Why should we listen to preachers? What do they know that we don’t, and how do we know that they really know? I don’t like preachers who are full of judgements, condemnations, and threats. In fact, I don’t think they are preaching but riding the rollercoaster of inflated self. And what if we don’t even believe in God? What on Earth is the point of listening to a man talk about something we don’t accept? Preacher Charles Spurgeon seems to offer a genuine and historically relevant selection of ideas and works that help us to understand the mind of the time and perhaps a little of our own ancestral memory.
 
When I wrote Meeting God In TheMiddle, I really wanted to help non-believers and believers alike meet on the middle ground and appreciate what is going on in a way that suits everyone. Obviously, no-one can truly make everyone happy, and those of us who are fundamental believers will no doubt find many problems in my little book. I’d love you to read it and write about what they are, linking to the original of course. Let’s start a discussion, that’s what it is all about. Nevertheless, the middle ground in the religious sphere is that a genuine phenomenon exists in that people are willing to believe and act in ways that perhaps go against the grain of the world. Understanding why is clearly important, so we can at least communicate with people on levels they understand and are willing to act on.  
 
But if it’s true, if the stories and wisdom handed down by religious texts and ideas around the world are still around because there’s something right about them, we can mostly agree it is in the same way a fable is important. We know that a tortoise and a hare never ran a race, but we tell the story because of the information it contains. If you are lazy, even the slowest can outpace you. Religion is like this whether you believe it is true or not. That’s the point of my book and that’s the point of this article.  
 
The magical world of old-fashioned Christianity taps into a deeper sense of connectivity to nature and the universe that today’s hooray churches seem to ignore. The majesty and mystery of being alive and with a crystal clear conscience that we trip over daily is an experience like no other. Finding ways of exploring this in terms that extend beyond the material but count the internal as part of it is what religion has done to a great extent. Christianity, like Islam, Buddhism and Yogic practices, is about relinquishing the self. To surrender the individual to the will of God, or the natural progression of the universe, is a way of life that billions of people believe is beneficial beyond the immediate. All faiths try to reach out to the divine source of all creation, with a belief that it holds a consciousness which cares about us. 
 
Understanding the working of this consciousness and its relationship to us is what religion is all about. Is this possible? Like looking into a masterpiece by a great artist, we can learn a lot about them from the way they produced the work. Every little detail can tell us about the intention and the motivation, which go on to inform us on the character of theartist themselves. Religion likes to treat creation like a masterpiece and God is the term we use for the artist. The entire universe and everything unimaginable beyond belongs to this grand source.  
 
So, whether you actually believe in it or not, hopefully you can appreciate the validity and importance of religious ideas. When the preacher is not tainted by hate and competitiveness and they reach into the grand mysteries of philosophical thought, we can bypass the need to fully accept in favour of gleaning the good information that stems from a genuine desire to live according to the laws of all creation.  Visit  the Pastor Charles Spurgeon YouTube Channel and enjoy the continuing updates.
 
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The painted people, Picti, were first mentioned in Latin during the 3rd Century AD. Their origin seems to stem from the Iron Age Caledonii tribes and their counterparts, known for making it impossible for Rome to conquer them. The Middle Ages saw Picts take the lead in the North of the British Isles, with wonderfully patterned architecture and fashion pieces leaving an immortal mark on the landscape. Pictland is a specific area of the Scottish countryside that holds the largest concentration of the styled creativity. It is, in fact, in the methods of creativity and the techniques employed that we could make our best educated guesses as to the origin of many various pieces of history. I wonder if this would be still true for today’s works of art and design? 
 
Although the Pictish people had a vibrant and diverse spoken language, rooted in the ancient Gael languages, they did not leave any written word for us to explore. This perhaps suggests they did not have writing at all, or perhaps despite their ability to make complex designs in stone, they wrote on something much more transient. It could have been a superstitious belief that prevented words from being made permanent. There is also the fact that Pict is a generic term invented by Latin speaking people to describe a culture they knew nothing about. The pictures they refer to were probably dyes applied to the skin or tattoos like the Māori people of New Zealand. Trends and cultural synchronicities can run through several cultures, like football today could mean we are the ballkicking people. Sounds good, but it doesn’t say much about the variety of players in the world.  
 
