I Shall we ever win free of war? It would take more than a crystal ball to answer that question, but we can at least look at some of the indications. In the experience of civilised people today, and of their forebears over generations, war occurs in a world dominated by capitalism and the state…. read more »
A talk delivered to The Ethical Society at Conway Hall by George Walford. For our text this afternoon we have What Religion Does for Freethinking. Following the example set by other preachers, I should like to start by drawing your attention to the wording. Not ‘What Religion has Done’ for freethinking, but what it does…. read more »
Having (at more than one remove) a Protestant background, IC has paid insufficient attention to the less orthodox developments appearing in Catholicism. Alastair Hamilton, in Heresy and Mysticism in Sixteenth- century Spain, speaks of the alumbrados (literal meaning close to illuminati), saying they sought ‘an intenser and more personal form of religious experience than the… read more »
WHEN one major ideology succeeds in detaching itself, if only for a time, from the restraints exercised by the others, trouble invariably results. The Holocaust finds a better explanation in unrestrained practice of the ideology of domination, driving forward to a chosen end whatever horrors it may bring, than in evil tendencies peculiar to the… read more »
IC has pointed out that every political movement, not only anarchism, places a high value on freedom; even the Nazis valued freedom of action for anti-Semites. To the list of freedom-lovers we now have to add the Bible: GAL. 5:1 It was for freedom that Christ has set us free. JOHN 8:36 If the Son… read more »
NIAT: Is it not absolutely true that the earth moves round the sun? ‘There is no privileged position in space. In one sense it is therefore as true to say that the sun moves round the earth, as it is to say that the earth moves round the sun.’ (M. Payne, S&MN Newsletter 51) DEPRESSED… read more »
Ideological development is a many-sided process displaying, as one of its main features, the persistence of the modes of behaviour characteristic of the earlier ideologies. As these are transcended modes come to be disvalued and disavowed, but they do not thereby cease to influence action. The person developing the ideology of domination is likely to… read more »
In calling attention to the persistence of early modes of behaviour we have to think why this should be particularly necessary in social and ideological connections. The answer lies in the complex nature of the process by which thinking advances. Although the development, the horizontal extension, of any ideology proceeds for the most part steadily,… read more »
IC stands committed to the proposition that Nothing Is Absolutely True (giving the acronym NIAT). The journal concerns itself with discussion, with propositions, and NIAT asserts that no one of these is completely true in every sense, at all times, without reservation and under all conditions. It is an instance of the only fully universal… read more »
I Some ways of thinking are more logical than others and this suggests the presence, somewhere in the background, of pure logic, a set of clear, precise and rigid laws which, if only we comply with them, will ensure that our thinking moves as if along rails to the correct conclusion. We seldom in practice… read more »