Last week I came off the cortisone completely, and it was like running straight into a brick wall. From one day to the next I was suddenly completely out of energy and a bit ill again, only in a different way to the usual cortisone side-effects. You know how Bilbo looks pretty sprightly at his 111th birthday party? Then bang, the Ring gets destroyed in the Fires Of Doom, and Bilbo ages overnight by about 300 years or so, and keels over looking like an ancient dandelion gone wrong. That's exactly how I felt from one day to the next.

Then I had another consultation with my GP, and he had been through the mill - it is extraordinarily difficult to get thalidomide as I wanted, to replace the cortisone and to make sure of my best pre-operation chances. As a GP he may not even be allowed to prescribe thalidomide; the hidden regulations state only a medico with experience in treating patients with the stuff may prescribe it (and the special prescription process is a nightmare in itself for thalidomide). So it hardly matters it would cost me 500 euros or more for 28 pills, since it would be off-label, experimental treatment, not if I can't even get it in the first place. Any old how, I'll blog on that separately later.

Last week I also signed up for the first time in my life to a gym, and went and did hard training on weights, exercises and stamina. Every bit helps to raise the chances. Unfortunately when I went to the gym to sign up and get a membership card (which functions as keycard for the doors, the lockers and so on too), I had just come off the cortisone, and as a result I looked like a mess. I looked bad, and worse, when the woman processing my application leaned acrosss the desk to take my picture with her desktop-PC cam-camera, I was caught unprepared, in an awful unguarded moment. So I came off looking like an Orc. Picture below. The only good thing about this is that that is probably the worst I've ever looked, so it can only improve, no? What one gets with the unguarded moment. Music below.

In better news, as of yesterday I now have (after an almost full-on brawl) an operation date. The big op is now planned for 01 June, meaning I go into hospital on 31 May, and if all goes well I emerge roughly 8 days later, in much better shape. So wish me luck, me hearties. I may feel like Bilbo and look like an Orc, but I keep the flag flying.







                Follow @Gurdur  

Comments are welcome! Please keep in mind if you are not registered that comments posted here to this blog post may take a while to appear - up to 16 hours after you post them, since they go onto a moderation queue and have to be individually approved, in order to stop spammers. The answer to the so-called "Random Question" is always "human", with no quote marks.

The current British conservative government is savagely cutting public services, while claiming it's necessary for austerity measures. At the same time, the Tories seek to privatize as much as they can of the public services, whether the police ever more and increasingly, or the fire service, or how the government has sought to destroy the NHS, after its attacks on nurses and other public services.

If you are British, the emergency services are your national common good. Unless you're very rich, you really won't like a privatized society - history shows how money rules in such a society, how ordinary citizens get left behind, how transparency and accountability become a thing of the past.

Today, members of the police federation, supported even by a Chief Constable, and other public servants are marching in protest in London. If you care about your society, if you want to keep your stake in your society, then support the public servants including the police, now and in the long-term. And be aware of sneak manipulative attacks through media outlets on the public services, pretending to only want to improve or "reform" them.

Some more links:

The press release/statement from Protect Our Police UK (@ProtectRPolice), and their overall site.

PC Bloggs' blog

The Thinking Policeman's blog

Inspector Gadget's blog (@InspGadgetBlogs)

200 Weeks (another British police blog)

Of interest:

Jack of Kent (@jackofkent) did a good chronology of the NightJack outing affair.


And very worthwhile indeed: The Magistrate's Blog.




            Follow @Gurdur  

Comments are welcome! Please keep in mind if you are not registered that comments posted here to this blog post may take a while to appear - up to 16 hours after you post them, since they go onto a moderation queue and have to be individually approved, in order to stop spammers. The answer to the so-called "Random Question" is always "human".

