Taking the view that God is hypothetical and unlikely, but that religions have played a vital role in allowing humans to definie and develope themselves as members of particular societies. Something that is only slowly and imperfectly being replaced by secular values.
C S Lewis as hypocrite. How the film Shadowlands does not tell the whole truth.
Religions as Imperfect Human Understanding. A mistaken combination of sensible rules for a human society and false notions of the wider universe.
Natural Selection as ‘Survival of the Grandkids’. Why mutual helpfulness is useful in a social species like humans. And given our intelligence, creeds that encourage helpfulness are useful even if based on false claims.
The Gospel of Enoch. How Mr Enoch Powell in his Evolution of the Gospel: A New Translation of the First Gospel defends his version of Christianity on the basis that the compilers of the Gospels were gross liars.
Gerrymandering the Gospels. Mel Gibson’s ‘The Passion of the Christ’ twists the tale.
Gaia, daughter of Pangloss. Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis as Rehashed Religion
“Fundamentalists” versus the Bible. The Unexpected Things said in the Bible. Including a detailed comparison of the Seven Days of Creation against a similar Babylonian story and against what we know now.
England’s Christian Revolution. The rival British Christianities of the 17th Century, and their relationship to the British Wars (“English Civil War”).
Burke – a British and Irish Deist. A man who founded 19th century Toryism, but was a Whig. And a disbeliver in an era before this could be said openly.
Celtic, Germanic, Multicultural. The relationships between the peoples of North-West Europe. And remarks on their current religious beliefs.
Is evil a problem? A quick discussion of what we might mean when we say ‘evil’.
Plato, St Augustine and the Counter-Enlightenment. A look at Western religious ideas, including Pascal and the Jesuits. The odd fact that the Jesuits had the most honest position in the theological dispute in which Pascal popularised the idea of Jesuitry.
Superorganisms – Ant Nests and Human Religions.
Is Giftedness Tied to Cultural Values? What’s mistaken and what’s useful in Charles Murray’s Human Accomplishment (a geographic / historic survey of famous names, mostly dead white males.) How he fails to mention evidence that most US creativity comes from recent arrivals, while being fully assimilated appears to depress creativity.
Bulstrode’s Progress. A study of a significant character from Middlemarch by Marianne Evans (George Elliot)
Sociocide. How Liberalism and North-West European norms became global norms by all sorts of dubious and oppressive methods.
Crusaders and Other Barbarians. How Europe was remade between the fall of the Roman Empire and the development of Puritanism.
Capitalism, a non-Christian theology of the Age of Reason. How Adam Smith’s ideas flowed naturally from his rejection of Christianity.
Nation States were NOT invented by the Peace of Westphalia, which merely left Germany in a fragmented state. Nation states existed long before that. The idea came from university Departments of Political Science, and is not supported by any historians I’ve come across.
- From two magazines, Problems and Labour Affairs.
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