Dr. Daisy Grewal of the Stanford School of Medicine published, in Scientific American, the results of a study on anti-atheism. “Reminding people about God, “she concluded, “has the same effect as telling people they are being watched by others. It increases their feeling of self-consciousness and leads them to behave in more socially acceptable ways”. …
Continue reading ‘Do we need an authority figure in our lives?’ »
St Augustine, according to Alain de Boton, modern philosopher: It was St. Augustine who came up with the idea of ‘Original Sin’. He proposed that all humans were crooked, because all of us are unwitting heirs to the sins of Adam. Our sinful nature gives rise to what Augustine called a ‘libido dominandi’, a desire …
Continue reading ‘Speak nonsense and you too can become a saint’ »
“Date rape is bad. Stranger rape at knifepoint is worse,” says Richard Dawkins. Seeming to have anticipated, although not understood, the feminist reaction this kind of sentiment generally evokes, he finishes the tweet: “If you think that’s an endorsement of date rape, go away and learn how to think.” Thus Richard Dawkins, once known as …
Continue reading ‘Richard Dawkins – doing godlessness no good!’ »
In Sudan a pregnant doctor has been sentenced to hang for apostasy for marrying a Christian man. Meriam Yahya Ibrahim, 27, was raised a Christian by her mother; however, her father was a Muslim. The Court in Khartoum also sentenced her to 100 lashes for having illicit sexual relations, her 2011 marriage having been deemed …
This blog spends a certain amount of time knocking organised religion and the control freaks who have inhabited priestly vestments over the centuries. Let us separate the sometimes well-meaning, sometimes ignorant, blather from what we know and what, maybe, we will never know. We know that the universe is 13 billion years old. We know …
Continue reading ‘“I said I made the universe, but I never said how I did it, or why”.’ »
Morals are simply the accumulated common sense of scores of generations of people gathered together in settlements, villages and towns. How, they asked themselves, can we live together? The rules they made up as a result are now called ethics and morals, including common sense ideas like not lusting after your neighbour’s wife, nor his …
In Senegal the test of success is still to have a big family. In the Washington Post of March 16, 2014 Allyn Gaestal interviewed a 76 year old farmer called Hadji Fally Diallo, who has taken the writings of the prophet literally and has three wives and 30, yes 30, children. “With 30 children some …
Even with 70,000 animals on board, Noah’s Ark could have floated, say researchers at the University of Leicester. If the Ark was 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide and 30 cubits high it could have accommodated samples of all the planet’s animal species (estimated to have been numbered around 35,000). The team, at the University …
Two previous Popes, John XXIII and John Paul II, have been canonized. You are supposed to be canonized after extensive scrutiny and two examples of miracles (successful intercession with God) are established. If you are immediately and permanently cured overnight from a terminal illness after praying to a saint, then that is a miracle. Epicurus …
It is believed that the end of the ice age saw massive flooding as the ice receded, so the legend of Noah may have had some basis in historical fact, even though it is presented in the bible as a survival parable and folk tale. There are so many practical, er, difficulties with the story, …
I find it morally repugnant to bring into this world children who are unwanted and unloved. If the principal objectives of Epicureanism are happiness and contentment, then it follows that children should be conceived, born and reared in warmth, love and friendship. Force majeure employed by those claiming to know the mind of God seek …
There is an emerging trend in British universities towards gender apartheid. This has no foundation in Islam. Indeed, the Koran explicitly sanctions the concept of legitimate social intermingling in Chapter 24:61. The distorted dogma of sexual segregation is an archaic pre-Islamic patriarchal throwback that is now in vogue in Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan. This non-Koranic …
Continue reading ‘Good news! Imam stands up for common sense’ »
Scientology is hard to take seriously. Its founder, L. Ron Hubbard, claimed that 75 million years ago a galactic dictator called Xenu brought billions of people, known as Thetans, to Earth (then known as Teegeeack) and blew them up with hydrogen bombs. Today, their frozen souls “loiter and make us crabby unless we know how …
Religion has been pushed back by science to the extent that an all-seeing God, in the image of Man, overseeing every minute of his life, seems unlikely. And if science has proved that the whole universe can emerge from nothing, then the final and only justification for organised religion has to be the inculcation of …
Until recently, tough restrictions forced Spanish women to go abroad for abortions – in such numbers that regular charter flights to London were set up. In 2010 the Socialist government introduced a new law permitting early-term abortion, bringing Spain into line with the rest of Europe. But now conservative justice minister Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón wants to …