Bissonomy was originally one of the 7a Virtues. Only everyone forgot what Bissonomy actually was. Everyone knows what prudence, charity, hope and grace are, no-one knows anymore what bissonomy was. All of that is detailed by Sir Terry Pratchett in various of his DiscWorld novels; you can read up all about Bissonomy here. Well, now, courtesy of @mariawolters and @langology who alerted me to this news article (though the DiscWorld Bissonomy connection is all my own fault), about the discovery of a hitherto-unknown language attested to by a list of personal names on a 2,800-year-old clay tablet "buried in the ruins of a 2800 year old Middle Eastern palace .... in .... an Assyrian imperial governors’ palace in the ancient city of Tushan, south-east Turkey".

The newspaper report details some of the names found on the clay tablet: "... Typical names, born by the women – the evidence for the lost language – include Ushimanay, Alagahnia, Irsakinna and Bisoonoomay. ..." Well now, the ancient personal name Bisoonoomay would seem to be very possible historical evidence for the existence of Bissonomy in the past.

And of course the DiscWorld, Ankh-Morpork, the Goddess Bissonomy, and bissonomy itself are detailed by Sir Terry Pratchett. If you think I take this all too seriously (and yes, this blog post is written somewhat tongue-in-cheek), I will remind you there is a British town, Wincanton in South Somerset, that is now officially twinned with Ankh-Morpork; Wincanton has even named several streets after AnkhMorporkian streets, such as Peach Pie Street and Treacle Mine Road. DiscWorld is serious business.







            Follow @Gurdur  

Comments are welcome! Please keep in mind if you are not registered that comments posted here to this blog post may take a while to appear - up to 16 hours after you post them, since they go onto a moderation queue and have to be individually approved, in order to stop spammers. The answer to the so-called "Random Question" is always "human".

As you know, Amendment One was passed in North Carolina. The resolution was more than what it seemed as a vote to ban same-sex marriages and civil unions; it was hardly necessary, since they weren't legal in the first place in NC. The right seems to have seen an opportunity in making a symbolic crusade; the left seems stuck in a rut of lack of practical, longterm political organizing and outreach, often preferring symbolic fights and worse, many allegedly of the left turning on the left's own people if anyone is seen as not totally 110% behind whatever line is drawn. The NC issue was turned into a fight on symbols widely divorced from reality. President Obama, who has not publically spoken in favour of legalizing gay marriages, supporting instead civil unions, nonetheless said through his campaign team that he was disappointed with the NC constitutional amendment, it being "divisive and discriminatory"; certainly, divisiveness seems to have been the main aim of the amendment's supporters. Many of the Republicans seem to have turned this into a major power-struggle, including hassling polling staff. But answering such divisiveness with divisiveness, as too often some of the more vocal of US liberals and "left" all too often do, attacking the people more or less on their own side in an orgy of narcissistic anger, doesn't seem like a good answer; it only plays into the right's hands, of course. Anyone still self-centered enough to think trying to primary Obama was a good idea? Then there's the often-made nasty remarks about the South, which really don't help, as pointed out.

All that being as it may. Some demographic maps:

First off, courtesy of @tautechnical, @BoraZ & @indyweek, an interactive map showing polling results on Amendment One county by county in North Carolina. Note the rural versus uirban divide, the exception being Watauga County, which can perhaps be seen as an example of wealth divide. The same page there will also give you interactive maps (see the options next to the map on that page) for NC Republican and Democrat gubernatorial candidates, and for NC results on Republican presidential candidates.

Then an interactive map from the US Census Bureau, showing all sorts of information for each NC county. Really worthwhile. The data is roughly for 2010, depending on which aspect is looked at.

Next, an interactive map looking at results for Democratic and Republican presidential candidates in 2008.

And, courtesy of @tautechnical, an interactive map showing number and percentage of adults with college degrees. While it is county by county, this map is for the entire United States -- zero in on the NC counties. Note that it gives data for 2005-2009, but options can also give you good comparative data for 1940, 1950, 1970, 1980, 1990 and 2000 as well. Very useful!

Now some links for chasing up more information:

A page of NC demographics links, from the Joyner Library, East Carolina University.

Then a page from the US Census Bureau on the 2007 Economic Census, as for NC.

And a page from the State Library of North Carolina, giving links for demographics info, including a link for the North Carolina State Data Center.

