Diversity

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Video Clip 1

There is deliberately a lot of varied content in this depending on what kind of point you need to make. (Links checked January 2019).

Of the street dance crew, Diversity http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cdpox5oJzyA

Video Clip 2

 Of the movie ‘The Island’ – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtyC3jFh6eM

Explain that in The Island, everyone is controlled, everyone has to wear the same kind of uniform and be a bit like clones with no personalities. Except that one man’s mind starts thinking about what could be…

Alternatively, cue up Chapter 2 of the movie, ‘The Island’ (UK rating 12). 00:02:25 – 00:07:15. Or Chapter 3, 00:07:16 – 00:10:06.

Something to try for fun!

Stay sitting down and make clockwise circles with your right foot. Keep doing this. Now, while you’re doing this, draw the number “6” in the air with your right hand. 

Your foot will change direction.

Any volunteers to show they can keep their foot going clockwise? (Better have some prizes just in case!)

Crazy Facts

(from http://www.berro.com/entertainment/humans_interesting_facts.htm, accessed January 2019)

  • People with higher number of moles tend to live longer than people with lesser number of moles.
  • Women blink twice as many times as men do.
  • We are about 1 cm taller in the morning than in the evening. Layers of cartilage in the joints gets compressed during the day.
  • There are approx. 550 hairs in the eyebrow.
  • Thinking about your muscles can make you stronger.
  • If left alone, 70% of birthmarks gradually fade away.
  • Grapefruit scent will make middle aged women appear six years younger to men. 
  • The world’s youngest parents were 8 and 9 and lived in China in 1910.
  • Your body is creating and killing 15 million red blood cells per second!
  • The average human produces 10,000 gallons of saliva in a lifetime.
  • You breathe about 10 million times a year.
  • A baby is born every seven seconds.
  • The colder the room you sleep in, the better the chances are that you’ll have a bad dream.
  • The foot is the most common body part bitten by insects.
  • The most common time for a wake up call is 7 a.m.
  • The typical person goes to the bathroom 6 times a day.
  • The fastest growing nail is on the middle finger.
  • The most sensitive finger on the human hand is the index finger.
  • The human body weighs 40 times more than the brain.
  • After eating too much, your hearing is less sharp.
  • A person swallows approximately 295 times while eating dinner.
  • If you eat too many carrots, you’ll turn orange.
  • Your urine will turn bright yellow if you eat too much asparagus.
  • There are more people alive today than have ever died.
  • The human body is better suited to two four-hour sleep cycles than one eight-hour one.
  • A man’s beard contains between 7000 and 15,000 hairs.
  • A beard grows an average of 140mm a year
  • A hair is 70 per cent easier to cut when soaked in warm water for two minutes
  • Women’s hair is about half the diameter of men’s hair
  • During an average lifetime, a man will spend 3,350 hours removing 8.4 meters of stubble
  • 4.5 million people have their health ‘adversely affected’ by air pollutants each year.
  • 4 million children die each year from inhaling smoke from indoor cooking fires that burn wood and Dung
  • 4 million people die annually from diarrhea infections, caused by poor sanitary conditions
  • The hardest bone in the human body is the jawbone.

Who are ya?

OK, so who is either this nationality, or has strong family ties to:

Britain / from elsewhere in Europe / from Africa / from Asia / from North America / South America / Australia, New Zealand / from the Middle East / from another planet..?

World Facts

(from https://www2.palomar.edu/anthro/ethnicity/ethnic_5.htm, accessed January 2019)

Geographic RegionPopulation% of world
Asia3,518,000,00056.4
Africa839,000,00013.5
Europe803,000,00012.9
Latin America & Caribbean539,000,0008.7
North America320,000,0005.1
Near East179,000,0002.9
Oceania (Pacific Islands)32,000,0000.5

Source: Global Population Profile: 2002, U.S. Census Bureau 2004

SPOKEN AS “NATIVE” LANGUAGETOTAL
SPEAKERS
1Mandarin Chinese874,000,000
2Hindi 366,000,000
3English341,000,000
4Spanish335,000,000 (av)
5Bengali207,000,000
6Portuguese176,000,000
7Russian167,000,000
8Japanese125,000,000
9German100,000,000
10Korean78,000,000

Note: If the 15 major variants of Arabic are considered one language, Arabic is the 6th most common language in the world having 198-201,000,000 native speakers.

Note: if Facebook were a country, it would have the largest population in the world, with an estimated 2.27 billion active users in the 3rd quarter of 2018 (according to statista.com, accessed January 2019)

World religion facts

(from http://www.adherents.com/Religions_By_Adherents.html, accessed January 2019)

  • Christianity: 2.1 billion
  • Islam: 1.5 billion
  • Secular/Nonreligious/Agnostic/Atheist: 1.1 billion
  • Hinduism: 900 million
  • Chinese traditional religion: 394 million
  • Buddhism: 376 million
  • primal-indigenous: 300 million
  • African Traditional & Diasporic: 100 million
  • Sikhism: 23 million
  • Juche: 19 million
  • Spiritism: 15 million
  • Judaism: 14 million
  • Baha’i: 7 million
  • Jainism: 4.2 million
  • Shinto: 4 million
  • Cao Dai: 4 million
  • Zoroastrianism: 2.6 million
  • Tenrikyo: 2 million
  • Neo-Paganism: 1 million
  • Unitarian-Universalism: 800 thousand
  • Rastafarianism: 600 thousand
  • Scientology: 500 thousand

Diversity

If you look around this room, you’ll see all kinds of people – different shapes, sizes, ideas, thoughts, ways of doing things, into different kinds of music and genres, with different fashion tastes, from varied backgrounds and cultures. Just imagine if we were all the same, or just like in The Island! The thing is that what starts so much trouble is when people consider others to be different and then react against them out of fear, hate or jealousy. You may hate someone because they’re better than you at a sport, or because you think they’re prettier than you, or have a funny accent, come from a different part of the country.. But being different is something to celebrate because life gets so much richer. Imagine if you only ever ate fish & chips. Then one day, you discovered pizza or curry! That would spice up your eating life. In the same way, when we value each other for who we are and realise that we’re all human, we can all grow as people. A friend of mine has visited many Arab countries in the world and he’s changed as a person, having met so many amazing people. Yet some people never even leave their estate which is sad. 

Christians sometimes get a bad press for being against things, but the message today is that as a Christian, I believe God is for you. He may not be for all the things you do, but he loves you more than any other kind of love you could imagine.

Diverse world or what?!

God talks about creation in the Bible, in the middle in some poems called the Psalms. We’ll read something from the 139th Psalm from a version of the Bible called ‘The Message’:

Oh yes, you shaped me first inside, then out; 
you formed me in my mother’s womb. 
I thank you, High God—you’re breathtaking! 
Body and soul, I am marvelously made! 
I worship in adoration—what a creation! 
You know me inside and out, 
you know every bone in my body; 
You know exactly how I was made, bit by bit, 
how I was sculpted from nothing into something. 
Like an open book, you watched me grow from conception to birth; 
all the stages of my life were spread out before you, 
The days of my life all prepared 
before I’d even lived one day. 

As Christians, we believe that God made us different. He made and loves you for who you are, just as he loves people in the deepest and darkest places of China, Africa or the Amazon rainforest. The Bible talks about people of every tribe, tongue and culture one day worshipping him. Whether you believe in God or not, we believe that God believes in you.