Six months and still learning...

Toady I have been in Germany exactly six months and I'm now feeling quite at home. The topography is starting to make sense, and I find I'm understanding enough of the language to make sense of what is said around me, on the radio and even on the TV. It's still quite a challenge and I set aside time each day to do my language lessons. It would be great if I could have joined a class of course, but the take up seems a bit low, so now I'm waiting until the end of November when there is another class I have booked for. Hopefully this one will run.

Religious decline

I had a very interesting discussion recently with a former ministry colleague who moved to north England to work in a very difficult parish and diocese, one now in the heartland of the area now populated by Islamic immigrants. It was a very working class area, one deeply and possibly irreparably affected by the power struggle between militant unionism and government in the 1980s. Trying to make a church, much less the message of the Gospel, relevant to people who have seen their communities destroyed, their way of life changed irrevocably and who now must compete for wealth with people of a different culture, with different expectations and different desires for the future, makes life for a vicar difficult to say the least.

My interest was really fired up though, when he mentioned that their muslim neighbours are more friendly than the supposedly Christian ones and certainly more generous when it comes to helping those in need. But, when we came to discussing the young people and their attitudes to religion I was surprised by his statement that Islam faces the same decline in the UK as Christianity. For most young folk, it is a 'folk religion.' Young people now only attend the mosqes regularly if they want to make a point, but for most, its the religion their parents follow and they just tag along. In his view, Islam is perhaps twenty years behind Christianity before it starts to decline dramatically. Clearly the strife between the fanatics has begun to appear as stupid as it is to the youth - who aren't that gullible or stupid!

Even more interesting though is the news that a recently published sociological study identifies an interesting trend. While religion is in decline in Europe, it is on the rise in every other continent. What is also identified is that it is changing, with less growth among the 'traditional' structures of church or mosque and far more on the fringes among small groups, communities and even totally individual explorations. No one seems to know why Europe is bucking the trend. Are we ahead of the rest? More aware of the scientific debate? Or are we actually behind the curve and the rest are onto something our thinkers and educators have not yet spotted?

I think this will be a very interesting area to watch in the coming years. It will also be a challenge to the churches to discover why it is that the traditional dogmas, doctrines and strutcures are so unappealing. Interesting times ahead I think for those who still hold a faith and practice it.

Ploughing ahead with the new textbook

Progress with the new textbook for the Insititution of Fire Engineers is slow, but steady. Lot's of it is already there in a sort of framework, but there are a few gaps, moreexpansions of information and a lot of words still to be checked, edited, sometimes taken out and replaced and so on.

Deadline is early 2011...

Back to the grindstone.

Slow Progress.

My German lessons are progressing slowly. I seem to make progress only to get myself completely tangled in a simple sentence at the first opportunity to try out my language skill. Pronunciation, tenses, articles and the personal pronouns all get muddled as soon as I try to string them together. Still, most of those I deal with are understanding and try to help.

I'll get there, perhaps its just that patience has never been my strong suit.

Brilliant explanation of Climate Skepticism

Found a fascinating video of Climate Skeptic The guy is a young college and university graduate and a skeptic of the "Global Catastrophe" the Global Warming lobby are trying to promote.

I heartily recommend visiting his site and watching and listening to this explanation, particularly those who have young kids who may be being fed the Al Gore/ Mike Hansen version.

I wish guys like this could actually get aired on the mainstream media. Unfortunately, they are all controlled by the AGW propagandists.

Sleepless in the Taunus

Madam Paddy has a bladder problem and had a bad night. So did we.

This is a recurrence of a problem she had in January and we had a bout of it last week. Last night we noticed she seemed to be showing the same signs and sure enough, found she has a problem again. She is now 20 years old and I suppose is entitled to a few health problems. The bigger problem is the vet is in Bad Schwalbach and it needs a car to get there.

So this evening she has another visit scheduled. Hopefully this one will contain the problem.

Differing responses

I have watched with fascination, the different responses to the austerity measures being announced around Europe. The French Unions seem to be in open rebellion over their government's attempt to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62 and the Greeks went wild over an attempt to move theirs from 55! With people in Britain having to work to 65 and in a few years to 66 to reach Pension age one does wonder how some of these State's expected to fund the early ages they originally set.

Perhaps the answer can be gleaned from a statement I caught earlier, from the spokewoman for the CGT in France. She declared that raising the retirement age of existing workers harmed the prospects of school and university leavers seeking work. Her argument seemed to be that by allowing older people to stay in employment meant that jobs would not become available for those starting out. This has echoes of the socialist pipe-dream of "Full Employment" so much trumpetted by the chattering classes who tried to seize the assets and investments of individuals in their "Nationalisation" programmes of the 1940 - 1970 period. The idea was that by centrally "managing" commerce and industry you could create job expansion programmes and ensure that there would always be jobs and everyone would be employed somewhere.

This is, of course, why they never allowed for investment of Pension Contributions and continually collected money for this and the health services which was then spent on social engineering schemes in all sorts of wasteful and now failed projects. And now that the population who paid for a pension would like to receive them, thank you very much, there is nothing in the bank.

Full Employment was a dream of the Communist planners and it works, assuming you can keep factories running on out of date machinery, producing goods no one wants to buy and which end up being recycled endlessly to make new appliances which end up being recycled... This is the sort of thinking which led, in the 1970's, to ports in the UK having to employ a "stevedore" to sit in the cab of every straddle carrier at container berths. He didn't do anything, there was nothing for him to do anyway, but why pay a man who could have retrained to do something economical? The same thing happened in the UK's shipyards, with demarcation between Unions which caused disruption and delays to new building and maintenance of ships to the extent that buyers went elsewhere. Apart from anything else, the Unions wouldn't allow the introduction of new building techniques - because these required fewer workers. One by one the Yards closed ...

The same happened in the mines culminating in the Thatcher years which saw mines, that had the ability to be viable and productive, closed, because the Union refused to allow any modernisation and the losers are still bitter and resentful - but they misdirect their resentment. It is the Union that destroyed thier jobs, not the government. Had the Miners Union allowed the modernisations and been less embedded in Soviet style thinking, many would now still be mining.

The French have evaded addressing these and other problems for several decades now. It may be too late, it may already be heading toward and fullscale civil war and that will be bad for the whole of Europe.