Some interesting remarks here in an in-depth piece looking at the gay marriage issue throughout the USA:

And lastly an interactive infographic looking at gay rights throught the USA; this one is very good in that it breaks down the issues and stand of things per marriage, hospital visitation, adoption, employment, housing, hate-crime rates, and schools.

Enjoy!


Edited to add: also please make sure to see the comments under this post, some important info there.






                Follow @Gurdur  

Comments are welcome! Please keep in mind if you are not registered that comments posted here to this blog post may take a while to appear - up to 16 hours after you post them, since they go onto a moderation queue and have to be individually approved, in order to stop spammers. The answer to the so-called "Random Question" is always "human", with no quote marks.

Most of us of "a certain age group" ran home from school every day to see each day's episode of the gothic soap opera Dark Shadows on TV which ran in the USA from 1966-1971. I was one of them. After enjoying the original series, the 2 movies - House of Dark Shadows and Night of Dark Shadows, and the 1991 prime-time resurrection, we are about to see a new movie version open next week. Here is some trivia at IMDB in anticipation of the release on May 11th. I'll try to blog about that after seeing the new version, but meanwhile:

Never with the new version of Barnabas portrayed by Johnny Depp:


No mention of Barnabas can be made without a nod to the original portrayal of the character by Jonathan Frid who passed away last month. I was glad to read that he spent some time on the set of the new movie and had a cameo (along with 3 other original starts).

Jonathan as Barnabas Collins:


DS has had a very loyal fandom - with conventions held every year (alternating US coasts) know as the DS festival. There is a print newsletter that is published roughly every 1-2 months by Marcy Robin called "Shadowgram". The newsletter is quite comprehensive, but the website seems to have never taken off. It does provide subscription information though. Issues update fans on the latest news from the DS property in general, the actors and even the fans. It also includes memorial notes about any of the actors who have passed on.

I was in a Barnes and Noble recently and was pleasantly surprised to see that Lara Parker's (Angelique) Dark Shadows books have been re-released and were on display there.
Dark Shadows: Angelique's Descent
Dark Shadows: The Salem Branch
I see looking for links to these that she's penning a new DS book for release in October:
Dark Shadows: Wolf Moon Rising

I plan to order the new book of old storyline and check out the new movie this week. Meanwhile, my Dark Shadows notebook (collection of clips from the day) and vinyl album of music done by Robert Cobert are safely stored downstairs. :yes4

In reaction to the current War On Women run by some segments of the GOP in the USA, Imani Gandy (@AngryBlackLady) and others have formed a political action committee (PAC) aimed at advocating womens' rights and a form of feminism, the PowrPAC. You can find its About page here, and its front page here, . I've known @AngryBlackLady a fair long time over Twitter; she's very sensible, positive and rational, and the aims of the PowrPAC seem quite competent, targeting all elected politicians whether Republican or Democrat. It all seems very worthy of support; the general plan looks focused, viable and effectual, and above all genuine, unlike others I've run into. So it gets a hearty recommendation from me!






                Follow @Gurdur  

Comments are welcome! Please keep in mind if you are not registered that comments posted here to this blog post may take a while to appear - up to 16 hours after you post them, since they go onto a moderation queue and have to be individually approved, in order to stop spammers. The answer to the so-called "Random Question" is always "human", with no quote marks.



*One note: She talks in that video about wondering what Pinterest is for. That's something I will blog separately on very soon, but I've also already blogged on why bloggers, activists and networkers should be using Pinterest.

I know some are waiting for me to get some promised blog posts finished. My apologies for the delay, caused by illness and also by the rather very nasty withdrawal period of coming off heavy cortisone (prednisone) doses. The promised blog posts will be up soon, tomorrow. There will also be more coming along on the promised subjects.

In the meantime, some good stuff on social-media for you.

The Guardian does a small start towards looking at the science of social attention.

The Guardian looks at gamification's march to ubiquity.

A big thing: the Guardian is doing an Activate Summit mini-conference/workshop, Wednesday 27 June. This looks very worthwhile indeed. Check them out for details.

