As depression and anxiety begin to ravage my mind, this post will be a random patchwork of things that have caught my attention. My depression and anxiety are non-reactive and endogenous, or put another way, not sparked by external changes in circumstances.
Psychology today has a little piece on anxiety and I can’t decide if I agree with this conclusion or not:
Therefore, the main concern about anxiety is not what you fear, but how you perceive what you fear. Anxiety is not the fear of a thing, it is the fear of the way you think about a thing. And, it is the perception of the thing that leads you to feel the way that you do about it.
On the subject of mental health, I read an interesting little study on the prevalence of mental health problems among users of NHS stop smoking services. Those with experience of folk with mental health issues, will not fail to notice the prevalence of smokers. Spend any amount of time on a psychiatric ward and you’ll notice this. Given this, it makes sense to study smoking cessation amongst the mentally ill.
Wifey has just left to attend a 2 hour annulment interview at the church, could do with your prayers. Hopefully this will lead to an annulment, Marriage Convalidation, and finally being received into the Catholic Church.
But of greater import for your prayers is the news that fellow blogger Anthony has recently lost his little brother Bobby, and could do with your prayers as he ponders his own future in light of this.
Insightful article detailing the presentation Scott Stephens delivered to the Intelligence Squared Debate in Australia, arguing for the proposition: “Atheists are wrong”. Well worth a read and sums up much of how I feel about New Atheism and is entitled: The unbearable lightness of atheism.
And here we confront a desperate contradiction at the heart of so much atheistic hyperbole (accurately identified by Bernard Williams and others). The New Atheists rely heavily on the thesis that religion is the enemy of progress and human flourishing, and that once the last vestiges of religion are done away with, humanity will be far better off.
But they also claim that all religion is “man made,” and self-evidently so. This begs the question: if religion is indeed this all-pervasive source of corruption and prejudice and moral retardation, where do they believe that religion itself comes from, if not the human imagination? And so, as Bernard Williams puts the question:
“if humanity has invented something as awful as [these atheists] take religion to be, what should that tell them about humanity? In particular, can humanity really be expected to do much better without it?”
And so, it would seem that we are left with an unavoidable choice: either these atheists are really misotheists, God-haters, who rage against the very idea of God, the Good, Truth and Law, and so desperately try to will God out of existence; or their oft-professed faith in the inherent human capacity for progress is without justification; or the history of religion reflects the extraordinary human capacity to pursue the Good, as well as its equally pronounced tendency for Evil, idolatry and nihilism.
Intriguing to note that The Council of Europe is weighing a resolution that would a ban sex-selection abortions.
Following my recent article on a post Assad Syria, Patriarch Beshara Butros Rai – head of the Lebanon’s Maronite Christians – is deeply concerned at what exactly would replace the current regime:
Many of Syria’s minority Christians, which include Maronites, are concerned that Islamic extremists could rise to power should Assad’s regime collapse.
Rai last week echoed that fear, voicing concern of a takeover by the radical Muslim Brotherhood, a movement the Syrian authorities have blacklisted for decades.
“We endured the rule of the Syrian regime. I have not forgotten that,” Rai said. “We do not stand by the regime, but we fear the transition that could follow.
“We must defend the Christian community. We too must resist.”
And who can blame them for fretting? Only yesterday we had the news that Libya is to create a modern democratic state based on…… “moderate Islam”.
Following the news that Sean Duffy has been sent to prison for 18 weeks for trolling on the Internet, Index on Censorship have an interview with an Internet troll, by the name of Paulie Socash, which affords a fascinating glimpse into the mind and motivations of the troll.
On a lighter note, David has taken a stunning image of [what we think is] an Accipiter Striatus: The Sharp Shinned Hawk, in his back garden.
That’ll do and I’m feeling better for some reason….
