Mar
24
2014
Remembered Bliss is already one of my most treasured possessions I must confess that when I used to see some of these poems when Sebastian was alive, as at odd times I did, I didn’t rate them at all highly. ...
Mar
21
2014
When Sebastian kept on and on about how wonderful Tolle is I stubbornly resisted him, perhaps itself an example of what Tolle calls the pain-body. It means an addiction to sadness. It says so much more than the social...
Mar
20
2014
The particular way in which Darwin presents Natural Selection to us involves even greater ambiguities than those implicit in his presentation of the Struggle for Existence. Ostensibly he was exposing Paley’s mythical and metaphysical designing Deity and replacing him...
Mar
19
2014
(I've had to cut out all the quotations because of copyright issues. But this blog is much better readc with a copy of Hawk in the Rain and Birthday Letters by your side.)The two great English poets of the...
Mar
18
2014
Canto XV of the Inferno is one of my favourite passages in all of poetry. In it Dante meets his old paederastic schoolteacher, Brunetto Latini. In the gloom Brunetto scarcely recognizes him, shading his eyes ‘like an old tailor...
Mar
13
2014
At the earliest stages of pregnancy the future body that the zygote will acquire has not yet developed. But the complement of genes that will govern and direct that development is fully present from the moment of conception. It...
Mar
12
2014
Woe! Woe! Have mercy on us we are sinners, turds, worms, but as the dust of the earth in thy sight. They mean other people of course. So fed up with bishops. Here we are committing the worst evil...
Mar
11
2014
Genesis and Original Sin Original sin is, as the name suggests, to do with origins. What were those origins? Science can tell us. We and the chimpanzees split off from a common chimpanzee-like ancestor only six million years ago. A...
Mar
10
2014
Projecting a guilt which cannot be faced outwards onto others is a well documented psychological condition. Such is the case in regard to society’s current obsession with paedophilia. Paedophilia is a dreadful scourge, for children who are unfortunate enough...
Mar
09
2014
When you see pictures of Tony Nicholson’s sad and pain racked face your heart bleeds and it must provoke the question: surely in a humane society should we not allow such a sad person to end his sad life? ...