Thursday 25 December 2014

Best Wishes to All (version 2)

Ok this is the second time around for this post as the first time I managed to publish some code! Anyway here's the original post:

"I don’t believe in God”

What a weird way to open a post, but there you go I’ve said it. I don’t believe in God however I do celebrate Christmas. Isn’t that a bit of a dichotomy I hear you ask, well I suppose it is however I’ll elaborate further, you see I spent a good portion of my childhood in the Scouts and as such every third Sunday was spent at church as well as quite a few church parades and also bible studies. Now you would think that I would have developed a firm belief system after all this intensive exposure however just the opposite occurred. I started to see flaws in many of the arguments, in my teen years I read both the Bible, Koran and Hyperspace (by Prof Michio Kaku) and like many people agonised over my own personal beliefs and place in the world (being a teenager sucks sometimes).

Anyway to cut a long story short I ended up with the following personal view of Christmas and that is it’s a celebration of the good in people. If I can make the lives of both my family, friends, colleagues and people that I pass in the street just a little bit brighter then that’s what I’ll aspire to do. By assigning a particular date to something I give myself a personal goal, something to work towards and therefore Christmas is a target each year to be better! You could argue that we should be like this all the time however I think that for me I would lose focus without this deadline, after all I work better to deadlines.

I freely admit that faith in something (gods, science, people) can make humans excel and bring out the best in people and please don’t consider this to be an argument against anyone’s faith. We each have to reconcile our personal beliefs with the reality of living in a society of diverse beliefs and aim to negotiate our way through life without conflict negatively impacting others.

Anyway now that I’ve set the scene I have to say that I am thankful in this festive season for a number of things over the last twelve months:

1. That my children are happy and healthy.

2. That both my wife and I managed to move to the other side of the planet without any major hiccups. It’s been a mad year with a lot of upheaval however we’re still going strong and firmly putting down roots in a brand new country.

3. I’m amazed by the way that we have been accepted by Kiwi’s. Prior to the move I read a lot of horror stories about how ex-pats have made the move and felt excluded and marginalised however that has not been our experience. We have been included in peoples lives with open arms, and with our families being 12,000 miles away at this time of year we were at risk of feeling alone, however this is definitely not the case.

4. That people of have continued to read this blog. It sounds a bit silly but when your life is being turned upside down the fact that there are people out in the big wide world that are interested in what I’m doing in this crazy little hobby has helped to keep me grounded and sane (and connected to a wider community).

5. Big thanks to two gamers here in NZ, Scott and Ashley who have helped me restart my gaming, given me an understanding of the local gaming community and provided me with something familiar (rolling dice for fun!). They both have the same mindset as me and that is that life is too short not to have fun doing this hobby.

And so I wish all you lovely blog readers, bloggers, gamers, search engines and advertising robots that happen across this blog a very Merry Christmas!

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