Opinion

Basic freedoms There is a news article at the moment about Aishah Azmi, a teaching assistant who insists on wearing a veil in school. I am really torn on this issue. There are clearly practical and safety issues with letting people wear veils in school, and I don't think it is that good an idea. On the other hand, I am all for freedoms and clearly this veil is an important part of culture and it is doing no real harm. Then again, children are expected to adhere to a dress code, so why not the teachers? What I find extremely infuriating is that Muslims demand civil liberties, but only when it works in their favour. Whilst we do have certain freedoms, for example to publish material that may offend others, Muslims still insist that we should not have that freedom. This is the essence of modern discourse, after all, if an idea cannot withstand criticism, then maybe it isn't such a good idea in the first place. Only by challenging ideas have we been able to ascend from the i...

Abolishing Limbo? Today the Pope is considering abolishing Limbo. This is where all the unbaptised children go if they die. So the Pope can snap his fingers and suddenly Limbo will disappear? Or, they can use some experimental method to determine whether Limbo exists? When are these people going to realise that they don't know what they are talking about? When is the rest of the world going to realise?

Whenever you use the Stumble! toolbar, you'll occasionally get something like this video . I love people who can articulate atheism better than I can.

Here is a good video about heaven (and how you will never get there):

Taking responsibility I can't decide whether Lebanon deserves the treatment it is getting from Israel. On the one hand, Isreal is acting out of all proportion and causing widespread misery. On the other hand, Muslims have not really confronted their relationship with violence. They think (mistakenly) that they have a duty to fight, and that their culture should prevail over all others. Such eugenics has not been been seen since WW2. The moderate Muslims should reign them in, but have not acknowledged their responsibility to do so. By being passive they become complicit, and have only themselves to blame when eventually Isreal turns and gives them a taste of their own medicine.

A bunch of idiots in Israel believe that the tooth fairy wears blue shoes. A bunch of idiots in Lebanon believe that the tooth fairy wears red shoes. Idiots who believe that the tooth fairy wears red shoes can't stand idiots who don't think that, and in particular think that all idiots who believe in the blue shoes should be wiped off the face of the planet. The idiots who believe in blue shoes are getting pissed off with this, and have the moral superiority (not to mention the financial and military superiority) and want to put a stop to all of this red-shoe nonsense. The blue-shoe idiots oppress and discriminate against the red-shoe idiots. The red-shoe idiots see it as their duty to kill blue-shoe idiots. The blue-shoe idiots unleash hell on the red-shoe idiots. Plenty of idiots who merely disapprove of the other idiots get hurt. Theology is like arguing about whether the tooth fairy wears red shoes or blue shoes.

I wonder if the future is fixed. Not quite the same as fate, since fate implies we can know our future, and nothing we can do can change it. We can't second-guess our fate, and deliberately change it, since then how do we know that what we changed it to wasn't our true fate all along? But are the future and the past as real as the present? Is time really an illusion, and we are really a bead on a 4-dimensional wire? To me, it seems silly to give the "now" a greater reality than either the past or the present. That would mean that what is "real" is constantly changing. Absolutely, what we perceive is constantly changing, but that is because our brains are a part of that physics. Our brains have a physical state that changes with time, and only represents the "now". That does not mean that "now" is the only thing that exists, it is just an illusion that our minds play on us. If we believe in an objective reality - a reality outside ...

Thou shalt not lie? Religious nuts claim to be the most moral and enlightened people. Isn't it ironic then that creationists are deliberately spreading lies and misinformation about evolution. This surely goes against their religion, and they should stop right now.

Something good by Bertrand Russell.

Accosted by Jehova's Witnesses The old ring at the door. "Are we expecting anybody?" asks my dad. The answer is no. Instead it's Jehova's witnesses, which I answer. Let the sport begin! Opening gambit: they ask what is the name of God? I answer Yawhe. They seem impressed, then correct me when I also say "God", which they say is only his title. Ok. Then they ask about morality. This is an excellent topic of debate. Where do morals come from? They say God, and he is a person. I argue that he is not human, or that he has thoughts and morals. They ask if I have thought about God seriously, I answer yes, and have rejected the idea, saying that it is a mistake to give God human characteristics. Is society going downhill? They claim it is going downhill, I claim humans have always been fairly rotten to each other. I immediately lay my cards on the table. I say that psychology, and morals are evolved, and did not come from God. They claim morali...

Dear Andrew Smith MP, I am writing to you concerning the education reforms that your government is steamrolling through. I strongly disagree with faith-based selection. I think the whole idea of insulating people from other cultures, other peoples, and other ideas is actually quite abhorrent. Yet this is what faith-based schools do. You can't mandate one hour a week for studying multiculturalism or religious education, that is simply not enough to integrate people. The only way to integrate, appreciate and respect one another's cultures is via contact with other people. My prejudices quickly melt away after spending just ten minutes with someone from a different background to myself. I can understand that some parents may want their children to grow up to be good Catholics or Muslims, but I would rather that the decision was taken by the child, not by the parents. I find the differences between the faiths to be largely artificial, and forcing it upon children at an early...

Are atheists moral? It is often claimed that atheists have no morality, that morality only makes sense through God, that a universal morality exists through God, or that God gave us morality. All of this is nonsense. (Hey, it's my blog, I can be as blunt as I like!) Let us deal with the last point, that morality comes from God. This statement is meaningless, since God is "everything we don't understand", which says that we don't understand morality. This is factually false, evolutionary psychology does give us a reason for morality. Even if God for some reason wanted us to behave in certain ways (why exactly he would want that escapes me), then how would that be communicated to us? Through prayer? Through stones carted down from Mt Synae? Through the Bible? The problem with appealing to God is that there are differing religions, each telling their flock different things. There is no reason to suppose that one religion has a connection to God, whilst other...

Intelligent design? Do things ever occur that are unexplainable by science? This is almost Godel's incompleteness theorem: some things cannot be proven using the laws in any sufficiently complex system. The fallacy is always the same: what cannot be readily explained, is "unexplainable", therefore must have been performed by an intelligent action. Both of those steps are logical fallacies. Underlying intelligent design is the idea that some things could not have occurred naturally. Eyes, flagella, DNA, are deemed to be statistically impossible to have arisen. The problem is that for every specific case where such an example is given by the creationists, it is possible to refute it. For example, a small part of a flagellum is still extremely useful to a bacterium. Evolution is a great theory, not because it is necessarily true (although it is overwhelmingly likely that it is), but because it can withstand such criticism, and win every time. Intelligent designers are...