Anthony Campbell

I have just published Medical Acupuncture: A Practical Guide. It is an illustrated companion to my textbook of modern acupuncture, Acupuncture in Practice: Beyond Points and Meridians. It is primarily intended for people who have attended one of my courses in modern medical acupuncture but it should also be useful to people who have attended other courses in this form of treatment.

I've decided to make my books available as e-books in a variety of formats, including those for Kindle and the Sony Reader. I don't suppose I shall be getting one of those devices myself (though who knows?) but I think they may finally be about to take off in a big way, after a decade of promises. We shall see.

The following books are now available:

1. Homeopathy in Perspective
2. Totality Beliefs and the Religious Imagination
3. Religion, Language, Narrative and the Search for Meaning.
4. The Assassins of Alamut

You can sample the books quite extensively before purchase.

My new book, Religion, Language, Narrative and the Search for Meaning is now published and available on Amazon.com. Also available as an e-book now.

This is a book about religion from a secular standpoint which nevertheless takes its subject seriously. Contrary to some secularists I don't think religion is likely to disappear any time soon, and here I look at some of the reasons why it is likely to stay. The early chapters consider a number of explanations for religion that are current today; all provide elements of the answer though none is fully satisfactory as it stands. In the remainder of the book I try to develop a way of thinking about religion, using two main clues: language and narrative. There are remarkable similarities in the ways in which we learn both language and religion. As for narrative, I think that religion is based more on telling stories than on assent to formal belief systems. Narrative is how most religious people encounter their religions. Humans are story-telling animals and for that reason alone it is likely that religion will continue to exist. Another reason is the capacity of the human mind to give rise to altered states of consciousness; unlike, some, I think that these are important in shaping our religious ideas.

This blog is primarily written for my own purposes, to try out ideas and pieces of writing that interest me but which don't (yet) merit a full-length article on my web page. Like the rest of what I write, the tone is mainly sceptical. In so far as there is a general theme, it's meant to be my own modest contribution to keeping alive the values of the Enlightenment, which seem to be under increasing threat today.

My new book, The Assassins of Alamut, is now available from Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. Also available as an e-book now.

This is a historical study of the Muslim sect known as the Assassins, and includes an explanation of their extraordinary world view. The book will interest readers who are curious about Islamic heresies, the origins of terrorism, and the stranger by-ways of the religious impulse.

My new book, Totality Beliefs and the Religious Imagination, is just out and is available from Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. Also available ad an e-book now.

Description

There seems to be a widespread notion that belief is, in itself, a good thing, but in this book I argue that, for at least some people, freeing oneself from all belief systems brings a huge sense of relief. I illustrate this by describing my own experience of Roman Catholicism and Transcendental Meditation. I also look at the evidence for miraculous cures for cancer and at ideas about the soul, with particular reference to survival. And I have a discussion of how religions are transmitted, which I think depends on story-telling and language as much as on formal belief.

You can read a review of the book by Taner Edis here and another by Edward Tabash here. There is also a review by John Floyd at amazon.com.

My book Homeopathy in Perspective is now available from Lulu and Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk. Also available as an e-book now.

This is a book about what homeopathy is, how it developed, where it stands today. It is a critical book but not a hatchet job. It is written for people with questioning minds. Anyone who has already adopted a fixed opinion about homeopathy, either for or against, may receive the odd shock.

No prior knowledge is assumed but the book is not only for beginners. Even if you have read quite a lot about homeopathy you will probably find that you view it differently when you have finished.

The book is written with inside knowledge. I was a consultant physician at the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital for over 20 years.

In today's "Thought for the Day" Clifford Longley rightly remarked that the fact that couples who are married are more likely to stay together than those who cohabit does not prove that there is a causal relationship between marriage and stability. As I said on 11 July 2007 about David Cameron's advocacy of marriage, it is equally possible that it is mostly those cohabiting couples who are confident that their situation is likely to be stable who decide to get married. On the face of it, trying things out for a few years seems likely to tell people that they can get on together. If marriage is a lottery, a peep into the hat before the tickets are drawn doesn't seem like a bad idea.

The involvement of the Church in solemnising marriage is a relatively recent phenomenon, having arisen during the Middle Ages. At least for common people, marriage was previously a more informal affair.

On 30 January over 300 homeopathic sceptics will publicly swallow a bottleful of homeopathic tablets to demonstrate that they suffer no ill effects. This reminds me of an experience many years ago: a casualty officer rang the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital to say that a child had been brought in having swallowed a lot of homeopathic tablets. Should she wash out the child's stomach? I was able to reassure her that there was no need to do anything. So what should she do? "Nothing,", I said, though in retrospect I wish I'd told her to warn the mother to be more careful with her prescription medicines in future because another time she might not be so lucky.

