Inside-Out Thinking

Bedfellows for Dawkins

Is it possible to think of a better image of the drive by militant secularists to eradicate spirituality from the face of the planet than China's oppression of Tibet?

More Dawkins

Those clips of Dawkins taking the piss out of healers in Glastonbury and elsewhere keep replaying in my mind.

Anyone who is not satisfied with bog-standard Christianity and wants to experiment with alternatives, anyone interested in alternative healing and spirituality, in astrology, in Cabala or Sufism is thought to be a 'bit nutty' by the scientific materialists who regulate our world-view.

I've written my book to show that there is an august intellectual tradition behind all these explorations, to show how they all hang together and that they present a unified and coherent view of the world to set against the scientific-materialist one.

I also show that many of the great minds of history have held this world view, most of them artists and writers, but also some scientists, some of them even greater scientists than Richard Dawkins.

Dawkins, Oxford and the Church

Last week The Times reported that leading theological colleges in Oxford were having funds withdrawn on the grounds that they were not intellectually rigorous enough.

Another victory for the Dawkins tendency!

I wish I could be outraged on behalf of the colleges. But the Church's responses to scientific materialism have always been either the God-wants-you-to-be-stupid approach - 'faith is good because it rises above the evidence' - favoured by the evangelical right - OR to compromise so much that it has nothing left to defend except a form of doubt.

Most people find both of these unsatisfactory. That is why it is a good time to make secret teachings public. If you have had a genuine spiritual experience, you don't believe, you KNOW. This is what Jung said when questioned on the BBC - and as I show in my book, he went beyond the pale and deep into esoteric philosophy late in life.