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John Baker's Blog

Reflections of a working writer and reader

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug. Mark Twain

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Science and Reason

Richard Dawkins explains why God is a delusion, religion is a virus, and America has slipped back into the Dark Ages:
That trend toward enlightenment has indeed continued in Europe and Britain. It just has not continued in the U.S., and not in the Islamic world. We’re seeing a rather unholy alliance between the burgeoning theocracy [...]

continue reading . . . Science and Reason

Presque vu II

A 1998 Purdue University survey found that religious Americans were more likely to be overweight than their nonreligious peers. Baptists were the fattest, according to the study; Jews, Muslims and Buddhists were the least overweight, though the researchers attributed this to differences in income, ethnicity and marital status, not denomination.
Nevertheless, there has been a rash [...]

continue reading . . . Presque vu II

The Da Vinci Code - the movie

In todays Guardian, Mark Lawson claims that:
In a nation where it was reported yesterday that the most popular new name for baby girls is “Nevaeh” - the word “heaven” spelled backwards - religious beliefs, which are properly a matter for that variety of opinion called faith, have been redefined as fact.
The nation is America and [...]

continue reading . . . The Da Vinci Code - the movie

Modernism VII

Herbert Read argued, in 1933, that the modernist movement had produced the greatest seismic change of all time. We were not, he wrote, concerned with an unprecedented development. But with an abrupt break with all tradition. The aim of five centuries of European effort is openly abandoned.
Twenty years later, C S Lewis, referred to the [...]

continue reading . . . Modernism VII

Must reads

Writing a Novel
Out Stealing Timber I
Looking to be understood?
A Writer’s Notebook I
(La Peste) The Plague by Albert Camus - a review
Saddest Books Revisited
The Glass Menagerie - a review
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
Bhagdad Burning
Five things Feminism has done for me
Read extracts from my novels

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