thoughtful ideas on life's big questions
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 […]
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 […]
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?
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 […]
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.
Steven and I have been discussing the Richard Dawkins vs William Lane Craig fracas on his blog Think That Through. At one point we referenced the ethical views of Peter Singer, and Steven suggested I do a critique of Peter Singer’s views on infanticide. This is not something I have studied a great deal, but […]
Atheist vs christian wars seem to be a permanent feature of life, and the internet, these days. The latest instalment is the verbal slanging match between US christian philosopher William Lane Craig and UK atheist biologist Richard Dawkins. It’s not really all that pretty.
Last weekend’s Sydney Morning Herald carried two opinion pieces on greed, ethics and a “broken” western society that presented a disturbing picture.
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 […]
In my last post, Why try to be good?, I discussed ethics in our secular postmodern western societies, and ended up with ethicist Peter Singer’s reflection that faith in a good God is the only way to provide a complete answer to the question, Why act morally? Today’s editorial in the Sydney Morning Herald, Britain […]