Religion & Christianity

Whether you're a member of a religion or not, we should at minimum read ancient texts as instruction manuals for life that ancient societies developed through much blood and tragedy. Take the Old Testament and its 10…

There are usually foundation-level social teams in the status games that define human society, at least in modern times (with the decline of Kings and Queens, at least temporarily). Today that’s the politics of Left and…

Margaret Thatcher is like a god to today’s conservatives, one of the founders of modern conservatism. You can see here from her speech almost 40 years ago how science dominated the discussion then on climate change,…

Good on Sammy for despairing at the social breakdown afflicting all of us. But like all rock star culture, the diagnosis here is all about feelings. Love vs hatred. As if the problem is an outbreak of people being nasty…

Actually what happened was, and it’s not the first time, Trump was responding to a leading question from Sky News Australia, the Murdoch sewer. They were trying to get a quote they could use as ammunition against the…

This guy traces the shift from institutions that build things, which we saw after WW2 in massive ‘nation-building’ efforts. To today, where nothing gets built. Where the main social activity is obstructing change,…

Girard realised that imitation was the root of all human life. Copying one another, our deepest passion. But he went a step further, because he realised *why* we do it. It’s rivalry. Imitative rivalry, his main concept.…

Do you believe in God? Or even gods? Here’s a fascinating twist on that question. Rene Girard was called both the Einstein and Darwin of the human sciences. I’ve posted about him a bit. He saw the central role of…

There's always a team. Take anybody's set of beliefs, and you'll find a social group (I call them teams to capture the rivalry) that those beliefs are the banner for. The overarching master teams in our time are Left v…

Independent of all the Terminator-driven angst about AI, it’s taking over much of our culture at an astronomical speed. Here a doctor describes using it, because it provided so much better healthcare than their own…

Hmm, sorry if this posts twice, it seems to have disappeared. This is what one of the senior staff at Exxon said, this week. Exxon is one of the biggest global oil companies. The cupboard is bare, we’ve run the reserves…

A bit longer this, but I’m very tired of the Musk stuff and it needs a longer explanation. There’s a shorter Part 2 of this as a separate post, that explains some things about what Musk is doing that I think are…

The remarkable thing about the Cold War was that the invention of weapons of transcendent power, that would lead to ‘mutually assured destruction’, actually stopped the rivalry. Just as transcendent gods (religion) and…

Father Brown was one of those shows I always saw in the options on streaming platforms, and never dipped my toe in. I thought it must be one of those innocuous Brit shows that offered pretty views of the UK countryside…

This is one of the Bibles of the Trumpian revolution. A how-to guide for super rich people to avoid regulation and taxes. This is also why crypto is so huge now, because those super rich see it as a way to get around…

This is what's really going on in Trumpland. The tech moguls lining up to fellate Trump are there for a reason, for years now they've had the idea of replacing government with what they call 'The Network State'.…

Internal Liberal Party polling suggests 52% of women now prefer Peter Dutton as a possible PM. Now I can understand men thinking that, God gave us a brain and a penis, and only enough blood to run one at a time. And…

Amazing aerial recreation of Rome more than 2000 years ago, at the time of Jesus. Nice one for Easter. Look at how stunning ancient Rome was. The Roman Empire also gave birth to many of the world’s most famous cities,…

Marjorie on the death of the Pope.

There are still people who think we overdid it for Covid (people who don’t understand exponential growth and pandemics). If a pandemic influenza emerges, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Killing machines, mortality rates…

AUKUS was another Scott Morrison train wreck. AUKUS is the US wanting a mobile launch platform for their missiles, against China, in the Pacific. They can piss off. Why shouldn't China be our main ally, in 2025? Pretty…

Gaza bewilders, how can Israel continue what it’s doing? It can because despite all the guff about Anglo countries (dominating the grey in the pic) being democracies, no country is actually a democracy, in the way we…

Ricky is one of the well-meaning, smart younger generations that think belief in God is belief in fairy tales. But they then adopt the *exact* same structure of belief, of an independent, ‘objective’ something that…

Why does it matter so much to understand that our lives are run by status games? That our particular culture uses a status economy developed in high schools and then rolled out to all of adult life? Well, it matters…

Democracy is not about electing people. Everywhere mass elections have been introduced, democracy is in free fall. It turns the ordinary running of basic things into an endless popularity contest, where the things that…

For thousands of years, Kings dominated human life globally. Only churches provided any sort of counter-weight. For example the 19th century was a century of kings, here’s a cartoon of the world’s top kings in 1815,…

The lychgate is one of my favourite architectural features, at the entry to old churchyards. Functionally lychgates evolved as a place to shelter a coffin from the weather, while waiting for the arrival of the priest.…

