Our stupidity may kill us, warns Archbishop

The Archbishop of Canterbury has warned us that we may ruin our 'material world' through our own stupidity. He says:In the doomsday scenarios we are so often invited to contemplate, the ultimate tragedy is that a material world capable of being a manifestation in human hands of divine love is left to itself, as humanity is gradually choked, drowned or starved by its own stupidity.This raises a couple of issues:Firstly, if we are...

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Stoppard, cricket and ideas

An article in The Times drew my attention to this quote from Tom Stoppard's play The Real Thing. The playwright Henry holds up a cricket bat: “This thing here,” he says, “which looks like a wooden club, is actually several pieces of particular wood cunningly put together in a certain way so that the whole thing is sprung, like a dance floor.“It's for hitting cricket balls with. If you get it right, the cricket ball will travel...

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The Road to Perdition?

Timothy, a pleasant, comparatively harmless theist currently posting on RD.NET has asked for comments from posters on how they arrived at atheism, so I thought I would take the opportunity to document it on this blog. It's not terribly exciting, and, I suspect, probably very similar to a large proportion of atheists, certainly in Britain, where it's not a particularly controversial worldview. No death for apostasy here, thank,...

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BBC clips embeddable

This is just a short post to test the new BBC embeddable clips technology; below you should see a story on football internet piracy:Obviously I'd never indulge in such a heinous crime!I had to adjust the size of the object a little from the script the BBC supplied, to make the video fit this blog (the script can be got at by hovering over the SHARE button and selecting EMBED).Cool, nonethele...

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Cherie Blair - The History of Christianity

Finally caught up to watch Cherie Blair's contribution to Channel 4's interesting The History of Christianity series (see Telegraph analysis)Not as bad as I feared! As a part of a general demonstration of the benefit of religious belief, she mentioned the rather splendid Dietrich Bonhoeffer (right), who died for his stand against the Nazis...

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Theism and Atheism

Response to Webfogey:Far too many strawmen for me to really consider you a 'lover of wisdom'; I hope you're not teaching your students such bad habits? The image in the minds of people who make such remarks appears to be of a universe in which there are areas of darkness that are progressively being illuminated by the searchlight of science; and soon all these areas of darkness will be brilliantly lit; so God will disappear. No,...

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Heaven?

A few questions about heaven: Where is it? What timezone is it? How exactly do non-corporeal minds, er, exist and, er, interact and stuff? Do we have to mix with other 'people' in heaven? A lot of people are (were? had?) arseholes and I don't want to talk to them. Bad memories and all that. Do souls have memories? What church do souls go to on a Sunday? Is there a Sunday? Is there anything to *do*? Is there any pleasure? If so,...

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Religious 'Evolution'

From the wonderful article Jerry Coyne's Seeing and Believing:Karl Giberson said Empirical science does indeed trump revealed truth about the world as Galileo and Darwin showed only too clearly. But empirical science also trumps other empirical science. Einstein's dethronement of Newton was not the wholesale undermining of the scientific enterprise, even though it showed that science was clearly in error. It was, rather, a glorious...

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Carrier and morality

From Richard Carrier, regarding apologists' reactions to his dismissal of the historical resurrection: The second lamest argument ever made is the wicked threat: "There will be a 'time'," one thoughtful would-be savior of mine wrote, "when we will all have all the 'evidence' we need to prove our beliefs correct or wrong. By then it may be...

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Hume and Probability

Response to edulike comment on RD.NET, re the historicity of the resurrection:You are taking the stance that "if there is any doubt, because of the incredible nature of the events depicted, then I will not believe they occurred until I have examined every shred of evidence". *Absolutely* not. Quite the contrary, I am open to the possibility...

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Occam's Razor

Some people object to Occam's Razor on the grounds that it dismisses more complex correct solutions. I think this is a misreading of its purpose. Einstein's famous quote on simplicity is often cited as: Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.The 'but no simpler' highlights why I think this view of the Razor is wrong. Another way to state the Razor is: Plurality should not be posited without...

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Howard Jacobson - The History of Christianity

Howard Jacobson made the case for the Jewish view of Jesus Christ in this Channel 4 documentary. I thought it was quite interesting, although I was aware of much of it already; he talked about Jesus' very Jewish life, his Jewish views, his Jewish disciples; the fact they were never baptised as Christians (!), his failure to fulfil prophecy. He was reclaiming Jesus for the Jews, as, I guess, they always have. Fair enough. Also...

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Rant!

Response to Dianelos Georgoudis comment on RD.NET:So you think naturalists can't possibly believe in even *more* absurd things than theists can. That there are physical universes out there where you and I exist and where the Statue of Liberty every morning swims around Manhattan and then climbs back to her pedestal and quotes from the Bible in a booming voice - would you say that's *less* absurd than theistic beliefs? That there...

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Derren Brown - The System

Derren Brown made a program called The System that illustrates a couple of things about reality very well.He tossed a coin ten times and it landed the same side all ten times. No camera tricks, so it was magic! Well, no, he filmed himself for a day tossing a coin and finally managed to come up with a sequence of 10 the same.He also did a similar thing where it *looked* like he was the world's best tipster, giving a girl the winner...

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Atheist Lobby

In response to a comment from David Robertson on RD.NET:Maybe its my warped sense of humour but I do find it hilarious that there is a lobby based on a philosophy which has no beliefs, doctrines, dogmas, tenets, principles. And why or how can an atheist lobby on sex education? I thought that atheism was just simply the absence of belief in God. That there are no atheist doctrines or policies. So what does a lobby for atheism lobby...

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Linus's Blog

I've set up this blog as a place to store posts I've made elsewhere on the blogosphere, in the hubristic notion that they are worth preserving. And in case I forget what I've said in the past!To that end, I'll post a few entries that are copies of old commen...

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