The Oxford conference 11 Jun 2010 … audio podcasts are here. This is the Religion, tolerance and intolerance conference I recently attended. I particularly was wowed and provoked into thinking – a rare occurrence these days – by Ben Kaplan’s talk ‘A tale of two churches’, in which he noted that religions in Europe tolerated each other but still tended to hate each other; tolerance was not a virtue. Despite this, they found all kinds of mutual accommodations, like Catholics and Lutherans sharing village churches. History Religion History
History Irish history of science 18 Sep 2009 The deputy prime minister, or Tanaiste, of Ireland, has made a slight gaffe: She said the IDA would be marketing Ireland as the innovation island — “like Einstein explaining his theory of evolution”. After that, she said that Ireland would win sport like Darwin discovering gravity, and sing in Eurovision… Read More
Evolution The World According to Genesis: Moral Knowledge 6 Jun 200724 Nov 2022 Like any middle eastern deity, YHWHW Elohim is a fairly petty individual. He doesn’t want competition from his creations, so he blocks access to the “Tree of Life”, which is a magical tree whose fruit can make you live forever. We have two magical trees, a corporeal deity of limited knowledge and good will, a snake that talks and has intentions like any trickster god to thwart the designs of the deity, and a justification for wearing clothes, which is not a matter just of shame, but of intended purpose. Read More
Evolution Evolution quotes 31 May 2010 Evolution itself, it must be remembered, does not necessarily mean, applied to society, the movement of man to a desirable goal. It is a neutral, scientific conception, compatible either with optimism or with pessimism. According to different estimates it may appear to be a cruel sentence or a guarantee of… Read More
This “fire and sword” belief not just with regard to religion but with culture and ethnicity in particular is so written in to popular notions of history and for so long was used by historians with regard to what are viewed as the ‘dark age’ ethnic origins of many modern European societies. Warfare and violence was always viewed as the cause of major shifts in culture and language. Its a view that held from the 8th cen. until nearly the end of the 20th cen with regard to British history. It’s just not that simple. As society was on a much smaller scale at this time you can find for example in the U.K. in the 6th century Celts and Saxons not just sharing the same village but living and sleeping in the same one room hut. But a Briton remained a Briton even if he wore a gold hilted sword, as a legal code put it. Not a popular period to study these days but a crucial one as it puts some rather old beliefs to bed.