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The Death Of Certainty?

I've just discovered - nearly ten years after the event, but I never claimed to be fast - that Stephen Hawking has changed his mind and declared that a Theory of Everything is unachievable. This is not quite as radical a piece of side-switching as the Pope announcing his conversion to Islam would be, but it's pretty significant and his reasons are interesting (not new, but interesting anyway, especially given his status in the world of science). Some Background Towards the end of the nineteenth century there was a general feeling among scientists that explaining the universe was on the verge of being done and dusted: there were still some minor issues to be resolved, but essentially all the elements of a complete explanation were in place and all that was left for the future was further refinement. So much for science, but in the field of mathematics things were not quite as rosy - the branch known as set theory was undergoing a major crisis as a result of the discovery tha
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The City Of Dreadful Night

This started off with a search for the poetry of W.B.Yeats and, through the magic of site-skipping, ended up somewhere else entirely, but first a small digression: Somebody - I can't remember who now - asked me fairly recently why I don't write poetry and I don't think I answered the question at the time so I'll do it now, and the answer is 'I don't write poetry because I suck at it'. In my mid to late teens I turned out reams of the stuff, all heavily indebted to Dylan Thomas and each one individually the literary equivalent of a steaming cow turd. Unfortunately having the technical knowledge necessary to construct poetry is no guarantee that the final result is going to be any good, and that same knowledge robs you of the ability to deceive yourself about its merits. For a while I embraced free verse as my saviour until it dawned on me that the lack of a formal structure actually makes it harder to produce anything worthwhile. So I gave up, and I remain
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Into The Mystic

I was half-watching a documentary about one of Dan Brown's books of piffle (probably 'Angels And Demons' but I wasn't really paying a great deal of attention) that (undoubtedly because I wasn't paying a great deal of attention) inexplicably seemed to segue into a nun waxing indignant about the Higgs boson . Now it's always pleasant to be presented with evidence that scientists have a sense of humour, but nicknaming the thing 'the God particle' was possibly one jape too far as it presented this poor woman with a large number of sticks, the wrong ends of which she was waggling vigorously and embarrassingly in public. This reminded me of a piece I read quite some time ago in which Deepak Chopra was trying to pray the Copenhagen interpretation in aid of the proposition of Eastern philosophy that reality is constructed by the mind rather than the other way around (it's not actually as absurd an idea as it may sound!). The comprehensive rogering that
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There's a riot going on ...

"What causes riots is a hot Saturday night in any dumb cockroach-filled neighborhood where there's a lot of guys standing on the corner and they don't have no bread, no broads and no wheels." - Murray Roman OK, flippant, but you get the picture and it isn't untrue: whatever the proximate cause may be the underlying one is just a bunch of people with a feeling that they've got nothing to lose. Those who do the finger-pointing in the aftermath of a riot - the politicians, the police, the media and all the other self-styled leaders of men - throw words like 'thugs', 'gangsters', 'anarchists' at the participants, slap mobile phones and Twitter around a bit for aiding and abetting and don't take the analysis any further because they can't take it any further without admitting that there's a larger problem to do with society itself that they are unwilling and unable to fix. Let's for a moment forget about those who actual
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Religion Sucks: Norway And An Abrupt Termination

Recent events in Norway have, rather than fuelling the fire of this discourse, had the opposite effect of dampening it. I could - I fully intended to - grab my trusty Chainsaw Of Logic and cut the world's religions (most of them anyway) into bleeding chunks but I find myself wondering what the point of it all would be: it's all been said before by more intelligent people than me and, ultimately, I don't really care how absurd anyone's beliefs are as long as they give them some measure of happiness and they don't use them as an excuse to hurt anyone who can't accept them . The problem is not even religion per se but our own accursed and apparently incorrigible habit of mistaking the mental models we make of reality for reality itself. Whatever ideologies we embrace, whatever stories we tell ourselves for the sake of comfort or understanding, whatever scientific or magical structures of thought we build in explanation of the universe and our place in it, are, a
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Religion Sucks: The Personal Stuff

I’m the child of occasionally church-going parents (an escaped Catholic father and a Presbyterian mother) and between the ages of five and ten I attended a Church of England school (not as the result of any religious conviction on the part of my parents, it was simply the only school in the village). The teachers at the school did do their best to pump us full of Christianity: I’m not sure how successful they were on the whole but I don’t think I can be counted as one of their triumphs in that, looking back, I don't honestly think I ever truly believed in God, or at least not the God they were anxious I should believe in. On the other hand I didn't do much questioning either. Until my mid-teens I went through all the 'right' motions - even attending a weekly Bible class - but in all honesty my motives for doing so were insincere and self-serving. I suppose that I could have continued to pay unreflective, agnostic lip-service to the culturally-approved mythology fore
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Religion Sucks, Preamble

I've been promising myself (or somebody, maybe even a Higher Power!) that I'd try to worm my way around the writer's block by producing something - anything - even if it's not fiction. I don't guarantee that any of the parts that form the postamble will be cogent, coherent, comprehensible (or even written in anything that is recognisable as English) but I'll give it a bash. What may (or may not) follow this brief introductory spasm may (or may not) be a series of personal reflections on the greatest misfortune ever to emerge from the muddled thinking and desperate hopes of humankind, i.e. religion. These will probably not be well-reasoned, and for reasons of personal sloth they will certainly not be supported by references, but this will give everyone the opportunity to point out the deficiencies and suggest amendments or corrections, or to pile in and hammer the crap out of me. I'll amble away now and leave you with a quotation from Mark Twain. Take it
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