Apparently in completely different light.  No idea how that happened!

There was a picture going around on Facebook the other day of a bookshop with a notice in the window.  It said the taxes it paid would pay for one trainee nurse.   That combined with the fact that Amazon doesn't appear to pay corporation tax has broke me. No more amazon, no matter how convenient.  Fuck 'em.  I apparently pay more tax than them.

There is a lovely independent book store down the road, so I'm going to help pay for student nurses.

There was one place with some vegetarian options.  But in fact it was one type of vegetarian option.  It was a cheese sandwich but your choice of THREE DIFFERENT CHEESES. 

WOW AMSTERDAM. LOOK AT YOU WITH YOUR BLOODY CHOICE.

Two bloody days in Brussels and Amsterdam and I want to never eat cheese again.  Seriously, its 2012, discover humous or bean burritos.

Some lovely man in an Italian Restaurant made me the largest bowl of vegetarian tagliatelli this evening though, so that was a win.  But this is a small northern town.  It has kicked Amsterdam and Brussels' ass at what is good to eat as a vegetarian.  

VEGETARIANS CAN'T SURVIVE BY CHEESE ALONE!

Thus ends the tourist whine.

I think it's a few things throwing up this road block.

1 - There isn't actually a lot of research done in my area.  It is really annoying to constantly read reams and reams worth of articles and books with no reference to your research area.  I guess it's a good indication of why I can do a PhD on this area.  But in terms of a road map of information to block in my research, it's not very helpful.  I think I need to just finish my current ream of books and then start on some proper research.  This might throw up some new people and areas that may have been researched to give me a few more guide posts along the way. At least with my MA I was well within the historiography that exists but it simply disappears after 1890.  

2 - I need to write something.  I'm not taking my own advice and writing something every week about the research/reading I have done.  I think I need some place to clear my head of thoughts and solidify them somewhere.  At least that feels like progress in one sense and helps me get these disparate ideas down.

3 - I don't know if I've taken on more than I can chew in terms of other things.  I might have to make some tough decisions and just back away from some of the stuff I do.  Part of my anxiety with not getting enough work done includes all these disparate things going on.  Either that or I just need to schedule my life better.  Hopefully the latter.

Anyway.  Onward and upward.  I have my first bit of writing that I need to submit next month so I should probably stop feeling sorry for myself.  After all, it looks like I am on the track to contributing some original research!

For example, Hypatia Bradlaugh-Bonner, the daughter of the 19h century arch-atheist Charles Bradlaugh had to repeatedly put to rest assertions by those of faith that Bradlaugh had a death bed conversion.  I'm sure there are equal amounts of them claiming that Darwin converted at the end or was really religious all along.

Reading today in A history of Atheism in Britain: from Hobbes to Russell by David Berman (1988) I was amused to find some aspect of this phenomenon dovetail nicely with the skeptical side of things.

"The Medium and Daybreak, a spiritualist newspaper, carried a detailed report of a message sent from the next world by Bradlaugh through a Birmingham medium.  In this message the 'ghost' of Bradlaugh affirmed that there is a 'life beyond the grave that I did not wish for nor believe' and, even more noteworthy, that 'there is a God!  There is a Divine principle.'  This attempt by the spiritualists to show that Bradlaugh did in the 'end' recant, whether it was conscious fraud or unconscious self-deception, shows, one again, the power of the suppression (if conscious) or repression (if unconscious) of atheism (p. 220).

There is a very pedantic element of my brain wanting to know if he swore or affirmed that there was a God while convening with this Birmingham medium, since he is famous for passing the law that allowed everyone the right to affirm rather than swear in court and parliament in the UK.

I think I need to get me a copy of that paper and perhaps keep a closer eye on this phenomenon as the period that will make up a large part of my study will including the passing of a lot of the Victorian old-guard of secularism.  Perhaps it would make a rather amusing talk or page (at least) in my overall dissertation.

First off:  Alan D. Gilbert, The Making of Post-Christian Britain which was okay, I guess.  It's just that sociological looks at things generally oversimplify the history which gets rather old.  It also does nothing to help me with the history of the period when it just goes off on these sociological expositions.   This was oh so evident in Herwig Arts, Faith and Unbelief, Uncertainty and Atheism.  It was rather religion heavy which I would have suspected given the university it was printed at.  It ended up having a lot about belief but not so much about unbelief.  A bit useless when you are studying the secular movement.  Wound up much of David Nash's Secularism, Art and Freedom but did rather a lot of skimming near the end as I bought the book anyway (these are all library books that I want to return in the next month or so).  It has a lot of super useful stuff (being history rather than sociology) which will be useful later but not so much at the moment.

