Is Cannabis a Gateway Drug and other stories

Is Cannabis a Gateway Drug and other stories: "Sometimes some of our beliefs make some sort of sense. But often they don’t. Some of our beliefs have been inculcated into us since early childhood. They’ve been repeated so often we take them for the truth. Our whole world is built around received belief-systems such as this.

Personally I always retain a healthy scepticism about anyone’s beliefs… and that includes my own."

Stonehenge and Civilisation

Stonehenge and Civilisation: "we think that history is like a piece of string. We imagine a straight line from some technologically inferior past to a well-informed present. From dumb to clever, from stone axes to mobile phones. But any clear understanding of the process makes it obvious that it is more like a wheel. History goes in cycles, from dumb to clever and back again, on a regular basis."

Landscape and Possession

Landscape and Possession: "That is what I mean by possession.

When a ghost enters a man we say he is possessed.

But what if he is already possessed and he no longer knows it?

What if the mind that he carries around in his head isn’t his real mind at all?

What if it isn’t just one man, but all of humanity that is possessed? Possessed by the demon of possession, in fact, by the mistaken belief that anyone can ever own anything."

Poor Little Frankie: the limits of child-centred education

Poor Little Frankie: the limits of child-centred education: "Frankie was made to wear backless clogs.

Backless clogs! On an eight-year old!

Have you ever tried to run in backless clogs? And isn't this exactly what an eight-year old is supposed to do: to run, in the sheer exuberance of his existence, for the joy of being alive? It was like he was being deliberately crippled.

Poor little Frankie."

Weird is the English Word for Fate

Weird is the English Word for Fate: "When fate casts its strange shadow – as it does sometimes – over the ordinary processes of our lives, it does so with reason. Fate is the question we ask of ourselves. Fate is the choice we are given. Once we have made that choice, then our lives are determined by it. But the moment of fate itself is actually the moment of greatest freedom."

Schr�dinger’s Uncertain Cat

Schrodinger’s Uncertain Cat: "You can’t know if the cat is alive or dead until you open the box, because you can’t know if the atom has decayed or not. Mr Schrodinger merely posited the cat as a way of highlighting the weird contradictions inherent in the world of Quantum Mechanics; that is, on the small scale of atoms and subatomic particles."