Even though we have various writings from the time about the so-called Picts, they are generally written in second-hand accounts or in passing tense. No real or long-lived emissary work was done to understand the cultures, perhaps because of the warring tribes on both sides. What we have to do is go to Pictland itself and explore the things the ancient culture left behind. In the most long-lived artifacts, the ones constructed with the most attention and care, the test of time reveals at least some of what they valued the most. The good news is that the work is still ongoing, with new finds being made all the time. Every fresh discovery writes another page in the annuls we never got. 
 
As reported in Live Science Magazine, a volunteer recently unearthed a splendid piece of Pict jewellery. The metal ring is at least 1000 years old and contains a red solitaire. It’s thought to either be garnet or red glass, testing the fragile piece might be harmful. Maybe a safe way of finding out can be applied. Retired Engineer and Alum of Aberdeen University John Ralph decided to join the dig when the opportunity arose, and he was the lucky archaeologist who found the kite-shaped antique piece. The ruined fort from Pict times was almost obliterated during the 1800s when developments built over the site. Now with a clear conscience, the modern-day Scots are revisiting their heritage and safeguarding the fantastic treasures that still hide beneath the fertile and haunted ground.  
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These days its websites that ​contain the most modern culture that future people can refer back to. Books, films, blogs, magazines, newspapers, it's all there. Why not add your own dimension to the picture with a website of your own? Start for free or get a custom domain like this one. Support Alternative Fruit with this link and start your website today.

LGBT Veterans of the British Armed Forces are refusing to wear a well-deserved award handed out recently, until “the wrongs have been put right”. It was illegal for people to be homosexual in the UK until the law was changed in 1967 in England and 1980 in Scotland. In 2017, the UK Government issued an official pardon for all those convicted of homosexual activity under these past oppressive laws. The military took a while longer to move on with the times, taking until 2000 to stop banning homosexual people from signing up to serve.  
 
With heavy origins in Christianity, homosexuality has become a symbol for the sins of vanquished Old Testament nations. It wasn’t in the 10 commandments, neither was it mentioned by Jesus or His Disciples, but because it appeared in a few lists of behaviours that resulted in demise, it’s always been seen as wrong by the orthodox. Perhaps, like the other wrongs they mention like eating pork and shellfish, homosexuality was seen as something to be avoided for health reasons. A superstitious people would blame things on God when they had natural causes. We know about disease now, and we must ask if, like eating pork and shellfish, homosexuality can be practiced in safe and proportionate ways.  
 
Being a gay soldier in the time of WW2 was a dangerous time. Not only was the enemy out to kill you, but the state was also out to imprison you as well. Like fighting an evil such as fascism, being gay isn’t something we can simply compartmentalise and walk away from. If you love freedom and you hate being bombed, you’ll do what you can do help. If you love a man and you can’t imagine loving another person, you’ll do what you can to maintain the relationship. This is captured in intimate detail with a new exhibition of audio-art in the village of Oswestry in the West Midlands.  
 
We should be thankful that these correspondences still exist, hundreds of letters between Gilbert Bradley and Gordon Bowsher have been meticulously stored and kept safe for almost a hundred years. The two soldiers wrote to each other at every opportunity and the contents of the letters offers a vast and intriguing picture of the lives that they shared. These and many other similar love letters collected by love-letter enthusiast and artist Megan Hayward have been turned into telephone calls for us to listen to. 
 
Held at the old Yoga Centre until September 28th, visitors are encouraged to visit Megan’s exhibition and romanticise themselves with a drenching of love language from the past. A large variety of stories and communications await, with their vintage being equally as large in range, you can visit the centre during business hours on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays.  

If you're interested in collecting old letters complete with their antique stamps, you can find a good selection on eBay. Support Alternative Fruit with any eBay purchase from this link. 

Innovation has raised human society from caves into castles and condominiums. 
 
Some inventions change the world for a handful of people who make the best use of them, for example tools that help blind people access what they need. Other innovations change the world for all of us, like the mobile networks that allow us to communicate without wires. If being non-telepathic was a disability, this Wi-Fi and cell-phone stuff would be irrelevant to most of us. In the previous posts I talked about human creativity and in particular, its link to mental health. In the same way that creativity is linked to mental health, it is also linked to innovation. The common thread in both relationships, of course, is the imagination. Unwanted thoughts and feelings come from the imagination. Hypersensitivity to external situations involves a strong emotional response which again is partly based on the imagination as well as from learned experience. Creativity is when the imagination is made real, it’s the process of actualising new thoughts and ideas into some form of action, object, or communication. Mind to matter, the end results can be as varied as the contents of our most vivid imagination.  
 
