“How Long, How Long Did We Sing that Song? - Daily Beast” plus 3 more

How Long, How Long Did We Sing that Song? - Daily Beast
Urban farming facts, fable topic of Detroit discussion - Detroit Free Press
Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit hosts 'Urban Farming: Fiction, Fable and the Facts ... - MLive.com
Do we believe in God? - Orange County Register

How Long, How Long Did We Sing that Song? - Daily Beast

Posted: 17 Jun 2010 05:05 PM PDT

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PA Photo / Landov When Britain's David Cameron apologized for the Bloody Sunday killings he healed a deep wound, says novelist Colum McCann—and appropriately for Bloomsday there were echoes of Joyce in his words.

Some people take fiction to be the truth. Others take truth to be a fiction.

Yesterday the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, made a dramatic public apology for the events of Bloody Sunday when, in 1972, thirteen civil rights protestors were shot dead on the streets of Derry. Cameron stood in the House of Commons and said that the events of the day were "unjustified and unjustifiable." He said that the government was responsible for the conduct of its armed forces. He said there were no ambiguities, no equivocations. The killings were a catastrophe. Generations were bereaved. And he was sorry, his government was sorry, indeed he was sorry on the behalf of his country.

Nothing was a more visible inherited scar on Northern Irish history than Bloody Sunday and the apology goes a long way towards allowing it its truth.

Sometimes it takes the best part of 40 years to open up a nation's ribcage and twist its heart backwards for a truth which is, ultimately, also a grace. Cameron held his head level—not high, not low—when he talked about the Saville Report. There were no whistles, no boos, no snide footnotes. He became the son of a time when he was little more just than an ordinary son.

History throws icons at our minds. No television images of Bloody Sunday are more iconic than those of Father Edward Daly, a Catholic priest, waving his bloody white handkerchief in the air as he tried to escort a dying young man to safety through the backstreets of the Bogside. The handkerchief seems, in the footage, to have a life and a grief all its own. It folds over onto itself, the red core, the white core. Father Daly turns the corner into another corner. It all seems like corners. There are details that make it seem so far away now: the sideburns, the wide flares, the cobblestones. One wishes it was only cinema.

Footage from the 1972 protests in Derry.

But it wasn't cinema. It was thirteen people dead and a couple of thousand more lined up along the ditches of what was euphemistically called "The Troubles." Ultimately, over thirty years, 3,594 people died. You cannot kneecap a statistic, though you can sometimes make it limp.

• Harold Evans: How My Paper Exposed Bloody SundayOne of the things about Bloody Sunday was that it was an event that was ripe for manipulation, or shaping—or, if you want, a fiction. In fact the word fiction is derived from the Greek "fictus," which means to shape. Each side used the events of that January day for its own narrative purposes. The British army got immediately down to language—they turned civil rights marchers into rioters, priests into agitators, and slingshots somehow became Thompson machine guns. On the other hand, the Irish Republican elements used Bloody Sunday to delude a whole generation of teenagers that the bullet was better than the ballot.

Everyone was bound to lose because there was no texture of truth in either of the fictions.

It is of course a spectacular coincidence that David Cameron made his announcement the day before Bloomsday, the anniversary on which James Joyce's immortal novel, Ulysses, takes place. Surely there was no obvious literary intention there on the British Prime Minister's behalf. But the thing that immediately sprang to mind was the conundrum faced by the central character, Leopold Bloom, an Irish-Hungarian Jew who sits in a Dublin pub on Little Britain Street (of all places!) contemplating the idea that a nation is "the same people living in the same place." He later revises his answer to those "also living in different places." It is a parliamentary answer, and Bloom gets a biscuit tin thrown at his head for his, shall we say, troubles.

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Urban farming facts, fable topic of Detroit discussion - Detroit Free Press

Posted: 17 Jun 2010 05:31 AM PDT

Urban agriculture is the subject of a discussion at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit.

Today's event "Urban Farming: Fiction, Fable and the Facts" is being presented by the museum and the Detroit Agriculture Network. Organizers say the aim is to look beneath "romantic fictions" about urban farming.

