Paul's Blog

1. Nearly half of the world's population - more than 3 billion people - live on less than $2.50 a day. More than 1.3 billion live in extreme poverty - less than $1.25 a day. 2. 1 billion children worldwide are living in poverty. According to UNICEF, 22,000 children die each day due to poverty. 3. 805 million people worldwide do not have enough food to eat. 4. More than 750,000,000 people lack adequate access to clean drinking water. 5. Preventable diseases like diarrhea and pneumonia take the lives of 2 million children a year who are too poor to afford proper treatment. 6. 25% of all humans live without electricity. 7. 80% of the world's population lives on less than $10 a day. 8. Oxfam estimates that it would take $60 billion annually to end extreme global poverty - that's less than 25% of the income of the top 100 richest billionaires. 9. Hunger is the number one cause of death in the world, killing more than AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined. 10...

In Tribune,  March, 1944. "........I think I can show that the present nebulous state of Christian doctrine has serious implications which neither Christians nor Socialists have faced. ......it also appears from my correspondent's letter that even the most central doctrines of the Christian religion don't have to be accepted in a literal sense...... .....Now, is this orthodox Catholic doctrine ? My impression is that it is not. I can think of passages in the writing of popular Catholic apologists in which it is stated in the clearest terms that Christian doctrine means what it appears to mean, and is not to be accepted in some wishy-washy metaphorical sense........ I do not know whether, officially, there has been any alteration in Christian doctrine. Father Knox etc and my correspondent would seem to be in disagreement about this. But what I do know is that belief in survival after death - the individual survival of John Smith, still conscious of himself as John S...

Henry Chadwick (pp 25 - 28) : "St Paul understood the distinctive heart of Christianity to lie in the historic facts of the gospel; the Jesus of history was one with the Christ of faith, who was also the eternal wisdom of God in creation. St John likewise believed that God was uniquely present in Jesus. But even as early as St John's Gospel the 'incarnation' implies a manifestation within time and history of the eternal Word of God. In the epistle to the Hebrews there is equal emphasis both upon the spontaneity and fullness of Jesus' humanity and upon the faith that in him the eternal Son of the Father has come to unite believers to himself; he is the pioneer of our salvation, our representative bringing to the Father and to the heavenly company those who put their trust in Him."

By J M Roberts: p 255: "......this is only a tiny part of the difference Christianity has made to history. Until the coming of industrial society, in fact, it is the only historical phenomenon we have to consider whose implications, creative power and impact are comparable with the great determinants of prehistory in shaping the world we live in. Christianity grew up in the classical world of the Roman empire, fusing itself in the end with its institutions and spreading through its social and mental structures to become our most important legacy from that civilization. Often disguised or muted, its influence runs through all the great creative processes of the last 1,500 years; almost incidentally, it defined Europe. We are what we are today because a handful of Jews saw their teacher and leader crucified and believed he rose again from the dead." pp 315-316: ".........Muhammad (570 - 632)  began to ponder the ways of God to man.........the roots of his achieveme...

Genesis 1 : 1 : "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." Deuteronomy 5 : 7 : "You shall have no other gods before me." Proverbs 3: 5-6 : "Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make your paths straight." Psalm 27 : 1 : "The Lord is my light and my salvation - whom shall I fear ?". Psalm 119 : 105 : "Your word is a lamp that gives light wherever I walk." Psalm 119 : 101: I obey your word instead of following a way that leads to trouble." Micah 6 : 8 : "He has showed you, O Man, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God." Isaiah 41 : 10 : "So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand." Luke 6 : 31 ...

Spending a few minutes each day reflecting on all the different things one can be grateful for is a great way to defeat or greatly lessen thoughts and feelings of self pity and resentments. To have a good wife and a happy marriage !! To have a warm, safe place to sleep each night and plenty of good food to eat each day (how many tens/hundreds of millions of people alive now do not even have these basics !!). To live in a wealthy, peaceful nation (the clear majority of the world's 7 plus billion people do not have this). To have very good and affordable (often free) health care and the best medications, when needed. To have received a good education. To have a much happier, saner and healthier (physically and mentally) life bought about by not abusing alcohol.

Married people are more than 40% less likely to suffer or die from heart disease than those who are not. A UK study also showed they are half as likely to die from stroke. Doctors believe having a "significant other" makes people more likely to get symptoms treated earlier and take medications. Researchers say the findings are so significant that a patient's marital status should be regarded as a risk factor, like blood pressure or smoking. Single people were found to be 42% more likely to develop cardiovascular disease.

A lot of alcoholics may have dual-diagnosis with depression, anxiety or even bipolar disorder etc. A lot of alcoholics may have experienced physical, emotional or even sexual abuse as children. Not many alcoholics have co-morbidity with an anti-social personality disorder or are sociopaths. Most alcoholics are decent people with a very serious problem/condition. Most alcoholics feel bad about how they are wasting their lives, actually ruining their lives and feel bad when their words and actions while drunk hurt other people..... Step 11 in AA refers to the alcoholic praying to God for knowledge of His will for us. How obvious is it that the will of God for any alcoholic must be for the alcoholic to stop drinking and stay sober for the rest of his or life !! How could it be the will of God for any person to regularly drink too much, too often and to experience all the pain, humiliations and various problems that come about as a result of alcohol abuse ? How could it be the...

