Seeing them was proof enough; they did not say, “So-and-so from so-and-so.”
Monthly Archives: October 2007
PAID
PAID1 Look at it this way. Life can often seem to be an endless series of cups of tea in this neck of the woods. I’m not alone in that. A good portion of humanity is strung out on caffeine, if not on something stronger. And I reckon that it’s more than an acre or …
Chalmers Johnson on US foreign policy
For people who don’t know it, Tomdispath.com is often worth keeping an eye on, and the articles of Chalmers Johnson are usually interesting.http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174852/chalmers_johnson_12_books_in_search_of_a_policy
More on the new religion
Atheists are all cock-a-hoop these days and conceited about their self-proclaimed rationality, and yet clearly atheism is equally as religious as any other religion, and perhaps more so, since it depends on belief in an unseen matter: the belief that there is no god. And anyone who believes that the universe exists without a cause …
Dawkins and scientific method
In conversation tonight, someone raised Richard Dawkins and his ‘crusade’, and I use the word deliberately, and it made me reflect on some deeper issues of science in general. Many people mistakenly believe that science is based on dispassionate and objective observations of the physical world, and deductions from those observations of some general rules …
US Genocide
A curious and not particularly pleasant story: a people who have just killed more than a million Iraqi men, women and children, and whose history is based on the genocide of its land’s native peoples, is now calling the Turks genocidal: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/10/washington/10cnd-armenia.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin   Genocide is an evil without doubt, but why is it that hypocrisy and lies …
New religion – new piety
An essential element of the emerging new religion that binds modern people is the new piety: ecological concern. It is not wrong, but it is framed in such a way as to paralyse. For example, the auto manufacturers have produced new cars with drastically smaller carbon footprints, and naturally motorists want to own one, because …
Religion
Religion is from the Latin word ligare ‘to bind’. It was what bound people to worship of God and His teachings. But those bonds are much looser today or entirely non-existent, and in their place we have other bonds that are powerful indeed: the bonds to the employer, the state and the bank. The new trinity …