Cracking on with a couple of essays in Realism, Ethics and Secularism:  Essays on Victorian Literature and Science which I hope will have something useful in it.  

So far my troubles are:

• monographs that talk about secularism are sociological and not very helpful
• the history is thin on the ground  post-1880.
• everyone treats 'secularism' 'freethought' 'ethicism' as different things where I think they broadly fall under a G. W. Holyoake broad tent of secularist activism.  I don't know if I can go against the historiography that much but I don't see why I shouldn't poke at the idea for a bit.
• still not a real focus on defining what secularism is - which may be my get out for confronting the historiography as aggressively as I want to, mentioned above.  

I need to get through all these books so I can get some more.  This shall be my life for at least the next year.  :p

My friend @TheatreGreekAmy is growing a person INSIDE OF HER and I promised a baby blanket.  Usually I knit such things but I have had no time.  So! To THE INTERNETS for something interesting which turned out to be a fabric panel with the Milky Way.

So I made a blanket today. Hooray!

How come every time there is an upsurge in religious feeling it is called a revival? Why isn't it categorised as "neo-christianity"?

Perhaps established churches have some claim to continuity but every time there is a new policy doctrine, different groups will split off.  The Reformation being such a massive break up of Catholic Europe is never looked at in terms of creating 'new' religions but rather as the title suggests - a reform movement.  Perhaps some of the anabaptists are looked upon as vaguely new and threatening, but even they are covered under 'the radical reformation'.  Even through these religions different greatly in terms of emphasis of different parts of the Bible, they are never new.

I'd wager that most of the newer congregations in South London have a shorter historical narrative than that of the UK Secular Movement.  Why are they not new/neo?

There is so much historical research on the religious groups in the UK so they can claim continuous historical narrative even though they differ radically from what the Christian Church started out as.  But, atheists and secularists who have had many of the same goals for centuries are still new.  There is no doubt that we also have our differences but I think if we are called new/neo every five years, so should new churches.

Ugh.  More things to write about after his whole PhD thing!  Or part of the PhD!

I think I have a few writing styles.  One is for Twitter, messages boards and blogs where it is quite a bit more informal and lackadaisical when it comes to grammar and capitalisation.  Another is for one I attempt to write fiction which is far more playful.  Then there is of course, my academic writing which sometimes feels like an entire other person.  I think it seeps into some of my blogs once in awhile, especially when I'm thinking of academic subjects.  

However, the main reason I am thinking about language at the moment is in an 'achievement unlocked' way, to borrow something from Xbox.  Going back to my undergraduate essays is sometimes quite painful but again quite good as I can see how much I've improved (though my 'German or Brit' punctuation has remained as one of my professors told me in 3rd year).  I don't really recall thinking of language all that much when I was doing my MA but I know my language had also improved.  I guess its the 4+ years that I'm going to dedicate my life to writing 100,000 words on a single topic that is causing this introspective look at my own prose.  Not only that but the literature review itself is going to be analysing language to a certain extent with critiquing how people use certain terms like secularism, atheism, freethinker, humanist and the like.  In the first book that I've picked up (mainly because it is the most relevant) I've already become rather annoyed with the use of Humanist.  The author is using it in it's current modern sense to describe all secular activities in the nineteenth century (!).  To some that may be mere pedantry but in historical terms is somewhat heretical.  It is a sociological study from the 1970s which is part of the problem no doubt.  At least it will give me something to write about.

I would like to have the more conversational tone that Hitchens has in his memoirs as it makes it seem like you are having a rather informative conversation.  However, that is probably not going to match well with academic rigour.  Perhaps I can use some of it as I'd prefer my panel to enjoy reading my dissertation (as much as one can).  It's not so much style to mimic flow of the story that would be emulated as that will no doubt help the argument.

Anyway, it'll be interesting to see how my writing style evolves once again (hopefully it won't involve being told off for punctuating like a Brit now that I am on the correct side of the Atlantic).  

Anyone up for editing when the time comes ;)

I note that I'm sounding as esoteric as some of the commentary of old-school Owenites did when commenting on some of Charles Bradlaugh's speeches:  "His mind was only saturated with textual contradictions of the Pentateuch, and he seemed never to have considered the tendency of Hebrew Sadducceeism towards the comity of thought, which was in antagonism to the Platonic Metaphysics of the age of the Apostles" (p. 41)

I realise going down the rabbit's hole of doing a PhD is going to be a lot more amusing to me than it is for you guys when I blog about it.