Guardian yet again: tomorrow is a live debate on the subject of the journalist of tomorrow.

And a topic much more important to you and your own efforts than you might think: starting in on how to Bring Your Own Collaboration (BYOC).

More later, am on run to an appointment.




            Follow @Gurdur  

Comments are welcome! Please keep in mind if you are not registered that comments posted here to this blog post may take a while to appear - up to 16 hours after you post them, since they go onto a moderation queue and have to be individually approved, in order to stop spammers. The answer to the so-called "Random Question" is always "human".

Atheism, despite gaining much ground in public acceptance in the USA in recent years, is having difficulties. It may be getting into trouble in other parts of the world; as possibly in Russia, for example. As for the USA, the impact zone is secularism rather than atheism itself. Jacques Berlinerblau has a new article up on the British New Humanist titled, "The death of American secularism", in which he worries about conservative backlash in the USA. The atheist movement may cease to be effectually benefiting secularism in the USA, owing to among other factors the antics of some atheists, owing to an attitude wide-spread among many atheists. There's the constant flamers and snarksters active all over the net and on the comment threads on newspaper websites, there's the unconscious bigotry as exampled here by reactions of atheist "friends" to a Christian. There's a new perception of atheists being built where atheists get seen as being all arrogant twit flamers (who then feed into the strange post-atheist phenomenon).

It doesn't help that some of the would-be leading atheists do vainglorious cheerleading and empty promises, running a movement on emo at a time the movement needs genuine outreach and broad building. The vainglorious promises are only that; those promises largely consist of the very-oft-repeated claim that if you as the atheist movement only scorn the religious enough, you will win. Well, bollocks to that idea. Moreover, there's some evidence to show that the problem in the USA is not that people are terribly religious - it's that they expect their political leaders to be religious, as a way of showing supposed social responsibility (more on this in a later post). Feeding into that is the widespread prejudice that atheists are sociopaths, or that atheism is just another name for sociopathy. While that prejudice is very wrong, it doesn't help when a good many vocal American and British atheists act just like that - like sociopathic-jerk flamers all over the net.

After all that, you get into other issues, such as the problem of just what is religion in the first place. That one gets tricky fast. Then there's the problem of what atheism is supposed to bem and what the atheist movement(s) should look like; is atheism in the USA:

1. a civil-rights matter?
2. or a social-acceptance matter?
3. or both, or something else?

Despite what some claim, there simply isn't enough institutionalized anti-atheism right across the USA to make it a genuine civil-rights matter for the USA as a whole. Others like blacks or gays have it much worse. If it's a social-acceptance issue, then behaving like a habitual flamer won't help at all, will it?

Then what really, really puts the crush on the atheist movement is the exclusivism of some. When various American atheists attacked the organisers of the recent Australian atheist convention, when people like Ophelia Benson and PZ Myers attacked Lionel Tiger as a speaker and his speech (without any factual rebuttal of his speech at all), when Benson and others attack the moderators of the Richard Dawkins site, when Ophelia Benson says someone like Abbie Smith should not be a speaker at an atheist convention, then you've obviously got problems as a movement. Maybe you're fine as a clique, but not as movement. These kerfuffles have grown worse and more numerous recently, and I shall blog separately on some of them. If all that weren't problems enough, there is the problem of the habitual flamers too often attacking those who actually get down and do the hard work of resisting extremist religion in the USA. There's much more to it, like spin, like ignoring the evidence, pushing bluster; there is much exclusivism in evidence.

John S. Wilkins for example asked why he had not been invited to speak at the 2012 Global Atheism conference in Melbourne. It turns out the main problem seems to be the large-scale format of many atheist conventions, leading to only a few, select speakers. Or is that the only problem or factor? At a time when it's said that facing down reactionary religion (e.g. Santorum, the War On Women, etc.) is a vital task in USA politics, then it isn't clever at all for PZ Myers to bitch about the speakers at the recent Reason Rally. And so on, and so on, and so on. It's the sheer number and range of such attacks recently that really raises the whole question. Some seem to be pushing for all they can to own atheism, to deny it and the atheist movement to others.

