War, peace and the gospel

Posted on 11/10/2022 by Jon Garvey

There is a strong anti-empire theme in the book of Revelation, which my church is studying at the moment – and very appropriately too, given the imperial war in which the Western US Empire is engaged, more and more openly (without parliamentary or popular vote) and not just using Ukraine as a proxy. Jeremiah 51:1-14 is worth reflecting on as to the nature of our current situation, I feel.

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

Climate alarm as a paradigm for universal deception

Posted on 06/10/2022 by Jon Garvey

The Daily Sceptic has a piece linking to this article today. In essence, Worddata.info, one of those sites assembling publicly available data, has produced regional temperature trend graphs using only data from stations in continuous operation since their chosen start date, 1950. As one can easily see, this is scientifically a lot more valid than trying to extrapolate back from the readings of newer stations, and so on. The graphs are below the fold. Before reading on, have a look and see what the charts tell you.

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Tearfund’s climate transformationism

Posted on 03/10/2022 by Jon Garvey

Tearfund (originally “The Evangelical Alliance Relief Fund”) is running a new campaign to mobilise Christians against the “climate crisis,” hubristically modestly called “Let’s Change the Climate.” Oh, do let’s!

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Posted in Politics and sociology, Science, Theology, Theology of nature | Leave a comment

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?

Posted in Philosophy, Politics and sociology | 5 Comments

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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How the West undermines Christian mission

Posted on 26/09/2022 by Jon Garvey

Most Christians are not absolute pacifists, though they see war as an evil. There are exceptions, of course, including Mennonites like Merv Bitkofer, who used to be an author on The Hump, and even more famously Quakers, who went into captivity in the World Wars rather than take up arms. But without having a theoretical grasp of Just War theory, most ordinary believers will accept the sad necessity for fighting to defend one’s own nation (and family, of course) against foreign aggression.

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Posted in Politics and sociology, Theology | 1 Comment

The selfish greed of the poor

Posted on 24/09/2022 by Jon Garvey

Quite a few people now have compared the hatred of humanity (“parasites on the earth” etc) evident in much environmentalism with original sin in Christianity. Gaia is dying, or in some renditions biting back, because of the rapacity of mankind, much as in theology creation is said to be fallen and yielding thorns and thistles because of Adam’s sin.

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Posted in Politics and sociology, Science, Theology | 2 Comments

Come back moth and rust – all is forgiven

Posted on 22/09/2022 by Jon Garvey

Toby Young, writing in the Daily Sceptic yesterday, revealed how the Paypal accounts of the Sceptic itself, Young’s Free Speech Union with around 9,000 members, and even his personal, seldom used account, have been closed without. An e-mail in my inbox this morning shows that the same has happened to UsForThem, an organisation set up to campaign on behalf of children, particularly as victims of misguided COVID policies.

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Posted in Politics and sociology, Theology | 2 Comments

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 by all of us, as in “My plumber is as honest as they come – he’s a far right sort of chap,” or “Not only is she good looking, but she’s far right.” Kind of like “far out, but morally sound.”

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Posted in Philosophy, Politics and sociology | 2 Comments

But how do you know?

Posted on 12/09/2022 by Jon Garvey

In my now highly-dated e-book Seeing Through Smoke I wrote about how, once propaganda becomes the basis of a society, even the most sceptical will be fooled much of the time:

In a society like the late Soviet Union, it may have been the case that everyone knew fifty percent of what they read in Pravda (ironically meaning “truth”!) to be false. But in a totalitarian state there was no independent way for them to know which fifty percent they should discount. I have no doubt that canny Russian dissidents who rightly rejected news reports on one issue were hoodwinked into believing other falsehoods, or indeed were dismissive of propaganda that turned out, in the event, to be perfectly true. Even dissidents may disagree.

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