thoughtful ideas on life's big questions
December 8th, 2011
A couple of weeks ago, I outlined some facts about exploitation in the growing of cocoa for chocolate (see My pleasure, their misery?) and at the same time wrote to two prominent chocolate manufacturers expressing my concerns and asking them to make more concerted moves to only source cocoa from growers who were paid a […]
December 2nd, 2011
Here’s another common atheistic argument. Christians often argue that God is the only reasonable or feasible explanation of how the universe got here. A common atheistic response is to say that “God did it” explains nothing – it leaves us with no more of an explanation than we had before we brought God into the […]
November 26th, 2011
I suppose we all like to think we are very honest with ourselves – we only believe what we really think is true and we don’t close our minds to evidence that goes against our beliefs. I suppose we all like to think that. But I think we are sometimes fooling ourselves. Let’s look at […]
November 24th, 2011
Gather round friends and I’ll tell you a story of anger, conflict, repentance, apology, acceptance and anger – the story of PZ Myers and the Gelato Guy.
November 21st, 2011
A short time ago, I posted on poverty and the growing world population (7 billion and counting), and about the challenge of deciding how to respond (The cost of addressing world poverty). Let’s start with something small which most of us can do this week, or this year.
November 14th, 2011
Photo courtesy of Photos of the Great War You’ve probably heard it or read it on the internet – “religion is evil and causes wars, killing, terrorism, etc”. For example, this atheist is quite certain: “we see religion regularly used for war, mass murder, terrorism, and even genocide” So I decided to see if there […]
November 10th, 2011
In 7 billion and counting I raised concerns about world poverty in the light of the world’s population reaching 7 billion people. But how big is the need, and how much would it take to bring some relief for those who most desperately need it?
November 7th, 2011
The argument goes something like this. If christians really believed in heaven, they’d all be dying to go there. If they really thought life was better after we die, they wouldn’t be sad at funerals. Doesn’t this show they don’t really believe it? Comedian Doug Stanhope put it this way: If you really believe that […]
November 6th, 2011
It was a beautiful sunny day in Sydney today. I went for a drive in the country and visited the Berry markets. (For those unfamiliar, these aren’t fruit markets. Berry is a former dairy farming town 2 hours south of Sydney, which has reinvented itself as an art and craft town. Once a month, they […]
October 30th, 2011
As I write this, the world’s 7 billionth person is about to be born. The world’s population is growing fast, though (thankfully) not quite as fast as it was a decade or so ago. This graph challenges us all.
A list of all blog posts, in reverse chronological order, is on the Blog archive page.