Behind the paywall...a sign of (bad) things to come

This week, for the first time ever, when thinking about subscribing to a magazine I decided it was probably better to subscribe to the edition-electronique rather than the paper edition.

It is a tad cheaper...and probably delivers quicker. It does mean that it won't be lying on the kitchen table!

But I can't help thinking that it's not quite right. But I guess I'll get over it.

Some of you may have noticed that I promote Ruth Gledhill's religion blog (here) from "The Times" of London. It is free no longer.

The Times has decided that they will charge people for the privilege of accessing this sort of material. I suspect that many, perhaps most, of us won't bother.

It is rather different I suggest to buying a whole magazine, I mean half the fun of blogs is not just the blogger's wisdom, but also the crackpot comments. It certainly doesn't seem right to pay for that!

This is part of a user-pays push that is going on worldwide in the Murdoch press. It's suggested that it won't be quite the same in Australia, but we will be paying for some content.

I tend to think that the reader doesn't need to pay for anything; that it can probably all be paid for by advertising, but I guess the difficulty is then that you don't value what you don't pay for.

Religion and politics

I hope to offer some thoughts on various aspects of this issue in the days to come. But here is a blog by the amazingly perceptive Ruth Gledhill of the London Times, with particular refereence to the British election campaign

http://timescolumns.typepad.com/gledhill/2010/04/gordon-browns-gospel-dream-where-wealth-helps-more-than-the-wealthy.html#more

good, better, best

Ruth Gledhill has a naughty article with a little web poll...Who is the better Christian? McCain, Obama, Palin or Biden
I have mused before (here) about the inadequacy of phone in and online polls since they are uncontrolled exercises and there is no way of stopping interested parties from trying to skew the results, and when we neutralise them by making them into percentages they all look the same (50% of 2500 is 1250, but 50% of 12 is 6...there is a lot of difference between over 1000 people who bother to ring in and a handful... you know lies, lies and damn statistics)
So the issue might not be...are the results meaningful? But is the question meaningful?
I indeed rankled, because there is much in Christian teaching that goes against this sort of religious self-promotion (you know the first shall be last), and some of Ruth's commentators rightly asked what does better mean. The usual suspects immediately jump on to the pro-life issues, but I want to hear what they say about caring for the poor and the broken, about the sick and the enslaved...it seems to me that there is more of Jesus' teaching about this than about anything else.
Of course it is an amusing bit of fluff!

God is not a homophobe

If the 20th century gave us the word 'homosexual'then God help the 21st century whioch appears to have given us the word 'homophobe'.
I am an Anglican who happily accepts the traditional doctrine of the catholic creeds. Now the word "catholic" is a precious one. Although we use it denominationally, let us use it literally...to mean universal... God is a catholic God, {not a Roman Catholic God but a universal God, anything less is a nonsense} when we state that he disapproves of some of his creation more than others we are, I suggest, diminishing God (often called blasphemy).
The catholic God does not hate homosexuals, or Muslims or atheists. He universally love us all, because he is catholic. (for an interesting little scuffle see here)