One of life’s idiosyncrasies is how it is seemingly full of paradoxes. One paradox that interests me is our various responses to stress. Some people seem to be able to cope with life threatening illnesses with equanimity. Others seem to fall apart at the seams when faced with, what seem to the rest of us, […]

Education has been under the spotlight in recent times, largely because of Australia’s declining performance on the world stage. There have been various reports (chief amongst them the Gonski report) about how we need to spend more money to ensure our children move their way up the international league table of educational outcomes. The dominant […]

I have written many essays on human behaviour. Apart from the music of Mozart, test cricket, and catching Barramundi, there are few subjects that interest me more. Most psychologists would concede that our biological history and our socialisation, particularly in our earlier years, have a large impact on how we behave. In this regard one […]

I am an inveterate jogger – in fact with the recent  passing of another birthday, I should probably say a veteran, inveterate jogger. Once I might have euphemistically described myself as a runner. But my dictionary confirms that to jog means to “run slowly” and given that it is some time since I passed anybody […]

I have found myself in a real quandary this week as a result of the atrocity committed by the Islamist psychopaths who sought vengeance on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo for daring to use satire to question the mediaeval beliefs of their fundamentalist Islam. I have written many essays about the core issues here […]

“What is life?” seems to me to be a very important and fundamental question. The fabulous physicist (and creator of a famous schizophrenic quantum cat) Erwin Schrodinger wrote a non-fiction book with this title. But unlike my explanation, Schrodinger was keen to show how life was dependent on a whole lot of chemical and physical […]

Religious scholars tell us that the notion of heaven or paradise is a relatively recent human idea. Heaven was largely unknown to the characters of the Old Testament. They did not seem to aspire to eternal life in a paradise with God, but in a rather early acknowledgement of Richard Dawkins and “The Selfish Gene” […]

In the early years of the Christian tradition there were two parallel approaches to faith, one was Gnostic and the other was Literalist. This phenomenon has been studied by two academics and spiritual historians Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy. They draw the following contrasts between the two approaches. Literalists Literalists teach that the important thing […]

I come from a working class family. My father worked in a very basic blue-collar job. But he and my mother managed their finances well. Apart from the purchase of their house, they never borrowed money. As I recall it, my father was probably sixty years old before the house was paid off. Until late […]

I have written elsewhere that the attribute that most distinguishes human beings from other animals is their consciousness – not only can they think but they are aware of their thinking. This allows the development of what is called the “concept of mind” such that we can imagine others have the same capacity. Biologists and […]