Innovation is when we use our creative abilities to make something that has value. 
 
Successful innovation occurs when a good idea is met with a good response, then the process of growth and take-up happens in a manner that benefits all. Getting all this right involves a process of critical thinking, communication, and creativity combined. We all have good and bad ideas, and not just when it comes to our end product. The how, why, and when are also important as well as all things in between them. Knowing how to refine the good from the bad in every instance is a matter of having a good critical thinking ability. We have to be able to cross reference results against assumptions, facts, and unknowns. Communication is then vital in making the innovation available to others. People have to know about the project and how to use the project for their own benefit. All three of these things have to be aligned if an innovation is to stand out. Knowing what to innovate requires critical thinking and communication. We need to know what the problems are in a given area and understand the necessary information that we can use to solve them. Then when we create a solution, a first draft perhaps, we need to be able to critically dismiss anything that is unhelpful, superfluous, or wasteful. Having the right vision comes from seeing the scope of the entire environment then knowing where work can be done and why. 
 
Innovation taps into social responsibility. Good innovations build roads to peace and prosperity for everyone.  
 
Because we must understand our environment before we can successfully innovate and apply ourselves, creativity begins when we are young. Young minds are good at learning to begin with, and when we become young adults around 15-25, our minds are ready to absorb much more complex ideas. Not only this, but we also crave alternatives and bigger picture ideas. We like to know how things operate beyond the facade and the front desk then get stuck in with our observations and ideas. It is during this time that the human brain is particularly sensitive to all manner of new ideas, good and bad. This means that we as innovators must act responsibly when feeding fertile fields with our crop. Teaching discernment for good and bad ideas is equally as important as having ideas at all and this is a problem that requires innovative solutions today. Hopefully this journal is working to provide an answer with fully researched and easy to read infomedia like this. 
 
Innovations have lifted billions of people out of poverty over the last 150 years. Since the Industrial Revolution and its microchip replacement, life has become gradually easier for us all as innovations create wealth and opportunity for those with access to them. The amount of information available to us to learn from and use is growing at an equally as fast rate. In the past it was chemical pollution that made our lives miserable, and these days we find a real problem with mental pollution. Bad ideas get just as much headroom as good ones with the modern communication sphere. If we are not given the correct tools so we can discern between the two, we can’t tell if we’re learning something of value or something costly.  
 
The first step to innovation is to identify a problem at its source. 
 
Finding a problem doesn’t always require creativity. You can be following the instructions to the letter and still find an issue that requires a creative solution. Maybe something went wrong in the previous process or perhaps the process itself is at fault. If you want to ensure the problem doesn’t persist, knowing the root cause is the key issue. This requires an in depth understanding of what it is you’re trying to achieve. Imagine trying to fix a submarine without ever setting foot in one or being told about the problem. Trying to innovate without an innate knowledge of your subject is setting yourself up to fail.   
 
We can’t be an expert in everything, and we can’t keep on top of every new addition to the information on any subject. Not only do we draw on the media given to us from experts and those with experience, but we also hand ourselves over to peers in our field who share in the desire to solve genuine problems. Collaboration results in a pooling of creativity and a sharing of intellectual resources in order to maximise the efficiency of everyone’s innovation. To isolate yourself and be creative in a bubble is to ensure your project will be devoid of many valuable insights and boosts. It’s also unlikely to help anyone apart from yourself when true innovation is able to achieve a lot more for the world.  There is nothing wrong with making art for the sake of enjoying yourself, but if you want to innovate, make a difference, and maybe make some money as well, you’ll be better off with a network around you.  
 
A non-fixed mindset is essential for collaborative innovation. 
 
When dealing with both new ideas and new people and their ideas, we need to keep an open mind. By always drawing on the certainties and the habitual answers, we will always find ourselves with the same set of issues. If we want to make value from the issues instead of cost, we have to be able to adjust our attitude towards what we think in favour of what could be. Answering the question can mean forgetting the answer and finding it out again. This is especially true for complex systems in which any tiny discrepancy can lead to wild swings in the final result.  
 
