Category Archives: beliefs

amusements, beliefs, quotes, science, thoughts

Quotes of the Week

The usual eclectic and eccentric mix this week …

If you can’t see the bright side of life … then polish the dull side.

Wear short sleeves … Support your right to bare arms!
Thoughts of Angel

The very concept of “average” necessarily implies variability.
Emily Nakoski, On monkeys, bullshit, and scale

I hold this truth to be self-evident, that a debt crisis cannot be resolved with more debt.
Hellasious on Quantum Economics

It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others.
MFK Fisher quoted in Why Do People Eat Too Much?

Ponder less on what you yourself perhaps think than on what will be the thoughts of the majority of others who, carried away by your authority or your reasons, become persuaded that the terrestrial globe moves among the planets. They will conclude at first that, if the earth is doubtless one of the planets and also has inhabitants, then it is well to believe that inhabitants exist on other planets and are not lacking in the fixed stars, that they are even of a superior nature and in proportion as the other stars surpass the earth in size and perfection. This will raise doubts about Genesis, which says that the earth was made before the stars and that they were created on the fourth day to illuminate the earth … then in turn the entire economy of the Word incarnate and of scriptural truth will be rendered suspect.
17th-century Rector of the College of Dijon writing to the priest-scientist Pierre Gassendi. With thanks to Barnaby Page.

beliefs, food+drink, memes, natural history

Listography – Random

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Yet again I’ve not done Kate’s Listography for a few weeks, in part because she has used several weeks of Listography space running a Top 5 Toys for Christmas survey for which I wasn’t eligible (‘cos her rule said “parents only”).

But this week we’re back to normal and I’ll let Kate herself introduce this week’s exam:

This week’s Listography is simple but with a very wide scope — Top 5 Random Things I Like.

Just one word of warning though – random is not ‘I like chocolate’ — that’s just not going to cut it round here. However ‘I like chocolate sauce with my chips’ is getting a bit warmer.

So, in the hope that my choices are whacky enough, here we go …

  1. Wasps. They generally get a bad rap, and I would agree can be annoying. But they are superb creatures and wonderful predators. Without them we’d be knee deep in creepy crawlies.
  2. Plane Crashes. Not because I like seeing people hurt or killed. Of course I don’t and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. No, my interest is forensic and analytical: I like to try to see if I can work out guess what happened and why. Think of it as a giant puzzle game.
  3. Curry with Avocado, Banana and Mayonnaise on the Side. Yep it works really well. Chopped avocado and chopped banana. Mayonnaise instead of yoghurt dressing (although I like that too). It’s a nice combination of flavours and contrasts of hot and cooling.
  4. Latin Liturgy. Despite not being at all religious — indeed I’m anti-religious — I do find that proper Tridentine Latin Mass does something to me. Well it is a spell, isn’t it?!
  5. Deep-fried Haggis. Yep again this works wonderfully well. I first met it 40 years ago when a student: the chip shop nearest the university in York used to sell it. Sausage-sized haggis, thickly battered and deep fried. And bloody good it was too especially on a cold winter’s night after a few pints. Sadly I don’t recall seeing anyone doing it since. And anyone want to try deep fried black pudding — I reckon that would be good too.

So there you are. I’m sure I have more interesting “random likes” than this but they escape me for now. Anyone care to add to the list?

beliefs, current affairs, history

Poppy Off

So FIFA have decreed that the England football team may not wear poppies on their shirts during their friendly match against Spain this coming Saturday. This is on the grounds that:

Fifa decrees that shirts should not carry political, religious or commercial messages. “Such initiatives would open the door to similar initiatives from all over the world, jeopardising the neutrality of football,” [FIFA] said.

I’m with FIFA. For once they’re absolutely right. If an exception is made in this instance it’ll be made for every other instance. The words “wedge”, “thin” and “end” come to mind.

Moreover someone has to stand up to this sycophantic poppy nonsense. As I wrote last year, I’m not saying we should forget all about the wars for the liberation of Europe, the bravery, the fallen, etc. But the whole thing is so totally out of hand one dare not do anything but go along with it. It’s dictatorial; it’s sycophantic; and it’s backward looking. We need to turn round and be going forward in happiness, thanks and peace; not looking backward in a sugar-coated, maudlin, pseudo-Christian, glorification of war. Yeuch!

