Establishing the Boundaries

 
This blog is to get a few things straight before I start on in depth, individual subject blogs.


I am not racist, skin colour is of no relevance to me. Neither is race, tribe, clan or nationality (well maybe the French, if I'm having a bad day J).


I do not care at all about someone's gender or sexuality. If the act is consensual and leaves no permanent injury that is not my business. And just to head off the inevitable I do not regard paedophilia as consensual, ever. I have some concerns about how the current age of consent in the UK was arrived at, and very grave concerns about the pressure to raise it, but I believe that currently it is appropriate and I can live with it, and the criminal cases arising from it. There is a wider issue about defining childhood, and the current abrupt boundary is nonsense. The immense pressure in education and elsewhere to raise the boundary age is unsupportable and the whole issue will be in a future blog in this series.


I respect anybody's right to the religion or belief that they choose, and condemn any religious persecution, overt or hidden, anywhere. With one caveat. Anybody who believes that they have the right to spread their religion by violent means, or impose their religion on anybody else by any means, is anathema to me. The way that certain belief systems, often masquerading as another religion entirely, use violence, often extreme violence, to attempt to spread themselves will be in one or more future blogs. So will the belief by some groups that they have the right to stop any criticism, analysis, or humour about that group, or impose their beliefs on what is acceptable in the media (any media), on everybody else. Although certain widely publicised cases involving fundamentalist Muslim groups will spring immediately to mind, less well publicised persecution by groups such as the Scientologists, and fundamental Christian groups are less well known. Worldwide there have been examples involving many other groups such as Hindus, Buddhists, Chinese Communists, and a host of others. Again watch this blog!


I also respect anybody's right to the political belief they chose. With my standard caveat, don't impose it on others against their will. This doesn't just apply to the usual suspects, National Socialism and its derivatives and analogues, Communism in its 101 varieties, and Military Dictatorships. But the attempts by apparently well-meaning and respectable democratic parties to apply social engineering with criminal penalties to tilt the long term balance of political power in their favour. I am talking here especially about Statism, mainly in education, economics and social welfare, which is creeping like a black tide through the democratic world and destroying the individual, the eccentric, the creative, the peaceful rebel. Another blog coming here I think!


And another blog exploring the boundaries between the State and the individual and how those boundaries at different times and in different places have shifted. Including how 'forces of law and order' have functioned. Or to put it more brutally, the right of the State to use violence on its own citizens.


I might even explore taxes and eminent domain, and the right to your own property, or does the State at heart own it all, and you are just a temporary custodian even in a democracy.


What else might appeal to me? Economics, or the blind leading blind. The function of, and causes of, war. History, why it is always wrong but worth studying anyway. Statistics the great liar. In fact over the coming years I hope to explore many areas where dogmatic belief, however disguised, pervades our lives at some level. I may not change your minds, but if I can put even a seed of doubt there, to get you to re-examine the world, and see the truth behind the thousands of years of accumulated smoke and mirrors, then I will have succeeded.


I don't want cynics, cynics don't believe in change. I want sceptics, who will believe that the broken can still be fixed, and that the individual is a powerful force for change.

"Do not go gentle into that good night,
…….
Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
(Dylan Thomas)

The barbarians are at the gates, and a new Dark Ages may come, but the process is not inevitable. Only knowledge, the will to use it, to pass it on to anybody interested, to preserve it, will be our liberation. Not some TV evangelist ignorant of the faith he purports to follow, preaching a culture based on bigotry, hate and violence. Not some Imam or Ayatollah preaching a faith that bends Islam into a shape Mohammed would not recognise, and using the Koran to support a culture that is barbaric not enlightened, and making a virtue out of ignorance. Not some politician, of any persuasion, colour, or creed, passing laws based on a belief that he alone knows the best way to run the world, lacking completely in compassion, humility and especially any knowledge of what he is talking about.

 
And I will make mistakes. In places I will get facts wrong. I am human and we ALL make mistakes. I welcome polite correction. I even welcome polite and reasonably short counter arguments. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis, the so called Hegelian dialectic, is fine by me. Knee jerk rejection, especially rude or offensive rejection is not acceptable and all threats will be reported to the police.

 
So watch this space, it should be an interesting journey together.