Feel like I’ve had a great break – just spent two days in Cambridge with my cell, which, for those who don’t know what such things are, is a small group of people that I trained with, with whom I pretty much see eye to eye, with whom I can have fully uninhibited conversation (not just about opening up veins, but also about unrestrained intellectual content) – in other words, an environment where I can just be myself.
It’s godly, and I’ve got lots of ideas….
In the meantime, something from Bono
Good post at Redwood Dragon, here.
I’ll have to get the book he references.
“…the preeminent strategy of Babylon, according to Stringfellow, is babel:
‘Babel means the inversion of language, verbal inflation, libel, rumor, euphemism and coded phrases, rhetorical wantonness, redundancy, hyperbole, such profusion in speech and sound that comprehension is impaired, nonsense, sophistry, jargon, noise, incoherence, a chaos of voices and tongues, falsehood, blasphemy. And, in all of this, babel means violence.
Babylon is the city of babel. The language and liturgies of emperor worship in Imperial Rome were babel. The Nazis practiced babel against the Jews. Babel spawns racism. In [Orwell’s] 1984, babel is the way advanced technocracy dehumanizes persons. By the 1970s in America, successive regimes had been so captivated by babel that babel had become the means of ruling the nation, the principal form of coercion employed by the governing authorities against human beings.’
But, one might ask, what are we to do in the face of such overwhelming power, our voices drowned out by a sea of nonsense and idolatry? In a word: speak the truth, live as human beings.
‘In the midst of babel, speak the truth.'”
Got woken by eldest son wanting to use the loo, but not being able to see in the pitch dark, and therefore panicking. Sorted him out, but woke myself up in the process, and now can’t get back to sleep.
Still thinking a lot about the clash of cultures that we are experiencing at this present time. And it occurs to me that if, when I write, I use the ‘<' symbol before the word Islam, ie 'less than', then I'm being suitably politically correct, and distinguishing between the faith/civilisation as a whole - which is much too diverse to be characterised as good or bad, evil or blessed - and that sub-group of Islam, coming down via the Wahhabis and Qutb, which has a violent hatred for the West.
I have two lurking concerns about the consequences of
I’m sure I’ll write more about this in the coming months.