I don’t expect other people to agree with me — although I can hope that some will. But it is only if dissident voices are heard that opinions (on anything) will ever change and progress will be made.

beliefs, quotes, thoughts

Joseph Campbell

From time to time I dip into all manner of curious authors, often returning to them at protracted intervals. One such is the late Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) the American mythologist and author who is best known for his work in comparative mythology and religion. He was one of those early/mid-20th century polymaths who managed to see deeply into everything and extract paradigm shifting ideas and ways of explaining things. His words invariably make one think long, hard and deep — even when they at the same time contain a certain throwaway humour.

So I thought I’d share with you a few I picked, some while ago, from an anthology of his work compiled posthumously. In no particular order …

Our Purpose
When we talk about settling the world’s problems, we’re barking up the wrong tree. The world is perfect. It’s a mess. It has always been a mess. We are not going to change it. Our job is to straighten out our own lives.

Marriage
If you go into marriage with a program, you will find that it won’t work. Successful marriage is leading innovative lives together, being open, non-programmed. It’s a free fall: how you handle each new thing as it comes along. As a drop of oil on the sea, you must float, using intellect and compassion to ride the waves.

Spiritual Need
If what you are following, however, is your own true adventure, if it is something appropriate to your deep spiritual need or readiness, then magical guides will appear to help you.

Rituals
People ask me, “What can we have for rituals?” Well, what do you want to have a ritual for? You should have a ritual for your life. All a ritual does is concentrate your mind on the implications of what you are doing. For instance, the marriage ritual is a meditation on the step you are taking in learning to become a member of a duad, instead of one individual all alone. The ritual enables you to make the transit.
Ritual introduces you to the meaning of what’s going on. Saying grace before meals lets you know that you’re about to eat something that once was alive. When eating a meal, realize what you are doing. Hunting peoples thank the animal for having given itself. They feel real gratitude.

Vegetarianism
Vegetarianism is the first turning away from life, because life lives on lives. Vegetarians are just eating something that can’t run away.

Truth
When we talk about scientific truth — just as when we talk about God — we are in trouble, because truth has different meanings. William James said, and it’s valid, “Truth is what works”.
The idea of Truth with a capital “T” — that there is something called Truth that’s beyond the range of the relativity of the human mind trying to think — is what I call “the error of the found truth”. The trouble with all of these damned preachers is the error of the found truth. When they get that tremolo in the voice and tell you what God has said, you know you’ve got a faker. When people think that they, or their guru, have The Truth — “This is It!” — they are what Nietzsche calls “epileptics of the concept”: people who have gotten an idea that’s driven them crazy.

Burqas
Those women were going around in tents! Even their eyes were covered with cheesecloth, so you did not know if it was an old hag or a glorious goddess walking around. And you can’t respond to a tent.

Awareness
“Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eon of the gods”. That is James Joyce. The statement is quoted in Ulysses by Buck Mulligan. The situation is that Leopold Bloom, thinking of his home problem, is looking intently at a red triangle on the label of a bottle of Bass ale. When someone starts to disturb Bloom, Mulligan stops him, saying “preserve a druid silence. His soul is far away. It is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be born. Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access” and so on.

Religion
There is a wonderful line in the Portrait [of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce], where Stephen’s friend, who’s been hearing all this heretical stuff, asks if he intends to become a Protestant. “I said that I had lost the faith,” Stephen replies, “but not that I had lost my self-respect. What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?”

Life
The obvious lesson … is that the first step to the knowledge of the highest divine symbol of the wonder and mystery of life is in the recognition of the monstrous nature of life and its glory in that character: the realization that this is just how it is and that it cannot and will not be changed. Those who think — and their name is legion — that they know how the universe could have been better than it is, how it would have been had they created it, without pain, without sorrow, without time, without life, are unfit for illumination. Or those who think — as do many — “Let me first correct society, then get around to myself” are barred from even the outer gate of the mansion of God’s peace. All societies are evil, sorrowful, inequitable; and so they will always be. So if you really want to help this world, what you will have to teach is how to live in it. And that no one can do who has not himself learned how to live in it in the joyful sorrow and sorrowful joy of the knowledge of life as it is.

