A Thinking Man

There is a lot of loss around.  And I’m not just referring to people mourning the loss of  a loved person.  When someone is bereaved you would expect the mourning.  It is natural and understandable.  But apart from the loss of human beings, there are many other kinds of losses, and many people in [...]

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Beck’s Cognitive Therapy: Distinctive Features
Frank Wills
Routledge 2009
ISBN 978-0415439527 £9.99
This book sets out to provide a concise account of Beck’s work against a background of his personal and professional history. It is divided into two parts. There are 15 short chapters which examine Beck’s contribution to explaining psychopathology, and then 15 more looking at Beck’s suggestions [...]

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Despite some £4m a year being spent on homeopathy, the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee said today that using public money on the highly diluted remedies could not be justified.  The cross-party group said there was no evidence beyond a placebo effect, when a patient gets better because of their belief that the treatment [...]

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Here’s something. Imagine you live in a community where you are expected to pay into a fund that is used to meet various needs in the community - the upkeep of roads, salaries for nurses and teachers, and community hospitality, for example. Then it transpires that you are about to receive a visit from a [...]

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In 1968 the sociologist Peter Berger famously predicted that in the 21st century, religious believers would only be likely to be in small sects, huddled together to resist a worldwide secular culture.  In 1710 Thomas Woolstan predicted that religion would be gone by 1900.  And many other thinkers (Voltaire, Jefferson, Marx, Engels, Freud) have all anticipated [...]

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Although it is nearly 24 hours since I watched the first in Channel 4’s new series, The Bible: A History, I still find myself annoyed at the mere memory of it.  It ended up being more of the aspirational wishful thinking of a romantic presenter than the history deceptively portrayed in the title.
The first quarter [...]

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It is now over 18 months since I first got her - ‘it’ seems way too impersonal for an object which has become an almost indispensable part of my life.  I have blogged before about the first love, about speaking to her so that she never forgets (ReQall), about the app that enables me to [...]

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When you stand back and think about it, it’s really strange.  I mean, it may have some side benefits, but the primary activity is odd.
What got me thinking was a wonderful essay (A Deal-Breaker by Ophelia Benson in 50 Voices of Disbelief) in which the author points out that some of the supposed characteristics of god [...]

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There is a sick theme running through all of this - or at least a clear attempt to involve some form of mental illness, and an attempt to bring in the people in white coats - well, at least psychologists if not psychiatrists.
Hey, I really, really don’t want to jump on the bandwagon and pour [...]

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Apologies for my absence.  I’ve been pre-occupied over the ‘holidays’ with a couple of other writing tasks that I needed to complete.  Having finished them today I found myself with a few idle hours before returning to work tomorrow and started amusing myself with dreadful similes to tweet.
For those of us who have forgotten, a simile [...]

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