Tag: bible

Winter Festival/Christmas/Whatever!

This is why I love you, my readers, see?! At the beginning of the week I put out an article highlighting DOCA’s Winter Festival, and included everything else going on in town this coming weekend, as side attractions. It was as well received as ever and no one on its social media shares thought to question the event’s name. Today Gazette & Herald reporter Jason Hughes followed suit, but its shares received a barrel load of terribly misinformed and exasperating comments from keyboard warriors who wouldn’t know the true meaning of Christmas if it slapped them in the chilling wintery chops; which, maybe it should!

Bag of coal for those ranting that it should be called a “Christmas Festival.” Why not just go, enjoy it, make of it what you wish, call it whatever you wish, and not worry what other people want to call it?!

Foremost, I feel a smidgen sorry for Jason, if he reads the Facebook piffle on his articles, as the paper is slammed there for calling it “Winter Festival.” Someone plucked Americans from the sky and blamed them, one even ingeniously used an emoji of a bell and wrote “end” next to it; is there no limit to that guy’s wit?! Jason is working from a brief, you spanners! The organisers, DOCA, are calling it Winter Festival, as they have rightfully done for years, not the newspaper.

Maybe they choose to do so because it’s too early for Christmas. Perhaps to make it open and inviting to all. Which, I’m sorry to the keyboard warriors, but I thought that’s what the season was all about?! Or are you all more clued up about Christianity than the Gospel of Luke, who told of angels chanting “peace and goodwill to all men” at the birth of Jesus?

Father Christmas will be there, a Christmas tree, and lots of other representations of Christmas too; not that they have anything to actually do with the birth of Jesus, and more to do with what was there before it. There was a midwinter festival for hundreds of years before its Christianisation. No one really knows when Jesus was born, or if he was at all. Yuletide, or winter solstice was a convenient time for Christianity to adopt, and claim it as the birth of Christ, because folk celebrated around that time already. Nearly everything in traditional Christmas symbolism represents the ancient folk festival, from trees, mistletoe, even Father Christmas himself!

But the bottom line and most important point is, atheists and people of other religions have absolutely no gripe, issue or even the slightest complaint about Christmas! They embrace it, many celebrate it too, across the entire globe. The idea that someone is attempting to “take Christmas away,” or ban it, is only a rhetoric invented by those wanting to spread hate and prejudice; is that the Christmas message you wish to purvey to others? What happened to joy to the world?!

Bar Humbug, it’s all complete hogwash, but likely the reason for the bitingly bitter comments added to the Gazette’s social media shares; Facebook is a toxic playground for so-called adults. The organisers want to call it the Winter Festival, for whatever reason, and that is their prerogative. No one is stopping you, or are even suggesting stopping you from referring to it as a Christmas Festival, if that’s what you wish to do.

And lastly, no one is forcing you to attend! Probably best you don’t if you’re going to walk around it as grumpy as the Grinch; or this just your Facebook persona? If so, it doesn’t look good on you, nor is it in spirit of the season. Here’s hoping three ghosts will visit you on Christmas Eve!

REVIEW – Devizes Arts Festival – Adam Rutherford @ Corn Exchange  5th June 2024

Andy Fawthrop

It’s All In The Genes

Today Devizes Arts Festival presentation took on a more serious and talkative tone with another marquee signing taking to the stage.  And it was another good audience with plenty of trade at the bar and at the merch desk.

Adam Rutherford is a geneticist, author and broadcaster who frequently appears on science programmes on both radio and TV. He presents Radio 4’s flagship programme Start the Week and was the host of Inside Science for eight years. His popular series The Curious Cases of Rutherford and Fry has been on air for a decade. He’s written extensively on race, genetics, evolution and trust in science. As an honorary senior research associate at University College London, he teaches courses on genetics and communication.  A self-confessed “science nerd” he’s a Professor of Evolutionary Genetics.

It’s a long time since I last attended a formal lecture, with a full Powerpoint deck to get through, but that’s what we got.  Taking station behind a pulpit-like lectern, Adam quickly went into professor mode and quickly taught us all a LOT about genetics, DNA, descent and the various trees of life.  It sounds slightly dry and boring, but it was very far from that, as he casually dropped in one amazing fact after another, along with amusing anecdotes, and debunked many myths about the whole business of human evolution and descent.

We were fed some lovely gobbets along the way, such as: it’s believed that 97% of all species that have ever existed on Earth are now extinct, that 2% of the DNA of all modern humans is Neanderthal and that Danny Dyer is not alone in being able to claim direct descent from Edward III, since the mathematical probability of anyone/ everyone being descended from that same monarch is 100%.

We learned that there’s a lot that we don’t know.  Ignorance begets (misplaced) confidence, and confidence begets a lot of (incorrect) speculation and theorising. “Popular science” has a lot to answer for, including the use of inappropriate comparisons, metaphors and illustrations.  There’s no such thing as genetic “progress” (in the sense of improvement), only continuing change.  Using a series of “trees” (tree of life, tree of human life, the family tree of Charles II of Spain, the tree of Charlemagne and the Who Do You Think You Are? tree), Adam progressively illustrated how many of our ideas and assumptions are often some way from the truth or scientific evidence.

There was plenty of amusement too.  The more complex theories and illustrations were summarised as “clusterfucks”.  The act of sexual congress became “a gene flow event”.  And multi-generational in-breeding was “sub-optimal”. 

The takeaways from all this were that this whole genetics and human descent issue is a lot more complex than we think it is, that racism and eugenics are concepts that defy any logic or evidence you apply to them, and that mathematics can teach us a lot about what’s really happening. We learned about the “isopoint”, where the entire population at a certain point/ date is the ancestor of the entire population of today.

It was half time and, boy, did everybody need a drink to think about all that lot.  It must have been inspiring, as the book-signing desk was overwhelmed with willing customers, and the second half (which consisted of a prolonged Q&A session) was fully engaged by fascinated punters.

Adam fielded a range of questions, despite some mic problems, including those on DNA Testing kits (largely a waste of time and money, and a rip-off monetisation of the world’s most valuable datafile), Artificial Intelligence (useful for data mining), and our African origins (we’re all African and 100% similar at the DNA level).

Like I said earlier, it sounds dry.  But it really wasn’t.  Despite the serious subject matter, it was informative and absolutely fascinating.  Adam is no comedian, but he does have a light touch, and just like on the radio, he was able to bring science very much to life, to engage his audience, and to leave everyone a little richer in understanding.  His passionate dismissal of racism and eugenics owes little to morality or emotion (although I was sure that was there too), but to simple cold-hearted scientific data, evidence and analysis.  That gets my vote every single time.

His new series will be on BBC Radio 4 Bad Blood: The Story of Eugenics and his new book, out now Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics. More information on Adam is available at www.adamrutherford.com/

Another great night at the Arts Festival, and thanks (once again) to DAF for having the vision to bring these types of entertainment to our little town. 

The Devizes Arts Festival continues until Sunday 16th June at various venues around the town.  Tickets can be booked at Devizes Books or online at www.devizesartsfestival.org.uk

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