Chaos theory is a great example of how tiny changes can create huge differentials in the field of available answers. In life there are many constant unknowns, things we can never know and things that change regularly. People can express all kinds of behaviours and opinions depending on who they are, what mood they are in, what happened to them that day, and so on. Nature works in the same way, every little event in the wide world is a seemingly random occurrence based on the application of countless other random actions. Accepting that the world works like this on every level makes it seem clear that we must be able to let go of what we think is going to happen and look for certainties through test and repetition.  
 
Innovation is the process of improvising with the current situation and the available options until you find something of value. Then the idea is to replicate the process so that you can achieve consistent results for yourself and everyone else. You can then create a guide and an intellectual study of your processes so that others can work with it for themselves, building on your ideas in the application of new tools and ideas as they emerge. We can use what we know already from the innovations and observations of those who worked before us and then map the heavens according to our interpretations of this information. In astronomy, scientists assume the distances to stars and galaxies by manner of measuring certain quantities that are known to be static across the universe. By using a formula, the apparent brightness of an object of known brightness can tell us how far away it really is. We can do this because we understand how brightness is affected by distance. In the same way, we can find a way to discover new concepts and problems to solve by using what we have observed and drawing lines of best fit to what the possibilities can be.  
 
Passion, purpose, and profit all drive innovation. 
 
In life the majority of us are motivated by financial rewards. Unless we are particularly lucky, we require a healthy income to survive. Poverty is a brutal motivator, it’s nature’s barbarian. Sometimes we can get stick from people for working for money on something that benefits others, it’s neurotic and you have to brush it off as bitterness. In a privileged lifestyle we can afford to volunteer our time and give things away for free. Please don’t hold it against the rest of us for asking for something in return. Innovation is a particularly difficult thing to make a living from. To have the ability to carry it through to its conclusion, it's often that we need a passion for what we’re doing and a sense of purpose that transcends the financial reward. A real sense of care about our project has to be present to keep us going when nothing seems to be working out at the time. If the vision is clear and the method is well-researched, sometimes things have to get ugly before they get beautiful.  
 
Alongside motivation, the other essential ingredient is to innovation is education. Our imagination draws on things we have already seen or experienced. It can alter and recreate, change perspective and apply metaphor, yet even the most abstract imaginary scene contains known colours, known shapes, known ways of movement, known physics. Perhaps many little things allow it to be dynamic and surreal, like a Salvador Dali, yet the basic rules remain. Up is up, joy is joy, red is red, light is light. In order to make something valuable from our complex and abstract imagination, we have to be able to wind thread from the raw wool of our dreams. Our spinning wheel is our ability to think and apply knowledge from every area that touches our idea. Innovation requires a broad knowledge of science, mathematics, and technology because it is the process of engineering processes with the tools available to measurable degrees that brings hardware to the software of our ideas. Innovation also requires the humanities because we have to understand the people we are serving and finding solutions for, to the extent that we are a joy to do business with and engage in collaboration. We know more about our market when we study history, literature, music, politics, and language. Sociology is the science of applying the humanities to real-world processes and innovations. It is essential to know what you’re doing before you do it, so getting a grip on these subjects is as essential as the sciences.  
 
Innovation means change and people resist change by nature.     
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Although innovation brings opportunity and prosperity to many, it can also bring hardship and stress for others. The way we feel about the life we live can dramatically affect our perception on the changes we are given. If we want change, then it’s not so difficult to apply it. If we are content as things are or are confident that we can bring things to a head without any extra help, then additional concepts and tools can become tiresome and a pain. Often, we naturally shun things we don’t immediately understand in fear of being duped. Perhaps we’re not so confident in our ability to discern a fake and a real opportunity. Maybe the shame of falling for some kind of scheme is a fear that prevents us from trying any scheme at all. The real work of innovation is in the provision of a motivation and incentive that works. Too much stick and you meet resistance, too much carrot and you meet entitlement. In life we have many sticks that so far can’t be avoided, finding the people willing to adopt your innovation is about finding the ones who are getting the stick the most. Even then, some people are so attached to their suffering that given the option to change, they still prefer the same old stick. The people who are most likely to adopt new ideas, find the value in new tools and processes, and see the real-world progress in the use of new services, are the ones who are wired to learn and find these alternative ideas. It’s the young. This is why, as creators and innovators, we must be especially careful when we inspire, motivate, and educate people in this malleable stage of life.  
 
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