I think one of the most abused words in modern culture is ‘experience’. It’s our religion, we see life as something to be ‘experienced’. Like we’re passive tourists on life’s journey, and it will keep throwing up new…

I posted about the explosion of nostalgia the other day. People flocking to bands from decades ago, to religions from centuries ago, to 'trad wife' marriage models from the 1950s and earlier, etc. The world of…

The Press has never been free. What we call media was invented by elite members of societies, barons, as part of the furthering of their own aims. It only began to appear free when multiple barons established opposing…

What to do, in the face of horrible events like Bondi this week? To me the answer is always the same. Think. Learn. Don’t try to find a team to ‘stand with’, our usual populist kidult response to everything now. This…

People who still read anything I post here will know that for a few years I’ve re-focused much of my attention on status. I did that because status is the root cause of all human thought, feeling and behaviour. If you…

Societies always have a foundational status hierarchy, social teams that are the most fundamental people belong to, that structure the rest. For most of our history those teams were religious. In our lifetimes that…

While you’re there Dorothy, can you explain what some dub the ‘Jesus Moose’? 😉

London is a Roman city. Originally Londinium. Much of our civilisation we owe to the Roman Empire, and specifically its adoption of Christianity as the Holy Roman Empire.

Next to the resurrection of Jesus, my favourite Easter story is traffic jams. Proof that doing a dumb thing once is no protection against doing it again. And again.

Thanks to @[1257795447:2048:Christine] for the heads-up. BYD launch its hybrid ute tomorrow. 100 km full-electric range, up to 1000 km if you use the petrol and electric together for longer trips. The US now looking at…

I guess I can safely say that I’m clearly not sharing this denial. I get more or less zero traction with just about every person I work with and know, in trying to warn that the pandemic never ended, and never got less…

I advise all my friends to not exercise for 6-8 weeks after they have Covid, or any serious illness. It can lead to hypoperfusion, the starving of your muscles and organs of oxygen and nutrients. This can lead to organ…

Another mystery, Scoob! (Post-infection asthma is a very common Covid side-effect.) I'm lucky to be friends with one of the world's leading Covid doctors, treating the Covid zombies who walk in his door every day, of…

If you know somebody whose personality changed significantly after Covid infection, particularly towards dark thoughts and depression, the most likely cause is dopamine senescence. There are neurons in the brain that…

Why do monarchies and churches exist? The answer has been forgotten, but is still there. They were human inventions to prevent violence. Left to themselves humans will *always* fight each other for status, in groups.…

The ‘cost of living crisis’ and problems with domestic violence are really the same problem. They’re the social model of the nuclear family under strain. The nuclear family is the expectation that children will move out…

The difficult thing about discussing ideas with friends and family is that every idea is actually a social group. Groups which help give people their sense of identity. In the past this often meant the rule of thumb,…

Meet Romney. Be quick, God may ‘crate’ him 6 feet under the ground, in a box.

“There is nothing so much like God in all the universe as silence.” Meister Eckhart (probably drove an EV).

Skipped the ’watch with free Covid’ sessions at the cinema and finally saw this yesterday. Great fun movie, amazing flight scenes. A few things: 1) the mission at the centre of the movie is a copy of the destruction of…

One day, Winston Churchill and his wife Clementine walked through a neighbourhood in London. People greeted and exchanged words with the Prime Minister. A street sweeper greeted Mrs Churchill in particular, and the two…

There’s nothing to rival a huge church organ, full choir and herald trumpets. It shakes the ground if you’re there. Makes all other music sound trivial. Hair stands up on every part of your body. Gotta play it loud to…

Last night the English were chanting/singing about Australia being ‘cheats’, and the MCC members even booed and jostled and swore at the Australian team in the dressing room area. Have a look at what England calls it…

Saw this in Bathurst. Was not aware Mary had this as a sideline, I’m sure Jesus said some pretty unkind things about moneylenders.

It's winter in South America. Temperatures. Brazil 41.3 Balsas 41.1 Carolina 40.8 Bom Jesus do Piaui 40.2 Sao Joao Piaui Peru 29.8 Machu Picchu (2400m elevation)

I feel that if there were a second coming of Jesus, most people would just want a selfie with him.

Social media: “there are Palestinian Christians?!” Bethlehem and Nazareth are both Palestinian locations.

