The Manifold Letters

  THE CONVERSION OF ST PAUL The Third Sunday after The Epiphany WHY PERSECUTEST THOU ME? It seems rather prescient that Paul Munton should choose to lead a discussion on civil disobedience this coming Tuesday. Civil disobedience is often the consequence of persecution, of subjugation, of the abrogation of human rights, of injustice. There are numerous examples of persecution: Spartacus, The Kett Rebellion, Anti-Slavery movement, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, CND, climate change protests, and the recent violent, deadly suppression of popular protests in Iran. Growing up and living in South Africa, I observed the persecution of black South Africans - the Soweto Riots, poor education opportunities, lack of political rights, poverty, segregation, diminution. Human beings being diminished, ostracised, scapegoated, often with Biblical and theological attempts to justify actions. Persecution persists. How do Greenlanders feel about Trumpian threats? Henry David Thoreau in an 1849 pa...

A poster on a wall in Ely invoking Civic disobedience.    Our religious mandate to civic disobedience and what that might mean in practical terms. Why do human beings have such big brains? Look at those starlings swooping and wheeling in their murmuration; these birds have tiny brains which are mostly eye, yet they can do everything necessary to find food, choose a mate, build a nest and rear young so perpetuating their species. Our large brains comprise some 86 billion neurons which form 100 trillion connections to each other. It seems probable that we need them to understand and negotiate the complexities of our human social life, including developing language skills more complex than any other species. It takes about 20 years for an individual human to learn about and manage their social life. Our social lives have an objective of maximising the utility of mutual help to be found in communities of human beings whilst avoiding the negative effect of antagonisms, by ma...