Category: Philosophy
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Let’s get ‘Real’
Assuming we’re not hostile to Science for religious or other reasons, we really ought to take on board some of its newest findings, however strange or disturbing some of them might seem to be, especially if we’re at all interested in being ‘real’. Imagine you’re sitting at a table. It has a flat top, and […]
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What a Tangled Web …
Around the year 30, in a provincial backwater in the Roman Empire called Judea, on the banks of the Jordan, a young man appeared. He came under the spell of the fiery preaching of John the Baptiser, threw in his lot with him, and was immersed in the river. It wasn’t long before he became […]
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Don’t Take Offence
A man, protesting because a cinema screened a film he objected to on religious grounds, claimed, “I have a right not to be offended”. On every possible ground, that’s a piece of egregious nonsense. From a legal standpoint, in the UK, no such right exists. This was made clear in 1979 when protestors against the […]
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The Search for Meaning (ii)
As a follow-on from the previous post, let’s consider how our universe began with a bang to end all bangs, a cataclysmic origin that might suggest that any resulting universe should be extremely disorderly, if not completely chaotic. Surprise, surprise! Ours is developing in accordance with ‘laws’ which we can mathematically formulate and experimentally verify. […]
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The Search for Meaning (i)
Does human life have a meaning? Paradoxically, perhaps, Richard Dawkins seems to suggest the only possible meaning of life is, it’s meaningless! Here’s a typical quote – “Nature is not cruel, only pitilessly indifferent. This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor […]
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Honest to God?
It seems to me that if we’re to be ‘honest to God’, (understood as being, in some way, the originator and sustainer of all that is), we must face the challenge presented by the philosopher Bertrand Russell, who cuts to the chase in an impressively concise way (unusual for a philosopher, some might say). “That […]
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A Down-to-Earth look at God (ii)
Following on from my previous post, I’m exploring what can, reasonably and credibly, be said about God. Many people may have the science versus religion debate, (occasionally acrimonious and mud-slinging), in the background, if not foreground, of their thinking. On the one hand, there are the ‘new atheists’ who don’t just claim that religion poisons […]
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A Down-to-Earth look at God (i)
Following on from my previous post, I’m continuing to give thought to what can be said about God, reasonably, meaningfully, and believably. Most of us might agree with the proposition that ‘believing in’ God has more to do with faith than knowledge. There’s a difficulty, however, in that different people have different ideas about what […]
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A Picture or 1000 Words
The old saying tells us that “a picture is worth a thousand words”. The Hebrew Bible/Old Testament contains thousands of words about God, but it seems to me that it also contains two ‘pictures’ that put all these thousands of words in their proper place, and warn us against understanding them in any crudely literal […]
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Myth – A Personal View
Let’s try to return to basics (so I’m not writing anything new). One of myth’s functions was enabling people to find meaning in, and feel comfortable with, the cosmos. A myth was a story that tried to make sense of life as it was experienced, day by day. People wondered how and why they existed, […]
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