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posted by [personal profile] mylescorcoran at 08:51am on 30/11/2005
Surprisingly, I'm a 'handholder'.

Handholder




You go out of your way to build bridges with people of different views and beliefs and have quite a few religious friends. You believe in the essential goodness of people , which means you’re always looking for common ground even if that entails compromises. You would defend Salman Rushdie’s right to criticise Islam but you’re sorry he attacked it so viciously, just as you feel uncomfortable with some of the more outspoken and unkind views of religion in the pages of this magazine.


You prefer the inclusive approach of writers like Zadie Smith or the radical Christian values of Edward Said. Don’t fall into the same trap as super–naïve Lib Dem MP Jenny Tonge who declared it was okay for clerics like Yusuf al–Qaradawi to justify their monstrous prejudices as a legitimate interpretation of the Koran: a perfect example of how the will to understand can mean the sacrifice of fundamental principles. Sometimes, you just have to hold out for what you know is right even if it hurts someone’s feelings.

What kind of humanist are you? Click here to find out.

And for the record, I was expecting to be a hardhat.
There are 9 comments on this entry. (Reply.)
 
posted by (anonymous) at 12:57am on 30/11/2005
Woah! Not that I think you are uncompassionate or anything but that is a suprise. The first sentence is fine but after that it gets a bit woolly and then downright sugary. Perhaps you just went to work feeling ultra charitable with the world today or something. The absence of rain can do that in Ireland.
 
posted by (anonymous) at 08:19am on 30/11/2005
me again - sorry. I have to rememebr to log the feck on.
 
May I commend to you the following posting?

http://www.livejournal.com/users/brisingamen/604872.html
mylescorcoran: (Default)
posted by [personal profile] mylescorcoran at 12:52am on 02/12/2005
Thanks for the link. I'm less enamoured of Dublin having actually lived there but I can see the appeal to the visitor. I do like the Dublin bookshops and restaurants. I don't like the congestion, house prices and insane traffic.
 
All sounds fair :-)

Did you note the following:

"... we met the author Conor Costick, and chatted for a while ..."?
mylescorcoran: (Default)
posted by [personal profile] mylescorcoran at 02:32am on 02/12/2005
Yes, I spotted that. Conor's finished up his Ph.D. now and I think he's working on a new novel for O'Brien Press.

He's Kostick with a K, though.
 
I didn't know about the K.

I suppose that I shouldn't be surprised: even though I encountered Conor because you and I were both astrophysicists, given that a lot of science geeks are SF geeks, there was a fairly high chance of a FoF event :-)
mylescorcoran: (Default)
posted by [personal profile] mylescorcoran at 04:33am on 02/12/2005
I used to role-play with Conor back in my post-grad days in Trinity. He's the brother of Gavin Kostick, who was in college at roughly the same time as me and introduced Conor to the circle of SF fans, gamers, and physicists that I moved in at the time.

We met Conor again in Glasgow at the Worldcon, and it was great to catch up with him after many years mutual absence.
 

Hairshirt


Image (http://www.newhumanist.org.uk/volume119issue5_more.php?id=969_0_32_0_c)

Excuse us, could you just put down that hammer for a minute and listen. You’re so busy getting things done you rarely take any time out just to relax. In fact, you’ve probably forgotten how to relax. That’s because you’re so anxious to prove that it’s possible to lead a good and moral life without religion that you have built a strict and forbidding creed all of your own.


You keep a compost heap, cycle to the bottle bank, invest in ethical schemes only and the list of countries you won’t buy from is longer than the washing line for your baby’s towelling nappies. You admire uncompromising self–sacrificers like Aung San Suu Kyi and Che Guevara, and would have liked the chance to be incarcerated for your principles like Diderot or Nelson Mandela.

You would never cheat on your partner, drink and drive, accept bribes or touch drugs. You never waste money though you give lots to charity. Living a good life? You’re a model to us all. But it wouldn’t hurt you to try a little happiness once in a while. Loosen up.

What kind of humanist are you? Click here (http://www.newhumanist.org.uk/volume119issue5_more.php?id=969_0_32_0_c) to find out.

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