David Tribe, 100 Years of Free-thought

David Nash, Secularism, Art and Freedom

David Nash, Blasphemy in Modern Britain - 1789 to the present

Alan D. Gilbert, The Making of a Post-Christian Britain

Alan D. Gilbert, Religion and Society in Industrial England

Herwig Arts, Faith and Unbelief, Uncertainty and Atheism

Edward Royle, Victorian Infidels (but in reality it'll be everything he's ever written)

Michael J. Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism

David Berman, A history of atheism in Britain:  From Hobbes to Russell

Callum G. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain

John Wolffe, Evangelical Faith and Public Zeal

Hugh McLeod, Religion and society in England, 1850-1914

John Habgood, Varieties of Unbelief

Susan Budd, Varieties of Unbelief (popular title)

George Levine, Realism, Ethics and Secularism:  Essays of Victorian Literature and Science

On top of all the books I already have and a bunch of articles.

Soon I will have 99 problems and ALL OF THEM WILL BE BOOKS.

As I've studied and continue to study the period in history where people were fighting for the rights to even be able to affirm in court or publish criticisms of the church without being thrown in jail, the retrogressive nature of some of these positions seem right out of the history books.

We are fighting for different things in the case:  saving the NHS, marriage equality, gender equality and some of the same - the right to freedom from religion as much as freedom for religion.  In many respects we are fighting for some of the same things - reproductive rights being the main battle that is constantly waged against the tides of the religious and conservative right.

But across the spectrum  you see the same elements that existed in the 19th century.

1 - The weight of history.  There are always many people using the argument for weight of history which as an historian I find appalling.  There is no reason why current generations should be shackled with the weight of the past.  The past has almost in every case been proven wrong.  If we rely on tradition, we embed notions of privilege to what is established and restrict the innovative (hello copyright vs the Internet).  We enforce the status quo and oppress those who don't adhere to current cultural norms.  Also, our interpretation of the past is mostly, very wrong.  If you see how certain fads get embedded in culture, you see how malleable our cultural norms are (ie the whole blue/pink thing in the Victorian period for boys/girls).  If you look at the past with a very critical eye, you see how ad-hoc our established institutions are and how they've forced their way into the national fabric.  The past was not logically or rationally ordered, it is by chance, force, criminality, money and occasionally democratic process that things evolve.   You can justify a lot if you depend on history from the oppression of minorities and the poor, to slavery, to rape, to murder, to the domination of an elite over the majority of a population.  History is not a good judge of anything, we don't have to rely on it to inform our current morals, values, ethics or way we do business.

2 - The arrogance of authority.  If you look at Cameron and the NHS and the bullying that is going on this is a very good example of arrogance of authority.  The recent thing of not inviting the organisations that oppose the reforms with those that to do.  Sure, you can say that we only want a productive dialogue as the reforms are going through but at the same time, those organisations that you don't invite are still going to have a massive part to play in all the reforms IF they go ahead.  It is very emperor's new clothes - surrounding yourself with the courtiers that will not say that you are naked whilst the reality of the situation still exists and the entire world can see you are starkers.  Cameron could fit in well with so many of the most arrogant rotten borough MPs in the 19th century (and that is not a compliment).  He's taking his position for granted, that it is his privilege (as do, it seems many of the political class on all spectrums of political affiliation) when it clearly isn't.  It is a position of service to the state and people.  The state does include businesses but the business interest shouldn't undermine service to the people.  The weight of history in this case can be relatively illuminating when that ration becomes unbalanced.  While Cameron and Lansley and their supports try to divide the NHS amongst private interest - banking regulations (which were promised) and curtailing the dangerous elements of banking culture seem to have disappeared.  That is what they were elected for, yet they seem to be hell bent on doing things they expressly said they wouldn't do.  That is the arrogance.  The say and won't do element of this class of politics.  It is not serving the interest of the electorate rather it is awaiting a peerage post-PM and the lecture circut thereafter.  It's like being in politics is a stepping stone towards more wealth and privilege.  

