Talking About Religion

All the usual principles of good practice on this site apply to discussion of religion too. Please be clear about the purpose of any contribution, and please aim to keep any response to a contribution relevant to what was posted.

God and Gods

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

War

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

Reason Alone

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,

What does it mean to be human?

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,

Human Nature

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.

Three Kinds of Sex

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

Science and Magic

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

Science and Life's Biggest Questions

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

Consent

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

Reality

This is an attempt to pull together the topics we have addressed from time to time which come under the general heading of 'understanding reality'.

A Theory of Everything

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.

Unrestricted Growth

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.

Am I Free?

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

Reasonable Misdirection

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

Star Wars, Magic and Spirituality

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.

Six Key Questions

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

Freedom and Free Will

[Back to Freedom]

Introduction

I know that Philosophers do things properly (sometimes, at least...) but, in casual conversations about Free Will, my experience is that most people talk about whether our will is free while assuming we all know what fr

Reason, Science and Faith

Neither science nor reason can guide anything, from individual choice to 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 acti

The Rule of Law

It is arguable that the fundamental change which took place between the ancient world and the modern world was the transition from the rule of a dictator to the rule of law.

Paul Hazelden's Articles (115)