A new title

Yes, a new title for the blog, reflecting new interests.... I'm now on my third module in my Philosophy Masters, and hope to use this blog as a sounding board of sorts. I'll also be posting essays and questions, so feel free to respond. My first completed essay - no great shakes, but interesting I thought - coming up today after this post.

One year on...

It is almost a year since I last posted here. YOTM is dead I fear. I'm now tackling an MA in Philosophy, which is taking up all of my reading time and most of my writing time. I shall post on it here. My current battle is with Kant and his regulative ideas... Nice to be back.

Yeah, right, OK, I know...

Still working on it. Honestly.

ok

Okay, okay, I'm still working on it. Congratulations if you are actually following this blog. The long wait is about to pay off...

There's life in it yet...

I sat at my computer last night and re-read the entire text of ‘The Year of the Monkey’. It’s significantly better than I remembered it. I moved chapters around and discarded the ‘jumping around’ notion to make it read chronologically. It’s easier for me to work on and will be an easier read. I realize now that I have wasted an inordinate amount of time playing with structure, instead of ‘just writing’. Something has clicked, and though I’ve said this before, I now see YOTM progressing.

Therapy

Just finished reading 'Therapy', David Lodge. Not the most cheerful comedy ever, but insightful. And leading me to a re-write of YOTM. Or possibly, I realise as I write this, abandoning it in it's present form altogether, and taking half the idea to work it up into a full novel. I can't escape the fact, or course, that the endless questions and self-analysis are futile attempts at procrastination, and nothing is going to write itself.

Coming off!

Having read 'The God Delusion', 2006, by Richard Dawkins, and, perhaps more powerfully having watched a series of programmes called 'Root of all Evil?', I have decided that I must take a stand against religion, that it would be morally wrong to remain 'sitting on the fence'. Here goes:

Throughout the world, we standardly make certain evidential requirements before we accept the truth of some statement: whether some experiment supports or disproves a scientific hypothesis does not depend on the country where the experiment was performed, and whether I am guilty of some crime or not should be decided regardless of my wealth and views, solely on the basis of the evidence before the court.

But there is one area in which societies usually don't make the same requirements, and that is in the area of people's religious beliefs, where we allow them to hold and express beliefs – and even act on them – that run counter to the best shared evidence we have, or that are at least not supported by generally-accepted evidence. In certain conversations we all step very carefully, don't we, worried we might offend?

It is because we feel we cannot challenge religious beliefs in the same way that we challenge other beliefs, that religion is liable to be exploited for other, political ends, and that it plays a role in much of the violence in the world, and not only large-scale violence – despite the fact that all major religions ostensibly preach peace, (at least when they are presented to outsiders.)

We therefore have to accept that all the 'nice' religious people, by claiming for themselves a certain area where the beliefs they hold are not to be subjected to the usual scrutiny and measured by the same standards of evidence that we, and they too, expect in all other areas of our lives, are giving cover to the 'fundamentalists' and 'extremists'.

It had always felt wrong that the 'nice' religious people so easily disowned violence perpetrated by their fellow-believers, in the name of the same god they believed in. I have now come to think that not only can they not disown it, they are implicated; and not only in the violence of their fellow-believers but in all religiously justified violence, in the name of any god.

This is not me, by the way, but Kai Arste, Atlantic College. (http://www.kahome.co.uk/index.php). However, I could now quite happily write and claim this as my own. I'm coming off the fence.