Last One

Yesterday's three or four remaining leaves are all gone today. Strong winds saw them off. Oddly, there are a few clumps of dried-up,dead leaves left, that have been there all year.

I am planning to move this journal to the winton pottery site to make way for a journal dedicated to The Architecture of the Spirit and my next book, which has not yet found a working title, and hence cant really be said to exist. It concerns the mythology and neurophysiology of the Soul; it did for a while get referred to as 'Soull Mechanic' but I suspect that not enough potential readers know anything of Soil Mechanice to get the point; so suggestions are invited ...

In God's Place; being and believing

Here is an New Scientist report on a symposium held in La Jolla, California with the title 'Beyond belief - Science, religion, reason and survival'. It's not easy to read, but it's cheaper than the magazine.

it's too easy for us in the UK to miss out on just how vital this issue is in the US. However, it seems to me that to confront religion with Science is missing the point. You don't have to be a scientist to see that religion is not inevitable. And it also seems to me to be a mistake to suggest that the 'Big Questions' that religion is supposed to answer are answered by either science or religion. Why are we here? I've never heard a religious answer that was any better than science's; 'we just are'. Science's nest is too pooped-up by technology in the eyes of non-scientists to ever hold its own in the foreseeable future.

The simple alternative to religion as a way of being is simply that there actually is another way of being human; science can tell us lots of interesting and useful things about this way, but the way itself involves something much bigger than just being a scientist.

When I look closely at discourse on the 'big questions' amongst scientists I find only heated debate, not answers. This applies at the most fundamental levels of understanding. Perhaps science will one day clear up these issues; but until then we can't expect non-scientists to take seriously any claims of science to be able to answer these questions. Even at its best, Science will always be a way of learning, not a way of being.

I have recently come across Naturalism. It seems to me that this term is a much more satisfactory banner under which to promulgate a way of being that doesn't involve gods. It has a profound scientific meaning, but it also has a more or less blemish-free 'parable' status, which science definitely lacks. I hopeto explore this further.

Broken links

Thanks to Joel for pointiong out that the link I put to my article on dawkins didnt work; it was a 'case sensitive' issue; I forgot that my server expects conformity of case at least. I've fixed it in the original post, but this is it too.

Forget Auric Knitting,

If you've failed to pick up the dropped stitches in your auric knitting don't despair; quantum technology means it's a thing of the past: now you can get life force beamed to you via subspace frequencies:
and only $600 per year

This is one of the finest examples I've come across of quantum twaddle. The worrying thing is that even pet cats are signing up

Another day, another decade

Since today's my last birthday before I get my bus pass, I thought I'd completely rebuild my myth of creation web site. Not much has been done yet but I was so incensed by reading an interview with that man Dawkins that I posted a reply on the first page that has any content. You can read it here but don't expect to get anywhere else except the half-baked home page and back here

free and fair re-visited

Sure enough, here are the stories we were told would come.
I've not bothered to post the link to the stories from California about intimidation because they're too depressing; even Schwarzenneger has complained. Course, it couldn't happen here.

Soul mechanics

having sent off the MS of Achitecture of the Spirit to my publisher, I am just beginning to understand what it's about. This insight comes as a result of thinking about my next book (which hopefully will get written a little quicker than the last)

There has been a bit of debate recently (Dennett, Dawkins and McGrath to name a few) arguing about whether we can justify faith in god. What these arguments miss, even though dennett has addressed it in his usual way, is the question where does it come from? It's just not good enough to say it comes from the fear of death which is more or less what the standard argument amounts to. it is important to consider how the details of the answers to this question come to reappear around the world. (when I say details, I mean unilkely stories to explain problems that don't really exist in the way they are stated.
I've said something like this before on this blog, talking about the notion that the world is held up by a serpent whose coils are wrapped around the pillars that support the world above the ocean. Every tradition retains some elements of this story in some form, and most of the 'untainted' ones tell it in full, with wonderful elaborations.
What's made me realize that there are answers not just to these puzzles (which I've explained in The Architecture of the Spirit) but that the same approach yields answers to more profound-looking questions like 'what are souls?' A religion which did not have the concept of 'souls' in some form or other would not be much use and I do not know of one such.
Australian traditions match those of the pre-Christian Gnostics about the answer to this question, and though I've touched on this in AS, I'm only now beginning to realize that this lies at the heart of the question of belief.
So that's what comes next.
Hopefully it will go hand in hand with a discussion on how Eastern Mysticism, having made a take-over attempt on physics, is now achieving the same kind of coup in the field of 'Lost Wisdom'. I hope to defend my conviction that we do not need to introduce 'mysticism' of any kind, neither alien intervention nor cosmic/galactic alignment, and probably not even 'lost civilizations', in order to explain the origin of the understanding that lead to these ideas first being expressed; all we need is the human imagination and what Dennett called 'epistemological hunger', the desire to know, and perhaps these are ultimately the same thing in origin.

free and fair

Just a thought about tomorrow's US elections; it seems the touch-screen polling machines have a tendency to 'slip' so that they record votes differently to the voter's intention; these machines are mostly made by pro-republican companies, so dont exxpect too many upheavals. I could suggest you read the article by Charles Rabin and Darran Simon, "Glitches cited in early voting," The Miami Herald (28 October 2006) but it's dissapeared into their archives and you need to register to read it.

chinese cockerel dance

here's a tune for joel. cochin chine

All that fall

It's been the most beautiful day here today.
I posted off the manuscript and the illustrations and the contract this afternoon;
Frightened the heron from the pond on the way back from the post office. Do they really make a noise? a kind of honky sort of sound, just once.
So, now I can get on with this life thing, which seems to have been going quite well on by itself.

one by one. this was one of the first, though

actually quite a lot went in one go in the winds that blew earlier this week

last sunday at the beach