Category Archives: Philosophy

Satan’s end game?

Posted on 02/08/2023 by Jon Garvey

Our friend Levi introduced me to Rene Girard, whose writings on the way that crowds become mad, set in the context of the Christian message, certainly have something to say about the present experience of cancellation, censorship, and a lot more.

Posted in History, Philosophy, Politics and sociology, Theology | Leave a comment

Discontinuities all the way down

Posted on 18/06/2023 by Jon Garvey

Laplace’s 1814 Demon sums up the mechanistic universe of the Enlightenment well. An all-seeing being, knowing the position and velocity of every atom in the Universe, could infallibly describe any moment in the past and predict every event in the future. The implication is that a half-decent scientist could go at least a fair way along that path to omniscience.

Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Science, Theology | 5 Comments

How Peppa Pig lost her faith

Posted on 17/06/2023 by Jon Garvey

Peppa Pig says, “Everyone likes jumping in muddy puddles! (Snort!)” And all her friends laugh and agree.

Posted in Philosophy, Science | 4 Comments

The danger of (post)modern syncretism

Posted on 28/04/2023 by Jon Garvey

The Puritans are (and always were) misunderstood as believing that they were morally or spiritually purer than their fellows. But in fact their basic tenet was rather that there is such a thing as “pure religion,” in the sense of the original gospel of Christ and the apostles untrammeled by syncretistic additions from other religions. This, of course, was the basis for the Protestant Reformation. It is (as the first of Martin Luther’s Wittenberg theses stressed) a religion of repeated repentance leading to constant assurance of salvation.

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Gobbledegook from hobbledehoys

Posted on 01/02/2023 by Jon Garvey

I found this article at the Daily Sceptic intriguing. The author, unimpressed with a university (UCL) “vision statement” that looked as if it had been cobbled together from buzzwords by AI, decided to use a commercially available AI program to construct his own.

Posted in Music, Philosophy, Politics and sociology, Theology | Leave a comment

Cancellation as a screening test for truth

Posted on 29/11/2022 by Jon Garvey

The last three years have generated some interesting folk-sayings, such as the difference between a conspiracy theory and news being about six months, and “misinformation” being truth that those in power want to suppress. From the latter insight I think it’s possible to develop a screening test to assist those who are confused about what Latest Thing they should suspect of being a deception.

Posted in Philosophy, Politics and sociology, Science | 9 Comments

Worshipping the god Parsimony

Posted on 24/11/2022 by Jon Garvey

Following on from yesterday’s post, and from the parallel article on “Degrowth” as a national (or international) government policy to which I linked, I’ve been thinking about the ideological logic behind such policies. In essence, they are a hangover from eighteenth century Malthusian beliefs.

Posted in Philosophy, Politics and sociology, Theology | 2 Comments

Ideological science

Posted on 14/11/2022 by Jon Garvey

Tom Nelson is running a series of YouTube interviews with climate sceptics. I note with interest that his own scepticism came, as an amateur ornithologist, from discovering to his surprise that “peer-reviewed science” was telling unreliable tales about a particular bird species, and then being told by a professional meteorologist that the same problems existed in climate science.

Posted in Philosophy, Politics and sociology, Science | 2 Comments

Help me out here

Posted on 29/09/2022 by Jon Garvey

These points were agreed by a number of friends, in a single conversation yesterday: You can’t trust the mainstream news – it’s all propaganda. We know Putin is evil incarnate, and it would be a good thing if God, or some good people, “took him out.” Everything we know about Putin comes from the mainstream news, and we haven’t tried to read other sources, or listened to Putin explain himself. Tell me, how do those ideas actually fit together in people’s minds?

Posted in Philosophy, Politics and sociology | 5 Comments

The bureaucratisation of virtue

Posted on 28/09/2022 by Jon Garvey

From one viewpoint, the whole woke movement can be seen as an attempt to produce virtue through bureaucracy. Forget for a moment the political undercurrents at play, and the resulting redefinition of virtues into novel categories like “transphobia”: let us charitably suppose that the less ideological people at PayPal and so on, cancelling organisations and individuals’ accounts, are genuinely aiming to “stop hate” by preventing its expression.

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