The Last Templar

This is a story about an FBI agent called Sean Reilly and an archaeologist, Tess Chaykin. They are dragged in to a life-altering cat and mouse game with ruthless killers.  This risky adventure puts them in close contact with the dark history of the Templar’s, and a secret that will shake the religious world to its foundations.

I’ve chosen this book because I like the way it makes me question my own religiousness (not that I would call myself religious) and the power and the veracity of the bible.

I was raised without any form of religious pressure. I was baptised and I did choose to go through with the confirmation. I really don’t know why, but I guess I did it because it was expected of me by some sort general preconceived norm.

So, is this a good thing? I don’t really know. I think that everyone have to have something to believe in, if it’s a god or something else, that’s really not important. I don’t believe that there is an old man “upstairs” deciding our faiths and moulding the universe in the palm of his hand. However, I do believe in something, I don’t know how to describe it, but lets call it “mother nature”.

Religious people often tell you that something is true, and that it is proved by the contents of the bible. The bible is, from my point of view, throughout made by men and therefore lacks the value of truth it’s supposed to withhold. On the other hand, the Bible means a great deal to a lot of people, since they trust the bible (or have been led to trust) and “the word of god” and the unshakeable truths it allegedly withholds.  But once again, it’s not written by god, it’s written by men, and it has never been proved. Why does so many people believe in something so ancient? The answer is obvious.  The bible has a thousand year old power-apparatus doing everything it can to uphold and maintain the myth that the bible is sacred and the container of god’s words.

So what would happen if someone could prove that the bible is bullshit? Would it be good that the majority of the world would loose their faith?

Would we see a decline of war?

The Christian church is around because it has won throughout the ages. And as we all know, the winner, not the losers, writes history.

My thoughts on The Story of Stuff

I absolutely love this video. It makes me think about Al Gores renowned documentary An Inconvenient Truth.

This sort of video is exactly what people of the west word need to hear. They need to know how their consume obsessive lifestyles affect the world we live in. However, the video blog might be a bit exaggerated at times.

The thought that the government is “on the payroll” of the biggest companies is scary, but sadly, I don’t think it’s far from the truth. Big companies are major contributors to American politicians election campaigns, and I really don’t think they do it just for the fun of it. I personally think the companies have a secret/”unofficial” purpose with their contributions, making the politicians indebted to them. For example, lets say that a major petroleum company (BP) decides to become a big contributor to Obama’s election campaign, in return, he might promise, if elected president, that he would allow BP to expand their oil extraction in the Mexican gulf.

Companies only have one thing in mind, profit, and as long as that is the case, less developed countries will be used for cheap labour and maximising profits.

I personally think that be best solution is to introduce some kind of mandatory table of contents on every single commodity produced, allowing consumers to see where it was produced, carbon footprint and so forth. This table of contents and the common sense of the consumers will help undermine the companies who only care about profit and couldn’t care less about the environment and the security and wellbeing of its employees.  This would most likely lead to a more sustainable environment.

/Gustav

Blog Assignment 1 “Snooping Bosses”

     This is a very sensitive subject and you have to be extremely careful not to jump to conclusions.

Personally, I think monitoring is a good thing, as long as its conducted in a morally sanctioned way (many examples in the article are not). But as everything else, it has it pros and cons.

     If I would be the boss of a small company, I think, and hope, that I would have developed a personal relation with my employees, enabling me to trust them too all extent, and therefore not needing any surveillance. If we are talking about a multinational cooperation with hundreds, maybe thousands, of employees I would have to say that monitoring is a thing I might use. If so, I wouldn’t monitor my employees after work hours, during lunch or breaks, but to some extent during their work hours. I would see to it that no social networks were available during work hours, but I would never monitor my employees phones or e-mails, unless my company was dealing with classified information or if we were developing a new product, that needed to be secret until it’s disclosed.

I wouldn’t use monitoring as a tool to maximize the profits of the company, like making sure my employees weren’t slacking in their cars etc, you have to have some trust.

     One other thing I find very interesting is the storage of our virtual behavior. Google are storing our searches in order to make their search engine more effective, so that the users find what they need faster. But I think this is scary. Google knows what we searched for at any given time on any given day. This enables them to direct their searches and most and foremost direct their advertising. For example, being a student, I get money at the end of each month. Therefore the searches for online stores will increase from my computer, during this period of time. That way, Google knows that at the end of each month they can sell advertising spots for stores, and putting them as an eye-catcher, when I use their search engine. I think this gives them too much influence over our online behavior.