Religion |

George Walford: Alive or Equal?

February 2, 2013

Would you rather be alive or equal? The right wing tend to think it an achievement that five thousand million people should be alive, regarding equality as certainly unattainable and probably undesirable. The reformers and revolutionaries tend to pursue equality (or the suppression of socially-imposed inequality), taking the maintenance of the population for granted. In… read more »

George Walford: The (Anarcho-)Socialist Party (33)

January 26, 2013

IC holds out a continuing invitation: We undertake to print any statement of up to 1,000 words carrying the approval of this party, or one of its branches. Letters from individual members will appear if they are cogent, interesting and concise, and if space permits. If you want your letter to appear unedited or not… read more »

George Walford: Progress of Reason

January 25, 2013

We are constantly being told that society as a whole progresses towards ever higher levels of rationality, but some of the revelations occuring in the wake of the American TV-religion scandals go to support a different view. One of the movements involved is ‘PTL’ – variously interpreted as ‘Praise the Lord’ or ‘Pass the Loot’… read more »

George Walford: Drugs

January 24, 2013

Pat Robertson, a television preacher now seeking the Republican nomination in the US Presidential election, recently visited a school in the remote and mountainous north of New Hampshire. He asked the pupils whether they had taken drugs or knew anybody who had done so, and everybody in the room put a hand up. [1] If… read more »

Austin Meredith: Letter to the Editor

January 24, 2013

I am basing these remarks on your “Charity Perpetuates Poverty” essay on page 6 of IC32, about kindness that prolongs suffering, food shipments that prolong starvation by perpetuating an evil establishment, where you comment: There is nothing wrong in making gifts that leave us feeling happier, provided the recipient also benefits, but if there is… read more »

George Walford: Yehudi

January 20, 2013

Adam Mars-Jones says of a literary critic who likens a novel to a piece of machinery: ‘She wisely omits any reference to Hemingway’s belief that the most efficient part of a story, the part that does the most work, is the part that the author has omitted, since she could hardly point to any actual… read more »

Ellis Hillman: Karl Kautsky, Heir of Marx and Engles?

January 20, 2013

Right up to the outbreak of the Great War Karl Kautsky was held generally to be the most prominent disciple and continuator of the ideas, theories and ‘method’ of Marx and Engels. Dick Geary, in a mini-biography of Kautsky (1854-1938) in a series entitled Lives of the Left published by Manchester University Press in 1987,… read more »

Ellis Hillman: Information Wanted

January 20, 2013

I am currently preparing a paper on the life and ideals of Harry Martin, one of the founders of the Socialist Party of Great Britain. He is referred to in Robert Barltrop’s colourful history of the SPGB, The Monument (Pluto Press 1975) on five separate pages. Harry Martin was the first (and last?) prophet of… read more »

George Hay: Letter to the Editor

August 21, 2014

It does seem to me that the “old” series of terms for the major ideologies – “protostatic,” “parastatic” and so on – has one big advantage: just because they are so outlandish they force people to stop and think. This is something I noticed also in the context of what Ron Hubbard’s critics used to… read more »

George Walford: The Stage Before Religion

January 19, 2013

IC26 carried an abridged version of a talk, delivered to the South Place Ethical Society, entitled THE LOGIC OF RELIGION. It set out to show that religion is not, as many humanists maintain, a wholly irrational activity. Classification is the beginning of reasoning and Durkheim has shown, in Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, that… read more »