When I was younger I was a great fan of George Bernard Shaw. I studied Caesar and Cleopatra at school. My English master was a devout catholic and dismissed Shaw as a lightweight playwright and insisted that we should read Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra in juxtaposition. Well, I am not about to criticise the works […]

Christmas 1970 was not a good time for my wife and I. We were living in Townsville and our first-born, Belinda, was about fifteen months old. My parents lived in Charters Towers, not much more than an hour’s drive south of Townsville. We intended to drive there and spend Christmas with my parents. There had […]

Progress and Religion It is an interesting fact that most economically developed democracies, with the exception of the USA, have become more secular. Research indicates that the extent to which people emphasise religion and engage in religious behaviour could, indeed, be predicted with considerable accuracy from the level of a society’s economic development. In their […]

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” […]