3 - Jesus and Co.  The 19th century and early 20th century saw huge waves of evangelicalism that swept across the US and the UK.  It saw attacks on other religious and other minorities.  It saw the persecution of those who were atheists and agnostics for blasphemy.  It threw people in jail for publishing an insult against their religion. It forced women into an unattainable ideal.  It persecuted people who did not conform to their definition of marriage.  It clamped down on any discussion of contraception and abortion (in fact it is where most the abortion laws started.  It was not 'always illegal' in the past).  Now, I'm not going to say that we are anywhere near the level of oppression that existed in the 19th century but I will say that all the arguments are the same.  It's all about a narrow definition of family, of womanhood, masculinity, parenthood, children and sex.  Victorians were enormously repressive and that is where a lot of our issues today stem from.  Go back a few hundred years earlier and in some ways there was a great deal more liberty (not all, it was still a very restrictive society).  The evangelical movement polarised discussions and has led to some of the absolutely regressive views on gay marriage, contraception/abortion and even women's rights in general.  In the 1950s you had this brilliant focus on science and that it would save everything - when this utopia didn't happen you had a growing distrust of science and evangelicalism which is starting to bear the fruits of ignorance and repression in today's society.  How we let this happen, I don't know but it is of serious concern.  The media in the passed few weeks from the charge of militant secularism being totalitarian and Richard Dawkins' slave genes are the results of this narrow minded view (though a narrow minded view with a lot of money).  So despite continuing polls (like last week) or studies (like a few months ago) or demographic trends (from the last 100 years) - these polarising views are still the one's that get attention, that formulate policy and get media attention. It is boring to report "HEY LOOK! Everyone is moderate and rational" on the six o'clock news.  I don't know the way to combat this stupid view of stupidly regressive and unrepresentative people getting attention and making an impact on policy.  Everyone donate to the NSS or the BHA?  We need to hit them with equal amounts of money and support - this is what happened in the 19th century, people gave money, read periodicals, demonstrated and went to jail.  I don't suggest we do the same but we have to do something because I don't fancy being persecuted for publishing my PhD in a few years time.  We know they have such a 19th century point of view - when I get more into my research I'll put up a few blog posts of where the language is almost identical it is scary.  

Anyway, that's just three.  There are so many more.  It's made me so impossibly angry and annoyed this week with everything that has been printed in the press or how much our government is not listening to their electorate.  I found it very difficult to understand how angry people got in the 19th century about what they were fighting for - how they'd rather go to jail than put up with the status quo.  Not so much now.  There is just this impotent aggravation that I feel - that signing petitions and demonstrations are just not working, that our representatives don't listen to us because they have invested interests that are more important.  How do we make the government more representative, how do we hold them to account when they make the laws?  This was the rage that those in the 19th century felt because their elected MPs had vested interests and didn't care about their electorate; they were corrupt and it was in people's faces every day that the corruption wouldn't be dealt with.  I think the difference now is a matter of motivation:  most of us don't go hungry, live comfortable lives or those of those that don't need to work hard to be able to make ends meet.  We have a million distractions and worries about losing our levels of comforts that it is genuinely scary to think of how to fight back.  I'm scared.  I don't want to not have a job or a house or food.  But I want representation and I want justice.  How do we change the system so that it works again and not just for those making the laws but actually need them to be protected, to have the same rights as everyone else?  How do we dis-establish privilege when that privilege is justified on the basis of always being privileged?  Time to find out I think.  Or welcome to the 19th century, take two.  More Victorian, more regressive and now with more money.

I wanted to Tweet that maybe the only people that should be allowed to talk about contraception and abortion or those most likely to use them but danger lies that way.  However, it might be useful to recognise that when men, especially religious men, are dominating the issue something has gone terribly wrong.

It really does stagger me how regressive and oppressive these laws really will be.  The most mind boggling thing is how un-representative they are and how it is the influence of very right wing religious groups. 

But why won't this go away?  Why do these bills get on the books?  Why aren't people writing in to their representatives and telling them that these sorts of right are voting issues?  Maybe they are, maybe no one is listening.  Maybe its all sound and fury and no substance (though the fact that many of these laws are being debated is frightening enough).  

If only all women (at least the vast majority of women who depend on contraception) could somehow organise and have a sex strike like in the Lysistrata - telling their boyfriends, husbands, whoever that a very limited sex life is they way it'll probably be if these laws keep getting passed.  That unless they want to support them and their vast amounts of children, this is what their future is going to be like.  It would certainly put the GOP in their place (except for maybe Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum).  Maybe it would get to men a bit more as well.  This is a women's right issue but it is also a fundmental attack on how modern society operates.  This isn't a small government GOP anymore, its a socially conservative monster.

