Signs of weak nations

Posted on 02/07/2019 by Jon Garvey

I’m not in any way primarily a political commentator, but in the “interesting” times in which we live, no thinking person can afford to ignore politics. In this case it was the brutal assault on a conservative (but Asian and gay) journalist Andy Ngo, who was filming an Antifa protest in Portland, Oregon – his home town. He was left with a brain haemorrhage, amongst other injuries, as well as having his equipment stolen. Continue reading →

Posted in Politics and sociology | Leave a comment

Meanwhile back in the real world…

Posted on 28/06/2019 by Jon Garvey

This is really just a local nature report, so don’t expect a punchline. We’re promised a heatwave from Europe this weekend. The papers were, of course, immediately blaming it on climate change, but you may recall that Irving Berlin’s Heatwave appeared in 1933, during the dust bowl years, and the Martha and the Vandellas song of the same name came out in 1963, and depended on people picking up the allusion. In fact 1962-3 was, in Britain, notably cold and snowy, and it wasn’t nearly as hot a summer as those I remember from the fifties. It’s called “weather.” Continue reading →

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Scientists pay now, or must pay with interest later

Posted on 22/06/2019 by Jon Garvey

Peter Ridd is an Australian geophysicist who has spent a lifetime studying the Great Barrier Reef, and recently won a court case against his dismissal from James Cook University, in which the judge was utterly scathing about the dirty tactics used to muzzle his academic freedom of speech and to discredit him as an individual. Continue reading →

Posted in Politics and sociology, Science | 9 Comments

“Just Nature” – clarify “Nature,” please.

Posted on 20/06/2019 by Jon Garvey

Chasing up, for interest, references to the 1908 “Tunguska Event” (now most commonly thought to be a meteroric or cometary air-burst), I came across this recent piece in Physorg. Continue reading →

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

Missing diagnostic categories

Posted on 17/06/2019 by Jon Garvey

Abortions in the UK have gained the dubious honour of reaching the 200,000 per year level, as the BBC reports. When I was last working, a decade ago, they were hovering around the 180,000 mark. Continue reading →

Posted in Politics and sociology, Science | 2 Comments

God’s Good Earth not so controversial after all?

Posted on 14/06/2019 by Jon Garvey

I wrote my book God’s Good Earth to counter the assumptions amongst both “conservative” Christians on the one hand, and secular and theistic evolutionists on the other, that the natural world is full of a morally problematic thing called “natural evil.” Continue reading →

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

Climate Economic Apocalypse

Posted on 12/06/2019 by Jon Garvey

I’ve been making bets with people that if the warnings about catastrophic global warming and sea level rise come true in the next twelve years, I’ll buy them a holiday in the Maldives. But in fact, though I fully expect the Maldives will still be a tropical paradise destination then, the aim of the UK government to make us unilaterally “carbon neutral” by 2050 will probably put such holidays beyond the reach of all but renewable energy billionaires in their private jets. Continue reading →

Posted in Politics and sociology, Science | 4 Comments

Sorry – not even a Pope can do that

Posted on 09/06/2019 by Jon Garvey

Pope Francis has reportedly endorsed the opinion of “Vatican experts” in revising the Italian wording of the Lord’s Prayer so that it reads (in English translation, of course!) “Do not let us fall/be abandoned into temptation.” Continue reading →

Posted in Theology | 4 Comments

Response to Nick Townsend on WHO post

Posted on 06/06/2019 by Jon Garvey

Yesterday I posted a piece on a news report about the World Health Organisation’s recategoration of “gender identity disorder” as “gender incongruence,” and was taken to task by a new commenter, Nick Townsend. I’ve decided I can give a more adequate response to his well-argued post in a new OP rather than in the limited format of the comments software. Continue reading →

Posted in Creation, Politics and sociology, Science | 5 Comments

What if it were NASA that said the Earth is flat?

Posted on 04/06/2019 by Jon Garvey

My pastor drew my attention to this BBC article last week. I’m not entirely sure how much this is new news, and how much old news repackaged, in that I have been aware that “gender identity disorder” has been rebranded in various national indices of medical disorders as a “gender dysphoria.” The “news” seems to be the ratification of this by the “World Health Assembly” last week, so it will appear in ICD-11, the international gold standard of diagnostic categores, as “gender incongruence, a marked and persistent incongruence between a person’s experienced gender and assigned sex.” Continue reading →

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