This is only the first of what will be several blog posts looking at some of these questions. The big issue is, what is happening with the atheist movement? Is it in the USA beginning to isolate itself, while making the mistake of thinking this is success because enough will attend conventions, even if isolationist ones? Is the USA atheist movement actually being of any help at all to progressive politics, or is it a distraction? What is its effects on other countries? The final word is there are too few atheists, so prejudices build up easily about them. But exactly how are atheists going to be vocal?






            Follow @Gurdur  

Comments are welcome! Please keep in mind if you are not registered that comments posted here to this blog post may take a while to appear - up to 16 hours after you post them, since they go onto a moderation queue and have to be individually approved, in order to stop spammers. The answer to the so-called "Random Question" is always "human".

By random chance, I was reading through the blog of Rev. Bosco Peters, an Anglican in New Zealand. He has some very funny posts, including one on Song Of Solomon pick-up lines, and he appears to have quite a sense of humour himself (he's on Twitter under @Liturgy). He had a post that included a video from Pastor Steven L. Anderson, which I watched, and which mindboggled me. In that video, Pastor Steven L. Anderson claims men are officially prohibited from pissing standing up in public restrooms in Germany. See the video below, his claims on Germany start around 2.00 minutes into it.

His claim is flatly untrue. I live in Germany. His claim is quite simply not true. I've never even seen any hint of such a prohibition. I only blog about this at all because of his bizarre claims about Germany. I will add his claim about private bathrooms is odd; I've never encountered such prohibitions visiting anyone here in Germany, never even heard of that happening here.

Pastor Steven L. Anderson, who is apparently in Arizona, then goes on to claim that the problem with the USA is that there are male pastors in the USA who piss sitting down. And that the USA is under danger of Germanicization of American toilet habits, and I guess Germanicization of bodily fluids too.

This just flatlines my brain. Has the silly boy nothing bigger to worry about? I googled and found out that Pastor Steven L. Anderson is famous for hating on Obama and on Bush, and for hating on gays, and is fanatic in his defiance of Arizona policing. So I guess it all fits in, I guess. Definitely a case for @JesusNeedsNewPR to comment on.

It takes all sorts to make a world, but I can't help but feel some sorts are very superfluous to requirements.






                Follow @Gurdur  

Comments are welcome! Please keep in mind if you are not registered that comments posted here to this blog post may take a while to appear - up to 16 hours after you post them, since they go onto a moderation queue and have to be individually approved, in order to stop spammers. The answer to the so-called "Random Question" is always "human", with no quote marks.

I'm currently watching a bulletin-board destroy itself very slowly. I watch not out of horror, as I did with the old RDFRS board, but this time round out of sheer amusement; it's a punishment for them fit for the crime. The bulletin-board in question - call it say X, for want of a name - is made up largely of atheists but with a fair smattering of Christians and general whatevers who migrated from other boards. Most of these folks take great, oft-voiced pride in being "post-atheist", that is, they're still atheist but now they look down upon the atheist movement as such. The Christians among them muchly share in the general communal feeling of being the Elect.

Hey. There's a fair bit inside the present atheist movement to criticize, there's a fair bit of rubbish littering up the grounds, unfortunately, but the vocal post-atheists are of course only repeating the same behaviour to which they think they object. Plus of course they're not being socially helpful in any way. These people are mostly the snarksters of the old big atheist boards, the ones who love to scorn everyone and everything else already, so when they all finally lost faith in the more pretentious of the promises made by certain atheists who want to be very leading, they then applied the same flames to those atheists, and scorn those would-be leaders now.

One person (who never was even really atheist to begin with, but who has adopted the post-atheist label with speed) claimed, "post-atheism. a drop of perspective in a sea of anti-religious sanctimony" (a play on the motto of the old IIDB board), but it isn't. It's just a drop of snarkster sanctimony in a sea of anti-religious sanctimony in an ocean of religious sanctimony. Bugger that for a game of soldiers, there has to be a better way.