I hope many Christians start questioning where their political and religious donations are going - are they fighting the very services they take for granted?  Are they being used to curtail the rights and freedoms that they are used to having?  

I worry about the millions of American women one day who might wake up and find their prescriptions cancelled or their planned parenthood shut down.  There's something very wrong in American politics and I can't just sit back and thank my lucky stars because I don't live in the US.  Money flows across borders and one victory can embolden.  It's all our problem, it affects the US, it affects the US policy when it comes to reproductive rights in the developing world and it will affect us, is affecting us now in the UK.  It must be stopped.  

The first will be to see what definition those already in the field have used - a short snippet of historiography I suppose (loads of historiography yet to come of course!)  But that has a lot of nuances itself - much of the history has been segmented into various time periods:

• Owenism
• Cooperative movement
• Chartism
• Holyoake secularism
• Bradlaugh secularism
• Post-Bradlaugh
• Modern 
• etc.

The other thing I might have to consider is theory vs practice.  Having been to 3 secular organisations' AGMs this year there is some variation in what is in a charter and what they actually do in practice.  Much of this will depend if I can distinguish between the two as my sources permit.  It is something that will be in the back of my mind though.

My time period should only stretch about 30-40 years but as it crosses over a century and has a world war in the middle, I'm still expecting a bit of fluctuation!

And who knows!  The other ticker is what organisations themselves would consider to be part of the secular movement.  Or that I might consider based on their actions? There are the obvious ones that specify that they are or that they don't believe in the supernatural - but there are the Quakers and other dissenting religions that would have profited more from teaming up with non-theists to secure their own rights.  There was a huge crossover when it came to anti-war movements during the First World War which will be within my time period to sort out.

Anyway, that will be one of the first things I'm going to be contemplating as I hunker down and get into reading all the secondary sources that will refresh my mind before I dive into the voluminous amount of archive material that awaits me.

I have been having some thoughts about how I'm going to keep track of my work, given that I am doing it part time and working full time.  I figured one way to keep thinking about things more broadly, rather than getting mired in millions of details (which is bound to happen with a history PhD) is do an informal report once a week or every two weeks to basically tell you what I've found out.  I think this will help me make sure I'm consistently doing something every week whether reading a book, articles or at the archives.  Also, one of the things I never really liked doing in undergrad was writing book reviews. I hear this is quite a staple of academia, so I better get used to it.  I'm hoping if anyone is even vaguely interested they'll ask me some questions and maybe think in different ways.  The other good thing is that when I have to get a gist of what I've been doing - presto! A record!  I could perhaps just keep my own record and hide it in some file somewhere but I feel like inflicting the history of secularism on all of you.  I wonder how much my focus will wander from my original topic?

The other thing I need to do is create a file structure to save everything and when I start researching/writing keep proper citations.  I'm really shit at that when I actually start writing and then have to spend AGES fixing my citations.  I usually put a book/page number but when you have 150 references to go through at the end of it all, it's more than a bit irritating!  I've never actually used anything other that Word or in the old days Word Perfect to write so I wonder if I should find some other sort of software to keep me more organized.   If anyone has any suggestions that would be great.  Note that I am doing a history PhD rather than something sciency!

I had intended to spend the last two weeks researching but this cold has really kicked the shit out of me.  Even just cleaning the flat wears me out.  I think there is some light at the end of the tunnel though (maybe, hopefully, oh god please be light).  However, I've got a job now so I'll have to work on it during weekends/evenings like usual.  Perhaps at the end of this contract, I'll take a couple weeks off between jobs and dig in the archives.

Theoretically, I haven't been accepted yet though all indications seem green lit. I'm rather excited about all this, even though I'm still full of this blasted cold.  I hope I don't cough my way through this interview tomorrow!  It's been a crazy couple weeks since I got back from Canada.  I've spent most of the time being horrible ill, coughing, unable to hear half the time, sneezing, congested and generally miserable interspersed with getting a new job (five month contract but really good pay) and getting ready to start my PhD.  I imagine both the job and the PhD are going to be challenging so I hope I get healthy quick so I'll be ready for them both.

My evening was rung in at the wonderful Snakes and Lattes where we played board games well into the wee hours of the morning.

This morning we were all rather sleepy, so it was puttering about my friend's flat and then getting a mound of vegan sushi AND EATING IT ALL.

Then MI4 with my big brother in downtown Toronto.

Now ending it was some Black Books and tea.

I hope the next 364 are equally relaxing.