When the Jewish exiles returned from their Babylonian captivity and, under the leadership of Nehemiah, began to rebuild Jerusalem, they found Arabs among those who sought to hinder them.[1] These may have been the Nabateans, who were the only northern Arabi­ans to establish a civilization comparable to that of South Arabia in the period before Islam. (In fact, some think that the Nabateans were actually of South Arabian origin; trading colonies from the south are well known in... Read more

    From The Wisdom of Near-Death Experiences, by the British intensive-care nurse and researcher Dr. Penny Sartori:   An account related to Dr. Sartori by Lyon White, of Sussex:   “My mother Peggy, whilst in the latter stages of Alzheimer’s disease was no longer able to converse with any coherency at all.  Her conversation consisted of what could only be described as ‘gobble-de-gook’.  She had a spell in hospital.  On one particular visit she was lying on the bed... Read more

    Yesterday, we were watching Geraint Lewis and Luke Barnes play with the cosmic dial to create different hypothetical universes.  Let’s do it a bit more:   “The Neutron Universe:  If you think the hydrogen universe is rather featureless, let’s instead increase the mass of the up quark by a factor of 6.  The result is that the proton falls apart.  In a reversal of what we see in our Universe, the proton, including protons buried in the apparent... Read more

    “A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.”   “I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.”   “The largest cultural menace in America... Read more

    I haven’t yet decided what to title the book:   From the earliest times, the people of Arabia, though dominantly nomadic, have also included seminomadic and even fully settled groups. Sedentary life was overwhelmingly concentrated in the south, with the inhabitants of north and central Arabia being largely nomadic. The two classes of Arabs seldom got along with one another. Arabic literature is full of references to the contempt felt by nomads for settled folk and to the... Read more

    A bit more from Pim van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience (New York: HarperCollins, 2010):   Can we speak of consciousness when a person is in a coma?  A recent article in Science looked at the scientific evidence of awareness in a patient in a vegetative state.  This is a form of coma with spontaneous breathing and brain-stem reflexes.  Brain tests showed that when this patient was instructed to imagine certain activities like playing tennis or... Read more

    From a well-respected Dutch cardiologist:   It is 1969.  At the coronary care unit the alarm suddenly goes off.  The monitor shows that the electrocardiogram of a patient with a myocardial infarction (heart attack) has flatlined.  The man has suffered a cardiac arrest.  Two nurses hurry over to the patient, who is no longer responsive, and quickly draw the curtains around his bed.  One of the nurses starts CPR while the other places a mask over his mouth... Read more

    Returning to Geraint F. Lewis and Luke A. Barnes, A Fortunate Universe: Life in a Finely Tuned Cosmos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016):   “[T]he up and down quarks are 4.5 and 9.4 times heavier than the electron.  These aren’t nice, neat numbers.  And yet, they are fundamental to the Standard Model of particle physics.  Frustratingly, we can measure them, but we can’t explain them in terms of anything else. “The other paraphernalia of the Standard Model aren’t any better.  The... Read more

    For one of the manuscripts that I’m tinkering with, I’m trying to outline the issues and options as clearly as I can, for myself and for readers.  Here’s a hasty first try, which follows a lengthy summation — still under construction — of various items of evidence and several distinct lines of argument:   It seems unlikely that Joseph was consciously deceptive. Let’s examine the various possibilities under this heading: It seems unlikely that he was consciously and... Read more

    Another few hundred words:   It was at Nahom, incidentally, that Lehi and his party abruptly turned due east after their long period of travel along the coast of Arabia in a southeasterly direction. A glance at the map shows that by doing so, they missed the area of what has long been known as Yemen. Instead, they moved along behind the mountains that form the natural division between Yemen and the rest of the Arabian penin­sula. (Most... Read more