There's one marvellously funny thread where they dump all over a recent speech by PZ Myers (you can read a full transcript of the speech here) at a Global Atheist Convention. Some of the speech is sensible, but the rest was replete with empty cheerleading, rhodomontade and bluster. It was like Heidegger Lite. There was also a bit of sheer arrogance; the anti-racism and the pro-gay-rights movements owe little or nothing at all to atheist movements, and attempting to subsume those other struggles under the atheist banner only displays a hideous egotism.

Except in their attacks on that speech the X people miss the point yet again. The vainglorious promises of certain atheists are only that; but what exactly are say the X folk or any like them - and there are quite a few such bulletin-boards that amount to post-atheist ones, you would be surprised too how much all the individualists look the same - offering to anyone else? On the board I'm watching, they're getting desperate for new blood, because they're all mired down in the same old - same old ego-contests with each other. There's no sense of purpose at all apart from being a group on one bulletin-board. There's no real idea anymore why even that much exists. It originally came into being because they claimed to feel so persecuted or mistreated by other bulletin-boards, they came together for the purpose of making sure no board admin could ever oppress them to the max again, and now a couple of years later they just drift, looking for new people whom they can flame. But not for the purpose of anything, flaming for flaming's sake.

Watching that continual, now-slow and pointless grind of ego against ego is for me like watching some vision of Hell. It isn't true that Hell is other people; Hell is pointlessness and meaningless aggro. The strut of irrelevance, the pomp of ineffectuality.

There will continue to be post-atheists and other post-atheist bulletin-boards, and new ones will appear. The bigger atheist boards do seem to produce quite a few, all that braggadocio so often pushed by some being so counter-productive in the long run. But regardless of how much one can criticize the atheist movement(s), there doesn't seem to be any worth in the post-atheist phenomenon.




            Follow @Gurdur  

Comments are welcome! Please keep in mind if you are not registered that comments posted here to this blog post may take a while to appear - up to 16 hours after you post them, since they go onto a moderation queue and have to be individually approved, in order to stop spammers. The answer to the so-called "Random Question" is always "human".

Analytic Thinking Can Decrease Religious Belief is of deep interest to me. I remember some of the things I thought back before I was of school age which portended the way I would think later – analytically. Βy the time I was in college, I was seriously analyzing superstitious beliefs and finding them null and void.

Yet, now I am considered religious. According to the article, I should not be very religious. The truth is, I'm not very religious, even though I'm a Christian. Analytical thinking bases itself on facts, and there have been too many stubborn facts in my life that logically bind me to Christ.

My take on most so-called worship services is what one would expect –- they are usually irrelevant – and I keep away from them. As far as I can see, they are basically entertainment and I have better things to do with my time. Often, they appeal to the emotions, though I see less of that in some groups, like the Amish-Mennonites.

Theology? I am analytical there, also. I found to my surprise that Christian theology, based on its early writings, is very clear and logical. It is only when trying to get the message over to less analytical people does it look cloudy. Paul, for instance, in what is becoming one of my favorite passages, uses four arguments to prove one point. The first was logical and the third appealed to the Jewish targumists. That last trips people up quite often and some strange conclusions have emerged over time. Yet, when contextually analyzed, Paul was doing his best trying to get truth over to different types of thinkers. He has no problem using analogical thinking.

These last two, “worship services” and analogies, had been combined at one time in my life. Roughly, we would take the Christian analogy of the bread and wine and, while being nourished by it physically, we discussed the meaning analytically. This happened every Sunday.

I have little to say about the study referred to above – I don't have current access to Science and cannot check the data and definitions – however, I do know that the more analytically I view life, the less religious I am, so therefore I can accept the findings as true. This brings up my last point. I think too many atheists are not analytical enough. I don't mind atheism, per se, but I distrust religious (militant) atheists. Perhaps if they learn to analyze more, they will become less religious about it.

I hope so.

Australian politics is usually on the rougher side of rough-and-tumble. Questioning of politicians by the media is often hard, and questioning of politicians by each other is even harder - especially from those theoretically on the same side.

