Category Archives: Philosophy

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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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Disinformation

Posted on 16/09/2022 by Jon Garvey

Isn’t it funny how words nowadays rapidly come to have a specialist meaning entirely divorced from their origin? For example, “far-right” is now very seldom used for actual fascists or Neo-nazis. Our press does not use it for the Ukrainian Krakens, the out-and-out Nazis who advertised in advance that they were going to hunt down “collaborators” and who are now showing pictures of the mutilated bodies of civilian victims of “Russian War Crimes” in the villages they have “liberated,” just like they did when they regained the village of Bucha months ago. “Far right” now means “having family values and telling the truth,” so it really ought to be embraced … Continue reading →

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The old, old story

Posted on 23/08/2022 by Jon Garvey

I’m currently reading Michael Denton’s new book, The Miracle of Man, which explores some of the astonishing fine tuning of the Universe not only for life, but for human life. I must do a blog on it soon, but my first reaction was a sense of resentment at how the insane deception now surrounding us on every side has drawn me from a decade of study of such wonders of nature (and hence of God) to filling these pages with stuff categorised as “politics and sociology”.

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Truth will out

Posted on 07/07/2022 by Jon Garvey

Well, I’m not talking about the fall of Boris Johnson, though clearly the general principle applies, on the small scale, to habitual liars ant their parties and lies about one’s poor memory, and on the large scale to the West’s repeatedly claimed humiliation of the madman Putin by mighty victories in a proxy war, quickly turning to a rout for its own economies as well as for the Ukrainian regime. No, I’m thinking of identity politics.

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