Category: History
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God’s Life Story (ii)
A previous post noted that the first Israelites were Canaanites, and so their chief god was called El or Elohim (as in the name Isra-el). How many other gods and goddesses did they follow? The answer is, lots! Unsurprisingly, the Hebrew Bible doesn’t go into details, but frequently denounces Israelites who followed the weather/fertility god…
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Irony of Ironies
Who is this a statue of? It’s of George Orwell who, in his book “1984”, warned us about the abomination of total state control over the lives of its citizens; what they do from minute to minute, and what they say in any place, at any time. Such control must include language. The state decides…
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Mirror Images
When Donald Trump, defeated in the polls, tells his supporters to go to the Capitol and ‘fight like hell’, and then goes into denial mode, despite plentiful backup video evidence, the whole thing becomes a Democrat-led conspiracy, a ‘witch hunt’ and a ‘stitch up’. When Boris Johnson, flouting his own Covid lockdown regulations, joins with…
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God’s Life Story
When people give thought to the word ‘God’, they may well have sophisticated notions about its meaning, and might use such words as infinite, eternal, all-powerful and so on. But let’s step back a bit, and focus on the Jewish-Christian God. If we journey back in time, we discover that he has a ‘life history’…
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Panacea for Po-Faced Politics
Delightful (to some) and Derided (by others) is the 40 year old Official Monster Raving Loony Party, complete with outlandish outfits and over-sized rosettes. Before writing them off, it’s worth taking note of the fact that some of their “ridiculous” proposals were eventually enshrined in law. It’s also worth noting that some of their “risible”…
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Offensive Realism?
John Mearsheimer, a Professor at Chicago University, is a political scientist and international relations scholar who has developed a theory of “offensive realism”. The suggestion is that interaction between the world’s great powers is basically governed by a determination, in an unstable international system, to gain and maintain the security provided by regional dominance. It…
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The things that you’re liable to read in the Bible …
Apparently, there are still some people who believe that the Earth is flat and, presumably, at least some of them are not joking. Equally unreal (at least to me) is that there are also people who believe the entire Bible to be literally true and historically accurate, all without errors of any kind. It’s unquestionably…
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Voices in the Wilderness of Time and Space?
“Welcome to planet Earth – a place of blue nitrogen skies, oceans of liquid water, cool forests and soft meadows, a world positively rippling with life. In the cosmic perspective it is poignantly beautiful and rare; but it is also, for the moment, unique. In all our journeying through space and time, it is, so…
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The Exodus times Three
In its final form, Exodus, like the Bible’s other opening books, was a well-crafted compilation using a variety of oral and written source materials. These had originated, and then been expanded upon, for at least five centuries, in different locations, at diverse times, by numberless story tellers and writers. The final editors had exemplary respect…
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A ‘Renegade’ Bishop and God
The recently deceased Bishop John Shelby Spong stayed in the Episcopal Church, though no longer able to accept many traditional teachings at face value. To be true to themselves, people must either leave, or seek change from within. Choosing pursuit of change, Bishop Spong wrote the book “Unbelievable” in which, like the reformer Martin Luther,…
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