But now a blip in all that happens. Courtesy of Mr. Bill Shorten, who is minister for the Workplace Relations Portfolio in the Australian Federal cabinet, under the current Prime Minister, Julia Gillard. Watch the video below; words fail me. Yes, I am an Australian. The video below embarrasses me.






                Follow @Gurdur  

Comments are welcome! Please keep in mind if you are not registered that comments posted here to this blog post may take a while to appear - up to 16 hours after you post them, since they go onto a moderation queue and have to be individually approved, in order to stop spammers. The answer to the so-called "Random Question" is always "human", with no quote marks.

This is my thoughts on Gurdur's Malcolm Bowden

I feel "charlatan" is going too far. I think the man is sincere. I run into his type all the time.

However, I don't agree with him. OTOH, even when I was an atheist, I was suspicious of many of the claims of the psych profession. Back in '72 it was shown that Witch Doctors had a higher cure rate, for instance. I'm happy to be seeing more and more science coming from that group in the last twenty years.

The brain is fabulously plastic and our thinking habits will modify it to a fairly large extent. OTOH, Gurdur is correct. The brain is a physical organ that can be damaged. He brought up Paul, who had been stoned several times. The proper way to start the stoning is to throw a large rock at the head, which damages the brain. Brain injuries often lead to depression. Paul's remedy for that was the same as for anger -- don't let it control you.

Paul also spoke on thinking about good things. Depression could be a result of negative thinking, and Bowden isn't altogether wrong. He will possibly help some people and that will be 'proof' that it always works. Take, for instance, part of your quote of his site, "...because he should be living his life for others, and he should have that peace of heart with God, when he knows that God has promised him a wonderful future in heaven with him." This is positive thinking that if done, will probably lead to a lifting of the type of depression that results from negative thinking.

Calling depression a sin, however, is pretty depressing to me.

As for schizophrenia, a schizophrenic in Old-Order Amish groups are usually in better shape than those outside the group, I understand. It has been said that is because they have a lot of positive support by the family and church and a well-ordered culture. Part of that results in their taking their medicines consistently, but the emotional support is good. This last is often missing in the ordinary schizophrenic's life.

Bowden probably doesn't know about the last, but it should give him pause. Like most evangelicals, his idea of the local church is probably authoritarian and individualistic, which is opposite of consensus and working together.

This really deserves a much fuller treatment, but I'm not gonna get depressed by it.

Malcolm Bowden is a man who does not seem to have any medical training at all. That doesn't stop him dictating on medical issues; like someone with no experience nor knowledge telling you what to do with your appendix, you would be very well advised to be very wary of him. Bowden, a self-declared Evangelical Christian, has a strange website up advertising many of his off-the-wall opinions, ranging from on geocentricity of all things, to Young Earth Creationism, to stellar parallax and redshift variations, to depression and schizophrenia. For reasons unknown, British 4thought.TV decided to feature him and his opinions on mental-health issues in a program on British C4 TV last night (25 April 2012). Bowden's main claim is that mental-health problems are a "sin of pride". He shows no modesty; he even claims schizophrenia is again only a matter of sinning, as in this video of his.

Let's look at the actual facts. For example, we know medically that there are often observable physical changes in the brain with mental illnesses; for example (with thanks to The Last Psychiatrist), we can often see, in schizophrenia, white-gray matter volumes decreased in the caudate, putamen and nucleus accumbens of the brain, deficits in the left superior temporal gyrus and the left medial temporal lobe of the brain. reduced gray matter volume, reduced frontotemporal volume, and increased volume of cerebrospinal fluid in venticles. You can also get more medical information here. We know that clinical, endogenous depression often shows physical causes and alterations as well.

Let's start with the basics. The brain is a physical organ. Just like any other physical organ of yours, just like your appendix or liver, things can go wrong with it, it can have defects, and it can get infections or be injured. If something goes nastily wrong with your brain, then it will likely affect your thinking, since your brain produces most of your thinking. We are stil researching things like schizophrenia and Bipolar Syndrome, but we already know these illnesses have a physical basis -- and their primary treatment is physical, i.e. medication. Just like when the liver is ill, just like when you have an infection.

