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Showing posts from July, 2017

Those times psychosis nearly killed me

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In as much as you are able, face your own darkness and the darkness in the world without flinching This article is one of a series on my experience of psychosis. The articles are: Conversations with the Holy Guardian Angel (or How I Ended Up in Prison) Wretchedness and a Gun Those Times my Psychosis Nearly Killed Me Fragments of a Once Broken Mind Account of a Curse Many years ago, what feels like several lifetimes in the past (but in fact around 1994), I was mad. Going mad wasn't easy, it took a great deal of time and determination but I finally made it. My madness lasted less time than the headlong plunge and bleak freefall into its crevices, but the recovery took around six years before I felt normal. Still there isn't a day when my mind doesn't wander back to that time and the pain of it all. My madness was a psychosis, a delusion, it left me homeless in Cambridge for months ending only with a brief stay in Beford prison (where Pilgrim's Progress was

Short Meditations III: The argument from tradition, there's a lot more light, epithets, etc...

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 If you're lost with good friends then you're not really lost at all. The Argument from Tradition In a recent debate with an acquaintance, the father of dear friends, a good man and a vicar (the two are not mutually exclusive) he resorted to what I call "the argument from tradition" when defending the churches' interpretation of scripture. His setting out of that argument, and my response, are a neat look at this common pattern of argument. "If you question the authority of scripture in the way it has been viewed over the generations by venerated Christians, then either you are saying they were wrong or implying that modern critics have a better spiritual knowledge than they did. When I read of the faith of people before us which they lived based on the traditional reading of scripture, and what they accomplished, I couldn't ever dare to do that." My response: so you still think that we shouldn't remarry the divorced, that whites and col