Watching an episode of Miranda Hart’s new sitcom tonight pulled me back to something I’ve been thinking about for a while — and slightly unsettled by. The co-writer on much of the series is James Cary, whose work I’ve come across a few times. He’s also co-written the majority of Milton Jones’s ...
The debate sparked by this year’s billboard campaign by Ariane Sherine and the British Humanist Association — not the campaign itself, which is crystal clear, but the subsequent debate — turns out to be as muddy and straw-man-ish as one might expect. The campaign slogan itself — “Please don’t label me. Let ...
[A few months ago, a friend, who is an ordained minister, asked what I thought about a piece at salon.com, which is an interview by Steve Paulson with James Carse, who ran the Religious Studies program at NYU for 30 years, about his book The Religious Case Against Belief. A lot of the issues are ...
[Copying here a comment I just posted to a piece by Mark Lawson on the Guardian website, which seems to me a perfect example — as the first commenter testily notes — of the borderline ignorance of the scientific model among even the best and brightest of those whose intellectual centres of gravity are in ...
There’s something apt-to-the-core about the rebuttal to theists who insist on misrepresenting atheism as a religion, or something akin to a religion, that, if atheism is a religion, then not collecting stamps is a hobby. However, while this identifies the theoretical heart of atheism as the absence of a specific ...
I find that I don’t actually know what ‘R.I.P.’ means. It’s splashed everywhere today before or after Kurt Vonnegut’s name — along with enough lazily glib trottings-out of ‘So it goes’ to dull the senses. But what do people actually mean when they say ‘Rest in Peace’, ...
In Thinking About The God Delusion, John Scalzi ruminates on Richard Dawkins’s new book, which I haven’t read yet, so can’t really comment on. However, I do know enough of Dawkins’s writings that something Scalzi said, mostly in passing, leapt out at me. He said this: As far as things go, I suspect ...
After years of bristling with annoyance at any suggestion that my very vaguely Anglican upbringing might be much of an influence on what I do or don’t believe — one flavour of which might be to imply atheism as a negative reaction to something imposed, rather than a ground-up positivist construction of something new ...
Another chapter in the pointless quasi-scientific investigation of intercessory prayer ends, the believers retreating to regroup and rethink, but never to let the results of their own studies actually affect what they think, except to confirm what they already believe according to that most anti-scientific throwback of ...
Evidence that I’ve been thinking too much about web-design lately: I was looking at a very elegant multi-column university letterhead yesterday, and I thought to myself: “Oh sure, it looks good now, but how will it cope when someone resizes the paper?” Funny that a window has become my default, rather than ...