If you go to a good doctor, the doctor will hesitate before giving a major diagnosis, just in case the first idea is wrong. There are an awful lot of things that can go wrong with you, and making a wrong diagnosis can sometimes be easy - many things look the same but aren't. A good doctor shows humility and attention. Malcolm Bowden shows no such humility; he gives a brutal, woefully simplistic answer without reservation. Nor does he show any attention; he takes no notice of the million and one ways mental illness can show itself, he takes no notice of the sufferer, he only condemns the sufferer, and he condemns the sufferer only for the sake of his own ego, for the sake of feeling he is the only one with the right ideas. A transcript in full of his remarks on 4thought.TV last night is given at the bottom of this post. One of his remarks is, "And a Christian, a TRUE Christian, should not ever be depressed". Even Biblically, he's completely wrong. We know the Bible talks of Jesus undergoing a depressive spell in the Garden of Gethsemane, of St. Paul suffering from occasional depression, of King David and the Psalmist often suffering from depression.

More to the point, this is like declaring a True Christian should never suffer from a broken leg, or that malaria is a sin. It is utterly ridiculous. The brain is a physical organ like a leg, and it can have physical problems like a leg. Going on, it's also evil. Pathological conditions like clinical depression, schizopherenia and bipolar syndrome are very dangerous, and the sufferers have a high risk of suicide; additionally, such illnesses if untreated often mean a much shorter life-span for the sufferers, owing to many effects. So when Bowden arrogantly tells people only he himself has the proper answer, only he himself has the right interpretation of the Bible, he is showing which sin again? When he ignores all medicine and science, he is also being evil. He may well cause a sufferer to not get the medical treatment necessary; he may well drive a sufferer to suicide. He commits evil, not because that is his aim, but because his ego is more important to him than the complex realities of mental illnesses and the sufferer.

Bowden has set his idea he is right above everything and everyone else. He gets his pleasure from denouncing mental illness as "sin", he gets his jollies by declaiming on those in severe pain and grief, he is the very definition of a narcissist who forces others around him into roles to suit his own self-image as Saviour. This is not Biblically-based Christianity of his. As @revpamsmith has remarked, it's not even Christianity - the more valid Christian idea is that God suffers along with human sufferers, while Bowden's idea is that his own religion must necessarily eliminate all such suffering, and only because he says so. This is mere unthinking narcissism with evil consequences.







                Follow @Gurdur  

Comments are welcome! Please keep in mind if you are not registered that comments posted here to this blog post may take a while to appear - up to 16 hours after you post them, since they go onto a moderation queue and have to be individually approved, in order to stop spammers. The answer to the so-called "Random Question" is always "human", with no quote marks.

There will be a talk on neuro-scientism and neuro-realism in London, Britain, on the 15th of June this year. The talk will be between @hugospiers (Hugo Spiers, who has also done a bit on art/neuro projects), and @MakingLondon (Sebastian Groes). It takes place at the UCL Festival of London and Literature: One Day In The City packet of events and happenings, which can also be followed on Twitter on @onedayinthecity.

Hugo Spiers defines neuro-scientism as the stance that, "all behav & experience should be described via brain", and he defines neuro-realism as the "belief that explanations wth neuro are more real/valid", which seem quite fair enough as a basis for discussion.

For more on scientism in general, please see this old blog post of mine, and you may want to take a look at this one and then this one too, and even this more recent one with reading recommendations. It may well be a very worthwhile talk, if you do pop along to it, please do leave your impressions and criticisms of it noted here in comments, thanks!







                Follow @Gurdur  

Comments are welcome! Please keep in mind if you are not registered that comments posted here to this blog post may take a while to appear - up to 16 hours after you post them, since they go onto a moderation queue and have to be individually approved, in order to stop spammers. The answer to the so-called "Random Question" is always "human", with no quote marks.