thoughtful ideas on life's big questions
Spam is ubiquitous on the internet. Offer an email address or a comment box and a spambot will attempt to make use of it. If you can’t beat them, at least find some humour! Recent spam comments on this blog (which don’t make it through) have been on behalf of a bewildering variety of commercial […]
Back in November I reported on exploitation in the world cocoa trade in My pleasure, their misery?. At that time I wrote about this to two prominent chocolate manufacturers. I subsequently reported (Fair Trade chocolate – report 1) that I had received a reply from Cadbury indicating their ongoing support for Fair Trade products. I […]
Are christians more likely to be socially and politically conservative or liberal/progressive? If you asked most people’s opinion, I reckon they would think christians are generally conservative. But some new surveys suggest this isn’t the full story.
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.
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?
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.
We often hear that religion “poisons everything“, and that it is a delusion that causes people to do evil things (Physicist Stephen Weinberg once said: “for good people to do evil — that takes religion”.) Some people claim that religion is responsible for many of the evils in history – the crusades, witch-burning, war, genocide, […]
Last weekend’s Sydney Morning Herald carried two opinion pieces on greed, ethics and a “broken” western society that presented a disturbing picture.
But what is certain is …. that humans believe only the irrational tales of their own culture, not those of others Adele Mercier I hear it a lot these days. “People only believe in christianity because they were born into a christian culture.” “If you were born in Mecca, you’d be a Muslim.” “No religion […]
Last post I referenced a newspaper editorial that suggested that the recent civil unrest in England was symptomatic of a much larger malaise – a lack of ethics in public life generally. Now a leading UK thinktank (and not a conservative one as far as I can gather) has come out arguing that English society […]