Exactly what's happening, and has been for years. A lot of it began in the 1950s in the US, when political conservatives and churches formed an alliance to take control of government. To give you an indication of how…

Christmas is of course a Christian festival. But do we even understand what that means any more? In reality we in the West are all Christians, in that the Church pretty much built our societies, over millennia. The…

Christmas is sometimes described as being too materialistic. But gift-giving is a fundamental character in the Christian story. In fact the whole Christmas story is about materialism, about not just gifts, but about the…

What made Eddie Van Halen the best rock guitar god of our era was that he was the greatest musician of all the rock guitar gods. Others would try to play flashier things, but that’s like the Eveready Bunny musically.…

Work can be fun, and it can also be boring, tedious, stressful, and just bloody hard. But what it increasingly isn’t, and why I’m glad to be closer to retirement than not, is meaningful. Look at St. Peter’s Basilica, in…

I wanted to talk about 2 things we’re told not to talk about, but I think we must. Politics and religion. My views on them, so people have a reference point. Politics first. My personal political leanings are to…

From social media. The last source of Covid information in NSW. "I’m in Bathurst my daughter goes to Scots All Saints and the boarding house is riddled (with Covid). Same as the boy’s Catholic boarding school Stannies.…

On Sundays I often remember the ‘day of rest’ idea we got from religion. It was against God’s will to work on the Sabbath. The Sabbath was actually a weekly ‘lockdown’. It bemuses me to watch those who hopped on the…

Did Jesus fly Jetstar to heaven at Easter? I think he just ascended. Australians engaging their deepest passion. Being somewhere else.

Good Friday remembers a death. Even noticing death has become a challenge for many Australians. They’re happy that hundreds die per week from a preventable disease, provided they can get back on planes and into pubs and…

Another hike in interest rates coming today. I think it’s worth remembering that this only matters because much of society has no money and is living off debt. And that this is why the gutting of the living standards of…

People may have seen me posting here for a few years now about how the political battles between ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ are actually something else. The continuation of the driving force of our history, the battle between…

I've been dreading this day. Latour was probably my greatest influence in thinking about the world, I can't even begin to describe the ways his genius changed the way we can think about everything. His own mentor Michel…

Is this something Jesus said? My memory is rusty. 2023 needs to be a turning point to take back control from sociopaths.

Politics isn’t Left vs Right. It’s Church vs State, a brutal battle going on for centuries and continuing today. Also not judging which ‘side’ should win, the Church built our civilisation, in many ways it knows what…

Christian Drosten is Germany’s leading pandemic adviser. Governments who started the pandemic saying ‘only a vaccine can end it’ (a lie), will now also vandalise the vaccine rollouts. Already happening in the UK. You…

Lot of debate online about republics vs monarchies. Here's an example of something that I think would struggle to get off the ground in a world of republics. What a monarchy does is transcend nation politics in some…

Prosperity Christianity. Because the poor will only waste those relief cheques.

There are lots of explanations given for our widespread anxiety. I think most of them are silly. The main reason we're anxious is our atheism. Not because we all need to believe in God as some supernatural Being to be…

I've had a book of Ainslie Roberts' Dreamtime paintings for years, and they've always fascinated me. It seems for aboriginal people, the key is to have eternal ('everywhen') agencies at the root of your society. Imagine…

There are very few towns, no matter how small or remote, that didn't make their first priority the building of a church. I want to understand why it was so important to us once to do this. Were we just silly 'believers'…

On a holy day, I think we need to understand why, once a week, entire communities would gather for the Sunday church service. Modern thinking describes these people as credulous, believing in fairytales. I think…

This is Nordlingen, in southern Germany. Over 1100 years old. (Trivia - also the city shown from the air at the end of Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.) Look how beautifully self-contained cities were before…

Look at these people, going to Winston Churchill's funeral in 1965. A nice orderly pattern, what we call a crowd. I think we see crowds and individuals as 2 distinct things. But look at every face in that crowd. Each…

As a kid I still remember shops being closed both Saturday afternoons and Sundays. You needed to get cash out on a Friday to get you through the weekend. Partly this was the religious Sabbath still shaping society,…

One more aerial shot for the day. Florence. Old cities could still be high density, and even have roads of sorts, without all the problems cars cause today. Access to the near vicinity (paths) rather than access to…

This is Jerusalem. Intense conflict again there this week. A holy place for Jews, Christians and Muslims. We call the problems there 'religious' problems. That framing of it never progresses anything, so is obviously…

The modern idea of 'events'. Bringing large crowds of people together. It's always felt a bit forced to me, like the only thing that will bring people together now is some type of personal entertainment. Even in my…

Those topics people say you shouldn't discuss (politics, religion etc.) are exactly the things we should talk about. Why are we surprised when the world turns into a toilet, when we don't discuss anything important? In…

Before 1847 there was no such thing as 'time' or 'space' in England. Each locality was a whole universe unto itself, with its own rhythms of life driven by things like seasons and cropping, and didn't see itself as part…

Christian Drosten, a leading German virologist, on why the idea of 'herd immunity' may be misleading. If you don't get vaccinated, you will catch this virus, eventually.

