Somebody once said that religion is basically a question of making you feel better about yourself. If so, there isn’t much wrong with that. Let those who get reassurance from it get on with it undisturbed. Where it is potentially distasteful is when missionaries at home and abroad try to "convert" the unbelievers, sometimes offensively, …
Continue reading ‘Epicureanism, an alternative to religion’ »
Epicureanism, like agnosticism and atheism in modern times, appealed to that minority of people who preferred rationality to beliefs in divine intervention and everlasting life. But Epicureanism also appealed to those who claimed to believe in God. Epicureanism was to be the avowed philosophy of Thomas Jefferson, who must have found Epicureanism compatible with the …
This text sees Judas dying as a martyr—because the other disciples hate him so much that they kill him! But the Gospel of Judas challenges the idea that God wants people to die as martyrs—just as it challenges the idea that God wanted Jesus to die. Whoever wrote this gospel—and the author is anonymous—is challenging …
In London 51% of the116,019 live births in 2005 were to a mother born overseas. By any measure this is an amazing statistic, and explains why immigration is the main, sometimes the only, topic of social conversation. Britain is now a country so diverse that those in their middle age do not recognize it. Thousands …
The first Christ Church tutor to be re-elected upon marriage was Richard Shute, a layman and philosopher….Much of Shute’s teaching was done through "private conversations between teacher and pupil’, that is, the individual tutorials which became the norm in Oxford by the turn of the twentieth century…..Lavishing time on his pupils, Shute tried to get …
