Agnosticism Very Short Introduction - Robin Le Poidevin While in the UK, I was looking for the VSI* book on consciousness, as the assistant was looking at the rack for the book, Madeleine pointed out this book on agnosticism. This is the fourth book I have read about agnosticism presumably by agnostics, they were: In … Continue reading Manifesto
I am going to tackle a difficult problem here. I am not an expert here, not even an expert on my own experience of consciousness. Quite often it is described as The Hard Problem. Some pundits don’t see it as a problem at all. Problem or not, all is not well in the house of … Continue reading Consciousness
One of the first pieces I ever wrote on the web was about agnosticism. Before James died there was little spare time for writing nevermind spare time for thought. I had recently opened a personal web page. I decided to put some time into it. Agnosticism was my chosen subject. When I put finger to … Continue reading Agnosticism
My wife spends a little bit of time with Ann almost on a weekly basis when the universe allows. Ann is sort of a guru, that provides insights into the way the universe is unfolding, and perhaps how to respond to that unfolding. This afternoon I asked my wife what they spoke about in this … Continue reading Love
A while back I read this book, The Jesus Sayings by Rex Weyler. Weyler uses his journalistic talents to look through a whole host of documentation including Josephus’s stories, Paul’s letters, the Gospels of Thomas and Mary, and Q collections, some 200 documents in all. Rex Weyler I don't have any dog in the fight … Continue reading The Jesus Sayings
This blog is a rebuttal of some arguments found in Marvin Edwards' essay on free will. For full disclosure, I am monistically inclined. And I cannot do otherwise but find remnants of dualism in Marvin Edwards' essay. While dualism can be useful to model this universe, it is fundamentally wrong, at least in my opinion. … Continue reading Deception
When discussing free will, people quite often refer to it as an emergent property. Emergence is described by Wikipedia as an entity having properties its parts do not have, due to interactions among the parts. This is fair enough. Sure, humans behave differently to molecules that make up the body; but so what? The assembled … Continue reading Emergence
I have real mixed feelings about religion. While historically, and perhaps to a lesser extent currently, it is a source of much pain and suffering. Now most sensible people might not buy into eternal suffering after death, some people still do and it is still on the smorgasbord of beliefs that is on offer. On … Continue reading Religion draft
An evangelical Christian suggested Spong was not a real Christian writer, he suggested that Billy Graham amongst others was a real Christian writer. So I trotted down to the local library to get a copy of Angels and read this book. I read each chapter twice before commenting on it. To be fair it was … Continue reading Graham’s Angels
A little while after James died, I got into discussions on what is sadly now the defunct AgnosticForums website. More than one of its threads touched upon free will. Initially, I thought the discussions trite, I believed I had free will, and even if I did not have free will, the whole thing was pretty … Continue reading Free Will