Gotta fight stupid wherever you see it. Australia and NZ *ARE* living with Covid. That's what all of our public health measures are for. Unsurprisingly one of the Bibles of the Economy crowd arguing to...well, it's not…

It would have been so much better to not call it ‘classical’ music, genre labels drive people way from things they should hear. Figaro is the greatest of all operas, many think. God really was ‘singing through this…

Those who don't believe in God, inevitably replace God with laws. Scientific laws, mostly. (Please don't mistake me for an atheist, theist, agnostic - none of those things. I reject the whole lot.) The thing is, if you…

The Taliban are back. No matter how much we try to separate religion and politics, we always fail. The modernist view of the world we all grew up with says this is a bad thing. It’s very historically naive. I struggle…

When I post about the church, this is the historical sort of background I'm talking about. It's not about whether a person is 'religious' or not, it's much broader. We don't understand religion, we've turned it into a…

The NSW Premier just announced she will no longer be giving daily press conferences. NSW Health staff will do them instead. She announced this immediately after saying the next few weeks will be the worst for Covid…

Underneath grand narratives you’ll usually find some simple, practical thing that explains things. The US has a much more libertarian, individual freedom focus than Australia. That comes down to underlying beliefs. But…

Not just ignoring the health advice now, also ignoring the National Plan and Doherty modelling. Our very own God-bothering Trumpie. (Just for the slow people at the back, the vaccines don't stop people carrying or…

A little learning is a dangerous thing. Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring; There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, and drinking largely sobers us again. Alexander Pope

At the origin of every modern civilisation is always one book. Ideas are what civilisations are literally made of - all of their most important shaping beliefs will come from that one book. For our civilisation, it’s…

Religion isn’t about a God in the sky. The origin of the word tells us what it’s about. It’s about what binds people together. I think our problem isn’t religion, all societies have an institutional religion at their…

I think people want something magnificent and glamorous. That magnificence is a scale of value. Royalty and the Church have been the historical answer at the country level. When replaced with secular republics, notice…

A few times I’ve posted here that I think the apparent divisions of our time have nothing to do with Left versus Right. Or even politics. It’s about Church versus State. It never went away. Populism is our politics now.…

Not filled with confidence at our response to Covid-19 if the toilet paper experience is a trial run. Things could get a lot more disrupted than this, if people are going to hysterically find scapegoats at every break…

Camus' wonderful novel is the bible on pandemics. Nearly a century old now but reading it is like reading the paper here in 2020, and novelists go way beyond the medical angle to the deep human psychology. How…

Been a lot of talk of exponential curves lately. What doesn't get mentioned a lot is that this is also the reason our financial systems always crash. The interest we earn on our investments, even in basic bank accounts,…

John Hattie is probably the world's leading expert on evidence-based education. Like 'economies', student results actually tend to improve after a crisis like this, even if they miss months of school with no online…

Our federal (LNP) member saying yesterday that it's great we're getting our 'liberties' back, and that we're 'opening up the economy' again. Like the disease was us being locked up against our will, and damage to LNP…

ScoMo's own website, check the order of priorities. I don't make this stuff up. Hillsong, ScoMo's guide, preaches 'prosperity theology' - basically God will make you rich. There's number 1 of the priorities. From the…

Now we have our 3-stage strategy to all go and get infected to save the economy, anybody notice parliament is still closed, and isn't in the 3 stages? Presumably it's unsafe. Schools are safe though and in Stage 1,…

Sunday is God’s day. In my experience people who don’t believe in God just swap something else to be in charge - science, politicians, the market, truth, corporations, etc. I don’t think I’ve met another person who…

Victorian England. Massive building programs, creation of the sewers, the railways, roads. The time of empire. Do we stop to think about what made all of that possible? Today we flog all this stuff off, to give away in…

I’ve been so proud to be an Australian in this pandemic. Our magnificent public institutions stuffed full of expertise have been allowed to flex their muscles. We’re the envy of much of the world. At the same time…

The real battle of our time isn't Left versus Right. It's Church vs State. The battle waging for a few thousand years.

Trump just nominated Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court of the US. Mother of 7, reads the Constitution as an 'originalist' (i.e. as if Moses had brought it down from the mountain), loves guns, hates abortion, hates…

Billy Graham is pivotal in understanding our world right now. One of the leading figures from the 1950s onwards mixing religion and politics. Read this, you’ll see how just about everything we describe as Left vs Right…

It's not an analogy for me that pandemics are the rebooting of societies. It's their job, throughout history. To force us to throw out everything we think we know and question everything we do. They can do that because…

We forget I think that stained glass windows pre-date most people having books, paintings, photographs, films - any sort of imagery. So we forget what they must have seemed to worshippers, a glowing radiance of colour,…

ScoMo just finished his address to parliament with 'God Bless Australia'. Our very own Trump.

