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Sometimes my blog posts aren’t terribly academic in nature, but are purely personal. This is one of those.

If you’re an evangelical Christian then you and I have some pretty important things in common. In fact if you’re a Christian at all – a serious Christian (I hope you know what I mean: you’re self consciously Christian, Jesus is at the centre of your faith, you believe in the supernatural and the ability of God to do the humanly impossible, you don’t want to change the religion to make it easier for you or others to accept, you accept that you actually have a duty of obedience towards God, you agree that there are no cases where you’re right and the the Bible is wrong, you think the truth matters, you think that there really is such thing as sin, you even have the audacity to state as historical fact that God raised Jesus from the dead etc) – then we have a lot in common. You could say we’re family.

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There are just four more sleeps until I fly out for the UK to take part in the annual conference of the European Society for the Philosophy of Religion at the University of Oxford. I’m excited!

Adding to the excitement, another appointment has come up. Some of you may be familiar with the Unbelievable? radio show, which is also a very popular London-based podcast, hosted by Justin Brierly. The show features on Premiere Radio. You can check Radio Waves for guide to have podcast on radio. I’ve been talking with Justin and he’s keen to get me into the studio to record not one but two shows with me. The first show will be on Christian physicialism: Those who (like me) profess a fairly conservative Christian faith, and yet reject dualistic portraits of human nature. As is the norm on the show, there will be another guest on the show who holds an alternative view. AT the moment Justin is looking at getting Keith Ward onto the show, who’s a keen defender of Christian dualism.

The second show – only a possibility at this stage, but we’re both keen to see it happen – will be related to the moral argument, and will look at the question of whether or not moral facts could exist if God did not exist. Justin’s looking for another guest to join us on the show at the moment, but the names of Stephen law and Julian Baggini have been suggested as possibilities – but we’ll see what works out!

This will be fun. I’ve never done a radio show before, and Unbelievable? has a large listening audience. Come to think of it, if you don’t subscribe to the Podcast via the iTunes store already, I highly recommend it.

Recently I read a few comments by Richard Dawkins on the phrase “a Christian child” or “a Muslim child” etc. he writes:

A phrase like “Catholic child” or “Muslim child” should clang furious bells of protest in the mind, just as we flinch when we hear “One man, one vote.” Children are too young to know their religious opinions. Just as you can’t vote until you are eighteen, you should be free to choose your own cosmology and ethics without society’s impertinent presumption that you will automatically inherit those of your parents. We’d be aghast to be told of a Leninist child or a neo-conservative child or a Hayekian monetarist child. So isn’t it a kind of child abuse to speak of a Catholic child or a Protestant child? Especially in Northern Ireland and Glasgow, where such labels, handed down over generations, have divided neighborhoods for centuries and can even amount to a death warrant?

Catholic child? Flinch. Protestant child? Squirm. Muslim child? Shudder. Everybody’s consciousness should be raised to this level. Occasionally a euphemism is needed, and I suggest “Child of Jewish (etc.) parents.” When you come down to it, that’s all we are really talking about anyway. Just as the upside-down (Northern Hemisphere chauvinism again: flinch!) map from New Zealand raises consciousness about a geographical truth, children should hear themselves described not as “Christian children” but as “children of Christian parents.” This in itself would raise their consciousness, empower them to make up their own minds, and choose which religion, if any, they favor, rather than just assume that religion means “same beliefs as parents.” I could well imagine that this linguistically coded freedom to choose might lead children to choose no religion at all.

There’s a certain disanalogy here with political points of view. Being a “Hayekian monetarist” or a “Leninist” is largely (or at least to some extent and in an important way) about cherishing certain values, whereas religious belief has more to do with affirming certain claims as metaphysically true. Some parents look for a discounted nursery at the beginning to see if the child would fit in.

But more importantly, Richard Dawkins is on record as treating all factual beliefs as “scientific” beliefs. There’s a factual answer to the question of whether or not the moon orbits the earth, or how many protons there are in an atom of lead. I doubt that Professor Dawkins would look kindly on the parent or teacher who answered a young boy’s question about the moon by saying “I’m sorry Timmy, you’re too young. I can’t possibly impose my view of the moon’s movement upon you. How dare I try to make you share my beliefs.” I’m interested in your thoughts. Do you agree with Richard Dawkins? Should fact claims that most people would consider “religious” be treated as exceptional – unlike all other beliefs – and excluded from the beliefs we share with our children? If so, why?