A number of people involved in community gardening in Detroit are expected to be a part of the discussion, including representatives of Earthworks Urban Farm, the Greening of Detroit and the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network.

In Detroit, residents are increasingly working to transform vacant, often-blighted land into gardens and small farms.

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Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit hosts 'Urban Farming: Fiction, Fable and the Facts ... - MLive.com

Posted: 17 Jun 2010 10:17 AM PDT

Published: Thursday, June 17, 2010, 6:15 AM Updated: Thursday, June 17, 2010, 7:37 AM

Urban agriculture is the subject of a discussion at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit.

Thursday's event "Urban Farming: Fiction, Fable and the Facts" is being presented by the museum and the Detroit Agriculture Network. Organizers say the aim is to look beneath "romantic fictions" about urban farming.

In Detroit, residents are increasingly working to transform vacant, often-blighted land into gardens and small farms.

Five Filters featured article: Headshot - Propaganda, State Religion and the Attack On the Gaza Peace Flotilla. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Do we believe in God? - Orange County Register

Posted: 17 Jun 2010 10:39 AM PDT

Do we believe in God? No. Yes. And sort of.

Surprise! A majority of those who voted in the online poll said they do not believe in God or anything spiritual. This was 44 percent The next group, 28 percent, said they believe that God is in control of the world.

Almost a quarter of the voters believe in a different idea. Of those, 13 percent believe that God influences but does not control the world, and 11 percent believe in some kind of spiritual connection in the world. Only 4 per cent could not fit themselves into any of these categories.

Some of those who don't believe in God spoke strongly about their lack of belief. For them, the material world is the complete picture. They don't feel a need for God to complete the scene. Some see God and the Bible as fictions made up to keep people happy.

One commenter said God can't be real because there are so many different religions. Many religions, he or she observes, believe that the teachings of other religions are false. If there really was a God in the world, this commenter asks, wouldn't there be one religion. Is that a valid argument? Could a real God allow people to perceive him or her differently? What do you think?

The idea of Occam's razor – principle that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one – is introduced by a poster who uses the screen name "Occam1." He argues that he has to ignore the idea of God, because he has never seen any evidence that requires God to account for it. He says his level of morality is as high as or higher than that of a religious person, because he does not have someone to forgive him. This idea that morality and behavior do not require God or religion has been advanced recently in a book titled "Good Without God." I plan to revisit this argument of rationality and Occam's razor in future columns.

The group that believes there is a God and that God is in control of the world form the second largest group in this survey and in the posting. Two different lines of thinking are offered by those holding this belief. One set refers to the Bible to provide the evidence for God, Jesus, and the idea that God controls the world.

Another poster, however, gave a different argument for a God who is the creator and is all-powerful. This poster did not appeal to religion or the Bible at all. Rather, "Virena" speaks of the need to have a God to explain the world and to give it purpose. The Big Bang, he or she argues, still needs a creator to cause it. God, and the existence of eternal life, are needed for Virena to find purpose and significance in life.

Finally, he or she invokes an argument known as Pascal's wager, because it was stated by the French philosopher Blaise Pascal in the 17th century. Pascal argued that a person should live as if there is a God because, if it were true, then God would reward him for eternity, and if he were wrong, there is only a minor inconvenience. But if one assumed there is no God and was wrong, there would be terrible consequences for ever. Is this a good argument for you?

The idea of spirituality includes some very different ideas. One person feels God does not cause or control things in the world but gives humanity the power of choice and of creativity. This commenter feels a spiritual force available to support him or her. It is a spiritual presence that can help you achieve what you set out to do, whether it is for good or for evil. Each individual remains totally responsible for his own actions.

Another person feels a spirituality that is described as close to a humanitarian position. If I understand him correctly, he means a feeling that is centered in the human being rather than in some transcendental entity.

I invite you to think about God, to look at the online discussion and to add to it. If you haven't voted yet, please go to ocregister.com/link/religion.

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Fiction

Kamis, 17 Juni 2010