Because in my experience people have very little knowledge of how politics actually works, ScoMo the professional marketing man continually pulls the wool over our eyes. Take the masterful spin of ‘Covid normal by…

Everything is ideas. Right now with Trump we’re seeing the endgame of our ridiculous ideas about democracy. That it’s just about the ‘people’. It isn’t, the people have only a tiny role to play in democracy. Most of the…

Nazi looting. One of the stores for loot found in a church after the war. A pile of eyeglasses from victims at Auschwtiz. Gold rings from Auschwitz victims. It’s estimated there are billions of dollars worth of looted…

Re-posting from another thread. This is a major speech Winston Churchill made in 1946, after the disaster of World War 2 and Europe lying in ruins. This was the beginning of the building of modern Europe, what the…

In our maths books, when we do trigonometry, are angles. What we don’t get taught is how angles were once the centre of all knowledge. An angle is a deviation. Trig lets us measure the size of the deviation, but it…

Lots of talk about how the Catholic Church is a toxic institution, with the recent child abuse scandals. It got me to thinking, on that measure, probably the most toxic institution in the world is the family. The…

Another hero of mine, Charles Péguy. He became a Catholic later in life, but understood religion in a much different way to others then and now. I only recently discovered he shared the same belief, that the ‘modern’…

I’m not a church-goer, but yup, this is exactly what happened. Religion became ‘belief’ in things, and ’faith’, that these beliefs are true. It’s why I’m deeply religious, but not at all in a way that is widely…

Presence, what does it mean? Here's Freddie Mercury just saying hello to an audience (sorry that FB keeps causing sound and vision to go out of sync). This is presence, it electrifies a situation. Anybody could just say…

It’s a bit weird to me that people can go an entire year following not one Christian tradition or ritual. And yet on Good Friday the thought of eating meat horrifies them.

Religion never lost its power, it just changed venues. We maybe don’t recognise it when we see it.

Easter has a message for everybody I think, its true original message, before religion got sidetracked around belief in things. Where did the message get lost? I think the message of Easter is that what we see as some…

Australians see government as a service provider. Something to make sure the basic infrastructure of society is in place, working and affordable. I think it’s a very healthy framework for government, and have actually…

Israel Folau's words here show exactly how I think religion was hijacked by idealists. Idealists are people who think there's another world, an eternal world of spirit and objective truths above and/or beyond our…

Another undercurrent from the election. Faith in politics is in freefall. As in the US, religious faith is filling the gap, drawing voters to parties. The separation of Church and State - some people never signed up for…

Happy Sunday! God’s day. A stained glass window seen from outside a church has almost no colour at all. Go inside though, where the darkness and light can interact, and you get this. What if light doesn’t shine ‘on’…

Michel Serres, maybe the greatest thinker of all time, has died. Was only thinking yesterday while reading one of his books that this couldn't be far off. It's difficult to describe the magnitude of his genius, he was…

Wisdom from physics. Light doesn't shine on things, it's part of things, stars produce it by squashing matter so much that it explodes. What we call a 'material' thing is actually a container of light - light is stuff…

Today a person will often look for the feeling of connection from a relationship that they used to get from wider social institutions - the family, church, the community, etc. So relationships are doing a lot of heavy…

Q&A was a science luvvies thing last night. The way we deal with scientists troubles me. When we're not ignoring them, we fawn over them, like last night. O please give us the answers science, isn't it nice to have firm…

Most of us don't go to church, and those who do often don't know the origins of the rituals and traditions there. And so we don't even see I think that money continues the Eucharist into modern times. Transubstantiation…

The graph below is fascinating research, the richer you are, the poorer you think you are relative to others. It's called affluenza. There's something in the bible about that, Matthew 13:12. Describes Australia the…

Here's why I think religion versus science is a dumb debate. Take a scientific law, like Newton's in the picture. Nobody actually knows *why* F=ma. It's a pattern that just happens. Scientific laws don't explain why…

There's something about modern Christians and taxes. Like a Church versus State ongoing grudge match. There's about a sixth of a degree of separation between these nutters and ScoMo.

