Well, Mick Jagger’s doing it and Paul McCartney’s doing it, so I thought I’d do it even though I don’t need to keep public interest alive under lock-down like they do…
So yesterday I recorded a new song, and experimented with recording the effort in video. I think the thing’s come out OK, and Hump readers can view it absolutely free, gratis and for nothing below the fold.
Continue readingOne group to do badly out of COVID-19 is the guild of celebrity charismatic prophets, who have uniformly both failed to predict it (except in the “Last September God gave me a secret message I can now reveal” manner), and who even got their false retrospective words from God wrong as they decreed instant death on the virus by Easter (or Passover, for some reason). Particularly instructive to watch on YouTube is Kenneth Copeland, whose spuriously authoritative curses on the thing, and demand for an instant vaccine NOW, almost tip him into apoplexy (though as he has also prophesied he will live to 120, I guess he’s safe). He dug himself an even bigger hole by predicting the Coronavirus would perish in an imminent heatwave that was actually a cold snap across the continent.
The only prophecy of his likely to come true this year is, sadly, that his organisation will make $300m in 2020. Such is the supernatural power of religious charlatanry.
Continue readingIraq, Afghanistan, Syria, COVID-19… we seem to have developed a penchant for embedding ourselves deeply into situations without fully considering how to get out of them.
Continue readingI’ve noticed something interesting in Britain during this COVID-19 crisis – perhaps not that surprising, but maybe a significant sign of the times.
Continue readingHere in rural Devon, most of the field boundaries are traditional “Devon banks,” which are banks of earth and stone originally capped with hedges, in order to contain livestock.
Down in our valley, many of the banks are mediaeval. The parish boundary just down the lane, dated by counting the number of tree species that have colonized what was originally holly, probably dates right back to Saxon times. But up here on the hill most of them, including the boundaries of my own property, probably date to around 1820, when the common-land “turbary” was enclosed: a mere two hundred years.
Continue readingIt’s the poor wot gets the blame.
I’m increasingly of the opinion that the “precautionary principle” that’s so prevalent in the current crisis, and in many other recent public applications of science, is a highly dangerous one.
Continue readingI’ve belatedly realised one plausible reason why Paul places homosexual acts at the head of his list of the sinful results of denying the true God in Romans 1:18ff. On the face of it, that particular activity doesn’t seem obviously to follow on from idolatry, nor to be uniquely evil.
Continue readingUsing an electronic copy kindly sent my new Hump commenter MartinV, I’ve been looking at a recent book by John Schneider, The Darwinian Problem of Evil (it’s not released in UK until the end of the month).
I won’t do a review, but from the comprehensive Introduction I found it to be a summary of the kind of theodical problems and novel theological solutions against which I reacted at BioLogos several years ago. Although the new book postdates my own God’s Good Earth, I’d see mine as a response to his, rather than the reverse (and indeed, Schneider does not interact with my work).
Continue readingWell, I guess that a large proportion of my readers around the world will be locked in against the Coronavirus pandemic, in one way or another. A friend in Sri Lanka is facing enforced curfews, and there are massive queues for food when they are lifted, which rather defeats the object.
Continue readingIn my former life as a doctor, I was a GP, but ended up specialising in back pain, for a variety of contingent reasons.
Continue reading