Ideology Driving Faith Schools Initiative

On 13th September this year I wrote, with the help of the BHA, to my MP, Jeremy Quin, about the recent announcement on faith schools to abolish the 50% cap on entrance faith requirements: Dear Jeremy Quin MP, I am writing to you as a constituent to ask you to oppose the plans to allow new and existing religious free schools to discriminate against all your constituents who happen to fall outside a school's denomination. I have...

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Why Trump won the Presidency

From Pew polling, 16th September 2016 (Warning: you are unlikely to find the reason for Why Trump won the Presidency in this post.) Have you noticed that there seem to be as many reasons people voted for Trump as minutes in the year? Some of them contradictory. Everyone seems to have their pet theory on why the Donald is now President-Elect....

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Swinburnophobia

Richard Swinburne's recent speech to a regional meeting of the Society of Christian Philosophers, and the response to it, highlights how religion can support retrograde beliefs long after the rest of us have jettisoned them. I was surprised to find, for example, that Opposition to Interracial Marriage Lingers Among Evangelicals more...

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Donald Trump and taxes: did he do anything wrong?

From https://onsizzle.com/t/donald-trump_taxes Jerry Coyne asks this question here, regarding Trump's refusal to release his tax returns. He gives a somewhat contradictory response: The fault lies not in Trump, but in a tax code that allows rich individuals and corporations to get away with paying almost nothing. And that is wrong,...

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Philipse on Theism - Revealed or Natural Theology?

In God in the Age of Science?: A Critique of Religious Reason, Herman Philipse examines what he considers to be the best arguments for God today. As we saw in his preface, he plans to examine Richard Swinburne's arguments for God. In Chapter 1, though, he wants to establish 'that for religious believers, natural theology...

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Craig on Animal Pain *Again*

Mooch and friend I've written before on William Lane Craig's curious views on animal pain, which amount to a dismissal of it as a phenomenon we need to worry about morally. Here I discussed the views he put forward in a debate with Stephen Law, that suggested that animal pain, following work done by Michael Murray, did not exacerbate...

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Philipse on Theism - Preface

In God in the Age of Science?: A Critique of Religious Reason, Herman Philipse examines what he considers to be the best arguments for God today. In the preface he notes that the arguments produced in analytic philosophy of religion in the last fifty years are worthy of consideration. His reasons for addressing religion are: The...

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Do People Choose What is Good for Them?

From Blick Jerry Coyne has a post up titled How Iranian women would dress if the theocracy disappeared. It shows a number of (western) fashionably clad Iranians from the 1970s. It seems obvious that (some) women would dress differently if there were no theocracy in Iran, although there is perhaps an implicit assumption behind...

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Liberalism

Liberalism poster, by Floris van den Ber...

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