Last week Hereford Market paid me for two cull ewes I had taken in earlier. The £360 will help offset our Winter Fuel payment, given by Gordon Brown in 1997 and taken away by Rachel Reeves in 2024. This reminded me of a scheme started by Barbara Castle in the late nineteen sixties. She told us that a new contribution to National Insurance would be added to our state pension. At age of 65, I got an additional 2.5p per week.
I actually retired at 82 after 67 years of work, and so I smile when I hear a politician speaking in high moral tones about what workers must hand over to the government and what they should expect to receive in return for being classed as a pensioner.
I am grateful for what I receive from whatever source, but it is true to say that politicians are those people who take from one and, after deducting wages for themselves and the civil service, then decide who will receive the remainder: Whether they act morally is not for me, or them to judge.
I did however make an error of judgement when I responded to an advert on YouTube for a device to zap mosquitos. I shall never again buy from a site that asks you for your method of payment before you have chosen the product .
My bank said this is a growing trend, and then revealed that if you use a Banking app; the seller can see a list of your standing orders / direct debits, and so, although he can’t access your account, may assess your creditworthiness.
Talking of learning however, I recall the time a Communist activist challenged me to prove that Jesus had existed. It took time to put together a case, but I eventually found eleven first century non-Christians, all of whom wrote about the resurrection in the seventy years following the event.
There is also the New Testament itself, some of which was written within 15 years, (some of Paul even 5) of the resurrection. Credal statements and other written evidence exists in the letters of Peter and Paul and the writings of Luke. Furthermore, there are lots of names and locations of witnesses who could easily have challenged a falsity. In all over five hundred people saw Jesus after his resurrection.
Psychologists have ruled out mass hallucinations and there is also the recorded evidence of the Apostles were martyred whilst witnessing to his works and words. Paul saw him in a vision and never wavered. All died for the Truth they knew.
I also told him that as far as we know, Jesus never wrote anything down. He was really surprised however when I said that Socrates also never wrote anything down, and then asked why he believed Socrates had existed. (Socrates’ pupil Plato did a lot of writing, as his own pupil Aristotle.)
Socrates, I told him, was primarily in search of the Truth of everything. He discovered it by 1) repeatedly asking; What am I seeing? And then 2) kept thinking about it until he felt able to accurately 3) Speak the truth of what he saw. His third step was to live that truth. He taught much about virtue and democracy, and it was this latter issue that led to his death.
His maxim was, See Truth. Tell Truth and Live Truth! But some public figures were so intolerant of truth that they demanded he drink hemlock to demonstrate that truth to them.
And so, like Jesus, he did not die because of the good he did, but for the words he spoke.
Anything about this sound familiar?
View from the Pew 