Thursday 16 October 2014

BBC radio 3 Free Thinking

I wish that students involved in the National Union of Students would tell the world that it can help to do a thorough review of books that have been previously written on the subject.
    The excellent book," Fighting Words: The Origins of Religious Violence (2005)." by Hector Avalos is like a mini university course, it shows how to look at the various sides of the debate.

  Voices of reason/atheism in UK:
     BBC Radio 3 "Free Thinking" festival. On the show of the 15th October 2014 David Baddiel, who describes himself as a Jewish atheist,  mentioned a line from his play, "Infidel" where the character says, "I am an atheist like most Jews" At 9:30 Baddiel says that he has a stone cold disbelief in God.
     The show also had Shlomo Sand who is a secular Jewish historian who debunks the myth of constructed Jewish identity. He mentioned Bertrand Russell's book "Why I am not a Christian" and took that as inspiration for his essay,"Why I am not a Jew"

    The BBC Radio 4 John Finnemore show on 16th October had a funny Sisyphus sketch at 17:48 to 20:45, with Zeus talking to Hades about how Sisyphus is getting on with rolling the boulder up the hill.

Clearly read, well spoken, good idea to do a spoken Wikipedia for those who do not speak English as a first language.
You know, it gets on my fucking wick when people use the word fuck too fucking much, like when they use fuck to  replace commas, adjectives, quantities, words denoting emotion etc However it can be quite funny when used to stress a point. Not funny when used lazily.

You know it makes me fizzing mad when people use swear words instead of just saying something like,"I'm furious about what has happened, I'm in a flaming rage at the damage done to my car, it is incredibly frustrating to be without my car, I'm fuguing angry about it" Most times I hear it used it is to convey annoyance, displeasure, anger, aggression. 

Actually I hear people swearing all the time and it doesn't bother me. It is an interesting project to see if you can reprogramme yourself to speak in terms of your emotions but I have found that in the moment of fury it has not been possible for me to succeed. It is just too easy a phrase to say,"Fuck it" The alternatives all require more brain power.
It would be more useful to exclaim,"Watch out", "Careful", "Pay attention","Stop that", "Quiet please","Enough said already","It was really bad, It was very good"

Maybe we do say those things but they just get interlaced with swear words. If you are hearing it a lot it is hard not to echo. Maybe it is more social to copy or at least not to be too different but on the other hand maybe we should dare to be a bit different ?

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