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- Fifteen minute čitties 23/07/2024
- Providence meticulous, mysterious and momentous 16/07/2024
- The deep roots of Englishness 13/07/2024
- Peace, peace – but there is no peace 10/07/2024
- Intelligence test 07/07/2024
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Author Archives: Jon Garvey
Fifteen minute čitties
My basic mental schema for the industrial revolution has been that it eventually brought great benefits, but only at the initial cost of millions of working people (including my Garvey ancestors) living in squalid and unhealthy conditions in city slums. Oliver Twist and all that. But I’m having to revise my ideas.
Posted in History, Prometheus, Theology
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Providence meticulous, mysterious and momentous
I’ve just re-read Luther’s classic The Bondage of the Will, in which he refutes the ubiquitous belief that the (fallen) human will is balanced between good and evil, able to choose either. I’ve only just got it back after an Arminian friend borrowed it to refute it twenty-two years ago, seeking to achieve against Luther what Erasmus failed to do, and not succeeding, kept it on his shelf.
Posted in History, Politics and sociology, Theology
3 Comments
The deep roots of Englishness
I’ve recently re-read Beowulf, which has been described as the foundation of English literature. And that’s partly true, but partly also it’s a record of what the English abandoned in order to become a nation worth celebrating.
Posted in History, Philosophy, Politics and sociology, Theology
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Peace, peace – but there is no peace
If there’s one well-circumscribed subject that demonstrates the utter depravity into which our national life has sunk, it’s the treatment of Tommy Robinson, a dogged working-class fighter for truth who, if you’ve not done any research, you’ll only know as a far-right fascist. The following long-form interview with Jordan Peterson will disabuse you of the last impression.
Posted in History, Politics and sociology
11 Comments
Intelligence test
The case for the UK’s suddenly catastrophic COVID response being led by the intelligence services (in cahoots with industry/NGOs) is well made here. To my mind, a perfect fit for what we know, which dovetails into pretty well every other mystery of those, and these, times.
Posted in History, Politics and sociology, Science
4 Comments
WeAreNotWorship
I play in, but am no longer in oversight of, our church’s music group. Regular readers will know I am somewhat underwhelmed by the state of the “Christian Worship Industry” nowadays, and I’m unashamedly returning to that theme today. It’s better than thinking about the election.
Posted in Politics and sociology, Theology
2 Comments
Mind the gap
I’ve written a bit on the “God of the Gaps” fallacy (ie that the accusation is itself a fallacy!) in the past. This post still covers most of the bases. But hearing a recent interview with Denis Alexander, of the Faraday Institute, in which he repeated the fallacy with pejorative reference (as one would expect) to the Intelligent Design Movement, made me think about it again after nine years.
Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Science, Theology
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Verbal diarya
Over the weekend, I had the notion that it might be worthwhile gathering the posts I did on COVID-related matters during the madness into a small paperback, and getting a few copies privately printed to hand out to friends as a kind of “war diary.” Everyone has their own baneful memories of those times, of course, some of which are slowly starting to heal. But my USP, I thought, might be of historical interest as a doctor who had just completed a book on propaganda and state deception when the business began.
Posted in Politics and sociology
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Falconry and parrotry
I always seem to be picking on Springwatch, whose last programme of the season I watched from a recording yesterday. But the show exemplifies the “we now knowism” of popular science, in which all the uncertainties and frank contradictions are air-brushed away to produce a religious faith in Science™. In this case the subject was birds of prey.
She don’t lie, she don’t lie, Cochrane
What started me investigating propaganda and related topics, around nine years ago now, was the strange phenomenon of how public attitudes on sexuality had (ostensibly) been dramatically reversed in just a decade or so, as if by magic. Another decade has shown up many of the mechanisms, such as institutional capture, mass formation and so on. But it still remains strange how it is far easier to sell lies than truth to ordinary people.
Posted in Medicine, Philosophy, Politics and sociology
6 Comments