Monthly Archives: October 2023

Cambridge U.L. scuppers Jorge Luis Borges

Posted on 31/10/2023 by Jon Garvey

Back in 2015 I wrote about Jorge Luis Borge’s fantastical “Infinite Library.” Read my post to see how Borges envisaged it, and why it proved useless to imaginary readers free to browse its galleries, but unable to gain any wisdom from it. I guess the nearest real-world equivalents are legal-deposit libraries like the Cambridge University Library, housing every book published in Britain since 1662.

Posted in Philosophy, Politics and sociology | 1 Comment

Divine geopolitics is individual

Posted on 27/10/2023 by Jon Garvey

I was walking Charlie the dog, and idly wondering about a common Evangelical saying I’d recently heard again somewhere, which runs: “If I’d been the only sinner in the world, Jesus would still have died for me.“

Posted in Theology | Leave a comment

More on climate

Posted on 21/10/2023 by Jon Garvey

I’m about three quarters of the way through a book, the reading of which was prompted by a brief exchange here, and a slightly longer one by e-mail, with GD, whose professional expertise is as a fuel chemist. The book, The Frozen Climate Views of the IPPC (Clintel Foundation, Amsterdam, 2023), is an analysis of the IPCC’s latest report, AR6, by a range of “questioning” scientists including those who have been expert reviewers and contributors to IPCC reports. Such analysis is essential because – sobering thought – almost nobody in the world has read AR6, or any of the other IPCC reports, in their entirety.

Posted in Politics and sociology, Science | 7 Comments

The strange ethics of propaganda

Posted on 14/10/2023 by Jon Garvey

YouTube is becoming all tough and militant (terroristic?) about the use of Ad-blockers. If I open a copy of YouTube in a fresh window now, in the time it has taken me to type these two sentences, twenty five ads have been blocked by Firefox. No, twenty six, as I did the full stop. If I actually open a video, pretty soon some threatening message will now flash up tell me it’s evil not to watch them all.

Posted in Politics and sociology, Theology | 1 Comment

The pivot of history

Posted on 09/10/2023 by Jon Garvey

At the purely geopolitical level, war in Israel is a highly significant and concerning matter. But if biblical prophecy is more than the fairy-tales the New Atheists loved to claim, without investigation, before their own demise as a movement, then war in Israel may be of cosmic significance. I have no intention here of going down the rabbit hole of placing the current situation of Israel in 2023 into the prophetic matrix of the Bible. Instead I want to take a look at the wider question of whether there is a basis for taking that matrix seriously, rather than airily dismissing it like the Gnus’ talk of “your imaginary friend,” … Continue reading →

Posted in History, Politics and sociology, Theology | 6 Comments