Moving your neighbour’s boundary marker

Posted on 29/09/2024 by Jon Garvey

Given the situation in the Middle East, I’m surprised to realise that I’ve never mentioned The Land and the Book by W. M Thomson, a missionary in the Levant in the nineteenth century. My edition is 1881, but I believe it was first published in 1860. As a fictionalised travelogue of “the Holy Land” with an American visitor, it is intended to relate the geography to the Bible, but of course it accidentally functions as a useful description of the region at that point in the late Ottoman Empire.

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…and they still lie

Posted on 27/09/2024 by Jon Garvey

“Some of the effects were direct from the disease, but many of them were indirect by the lockdowns, which were in and of themselves unpredictable because they weren’t part of the plan.”

Chris Whitty at COVID Enquiry.

So speaks the man who was Chief Medical Officer in 2020. Note the “Some” from COVID opposed to the “Many” from lockdowns. And he lies anyway, because even I (a retired non-CMO GP) predicted the tragic outcomes before the lockdowns happened. At the time I didn’t even know that the pandemic plans of everyone up to the WHO excluded lockdowns because their ill effects were entirely predictable. But you don’t get knighthoods for telling the truth – just for covering up your lies in retrospect, and abjectly failing to even think of including a cost-benefit analysis in your “plan.” “Negligently unpredicted because omitted from plan” is very different from “unpredictable,” Dr Whitty.

Posted in Medicine, Politics and sociology | 2 Comments

Nickel-plating gold

Posted on 26/09/2024 by Jon Garvey

Bret Weinstein, as many readers know, is an evolutionary biologist who has come on a long, and now familiar, journey from trusting Western institutions to seeing them as thoroughly, and even maliciously, corrupted. Most of you are probably acquainted with his departure from the woke Evergreen University over diversity, his realisation that the COVID response defied science and logic, and his coming round to perceiving that the overwhelming degree of error points to a deep-seated conspiracy of lies rather than to incompetence.

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Posted in Philosophy, Politics and sociology, Theology | 4 Comments

More on anomalies

Posted on 20/09/2024 by Jon Garvey

Not long ago I did a piece on the Shroud of Turin as an anomaly, both to science (as it appears to defy naturalistic explanations) and to faith (since, though potentially evidential, it is not mentioned in the documents or traditions of Christian faith).

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Me on my book

Posted on 19/09/2024 by Jon Garvey

As promised a few weeks ago, the American Gregg Davidson, geologist and writer, has posted the podcast I recorded with him on God’s Good Earth. It may be found here. Check out his own excellent book on interpreting the Creation narrative, The Manifold Beauty of Genesis One.

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How Jesus is society’s only answer

Posted on 16/09/2024 by Jon Garvey

As nearly everybody, even starry-eyed Christians, begins to get a sense of the dire situation into which British and Western culture has sunk, I’ve heard a number of people say stuff along the lines of “Politicians and scientists won’t save us – only Jesus is the answer.” And I don’t disagree… subject, though, to a number of serious qualifications.

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The undeceived don’t panic

Posted on 13/09/2024 by Jon Garvey

Here’s an excellent piece by John Stackhouse, writing for the Jubilee Centre. I don’t know John, but I do know Guildford Baptist Church, of which he is senior pastor, well from the past. He sums up my own feeling that closing the door gratefully on the COVID era leaves Christians vulnerable not only to future lockdowns, but to all kinds of ungodly restrictions that might be sprung on us.

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Posted in Politics and sociology, Theology | 4 Comments

More insights on the cult(ure)

Posted on 11/09/2024 by Jon Garvey

Here’s an excellent article on The Daily Sceptic, taking a slightly different tack from my recent piece on The Hump on the same phenomena.

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The Syro-Phoenician sister’s lived experience

Posted on 08/09/2024 by Jon Garvey

(The woke answer to Matthew 15:21-28 and Mark 7:24-30)

So, I heard this faith-healer was speaking in Tyre, and I went to hear him because of my daughter’s mental health issues. If I’d realised he was Jewish, of course, I’d have been there with my “Death to Zionists” banners rather than thinking about my daughter, who always stays at home for protests because they trigger her. In fact, the only time I took her to one she was arrested for decking a policeman and screaming “Why don’t you arrest my demons instead, Pig?”. That’s where NHS child psychiatry gets you!

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Understanding the Cult Wars (or trying to)

Posted on 05/09/2024 by Jon Garvey

Toby Young (of the Free Speech Union – join!) reports that he had a moment of revelation recently when he realised that England’s current ruling class is, in fact, a “technocratic theocracy,” acting in effect as a secular State Religion, its own beliefs being unchallengable truths, and its opponents irredeemably evil.

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