Advice
A bit of advice given to a young Native American at the time of his initiation: “As you go the way of life, you will see a great chasm. Jump. It is not as wide as you think”.

I’m currently dipping into The Power of Myth, so expect some more of the above in due course.

beliefs, history, links, science, sexuality, thoughts

Links of the Week

This weeks collection of the curious and interesting you may have missed …

Lord Norwich makes some sly remarks about Popes. But how does he know what Pope Nicholas V was like?

Now apparently out gut bacteria may be causing obesity. And you thought it was because I ate too much.

Scientists also think they’ve discovered why some of us hate Brussels Sprouts. Yes it’s all in the genetics, and our taste buds.

In other news, speculation is rife that Palaeolithic man went in for piercing his penis. It all sounds pretty tenuous to me, but then there’s nothing new under the foreskin sun.

And finally … And finally someone in “authority” has come to realise that what we’ve been saying all these years might just be helpful: prostitution could be solved by decriminalising brothels. Government: smell the coffee … it ain’t going to go away and if you licence it you can tax it!

beliefs, books, quotes, science

Quotes of the Week: Sublime & Ridiculous

The Tuesday scowls, the Wednesday growls, the Thursday curses, the Friday howls, the Saturday snores, the Sunday yawns, the Monday morns, the Monday morns. The whacks, the moans, the cracks, the groans, the welts, the squeaks, the belts, the shrieks, the pricks, the prayers, the kicks, the tears, the skelps, and the yelps.
[Samuel Beckett, Watt]

The moon lives twenty-eight days and this is our month. Each of these days represents something sacred to us: two of the days represent the Great Spirit; two are for Mother Earth; four are for the four winds; one is for the Spotted Eagle; one for the sun; and one for the moon; one is for the Morning Star; and four are for the four ages; seven for our seven great rites; one is for the buffalo; one for the fire; one for the water; one for the rock; and finally, one is for the two-legged people. If you add all these days up you will see that they come to twenty-eight. You should know also that the buffalo has twenty-eight ribs, and that in our war bonnets we usually wear twenty-eight feathers. You see, there is a signif­icance for everything, and these are things that are good for men to know and to remember.
[Black Elk, quoted somewhere I now forget by Joseph Campbell]

Moyers: What happens when a society no longer embraces a powerful mythology?
Campbell: What we’ve got on our hands. If you want to find out what it means to have a society without any rituals, read the New York Times.
Moyers: And you’d find?
Campbell: The news of the day, including destructive and violent acts by young people who don’t know how to behave in a civilized society.
Moyers: Society has provided them no rituals by which they become members of the tribe, of the community. All children need to be twice born, to learn to function rationally in the present world, leaving childhood behind …
Campbell: That’s exactly it. That’s the significance of the puberty rites. In primal societies, there are teeth knocked out, there are scarifications, there are circumcisions, there are all kinds of things done. So you don’t have your little baby body any more, you’re something else entirely.
When I was a kid, we wore short trousers, you know, knee pants. And then there was a great moment when you put on long pants. Boys now don’t get that. I see even five-year-olds walking around with long trousers. When are they going to know that they’re now men and must put aside childish things?
Moyers: Where do the kids growing up in the city — on 125th and Broadway, for example — where do these kids get their myths today?
Campbell: They make them up themselves. This is why we have graffiti all over the city. These kids have their own gangs and their own initiations and their own morality, and they’re doing the best they can … they have not been initiated into our society.
[Joseph Campbell; The Power of Myth]

Out of this scrimmage Thomas Drury emerges as something of an orchestrator, an impresario of knaveries …
[Charles Nicholl, The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe, 2nd edition, 2002]

A fair hot wench in flame-coloured taffeta.
[Shakespeare, I Henry IV, I ii]

beliefs, memes, words

Word of the Week : Amniomancy

Amniomancy

A method of divination whereby the future life of a child is predicted from the caul covering their head at birth. The colour and consistency of the caul are used to interpret the future. A vivid colour is supposed to reflect a vivid life whilst the opposite is also true.
A form of divination by examining the embryonic sac or amniotic fluid.
Divination using an after-birth.

beliefs, food+drink, memes, pleasures, quotes, sexuality

Listography – Top Five Keywords

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As regular readers will know I don’t always do Kate’s weekly Listography — sometimes because I just don’t get time and sometimes because the subject doesn’t fire me with enthusiasm. But this week Kate is asking us something simple: list the top five keyword searches on your weblog (excepting the name of the weblog and keywords like “blogger”). So I can hardly refuse, especially as whenever I see anyone listing the searches used to find their weblogs they’re usually either a scream or completely unbelievable!