Society's deep tectonic plates. It occurred to me yesterday that most of the modern conservative agenda, of small government and lower taxes, is actually driven by the same people who opposed the separation of church…

The annual pilgrimage to Mecca, to a sacred place. 2 million people. The Ed Sheehan world tour: 8.5 million people. Rather than see ourselves as 'modern' and secular, wouldn't it be better to understand how our…

Even the tiniest country towns built churches as a first priority. My theme at the moment - can we still understand how space and place can be so meaningful to people? At the same time we laugh at people who are…

The ‘virtual’ world has nothing to do with IT. It sounds a bit abstract, but i think it actually changes everything we know, about life, death, space, time - the lot. We all still use Newton in everyday ideas, I think…

The religious freedom debate and legislation has had the excellent result of flushing out what the real battle lines have been in politics these last 30 years. It's the re-emergence of very old battles between Church…

James Lovelock has turned 100. A scientist and inventor, here he is with one of his early devices, a gas chromatograph. Some now call his work (together with Lynn Margulis, now sadly gone) the greatest shift in human…

Isn't this magnificent? The House of Lords has its problems, but one of them isn't its full name: "The Right Honourable the Lords Spiritual and Temporal of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in…

Was the problem with communism the idea, or the implementation? The idea is straight out of the Bible - a society based on sharing. (It's bizarre that modern conservatives evoke the Bible so much actually, nothing they…

More Venn. This is how I see people. Say you're discussing a topic, in politics for example. No person is just an issue, that issue is part of their entire way of seeing everything. It'll link to what washing powder…

Modern conservatives puzzle people, because many of their policies go against conservative thinking. This is why, their actual motivation is to undermine the separation of Church and State. This from the home page of…

John Lennon is idolised for this anti-establishment view. And then we wonder where Trump came from. A world that believes only in itself, and getting rid of all 'elites'. It's why me and many boomers don't really get on…

One thing I've noticed that is shared by most of the competing beliefs in society right now, is a retreat to the ideal. Whether it's spirit in religion, or New Age metaphysics, or absolute truth in science, or the…

Surprises me sometimes that people don’t see the word ‘protest’ in ‘Protestant’. The Protestant churches are a protest movement that’s been going on for centuries. Have a look at what protest produces - directionless…

Not my tree! But let’s embrace the essential message of Christmas. Materialism, the love of material things. The incarnation of God. Let’s rescue God from the spiritualists, get him out of the sky. Merry Christmas!

Margaret Atwood, I think making the important point that many social movements like #metoo end up as squabbles between people within the movement, and the real issue gets lost. (I don’t agree with her that moderates are…

Apple have been asked to look at ways to make their devices less addictive. But I think we’re looking at this backwards, it’s not the technology (technology isn’t a thing). Why are people so glued to screens? My guess…

I think this is one of the greatest fantasies at the heart of modern life. The idea of starting society again from scratch, going off-grid, being more ‘authentic’. Think I’ve mentioned that before, I see the passion for…

Have posted this one before, but i think it’s got more still to give. Religion is a contentious thing for people, mostly because those for and against it have bizarrely come to think it’s a debate about whether there is…

Iconoclasts were famously known as the people who would go into churches to smash ‘idols’. All the beautiful iconography in churches was their enemy, which they saw as a distraction from true religion. But iconoclasm…

Institutions, especially unions, are the answer to the world's problems. Brilliant read, institutions are the answer, not voting or swapping leaders. Institutions, always institutions. "Although income stagnation is…

This is Ulm Cathedral. Still the world’s tallest church I think. It took 500 years to build. I think there’s an important lesson there, we’ve lived in a selfish age where life and what’s important is increasingly…

Do you believe in God? If you don’t, have you just replaced God with laws of nature? Providence is the belief that there is something ‘above’ our lives, shaping them and giving them purpose. It’s easy to see with…

Neils Bohr, a science giant that many have never heard of. We have so much to learn from him. “The language of religion is more closely related to the language of poetry than to the language of science. True, we are…

Our public life is becoming a fantasy, like a film set. Celebrities at the front of the church with royalty at the royal wedding, now two TV stars in the White House. (Remembering Ronnie Raygun was also an actor.) I…

Re-posting this from inside another thread. This, to me, is another big disease of our age. Binary thinking. And as the article says, driven by one thing mostly - anxiety. Anxiety about ambiguity, although I think maybe…

A post just for the two of you, from Rowan Williams again. The "vastly complicated and enticing and frustrating borderland, where physics and philosophy and psychology blend" is the space I work in, in religious ideas.…

“Do you believe in God?” How did religion end up being thought of as ‘believing in’ things? To have ‘faith’ that what you ‘believe in’ is real? Like some sort of guessing competition. The atheists that oppose religion…

Love Aeon. This topic is one I cycle back to regularly - binary, absolutist thinking. Often linked with high stress, anxiety and depression (which it tends to cause, rather than be caused by it). Splitting things into…

The path to the real meaning of life, God if you like, is a path that leads out of your mind, into the world. A long tradition stretching back thousands of years studied the mind, modern psychology came very late to the…