I found myself reading Chinese proverbs today. How true it is that by not being impatient and thinking before acting one may avoid a great disaster. But by being impatient and impulsive and acting rashly without thinking, on one particular day, one may ruin his or her whole life.

When an alcoholic stops drinking it is AMAZING how better life can be !!! To wake up morning after morning without terrible hangovers; to wake up feeling physically fine !! It is so true that often you don't realize just how sick you were from alcohol abuse until you get to feel SO much better after a period of sobriety. To save a LOT of money and not have continual money worries is only the beginning what is SO much more important is : To live without the sadness and guilt when thinking about how your words and actions have hurt people close to you...... To live without the humiliations of being regularly told of the stupid, crazy and even anti-social things you've said and done in black-outs....... To live without the fear of an upcoming court appearance and not knowing if it will be just a fine and good behavior bond or, maybe, being forced into long term rehab to avoid jail, or whether it actually will be a jail sentence....... I have lived in the town I am now...

What follows is a short summary of some of what has appeared on this blog: It is terrible how very little the majority of people in the economically wealthy, and relatively stable and peaceful, parts of the world know (or care) about how much incredible poverty and suffering and persecution millions experience in many other nations around the world. How much is TV to blame for this ? How true is it that TV (and now the internet too) almost always turns everything - including politics, current affairs, education, religion etc - into banal entertainment ? How easy is it for us, especially in the wealthy West, to forget that for most of us almost 99% of the daily events that happen to us are VERY trivial; and that truly, seriously tragic events are quite rare in most people's lives. How many people cause themselves so much unnecessary emotional pain by overacting to events which are really (if one reflects calmly and rationally) quite trivial, small events. How many...

David Williamson: ' "Dead White Males" satirised the dominant thinking of the humanities in our era, variously called postmodernism, post-structuralism and deconstructionism etc .........the central proposition seems to be that there is no "reality" in the world other than the one constructed by words. Categories are constructed according to the power interests of groups advantaged by such constructions and the main intellectual labour confronting the humanities is to deconstruct these false categories and show them not to be based on objective reality or knowledge but on ideology generated by a group wishing to attain or maintain a power advantage. The corollary of this belief is that these ideologies or discourses are taken to be the "truth" by those generating them and most times by those who are being exploited. Thus the only way that justice will be served is by analysing the modes and techniques of verbal deceit used in the construction of thes...

From John Mortimer's "Murderers and Other Friends", pp 81 - 82: (Mortimer on Christianity) ......Although I was not bought up to be religious, and was neither christened nor confirmed, I have always had the greatest respect for a religion which asserted the importance of the individual soul. Believer or unbeliever, I am part of a Christian civilization, with a Christian ethic, a faith in the possibility of redemption and the forgiveness of sins. It also seems to me that total materialism is unbearably drab and that a faith that recognizes the importance of mystery is essential. I envy the Catholic novelists Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene and Muriel Spark, whose religion adds shape and weight to their stories; they start with an advantage over the writer who is merely a well-meaning member of the Atheists for Christ Society.......I can't imagine England without cathedrals and village churches, and I'm perfectly happy sitting in the garden arguing with the vicar...

From Johann Hari's "Chasing the Scream", pp 180- 184: Human beings (mostly) only become addicted when they cannot find anything better to live for and when they desperately need to fill the emptiness that threatens to destroy them. The need to fill an inner void is not limited to people who become alcoholics and drug addicts, but afflicts the vast majority of people of the late modern era, to a greater or lesser degree. A sense of dislocation has been spreading through our societies like a bone cancer throughout the twentieth century. We all feel it: we have become materially richer, but less connected to one another. Countless studies prove this is more than a hunch, but here is just one: the average number of close friends a person has has been steadily falling. We are increasingly alone, so we are increasingly addicted.......the modern world has many incredible benefits, but it also brings with it a source of deep stress that is unique: dislocation......being atom...

The following is from David Williamson's play "Dead White Males." "My name is Dr Grant Swain. Welcome to the English and Cultural Studies Department and to my course, Literary Theory 1A. Most of you have always assumed that there are certain eternal "truths" about "human nature" that perceptive writers reveal to us. This course will show you that there are no absolute "truths"; that there is no fixed "human nature" and what we think of as reality is always and only a manufactured reality. There are in fact as many "realities" out there as there are ideologies which construct them...... One of you wrote: 'I am skeptical of all ideologies, and try to weigh all the available evidence in order to make informed choices.' This statement sounds as if it is a credo that warns against ideology, but in fact it is the defining statement of liberal humanism, one of the most powerful ideologies to have ever appeare...