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The Personal Website of Michael Foord

The personal website of Michael Foord.

A Momentary Lapse of Reason

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February 09, 2017

All that exists is now. All that ever will exist, or ever has existed, is this tiny moment. And how precious it is. How worth fighting for, this fleeting instant

It dances, it is and we are.

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The Jesus Army and the Independent Inquiry into Childhood Sexual Abuse

September 17, 2021

IICSA Inquiry - Child Protection in Religious Organisations and Settings The Truth Project for Victims of Religious Abuse The exclusively male authority of the Jesus Army, delegated from the cruel and unusual senior pastor Noel Stanton, was full of darkness and deceit and nothing of God. It was a personality cult with Noel as an absolute ruler who delighted in crushing people. Those in the cult who took on a sacred duty to care, and swore a covenant to it, have to answer for the shameful way they treated so many. The leaders who were in charge; it happened on their watch, they let it happen and made it happen. Oath breakers and traitors. To betray love is its own reward. There is a price to be paid in the heart. Deuteronomy 1:35 None of this evil generation will see the good land I promised your ancestors. The JA called itself the "Joshua generation", the J Generation. They didn't read the story right. Only two from that generation believed God and entered the promise

Commentary on Brexit and Thoughts on Patriotism

November 06, 2017

I don't seem to meet many ordinary people. Most people seem extraordinary. As much as I am opposed to Brexit it seems curious to me the delight with which some people I follow on Facebook seem to take in news that the negotiations are apparently difficult and that it could be bad for Britain. They seem to relish the damage as they'd rather be right than see something good come out of it. It is a rather foolish state of mind to wish harm upon yourself and your fellows merely in order to be proven right. I detest much of the harm and lack of compassion I see in the Tory government, whilst accepting that those who vote conservative see the world in a very different way to me and that I am not wholly right and nor are they. I want the best for the UK and I want the best for Europe and I sincerely hope we can find our way forward together no matter who is in government in the UK. This is why party politics is so pernicious. It cons you into supporting a side instead of suppo

The Bible: The Good Parts

October 08, 2015

I'll start by saying what most "bible believing" Christians dare not say: the bible is a highly problematic book. As a historical record of the (gradual) revelation of the nature of God to humanity it paints a pretty unflattering view of God at times - seen through the eyes of a fallen humanity. For a look at some of the parts of the Bible that have been used to cause harm see: The Bible: The Bad Parts The bible was greatly redeemed in my eyes by reading " A Matter of Integrity " by Steve Chalke. I recommend it to everyone. Seen as the ongoing revelation of God to humanity, a revealing that didn't just stop 2000 years ago by the way, the bible again became something sacred and beautiful to me. Despite being a "difficult" book, the nature of God and the way to the kingdom are hidden (or revealed - as you please) within the bible. Below are some of my favourite passages (there are many more that I could have picked) that reveal God and

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Descartes, Imagination and the Death of the Ego

August 29, 2017

Existence blossoms out of non-existence, and no-one knows why. The essence of Descartes' second meditation and his famous conclusion Cogito Ergo Sum "I think therefore I am" is that you cannot prove to yourself that you are not actually insane in an asylum and hallucinating your whole life experience. The modern equivalent would be that you cannot prove you're not in fact a computer simulation switched on just a second ago, with all your memories pre-programmed. You cannot conclusively prove that your memories, experiences and senses do not deceive you (and in fact your experience will be that they do at times deceive you). Therefore the only thing you can be truly certain of, to your core, is that something that you experience as self exists. Sometimes expressed as "there is thought, therefore there is a thinker". The only certainty is I Am. Therefore, certainty cannot be the basis of our knowledge of other, and the ways of other. We just can't

The Jesus Army and the Independent Inquiry into Childhood Sexual Abuse

September 17, 2021

IICSA Inquiry - Child Protection in Religious Organisations and Settings The Truth Project for Victims of Religious Abuse The exclusively male authority of the Jesus Army, delegated from the cruel and unusual senior pastor Noel Stanton, was full of darkness and deceit and nothing of God. It was a personality cult with Noel as an absolute ruler who delighted in crushing people. Those in the cult who took on a sacred duty to care, and swore a covenant to it, have to answer for the shameful way they treated so many. The leaders who were in charge; it happened on their watch, they let it happen and made it happen. Oath breakers and traitors. To betray love is its own reward. There is a price to be paid in the heart. Deuteronomy 1:35 None of this evil generation will see the good land I promised your ancestors. The JA called itself the "Joshua generation", the J Generation. They didn't read the story right. Only two from that generation believed God and entered the promise

Crossing the Soul Gap: a Rational Faith

June 05, 2015

We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. ... By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies—all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. ... From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes. -- Aldous Huxley No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. -- John Donne In I was brought up I describe my Christian up-bringing and my journey back to faith via Cambridge university, atheism, Buddhism, homelessness and Christian community. In Pursuing Faith this came full circle with me having to reconcile my faith to how I saw the world and spirituality without faith. This article is a further exploration of how I am pursuing a genuine and deeper spirituality. My faith is a rational pursuit. It has to be.

