If I could send one person back in time to the mid 19th century…

And on the matter of time – if I could send one person back in time to the mid 19^th century, who would I send? The answer is Richard Dawkins, because this is precisely where he belongs. He would feel very much at home among the social Darwinists of that era, and from there he could do no more damage in our own time. But on the other hand we would then lose a key person who provides an excellent model of why we as human beings need to move beyond being ideological, beyond having minds that have closed in on fixed opinions, beyond being people who do not understand the true nature of being human, beyond being people who seek to project our self constructed understanding of reality onto others … and become instead, people who embrace – syncretism. Then, and only then, might we stand a chance of creating a world based on living together in peace and harmony, a world in which love and compassion are our overriding concerns.

“Um! That’s not something one often hears said these days Paul. Julia xxx”

“Yes Julia, you are right. That’s why I say these things, for it is time that people started to listen and to begin to change – a familiar message for sure, but one that is timelier than ever! And science will not help you to achieve this goal. So perhaps it is also time to tell all those caught-up in scientism, scientific atheism, and similar nonsense to stop being so stupid and begin to embrace the totality of being human. We surely need science, but to raise it above all other ways of knowing the world, and to claim it as being superior to other ways of engaging with life and understanding ourselves and our world, is a recipe for a human catastrophe on a scale never before experienced. We know this, because history demonstrates that this is exactly what happens when one belief system claims such a status: Christianity, Islam, Capitalism, Fascism, and Communism provide the historical evidence. The human mind will corrupt anything, and the way to deal with this is to recognise that this is so, and then to change as people and to stop projecting these beliefs onto others.”

“Paul, it is indeed a moment in time when people need to begin to understand the true nature of being human. Julia xxx.”

Moments in Time

Moments in Time, a novel about time and that which is timeless and that which is not, tells the story of Benjamin Woodward, an engineer, an icon of the modern world, who, believing that he creates order out of disorder, and that the risks can be managed, discovers, to his cost, that neither is true. Accidentally discovering a portal that leads from the early twenty-first century to 1750, he finds himself in a Britain on the cusp of the Industrial Revolution, and the dawning of the age of the industrial engineer. With growing but misplaced confidence, he sets about living life in two ages separated by over 250 years, but he encounters a mysterious voice that persistently warns him about the folly of his actions, but which he constantly ignores – as he does, too, the self-evident, unexpected consequences of his actions.

Gradually, however, the universe begins to teach Benjamin important lessons. These enable him, in the end, after he has destroyed everything that he values in both eras, to understand that he should have taken note of what the voice was telling him. And upon reaching the edge of doom, Benjamin realises what he needs to do to save himself from himself.

Moments in Time is a tale that comments upon the damaging values and beliefs of scientists, engineers and technologists, who, with their collective delusions, Darwinist perspectives, fragmented minds, vested interests, and their reductionist and mechanistic worldview, bear a significant responsibility for creating the madness of the modern world – insanities that threaten to condemn future generations to a bleak existence. The clear significance of the book is that it shows that it is possible to walk a different path if people are prepared to think and behave differently – a very timely message indeed.

Europe – condemned by Zeus, cursed by Nemesis

Everyday Europe reinvents itself in exactly the same form that it was the day before, being as it is, bound, by invisible and silent chains, to the rock of the past, and unable to escape from it. And Europe has so fallen in love with itself that it is unable to see this. Thus will the past become the future!

Europe has been condemned by Zeus and cursed by Nemesis. There is no Hercules to set Europe free. And using such knowledge, China and India can unleash against Europe the forces of creative destruction, and Europe will not understand what is happening, but will instead retreat even further into the past, for this is what civilisations that are in a state of collapse do. And the case of the former chief scientific advisor is a very good example of someone retreating into the past.

Thus once more will Europe unleash upon its citizens and the world, yet more of the horrors for which it is infamous. You doubt this? Well look again and you will see that the process has already started and as Europe’s social, economic and political conditions deteriorate, and the world begins to engage more intensely in resource and ideologically driven conflicts, thus will Europe retreat further into that which is comfortable and reassuring – the place known as the past.

