Sherlock the Neocon

Posted on 04/03/2023 by Jon Garvey

Oh dear. It seems that the first globalist was none other than Sherlock Holmes, consulting detective, or at least that the Neocons and Neolibs got their ambitions, if not their limited intelligence, from the great man.

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Posted in History, Politics and sociology | 1 Comment

Christian asceticism in suburbia

Posted on 02/03/2023 by Jon Garvey

A good friend of mine predicted a couple of decades ago that the next big thing, in popular religion, would be asceticism. He was, I think, foreseeing a reaction against the rampant hedonism of the times. I think there is indeed an element of that reaction seeping into our culture, so he’s been proven right about the fashion trend, at least to an extent. But I think there is a real, and largely involuntary, asceticism of the truly spiritual kind that is proving to be a necessary Christian accomplishment in our times.

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

The implications of Genesis historical verisimilitude

Posted on 24/02/2023 by Jon Garvey

As I get to the end of Mallory’s Morte d’Arthur I understand why it’s a great book rather than simply a collection of knightly names and tournaments. That won’t stop it getting banned once the woke censors finish with Dahl and Shakespeare and get round to spotting its sexism, Islamophobia, colonialism and gratuitous violence. But one thing it cannot be accused of is historical verisimilitude.

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Posted in History, Science, Theology | 5 Comments

It’s the epistemology, stupid

Posted on 21/02/2023 by Jon Garvey

Gavin Ashenden, some-time chaplain to the late queen, after long soul-searching left the Anglican church for Roman Catholicism, around three years ago. That’s out of the frying pan into the fire as far as I can see, but I respect his conscience and his intellect, and indeed his work helped me bottom out some of the ideas in my own e-book on the Great Deception, Seeing through Smoke. He was unwilling to live by lies.

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Posted in Creation, Politics and sociology, Prometheus, Theology | 2 Comments

RIP Mike Heiser

Posted on 17/02/2023 by Jon Garvey

I feel I need to say a few words of tribute for biblical scholar Mike Heiser, who has, I hear, recently succumbed to pancreatic cancer at too early an age.

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Posted in Creation, Theology, Theology of nature | Leave a comment

When kings go out to war

Posted on 15/02/2023 by Jon Garvey

When I mentioned Le Morte d’Arthur recently I observed in passing the blase way in which mediaeval aristocrats fought wars with their relatives for their power, consigning thousands of their unsung soldiery to death in the process.

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

Murmurs of content

Posted on 13/02/2023 by Jon Garvey

On Saturday, having suddenly grown a year older, I was invited by our daughter’s family to lunch, followed by a visit to the Somerset levels to see one of the famous starling murmurations there.

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Posted in Creation, Science, Theology of nature | Leave a comment

My poor bald pate

Posted on 05/02/2023 by Jon Garvey

I don’t know which is sadder – the US government and the entire media industry peddling tales of a Chinese spy balloon, or the fact, from comments under the news stories, that many people believe it.

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Posted in Politics and sociology | Leave a comment

But who can replace a spook*?

Posted on 03/02/2023 by Jon Garvey

*An allusion to Who can Replace a Man? by Brian Aldiss.

There are encouraging local signs that, after three irrational years, the COVID scare is ending. First, I saw that our local hardware-cum-everything-else store had removed its useless Perspex barriers and queuing separation system; although Tesco still has their screens it gave up on social distancing months ago. Then my wife tells me our dentist’s waiting room is now open, so you no longer have to bang on the door for admission and pass a gauntlet of hand-detoxification before being treated by a dentist in a diving-suit. Lastly I notice that our church no longer opens the windows in freezing storms (the one measure that had some science behind it).

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Posted in Medicine, Politics and sociology, Science | 4 Comments

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