That's the good news - I have a job. However, it's perfectly possible that I could turn up on site at 8.00am to start work only to be told that no one knows anything about me, no job of the kind described in the contract exists, and if it did, and if I were supposed to be working it, they'd fire me anyway. That sort of thing does actually happen. Not, so far, to me - but to people I have known. The joys and satisfactions of working as an independent contractor. But supposing all goes well....
Science, by which I mean that episteme which states that the rational method is the sole arbiter of truth, denies Death. It denies to Death that supremacy which has been accorded to It by every previous culture in human existence. Rather than viewing Death as an ineluctable Power that cannot be defeated, it views Death as an equal adversary with which it is in contention. Medical Science wiews Death as an enemy that can be defeated. First, aging must be deferred indefinitely. Secondly, the ...
All my successes, those things I regard as highpoints in my existence to date, have been metaphysical in nature. As cactoblasta points out in his response on the linked article, the truly traumatic events of my existence (being stoned through the streets as a child, emotional and physical abandonment, the decades during which I withdrew further and further from the world) occurred in my childhood and youth. And the successes that I have had, my eventual return to the world, the completion of fir...
I don't like what has happened to JU. I think I've made that abundantly plain. But I do like the community. Therefore I have nothing further to say concerning my disappointment in JU2. No doubt I'll get over it. One thing only I will suggest - that the number of possible blog categories be reduced to three: thought, life, blogging. Anything else is over-provision. I am 48 years old. I feel that I am sixteen. Both my chronological age and my existential estimation of my age are facts of my exi...
Yes, I know it's free. Yes, I know it's our Local God's house and he can do anything he likes, to anyone he likes, whenever he likes. Are you listening, Our Little God? I know all that. And? Your redecoration sucks. Yes, it's your house. But why paint the walls a yellow-green whose only known equivalent is babyshit? Your reorganization sucks. What before was relatively clear is now pointlessly complex. What before could be readily undersood is now hopelessly obscure. The front pag...
I've come to loathe 'the religious'. Whether they be Christian,Muslim, Hindu, Zoroastrian, Pagan, or whatever. In all honesty, and to paraphrase an honest man, "Whenever I hear the word 'religion' I reach for my pistol". I don't have a pistol. But if i did I'd kill everyone of you pathetic motherfuckers whenever I caught you. You preach endless hate. Your righteousness is nothing more than what you consider to be right, nothing more than what you consider God to have spoken to us all. W...
If there were no God or Christ we would have to invent him. That's no conceit of mine, it's origin lies with the German philosopher Heidegger, who said of our modern (and now post-modern) epoch that "Only a god can save us now." By which he meant that only something that was at once fundamentally objective and fundamentally just could relieve us of our all-consuming confusion as to what is 'true'. What is frequently not understood is that Heidegger intended his comment ironically. It's a mark...
We don't know. We don't even know what we think we know. That wasn't always the case. There was an era in human history when we knew what we knew, and we knew that we knew it. But that knowing was anchored in the unquestioned certainty that the gods were real, and like us. In contrast, our own era has the motto 'God is Dead'. Each statement is perfectly true at the same instant that it's perfectly false: what counts is not the 'truth' or 'falsity' of each statement but the consequences of ...
This is a rant. It's not a rational argument, it's not a reasoned statement of opinion. It claims no substantiation and is indifferent to justification. It's a rant. You have been warned. I hate doctors. Let me reiterate, explain and intensify. I hate the medical profession. If I had a daughter I would rather she married a N*gger Pimp than a doctor. The Pimp is honest - the medic is a hypocrite. The Pimp provides a service - the medic tells you he or she can't help you, or leaves a surgi...
Deja Vu is sometimes defined as a 'disagreeable similarity' to something else. Whether that definition applies in this case remains to be seen. HCC stands for Hull Community Church. XCC stands for X Community Church. HCC was the church in England that I was most committed to, and attended for more than four years - before leaving to "Wander in the Outer Darkness", as the wife of my then Congregational Leader told me I was about to do. X Community Church is the most promising religious comm...
( Link ) The link is to one of several stories detailing Smith's faux-pas in relation to Hitler. He said, in essence, that Hitler didn't wake up mornings thinking to himself 'What evil can I do today?' but instead woke up and by using "twisted, reverse logic" decided to do what he (Hitler) considered to be good. That included the attempt to exterminate European Jewry - along with homosexuals, the mentally and physically dysfunctional, the Roma, the political opposition, trades unionists,...
This is not a rant about the materialism of the Christmas season - even though there's need of such a rant, since this supposedly 'holy' season has become nothing but one more holiday and an excuse for the grossest and most pathetic manifestations of greed. However, I'm not inclined to write it, not today. Instead it's a meditation relating to some of the similarities between faith and money. It's been borne in upon me, over the last few months, that faith is a tool and not an end in itsel...
( Link ) Bush is a bit like an unhinged iconoclast who has arbitrarily decided he doesn't believe in cows, and loudly and repeatedly denies their existence until you get so annoyed you drive him to a farm and show him a cow, and he shakes his head and continues to insist there's no such thing. At which point it moos indignantly, but he claims not to hear it, so in exasperation you drag him into the field and force him to touch the cow, and milk the cow, and ride around on the cow's bac...
The final solution? Treat every citizen as a citizen without regard to skin color, ethnic heritage, sexual orientation or practice, gender orientation - or any other of the various designations used to seperate Americans into their respective ghettoes. Treat religion as a matter of private conscience - which means removing every trace of religious practice or dogma from the life of the Federal State. Every trace; no exceptions, no favoritism, no pandering to the Muslims, the Jews, the Ch...
It occurred to me not long after I arrived in the USA (in August of 2003) that there is very little difference between the fundamentalism of American life and the fundamentalism of the lives of Islamist extremists. Americans, like the Islamist fanatics, have their shibboleths, their idols, their sacred cows. And to threaten them in America yields the same results as does threatening them in Mecca. What's in a Name ? Among the ignorant peasants and political factions of Sudan, you can't na...