The Perversity of Transgender Politics

It is such a strange phenomenon, Transgender Politics. It is built on the fantasy that human beings can voluntarily choose their gender. Many other aspects of our biological endowment are not challenged in such a way. I haven’t heard for example of brown-eyed people demanding that they should be called blue-eyed or short people demanding […]

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The Death of Charlie Kirk and the Erosion of Democracy.

Charlie Kirk died in a mindless, murderous attack that reflects a growing assault on our democracy. Democracy is built on the foundation of free speech and the vigorous intellectual competition of ideas. In democracies we shouldn’t seek to silence those who disagree with us. We should listen respectfully to their ideas and if we disagree, […]

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Remembering My Father

Mother’s Day and Father’s Day are largely occasions created for commercial reasons to make us feel compelled to buy presents and increase retail sales. They are cynical manipulations of our inherent feelings (normally) of affection for our parents. I must confess that I was blessed with the parents I had. I loved and admired them […]

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The Existential Threat of Radical Islamism

It is a strange quirk of the human condition that we almost universally romanticise the past. T H White captured the sentiment in his lovely book The Once and Future King. The myth of King Arthur and Camelot reflect our desire to reclaim an idealised past. As in many such myths (including the Christian one) […]

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Froth and Goblets


You might wonder why I might have imbued my new book with such a title. Those of you that have read my small offerings over the years would know that I have a belief that most of the great truths are propagated through stories and often through the use of parable and metaphor. I like […]

October 7, 2012

Coming to Grips with Mind


In my blog essay last week, I stipulated how important to our personal well-being it is be able to cultivate a sense of equanimity in our internal world, our theatre of mind. Our state of mind, rather than our external circumstances, is the prime determinant of our well-being. You and I both know people whose […]

September 28, 2012

Some More Thoughts About Depression


As I have written often, the essential nature of our humanity comes from our consciousness of self. From this faculty we immediately are confronted by two worlds. The first is the world “out there”, the physical world of objects, space, matter and other beings. The second is the world we are aware of within ourselves, […]

September 21, 2012

A God For Our Times (II)


After I wrote my recent essay which I entitled “A God for Our Times” Bruno made the following comment: You articulate clearly your “future god”. But what purpose does he serve? It seems that you still describe an adult/child relationship. He is still a “god of the gaps”. We don’t need a god to live […]

September 16, 2012

Where To For Welfare?


If you read my blogs you might come to the conclusion that I am reasonably opinionated. I certainly have shared with you opinions on some of the more controversial subjects such as politics and religion. But I must confess that there are areas where I feel frustrated that I can’t make up my mind. One […]

September 8, 2012

A God for Our Times?


In the beginning there were many gods. As Man’s consciousness evolved and he tried to make sense of his world, he invented gods to help explain it. Early on most gods related to natural phenomenon like the moon and the sun, rain and floods, fertility and fecundity and so on. Such gods were often embodied […]

September 1, 2012

We’re Not Growing Old, Are We?


A few weeks ago, I was having a geriatric jog, as I am occasionally wont to do, when I pulled a muscle in my lower calf on my right leg. Over the years I have damaged muscles reasonably frequently. Normally you just stop running for a while and revert to walking until the muscle repairs […]

August 25, 2012

Some Thoughts About Work


The good Dr Phil told me a story once about his visit to a very traditional workplace. It was a workplace characterised by low productivity, high industrial militancy and the inevitable alienation of the workforce. In walking around he came across one of the more renowned malingerers, (let’s call him Fred), loitering outside the workshop. […]

August 18, 2012

Buddhism and Depression


My recent book, “Froth and Goblets”, tells the story of how a Buddhist adept helps a princess deal with her depression. The story is a parable, but as many parables do, it contains some serious teachings. In this essay, I thought I might explore in a little more depth, some of the basic tenets of […]

August 12, 2012

The Frontiers of Science


The history of science is discontinuous. It is punctuated with new discoveries and changes of direction. These produce new frameworks which Thomas S Kuhn in his fabulous book, “On the Nature of Scientific Revolutions”, called paradigms. One of the first was the dramatic Copernican Revolution, when scientists first realised that the earth was not the […]

July 30, 2012