People constantly talk about God, whether they believe in God or not, and they clearly have something in mind when they do so. But, when you move beyond the beliefs of a specific group, there is almost no agreement about what a 'God' (or 'god') is.
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There is a common assumption in many Western countries that if you are religious, then you 'believe in God', and that your choice of religion is all about believing in the 'right' God. However, while you will find a God or multiple gods in many reli
This is an attempt to identify the key aspects of war. Almost everyone agrees that war is bad, something to be avoided if possible, but we are not very clear what the ‘if possible’ might consist of: whoever you talk to, the responsibility for avoidi
Neither science nor reason can guide anything, from individual choice a national strategy. Science can tell us the fastest way to get from A to B, but it cannot tell us whether we should go there. It can tell us the likely consequences of an action,
In Western thought, there are two traditional ways of understanding what it means to be human, associated with the two major philosophical traditions found in the Greek and Hebrew cultures: in the Greek tradition, a human is a soul trapped in a body,
This article is written in response to a recent JustHuman meeting (February 2023), I attended but didn’t really contribute much to the conversation at the time - apart from my opening statement (something that
I believe that human beings are essentially good and rational, but we are pulled in two different directions because we are both social and selfish. Everything else, pretty much, comes from this basic starting point.
One of the basic problems we face in talking about sex, is that we may be trying to talk about vastly different things. At the very least, we can distinguish between these three kinds: physical mechanism (the process of reproduction); social roles a
Everyone seems to be familiar with the quote, "Sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic," but I sometimes talk with people who appear to think that our inability to distinguish between the two implies that there is no real differ
Sabine Hossenfelder filmed a talk at the Royal Institution on 19 August 2022 with the title, "Existential physics: answering life's biggest questions". Sabine argues that science, philosophy and religion are not entirely distinct activities, but the
In the messy details of human relationships, questions of consent are rarely clear-cut. We have pressures, preferences and obligations, we make assumptions about other people, their actions, beliefs and motives. We don't even understand what we do
While the details of any Theory of Everything must be horribly complicated - or it would have been found long ago - the big picture summary of what it must be like is surely far simpler than most of the articles suggest.
Traditional economics relies on continual growth, an assumption which made little sense in the 1960s and makes even less sense now. Any plan which requires unrestricted (in effect, infinite) growth on a finite planet is unlikely to succeed.
You are not perfectly free - nobody is - but you are sufficiently free. You are sufficiently free to be able to choose how to act and the impact you want your actions to have on others, and you are sufficiently free to take responsibility for your c
Stage magicians commonly use misdirection to fool their audience: when they tell you to concentrate on this object or activity, you can be reasonably sure that the real action is taking place elsewhere. In a similar way, it seems to me that people w
The Star Wars stories can help us understand the difference between magic and spirituality - between seeking to use power to achieve what we want, and seeking to come into alignment with the deeper reality of the universe.
Our basic framework (Particles, People and Purpose) divides all of reality into three parts: physical, social and spiritual. This enables us to talk about each part in a constructive way, because each one requires us to use different techniques and d