But this does not have to be, for a different future is possible. The past is Abrahamic. The seven Abrahamic belief systems I have already mentioned (in earlier blogs), including the four secular ones of Western Science, Western Atheism, Western Capitalism, and Western Communism, all of which have inflicted upon the world their dogmas and the horrors that go with them, although those caught up in these dogmas are too consumed by them to know this. Ordinary people however are free to turn away from these dogmas and to choose a different future – a Taoist one. Unless Europe changes and embraces the Tao, then its future will be its past.

This nicely brings me to next week’s blog, which is about my novel – Moments in Time.

Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners

Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners is a BBC documentary programme, written and presented by historian David Olusoga, looking at the abolition of slavery in Britain and the extraordinary choice by the government of the day to compensate slave owners for their loss of 'property'. Compensation which amounted to 17 billion pounds in today’s value!

I was already aware of the extent that British slavery was the foundation upon which Britain built its industrial wealth. In 2007, the 200^th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade (but not slavery!) in the British Empire, the BBC transmitted a number of programmes which revealed the shocking truth about the British and slavery. The matter was also exposed in another documentary (first transmitted in 2012) called Empire, written and presented by Jeremy Paxman.

David Olusoga’s new documentary programme delves into these dark matters in greater depth and reveals just how much slavery had been normalised in the minds of British people, the extent of slave ownership, the phenomenal wealth that it created, and the staggering compensation amount paid, not to the victims – the enslaved – but to the slave owners – the criminals.

What I found disturbing was the dehumanization of the African peoples and how this was used to justify the enslavement of human beings, which if you recall my blogs on genocide earlier this year (2015), is part of the path to genocide. We, the British, so proud of ourselves for being the light of freedom and democracy in the world, behaved just like the Nazis did. And let us be in no doubt that slavery and the slave trade were (are) crimes against humanity, committed by the British, but also by other Europeans such as the Dutch, the Portuguese, among others. The Nazis were not an aberration but a continuation of a European inclination towards barbarism, violence, aggression, and racial superiority. And this continues to this day.

The other thing that I noted is the British peoples’ denial that slavery happened, which is the last stage in genocide. As Olusoga points out, the history of British slavery has mostly been forgotten and pushed out of sight. The truth about slavery serves well to demonstrate just how far the British were prepared to go in the pursuit of profits. So what has changed!

It is not science that people need to know more about, but history, our history as Europeans, and social sciences as well, where one begins to understand how and why such things happen. People who do not know and understand their history are very likely to repeat such dark and evil deeds. Science will do nothing to prevent this, and is more likely than any other field of activity to create the conditions which will lead to further rounds of barbarism. This is the nature of the reductive mind caught-up in the nonsense that we should embrace rationality and reason. Why? So that we can use rational arguments to reason our way to accepting crimes such as slavery? What will be the next crime against humanity that we will use reason – rational arguments – to justify? Actually we already know the answer to this question – it is the destruction of our planet in the pursuit of materialism, profit, growth and jobs. Europeans have not changed.

One must understand that there is a truth, beyond the realms of scientific positivism: the light does indeed shine in the mind, and the mind has not understood it. And the more an individual embraces the rational, the objective, the less likely their mind will understand it. We humans are a trinity of opposite characteristics (rational/objective, irrational/subjective, and the spiritual) and there is nothing wrong with this. It is what we are - human. We are not machines.

It is about time that we embraced such understandings and turned away from all forms of ideology, for it is the case that all ideologies, including those of people like Dawkins and his disciples, do lead ultimately to … exactly the horror that we Europeans have been inflicting on ourselves and the rest of the world for thousands of years. It is time now to change, to become different people, and you will not achieve this goal by listening to extremists, in whatever form they come – religious, scientific, atheist, materialist … There are many to choose from!

Inside the mind of Richard Dawkins

The light shines in the mind of Richard Dawkins, but the mind of Richard Dawkins has not understood it.