Anthony Campbell's Home Page

My new book, The Assassins of Alamut, is now available from Lulu.
This is a historical study of the Muslim sect known as the Assassins, and includes an explanation of their extraordinay world view.

My new book, Totality Beliefs and the Religious Imagination, is just out and is available from Lulu or from Amazon.com.

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, both as a paperback book and as a download. It is also available from Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com.

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.

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.

Perhaps naively, I've been rather taken aback by the near-total domination of the news by the death of Michael Jackson. I knew, of course, that he was a major figure in the pop music world, but as I never listen to pop music I hadn't realised that his death would make the impact that it has. It seems to be comparable with that produced by the death of Princess Diana.

If almost everyone knows a lot about Jackson, hardly anyone, it appears, knows anything much about the Bible - not even the New Testament. According to a survey by the National Biblical Literacy Survey, due to be published in full shortly, although most people in Britain own a Bible very few read it. Most of those questioned were unable to say anything at all about Abraham or Joseph and their knowledge of the parables of Jesus was garbled or non-existent; one man thought the good Samaritan had helped someone who had fallen off his camel.

I imagine most of those questioned would have been able to tell you a lot about Michael Jackson. As many have noted, figures such as Elvis Presley and Diana are acquiring mythological status for many people and there is something approaching a religious cult surrounding some of them; this may happen to Jackson.

At the cost of sounding reactionary, I can't help feeling that all this represents an impoverishment of the imagination. Earlier generations were intimately familar with the Bible and its stories informed much of our history, literature, art, and music. If you don't know the Bible you will lose many of the allusions in Shakespeare. Many of our proverbs and metaphors come from the Bible. The decline in knowledge of this source is in many ways a parallel to the decline in knowledge of the Classics, which occurred earlier as the study of Greek and Latin fell away.

You don't have to be a believer to find this state of affairs deeply regrettable. Like it or not, our culture has been shaped by two thousand years of Christianity, and if you are ignorant of this you are cut off from the past. Unlike Mrs Thatcher, I think this matters.

I've just posted my review of The Believing Primate>, edited by Jeffrey Schloss and Michael Murray. I'd expected a rather different book ...

I've not done any reviews for some time because I've been working on a book of my own = more about this shortly. Meanwhile, I've now caught up with two reviews.

13 Impossible Things, by Michael Brooks is popular science. The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman is an attempt to say what the world would be like if humanity disappeared overnight and is also a lament for what has been lost.

NICE has now approved acupuncture for back pain and says it should be widely available on the NHS for people whose back pain has lasted more than six weeks. This is mainly in the light of the recent large-scale trials in Germany, which show that it is effective for this purpose. What these studies also show is that it appears to make no difference where or how deeply the needles are inserted. We therefore still can't rule out the possibility that acupuncture is a complicated placebo, though, if it is, it is certainly an effective one for some indications.

I have long believed and taught that it makes little difference in many cases where the needles are placed. As for the placebo question, there are interesting philosophical issues about how doctors think about placebos. I have a paper coming out on this in the forthcoming issue of Acupuncture in Medicine. Incidentally, this journal is now one of the specialist publications of the BMJ.

I spend part of the year in a country where the revelations about MPs' expenses would occasion no surprise at all. We should at least be grateful that we live in a society where honesty in public figures is expected, even if it isn't always achieved.

In the current issue of The Skeptic, author Robert Sheaffer replies to a correspondent thus: 'Mr Parrish laments that none of we skeptics ...'. I know it's illogical,but when a writer perpetrates grammatical howlers of this magnitude I find it difficult to take the substance of what they write seriously.

The BBC recently broadcast a programme about twin sisters, one of whom is a Christian, the other a Muslim. This was counterpointed by by the twins' mother, an atheist - or at least she was an atheist at the beginning. But she was suffering from terminal lung cancer and, while the programme was being made, she had an ecstatic experience which led to her becoming a theist (though not a Christian).

The programme naturally made much of the Christian-Muslim differences, but what struck me was how similar the attitudes of the two sisters were. Twin studies have often shown concordance between 'identical' twins in respect of their religious attitudes, so this wasn't surprising. And, of course, Christianity and Islam are both 'Abrahamic' faiths, worshipping the same God, so it isn't all that surprising that the twins should have adopted their respective religions.

The most interesting part of the programme was, I thought, the mother's changed opinion. At first, when interviewed, she described herself as agnostic or more ;probably atheistic, and she thought it would be a 'cop-out' to alter her lifelong attitude to religion simply because she was soon going to die. But after her experience, which was evidently a deeply emotional event, she was unequivocal about her conversion. Not everyone who has an ecstatic experience will interpret it in theistic terms, but then not many people have such an experience when they are near death. A fascinating story.

The Language Log


Just come across this thanks to a link provided by John Hawks (see my links page). An excellent blog on matters linguistic which I shall certainly follow in future.

I just heard on the news that four public libraries in Gloucesteshire are to play pop music to readers. As I detest pop music and canned music of all types that would be enough to prevent me from using the libraries in question. Talk about dumbing down. I only hope other libraries don't follow their example.

I just heard on the news that four public libraries in Gloucesteshire are to play pop music to readers. As I detest pop music and canned music of all types that would be enough to prevent me from using the libraries in question. Talk about dumbing down. I only hope other libraries don't follow their example.

Just posted my review of Abducted: How people come to believe they were abducted by aliens, by Susan A. Clancy. This is a brilliant and very readable account of a puzzling subject, with implications for our understanding of memory and also of religion.. Definitely an important book.