In Praise of Kurzgesagt: String Theory

July 03, 2020

Quantum mechanics, as I'm sure you know, is the deepest and lowest level exploration of reality that science has any understanding of. It leaves beautiful space for the spiritual. Things exist and don't exist (wave particle duality and uncertainty) and can teleport (quantum teleportation), information can travel faster than the speed of light (quantum entanglement), and everything exists as probability waves (also wave particle duality and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle), and all of empty space is a seething morass of virtual particles that fleet in and out of existence in a dance choreographed by pure chaos (Kasimir effect and Hawking radiation). It seems that none of it exists at all without an observer. Reality is weird and beautiful and improbable and science explores and affirms this. Understanding scientific theories as different abstract models of reality is helpful, especially if you know the classic model of physics (Newton) and the relativistic model (Einstein).

Hippies and Charismatics: From the Sixties to Here

November 29, 2017

Loving people is so much more fun than trying to convert them, I promise you. The article linked below is a description of an aspect of the Charismatic Christian revival of the sixties and seventies that happened as part of a wider movement of longing for peace and a better world. And the article mentions my church. Jesus People Revolution: Meet the 60s hippies who changed the world That wider global movement had a resurgence in the nineties expressed in electronic dance music, seeking a genuine culture of love, with a parallel within the Charismatic movement called the Toronto blessing. For an interesting look at the youth culture around the nineties the film " Human Traffic " is very good. Unfortunately Evangelicism, which started so genuinely in love and was more evident in the house church movement of the sixties not covered directly in this article, seems (as a movement) moribund in dogma, commercialism and being defined by what it is against. There are stil

George William Curry and Pathfinder Squadron 627

June 13, 2020

You can read more of my story in: My Autohagiography: Fragments of a Once Broken Mind A 627 Squadron Mosquito I went to visit my Dad today and spent about an hour talking to him before he got too tired. He's dying of cancer but as always he was in a cheerful mood. He told me a bit more of the story about his Dad who he never knew. His Mum hardly ever talked about him so what he knows comes from some of Granny's papers and my Dad's investigation after she died. He found a whole new branch of his family including Aunts and cousins and a Great Aunt Olive. Before joining the RAF George William Curry worked for an insurance company called UKAPIAN. The only remnant of UKAPIAN now is one page on the website of Axa who ended up buying them, but they started life as a motor insurance company run by a temperance society. Teetotalers are good customers for a motor insurance company but there wasn't enough of them and UKAPIAN had to branch out. At any rate my Dad has George's b

Commentary on Brexit and Thoughts on Patriotism

November 06, 2017

I don't seem to meet many ordinary people. Most people seem extraordinary. As much as I am opposed to Brexit it seems curious to me the delight with which some people I follow on Facebook seem to take in news that the negotiations are apparently difficult and that it could be bad for Britain. They seem to relish the damage as they'd rather be right than see something good come out of it. It is a rather foolish state of mind to wish harm upon yourself and your fellows merely in order to be proven right. I detest much of the harm and lack of compassion I see in the Tory government, whilst accepting that those who vote conservative see the world in a very different way to me and that I am not wholly right and nor are they. I want the best for the UK and I want the best for Europe and I sincerely hope we can find our way forward together no matter who is in government in the UK. This is why party politics is so pernicious. It cons you into supporting a side instead of suppo

Authority and Today's Pain

February 05, 2018

If you make decisions you can feel proud of then you're able to respect yourself. Authority I like having authority figures in my life. Not the kind of authority where people decide who is in charge and that they have the right to tell you what to do. That's delegated authority and it generally becomes awful because it's too easy for self interest to take over. I recognise that authority when its wise to do so, but I don't like it. The authority I like is to find people in my life who know more than me on a topic, and who demonstrate in practise that they do. They're not hard to find, I doubt there's a single topic where I know more than anyone else in the world. There's always someone, somewhere, who knows more. I will then consider them an authority on the topic and be more likely to believe what they say, including within the area of ethics and morality. It's very easy to hurt people and it's very nice to have people in your life, or in

A Road Trip to Niagara

October 11, 2021

You can read more of my story in: My Autohagiography: Fragments of a Once Broken Mind My journey into poly and ethical non-monogamy was long and tortuous. The pursuit of a freedom I'd fallen in love with as a troubled adolescent but had no words for and no worthy examples to look to. The first polyamarous person I met was in Boston, a friend of Garth who I knew from the Python community and now worked with. Taylor was working on his PhD in neuropsychology and we tripped together. One huge mushroom with a colourful cap, blended into orange juice. My first trip since my psychedelic psychosis of about fifteen years previously. I saw aliens and talked to Stephen Hawking. The next time I saw Taylor was a couple of years later. I'd come to America to celebrate the birthday of a friend's wife. Garth, his wife and I and a work colleague, trekked by car from North Carolina to another friend's ranch just outside Nashville. He was a tech just-about-millionaire and this ranch was t

To Those Who Worry

September 14, 2017

The austerity doctrine is as bad as the prosperity doctrine. To those who worry, And feel they ought to worry, Because there's such a lot they care about, And such a lot that matters, And it really does matter and maybe if you don't worry You'll forget to care, or not care enough, and you need to care. That's why you're alive. Don't worry about worrying, Or worry about not worrying. I promise you care enough, you won't forget to worry and you won't forget to care. You don't need to worry about worrying, it happens by itself I promise you. You just get on with the caring, and let the worrying worry about itself. I love you. How much you care is so very beautiful. My own story about worry. I worry, but not as much as I used to. I used to worry a lot but eventually I made things so bad for myself I had to stop worrying. I worried, but I didn't know how to fix it, and it wasn't actually possible to worry that much. I couldn&

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