The demonstration to be staged next Saturday will be good theatre, I suppose, but it won't do much to clarify the issues. My book Homeopathy in Perspective gives plenty of information for anyone who really wants to know about the subject.

On Today this morning the Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, used the expression "what it means to you and I" and several times mentioned "reticence" when what he meant was "reluctance" or "unwillingness". (Admittedly, the interviewer, Evan Davis, also misused "reticence" but that's no excuse.) I suppose we should be grateful that Johnson is no longer Secretary of State for Education and Skills, but even so ...

I have just posted my review of The Mind-Body Problem, by Rebecca Goldstein, In spite of its title this is a novel, although the central character and narrator is a philosopher.

On the Today programme this morning John Sentamu, Archbishop of York, was interviewed by John Humphrys about the Haiti earthquake. Humphrys was asking the age-old questions: how can an all-powerful and loving God allow such things to happen, and why do some people survive while others don't? Humphrys is of course an old hand at this game; he recently conducted a series of interviews with leading theologians of different faiths in which the question of reconciling God's omnipotence and love figured prominently.

One of the earlier interviewees was Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, who admitted that he could only just live with the paradox. That was at least honest. Sentamu, in contrast, failed even to attempt to confront the issue. He started by voicing the platitude that natural forces can be both beneficial and destructive. He instanced water to illustrate this: essential for life but destructive if there is too much of it. He didn't explain how this analogy could be applied to earthquakes. Are small earthquakes beneficial?

He then wandered off into talking about how Jesus shows us the face of God. Humphrys, understandably baffled, said that he didn't see what this had to do with the question. But Sentamu did little more than repeat himself in answer.

This was one of the feeblest efforts at a theodicy that I've heard from a prominent churchman. I can respect those who, like Rowan Williams, confess themselves unable to find an answer, but to take refuge in irrelevant waffling is unforgivable..

These two books tell the story of Roald Dahl's life, from boyhood to his wartime service as a fighter pilot in the RAF. Both volumes are well worth reading, but for me the description of his time as a fighter pilot in Greece is definitely the high point. I've read few more vivid accounts of this kind of experience.

I'm constantly surprised by people who send emails or post entries on mailing lists, asking for help or advice, who do so in continuous blocks of prose with no paragraph breaks. This makes reading what they've written so difficult and unpleasant that I never do so.

Perhaps they were never taught paragraphing at school, or perhaps they think it doesn't matter - just another example of elitism. But surely, when they have to read other people's paragraphless prose, they see how difficult it is to follow?

They are writing, after all, in the hope of being read and responded to, so why don't they try to make that happen?

Actually, I think that for reading on-screen as opposed to on the printed page, more paragraphs are needed, not fewer.

In 1875 a Flemish labourer called Pierre de Rudder visited a local replica of the Lourdes Grotto, and apparently experienced the instantaneous healing of an ununited and infected fracture of the tibia and fibula. A section of bone was entirely missing, yet a photograph shows the leg not only whiole but equal in length to the opposite leg. The healing was certified by physicians and, when Rudder died, post-mortem examination showed the bones were united and of normal length.

In her book on Lourdes, Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age, Ruth Harris, who is not a Catholic, says that the case "dismays and perplexes".

I agree it does, but it happened a long time ago and it is always difficult to know what to say about one-off cases. Fortunately, new light is shed by an article by Joe Nickell in the current issue of Skeptical Inquirer (Vol. 34, No. 1). Nickell twice visited Belgium to investigate alleged miracles. One of these was the de Rudder case.

In outline, he has found documentary evidence which, together with the bones themselves (which show impaired alignment at the fracture site), suggest that the healing was not in fact instantaneous and might have occurred naturally before de Rudder visited the shrine. Prior to the visit he used to perform a stunt in which he demonstrated almost 180 degree rotation of the leg at the fracture site, but this was always with the limb clothed and Nickell thinks that he may have simply had unusually lax ligaments and that there may have been an element of malingering . De Rudder was in receipt of a pension from the viscount who employed him but this ceased when the viscount died; a 'miraculous' recovery would allow him to return to work without admitting he had been a fraud.

I'm glad to have this information, because I have elsewhere published my view that apparently miraculous healings are usually of disorders (including cancer) that may on occasion recover naturally. The de Rudder case might have posed a challenge to this view, but Nicholl's research offers the possibility of a plausible natural explanation.