Darkling Wood

But We Can Still Rise Now, And Be That People Again

It was coincidental with the aftermath of the Scottish Independence vote, but timely nevetheless, that I just picked up a copy of "Poems That Make Grown Men Cry", by Anthony and Ben Holden (Eds.) They didn't make me cry, but one of them does seem very apt given the result of the vote:

Let My Country Awake

Where my mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depths of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action --
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake
       Rabindranath Tagore (1930s)

The Phantasmagorical Argument For God’s Existence

These days, popular argument about the existence of God remind me a bit of my learning about snakes on moving to the US. Of course when I first arrived I expected to see them slithering up and down the walls, but although it’s nothing so Indiana Jones-esque, common sense leads one to learn at least a little. One useful skill is being able to differentiate the highly venomous Coral Snake from the non-venomous Scarlet Kingsnake. At first sight, they look similar, but with a little extra information, and the following rhyme as a reminder, they’re easy to tell apart: “Red on yellow kills a fellow, red on black venom lack.”

The basic lesson is, make sure you know which is which, and if you want to mess with a Coral Snake, you’d better know what you’re doing. I just wish the current batch of atheist apologists – a lot of what I see from them looks remarkably like defense of a faith – would take the same approach.

 Take, for example, the following argument attacked by Richard Dawkins at the beginning of Chapter 3 of his “The God Delusion”:

 “There must have been a time when no physical things existed. But, since physical things exist now, there must have been something non-physical to bring them into existence, and that something we call God”

 

Scottish Independence -- Why I'd Vote "No"

I don’t get to vote in tomorrow's Scottish Independence Referendum. Although I was born and have lived in or around Glasgow for 80% of my life, I am denied a vote simply because for the most recent 20%, I’ve been living and working in the US. But my Scottish credentials are as good as any man’s. I have built sandcastles at Saltcoats, moaned about the rain while on a caravan holiday in Millport, and stopped many times for a break at the Green Welly near Crianlarich as I drove “up north”.

Saltcoats

I know the right way to say “Milngavie” ("mul-guy"), and “Sauchiehall Street” ("sucky-hall street"), and know that of Daphne and Maggie Broon, it’s Maggie you’d want to winch. I went to school in working class Johnstone, and then onto yooni, at Glasgow and then “Embra”. I’ve climbed the In Pin on Skye, and Masquerade at Auchenstarry Quarry, where the most dangerous part of the latter was if you fell off into the pond and cut yourself on a submerged trolley dumped there by a local team of urchins from Croy you might catch hepatitis.

 And even today I can confuse my local Texan friends by pronouncing “magnet” with its appropriate three syllables (“mah-gih-nit” -- what else?), or just downright scare them by referring to the thing I use to edge my lawn as a “petrol-driven strimmer” instead of their “gas weed whacker”. And I can actually say "It’s a braw bricht moonlicht nicht the nicht."