It's a reasonable assumption that one major barrier preventing faster and more effective response to climate change is this: the elite believe that they will be able to hide from the worst effects. They think they will be able to retreat to a gated
When we talk about religion or belief - almost any religion or belief - it is easiest to talk about the aspects which can be expressed in words. Obviously. We can't talk in any meaningful way about the subjective experiences people have, but these
We tend to think about faith as a state of mind, but when considering faith we need to focus, not on the subject who is believing, but on the object of that belief. We can have faith in something or someone. When we have faith is something, we belie
Many of our conflicts and difficulties are the result of our tendency to create abstractions and then argue about them. Is justice more important than freedom? Is positive discrimination fair? Given the choice, should you betray your friend or you
All of this site can be seen as a search for ways to improve the world, make it a better place. This page is for the 'meta level' question - how do we promote and implement all the specific ways to make the world a better place? These are the ideas
As social creatures we need to share our spirituality, and shared spirituality is what we call 'religion'. You can have your own private spirituality, but as soon as you try to communicate it, you need words; and as soon as you find a way which help
Jesus was a Jew, brought up within the Jewish faith. We cannot understand what he did and taught if we ignore this context. But Jesus had a very nuanced understanding of the Jewish faith, and of His own role within it.
The Bible as we have it today, is two collections of books. Two faith communities have created these collections, and said that these are helpful books, worth preserving and reading. The collections are referred to by Christians as the Old Testamen
This is a common theme running through many of the issues we face: it is very easy to see the world as a set of binary choices - either this is true, or that is. But, even if our choices are sometimes binary, the issues we face rarely are.
Jesus promised His first disciples, "I will build my church", but it seems unlikely that the Church we see today was what He had in mind at the time. If we are genuinely seeking to follow Jesus, then we have to ask ourselves: when Jesus promised to
In many discussions, we appear to treat the terms 'state', 'country' and 'nation' as being interchangeable. But on reading around the subject, there seems to be a large degree of agreement about the precise meanings. The terms 'state' and 'country'
Much of the campaigning undertaken by equalities groups is, either explicitly or implicitly, directed at achieving a fair society - or, at least, a fair society for the members of our equalities group. The initial goals tend to be straightforward, c
There has been a lot of talk recently about various aspects of artificial life - artificial intelligence, sentient machines, computers gaining self-awareness, and so on. It seems self-evident that we can easily distinguish between living and non-liv
A materialist solution to Cartesian Dualism does not work because the body, the living organism, is not only material; the other side of the coin is that the problem of Cartesian Dualism itself, how a non-material mind interacts with a material body,
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.