Will mine be any different? In a word, No …

At we have pheasant. Yep really. Four times the number of hits of its nearest competitor! Everyone seems to have liked my December 2009 recipe for Pheasant Casserole.

is the quite shocking pussy porn. I guess, guys, you were sadly disappointed to find this, this or this.

is perhaps the equally worrying, and equally disappointing, dumb blonde.

At we have another search for pornography: osho on porn. But this time it is a serious article.

Finally at #5 we go from the sublime(?) to the ridiculous with the search woodpecker feet. Well, yes, I really did write a post about woodpecker feet!

In the words of JBS Haldane:

The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.

beliefs, memes, words

Word of the Week : Chimera

Chimera.
1. A fabled fire-breathing monster of Greek mythology, with a lion’s head, a goat’s body, and a serpent’s tail, killed by Bellerophon.
2. A grotesque monster, formed of the parts of various animals.
3. An unreal creature of the imagination, a mere wild fancy; an unfounded conception.
4. An organism (commonly a plant) in which tissues of genetically different constitution co-exist as a result of grafting, mutation, or some other process.
5. A horrible and fear-inspiring phantasm, a bogy.
6. Any fish of the family Chimæridæ.

beliefs, books, quotes, thoughts

Quotes of the Week

Oooo … have we got a thought-provoking bunch this week!

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
[William James]

Life is short, smile while you still have teeth!
[Thoughts of Angel]

A shepherd in William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale wishes “there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting.”
[David Dobbs at National Geographic]

[Natural] Selection is hell on dysfunctional traits. If adolescence is essentially a collection of them – angst, idiocy, and haste; impulsiveness, selfishness, and reckless bumbling – then how did those traits survive selection?
[David Dobbs at National Geographic]

If there was a God, why on earth would he want us to ‘believe’ and/or ‘have faith’? Given that he (she or it) is omnipotent, and can therefore by definition do anything that he wants, why doesn’t he just make us have faith/belief hard-wired into our brains? Also, can anybody think of reasons why he would care if we have faith or if we just merrily go on ignoring him? I’m genuinely puzzled by this.
[Keith J at cix:enquire_within/54discussion]

For what are we if we are not words made flesh, or flesh expressing our meaning in words? We are memories, thoughts, feelings, ideas, pain, anguish, love, amusement, boredom, hopes and dreams. We are all these things in a sheath of skin, making our way into the unknown, and if we cannot capture it, think about it, reflect on it and own it, what do we have?
[Katyboo]

I visualize the ego as a little guy in a gray flannel suit and tight necktie. His job is to get you safely through your waking day, to make sure that you pay your electric bill and don’t offend the boss. He keeps up a constant chatter, telling you to do this or that, and insisting that you pay attention to what’s happening in the world around you. He takes occasional coffee breaks, like when you’ve driven down a familiar road, and realize when you arrive home that you have no memory of the trip. The ego has taken time out, figuring you can get home on automatic pilot. He’s grateful when you finally retire for the night. He’s got you in a safe place – your bedroom – where nothing is likely to happen to you. He pops up again in the morning, when you “wake down” from your wider experiences in the sleep state. He’s the character who makes you look at the clock (“time” only exists in its usual sense when the ego is on the job) and nags you into getting out of bed and on your way to work. Jealous of the time you spend in your right brain, he likes to insist he’s been around all the time. He hates to admit that his job isn’t all there is to your experience, so he makes sure you forget your dreams. He’s especially good at pretending he’s never off the job. “I wasn’t asleep, or not paying attention. I was just resting my eyes. I heard everything you said,” he insists indignantly when you catch him at one of his coffee breaks, such as when you are wool-gathering, sleeping, or under hypnosis.
[Helen Wambach, Reliving Past Lives]