Bruno Latour was one of my mentors, and also one of the examiners of my PhD, years ago now. He’s internationally renowned for his brilliant and breathtaking recasting of science and technology, but also religion and…

What if the entire world, no matter what scale you look at, was nothing but mixtures? Our thinking and feelings can make us want there to be pure things, that are not mixed. But in reality, everything is a mixture.…

Hannah Arendt saw loneliness as the root of all extreme thinking. Not the loneliness of not having friends - lonely people often have many friends - but the loneliness of not fitting in. The breakdown of social…

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s (try typing that in a hurry) ‘flow’ is a way of being. Once you get good at it, it beats anything else - it makes it possible for everything you do to become transcendent, no matter how…

The modern world seems peculiar. On the one hand life has never been more complex and connnected and rich. But on the other we seem to often be in a state of panic about it all, for example: - belief in conspiracies is…

Brian Rotman studies the physical roots of mathematics. One of his passions is to ‘take the God out of mathematics’. By which he means the number of ways people have taken the patterns of mathematics to derive from…

“What is society? It could be defined, from our point of view, as each individual’s reciprocal possession, in many highly varied forms, of every other. Unilateral possession, such as that in ancient law of the slave by…

I sometimes wonder if the modern fights between atheists and believers are down to the fact that we talk about God, rather than Gods. Historically we arrived at God - singular - via Gods - plural. Like the old Olympian…

Did you know Isaac Newton thought the ‘forces’ he studied were the actions of angels? Newton would have found our modern separation of science and religion bizarre.

The history of chairs is actually very interesting. Originally chairs were more ceremonial things, reserved for royalty or people in high church office. If you look at some of the old paintings of kings at court for…

Rest In Peace. Everyday wonders - the origins of that phrase is one of them, I think. For the earliest Christians it was actually dormit in pace - to ‘sleep in peace’. Why is this an everyday wonder? I think I posted…

Was reading a book on the weekend, which made the suggestion that rather than have wars between Science and Religion, it's much better to move away from names of things like that and ask instead - what is the 'supreme…

The Da Vinci Code was one of the biggest selling books of all time. The root of the stories is Gnosticism, which is one big reason I think the book sold so well. We say we live in a secular world, but even the most…

The Thirty Years' War took place in the 17th century. More than 8 million people died, and it's considered one of the most destructive conflicts in history. Triggered mostly by competing ideas of one true religion, it's…

Border protection gets people excited. One of the things I reckon is not said much is that a national border isn't a physical thing. It's a legal thing. All national borders are the result of an agreement, between…

'an rock iconoclast'. Says it all really, about critics. Can't even write. Imagine a film about Winston Churchill that focused on his sex life - people would (rightly) ask - why? I remember the 1980s, when AIDS was seen…

The idea of ‘Left’ versus ‘Right’ came out of the French Revolution, where those who voted to retain great power for the King sat on the right of the chamber, and those to limit that power sat on the left. At the same…

I couldn't recommend Edmund Burke highly enough. Also John Howard's hero, though I think Burke would have found Howard clueless. This description of Burke describes exactly the world we ended up living in, which he…

Our tools shape how we see and think, something I was taught but which isn’t common in many schools or universities. Apart from making us think there is a 3-dimensional thing called ‘space’ (there isn’t) and a 4th…

Thank you David Rowe. A picture and a thousand words and all that. I'm not obsessed with banks and finance, but since the time of Jesus and before, major religions have attacked usury. Lending, finance. There are very…

Watching a panel discussion about the meaning of Christmas, and how ‘materialism’ has apparently taken over the real meaning of Christmas, which is about family and love and blah blah. The usual tired binary argument.…

Once a year Christmas, for a tiny moment, forces its way through the fog of our one true religion. Porn.

Why do we have so many conspiracies today? (New Coke was just one of hundreds.) Some even call it a ‘conspiracy culture’. A real Christmas question for me. I think it’s actually pretty simple. Society’s institutions are…

Did you have a New Year resolution? Mine, hmm. Maybe that we don’t make public thinking about life and enjoying life mutually exclusive things. Australia can be frustrating like that, it often opposes thought and…

I posted this a few years ago, but think it's so important and interesting that it's worth revisiting. Harris also has a stake in the whole science-religion wars (he's a devout atheist), but that's irrelevant for this…

You can dig deeper into the dramas of the world right now. This is what it's really all about, from Trump to Turnbull here in Oz. Not so much about religion trying to take over the role of the State again, although…

Many, many people are despairing with politics. But that's what they want, to make people switch off politics. When people do that, it paves the way for the rich and powerful to do whatever they like. Politics isn't…