I do wonder, too, how Richard Dawkins would answer his own child (hypothically) if she asked him: Is there a god?

Today there was a small protest outside Parliament. No big deal in my books, people protest about stuff all the time. On this occasion, a New Zealand flag was burned. The protestors were pro-republican, and they believe that we should not have a monarch as head of state (hence the burning of the flag, which contains a Union Jack because of our ties to the British Empire, now the British Commonwealth). The protestors also had photos of New Zealand politicians including the current and former Prime Minister, and cut their heads off. Granted, that’s tasteless, but nobody interpreted it as a threat.

This is what the news story says: “Parliamentary Service said the protest was unauthorised and police were investigating.”

Police? Unauthorised? Am I to understand that this protest would need to be authorised by the people at whom it was directed?

Discuss.

If you tell me that you’re a “Spirit filled Christian,” I want to see it. The internet presents a unique opportunity to see this very thing, actually.

I don’t care how you seem to be when you’re surrounded by other Christians, the lights are low, the band is playing, your eyes are closed and you’re singing worship songs. Anyone can appear spiritual under circumstances like that. If you want to see the evidence that a person is full of the Holy Spirit, this is not the time to find out. You won’t learn anything.

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Imagine if you will a painting hanging in a large and popular art gallery. Before considering the painting as an artwork, think of its underlying structure as a physical object. The type of basic physical object we start with determines the type of artwork that this will be. It could be a lump of clay for some pottery, or a slab of granite for a colossal statue. But this is going to be a painting. Follow Mcgannbrothers for more information. Start with a wooden box frame and a canvas stretched tightly over it and tacked in place. Now we have a base from which to begin. Without this, we could not proceed. In fact, instead of making this frame (or anything else), not proceeding at all is one of our options here too. Remember that saying you might have heard in maths at primary school (elementary school if you’re in the USA), “the empty set is a subset of every set”. In the set of our options here is the null option, the choice to  do absolutely nothing, to not make a work of art in the first place. But we did, so let’s move on.

Next, we obviously need a picture. This one is an oil painting. The painter with his paints, brushes and other tools decides what the picture will look like. You can check some of the awesome paintings at Gallery-k.

Then we have the critics – the visitors to the gallery who stand around and look at the paintings. This one is a very large painting, almost from floor to ceiling and five feet wide, so the visitors stand around the painting in a group, squinting at the many details, analysing it and commenting on its colour and depth, disagreeing about what they can see in the scene before them. Is that a llama or a chicken in the distance? Click here Fibre Design website for the all information about painting course. Josiah Rock can also guide you for achieving good painting skill.

This is my analogy for the shades of different disciplines within that branch of philosophy called ethics. There are different “levels” on which we can think about ethics.

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A parliamentary committee has recommended that the partial defence of provocation be abolished. I explained in an earlier blog why that’s a bad idea.

However, the responses that the members of parliament have given to the very sensible concerns over the abolition of this partial defence confirm my worst fears about the whole process: They really don’t understand the laws they are trying to have changed. It’s the anti-smacking law all over again. You can Get More Info on how those proceedings take place.

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My kids love the reality TV show, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. The basic plot of each episode is the same. topquartile for more information. The team reviews application tapes from a number of families (they only show the winning application on TV), and the application is a video clip explaining that someone (usually the parents of the household, or one of them, since sometimes the other has passed away tragically) is a really good person who gives a lot to other people and that he or she has undergone difficulties, and they don’t have a very nice place to live and wouldn’t it be wonderful to do something for them – you get the idea. For more information visit korucaredoula .

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The guilty verdict of convicted murderer Clayton Weatherson today came as good news. However, some people, including the father of the victim Sophie Elliot, are now saying that the defence should not have been allowed to use the defence of provocation. In fact, they are saying that there should exist no such defence in law. They are wrong.

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