Ahum is a blend of Ah, Om and Um

I think Joseph Campbell had the most interesting things to say on what would replace religion. Individual patchwork quilts of significant moments and numinosity- art and great narratives.

One thing which crude religion and crude scientism do not do is face us round and point us towards the mystery and wonder of what we do not know.

Sophisticated religion and science is a-hum with curiosity and wonder. Ah, Om and Um. Blend together.

Now prayer is a form of addressing what passes understanding, but science in schools is full of platitudes and certainties which latter unravel in the curriculum. Instead students of science from a young age should be asked to face up to what science does not really know. Holes should be poked in all the theories - open for the students to see them and marvel at.

If you could give young people an idea of the mystery and depth of the phenomena they face from the start, instead of the teacher putting on an omniscient mask, then that would spark us all to wonder and scientific endeavour.

The story of Andrew Wiles search for the solution to Fermat's theorem is a case in point.

Is Andrew Wiles a genius. Who knows. But one thing is for sure, he set off in dogged pursuit of a solution to Fermat's Last Theorem at the age of 10. This is because he was exposed to the depth and mystery of the seemingly obvious.

From Simon Singh's book:

"It [the mathematical problem] looked simple and yet all the great mathematicians in history couldn't solve it. Here was a problem that I, a ten year old, could understand and I knew from that moment that I would never let it go, I had to solve it."

And haven't we all had our epiphanies when we were very young, where faced with the awful knowledge of our mortality for the first time at about 6 or 7, our brains start revving frighteningly, and thus we develop our first hypothesis about the nature of reality. It happens to all of us. If Piaget or Vygotsky haven't written about this as a stage of human development then they should have.

I remember my son at the age of 8 developing complex theories about what "time" was and how it worked. Bryan Magee's young brain jammed itself into the suffocating little niche of knowing that we were locked into our bodies not knowing ever if what we thought or perceived was real.

Neil Turok has set up a foundation for gifted African children to draw them into the funded study of physics. The prerequisite is that they demonstrate curiosity towards natural phenomena. He gave the example of a boy measuring one brick and then counting off the bricks and then multiplying the two numbers together to estimate a building's height. That qualified the boy, in Neil's mind - the boy deserved a good science education.

It's the attitude of attention, curiosity and wonder in both religion and science that is of value and I would say that at the deepest level the qualities of this form of attention are the same for religion and science.

Guardian: Kate Harding's reactionary censorious blog on CiF

It should go without saying... ....that we condemn the scummy prat who called Liskula Cohen : "a psychotic, lying, whoring ... skank" But I disagree with Kate Harding , (in my view a pseudo blogger), posting her blog in the Guardian attacking bloggers. It's a case of set a thief to catch a thief. The mainstream media is irritated by bloggers because they steal its thunder and so they comission people like Kate Harding , people with nothing to say for themselves, apparently, other than that they are feminists, to attack bloggers. I'm black. So I can legitimately attack "angry white old men". I'm a feminist, so I have carte blanche to call all anonymous bloggers "prats." Because yes, that is her erudite response to bloggers. No I don't say that the blogging medium can't be used to attack progressives in whatever context. Of course it can. But to applaud the censorship of a blogger by a billion dollar corporate like Google, and moreov...

The Guardian books bloggers' poetry anthology

There more to composing poetry online than this. ..isn't there? I don't really like conventional poetry of knowing. I love the poetry of words coming into being. The Guardian is going to publish a printable book online with our poems in it and the Irish poet, Billy Mills is getting it together with Sarah Crown, the literary editor. Good for them. Let's also remember that Carol Rumens got the ball rolling. Does Des feature in this anthology? Taboo-busting Steve Augustine decided not to join in. So what are we left with? In the anthology we will be left with a colourful swatch of well-meant, undeniably conventional, occasionally clever, verses - some of them. But there could be, there should be and there is a lot more to on-line poetry than this. Than agile monkeys, koalas and sad sloths climbing up word trees. Perhaps we should focus in on translation, because in translation there is a looseness of form and a dynamism such as, it seems, we can't easily encounter in our...

Guardian books blog fringe: Norman Mailer

FLASHING THE GUARDIAN -- A BOOKS BLOGGERS' REBELLION : The unheroic censor with a death wish Part 1: In which Norman Mailer stars in an experiment in search engine optimisation By ACCIACCATURE 3 February 2009 When Norman Mailer died in 2007, informed opinion – in the blogosphere, people who had read at least two of his books – was split. The army of readers who saw him as one of the most despicable misogynists writing fiction in the 20th century was perfectly matched by warriors on the other side, who raged that the label wasn’t just unwarranted but tantamount to heinous calumny. Before commenters returned to bitching-as-usual, tempers were lost on literary sites all over the net in debating temperatures high enough to bring to mind tiles burning off space shuttles re-entering Earth’s atmosphere. After I'd agreed to a spontaneous suggestion by our good friend Sean Murray -- a pioneer and stalwart of the comments section of The Guardian’s books blog – that we re-...

Donkeyshott & Xuitlacoche

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