Trump's actual legislative agenda so far, summarised by an American friend. Not much in there for the ordinary downtrodden citizen, he's like Tony Abbott, talks the talk and then walks the jackboot big business and…

@[783412914:2048:Kyle Manning], @[100001374621876:2048:Michael Kato], we often discuss science and religion debates, and the nature of science itself. Would be very interested in your (and anybody else's) views on this…

I think mischief is a beautiful word. And a beautiful thing. Little boys specialise in mischief, and are usually in trouble for it. Mischief is like humour but more gentle, and more engaged in the things of the world.…

We think we're a bit clever for religion these days, but the true message of Easter is much more profound than all the self-help, self-esteem, self-improvement and status-seeking we've replaced it with in our lives.…

Michel Serres talks about legend, as having two related meanings. One as a type of story, and the other as the legend on a map, which tells you how to read the map. Serres says the two meanings are connected. The…

Germaine Greer was one of the only prominent boomers who saw through the emptiness of the 60s 'peace and love' movement. This looks a miserable quote, but it's not at all, and matches what Proust for example saw about…

Charging interest on loans used to be called usury. Today it's a common thing, but for thousands of years there were arguments about whether it should be allowed at all. Jesus and the moneylenders, for example -…

Les Fehmi researches how we pay attention. He developed a technique called 'Open Focus' which helps people to move out of a common addiction to what he calls 'narrow-objective' focus, where we spend much of our days…

The same-sex marriage debate is brilliantly showing us I think what's really going on in politics, we just have to look. Why are people so prepared to go to the wall on this issue? I think it's because the people so…

Dawko has somewhere to retire. North Korea bans all religion. Seems to be working out for them, a fun place to live.

It's not a secret I hate daylight saving. But it's always been difficult to explain to others what it is about it that is so stupid and so appalling. I think this nails it. We have a semi-religion of WAKISM, as…

Do people think Church and State should be separate? A lot of what's going on in politics is driven by people who think the answer to that is a firm no. That fight never went away.

"I would be very emphatic that our schools, our parishes exist to teach a Catholic view of marriage," he said. I would be very emphatic that they take some of the hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars they're getting…

Watching again, with the same-sex marriage debate, just how hopeless progressive people are at politics. "For example, when Feinberg and Willer asked liberals to write an op-ed aiming to convince conservatives of the…

Henri Bergson was a trippin’ dude, even though he looked like a minister at the local parish church. He won the Nobel Prize for literature, although was actually a philosopher (he wrote very well). His speaking tours…

I've substituted LNP for "Republican Party" in the quote, because they're reading from the same playbook. "What is the fundamental purpose of the LNP? To minimize the tax bill of the rich. For those in the highest tax…

So - what does 'religious freedoms' mean? We're going to hear that phrase a lot in the coming weeks. The No campaign thinks it means if a gay couple walks into your bakery and orders a wedding cake, you can refuse them…

Palliative care or assisted dying? As always the answer is probably neither of the extremes. And it’s not the middle or ‘moderate’ position either. Paul Keating has been out again, exercising his big Catholic muscles,…

One of the things I think Marshall McLuhan made people aware of was that copies make originals. The idea of an ‘original’ doesn’t even exist, until you have copies. Tarde said it, imitation is the heart of all life. Our…

During the anthems for the beginning of the Ashes today, it struck me what a hopeless anthem God Save the Queen is. The entire anthem is just a grovelling homage to the monarch, there’s not one reference to the country…

Do you know any grammar Nazis? This was a story about 85,000 cubic metres of American nuclear waste from the 1940s and 1950s, leaking into the Pacific Ocean. Tony is worried about the grammar. Incidentally, aren’t the…

Even more, religions have been the institution that more than any other have stopped us from exterminating one another. And I'm not a card-carrying member of any of them, it's just an historical fact. We live in dumb…

So much of the mood is gloom. But are we blaming the wrong things? We attack religion, we attack politics, we attack unions, we attack business. We attack institutions, basically. But institutions are the answer, not…

Have never understood the stupidity of this argument against God. That a God wouldn't allow for suffering. As if the only way life can make sense is if everything is happy, all of the time. Funny man, Stephen Fry, but…

Mark Twain said history may not repeat, but it sure does rhyme. Modern companies and organisations have so much in common with much older organisational forms. I did a fantastic course on organisational forms and…

Fantastic. There's the Daily Terrorgraph version of religion bashing, and then there's the more 'intellectual' version. The latter is harder to spot, but Sparrow outs it beautifully. And he's spot on. We need to…

So Jason Green isn't the new pope.

A pope who smiles!

So much nonsense said and written about science and religion. This is a completely different view, minus the straw men in both sides: http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/86-FREEZE-RELIGION-GB.pdf