The Palestine Dilemma

On 7 October 2023, Hamas terrorists emerged from Gaza to commit an horrendous atrocity against Israeli civilians. This deadly incursion has been well documented so I won’t elaborate on the gruesome details. Inevitably Israel responded with deadly force in order to deter further aggression and to rescue the civilian hostages that Hamas had kidnapped during […]

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The Downside of a University Education

At the age of eighteen, I left my family home in Charters Towers to start an engineering degree at James Cook University (JCU) in Townsville. In those days it was quite an extraordinary thing to do! In my high school years I can only remember two students in the cohort that I knew ahead of […]

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The Perfidy of God

Well, after this essay my soul is likely to be sentenced to eternal damnation in Hell, but I can’t but help share with you some of my reservations about conventional religious beliefs. Traditional monotheistic religions have been largely constructed by those who have claimed to have had particular, personal access to God. In ancient times […]

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The Manufacturing of Muhammad

Some years ago I wrote an essay which I titled The Most Famous Man who never Lived which critiqued the mythology that had been created to support the notion that an extraordinary man, who purported to be the Son of God lived on this earth some two millennia ago who held the keys to eternal […]

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Coping With Social Media


Most of us baby-boomers will remember that in the 1960’s a Canadian academic, Marshall McLuhan, whom we’d never heard of, famously declared “The medium is the message!” It was one of those iconic statements that few of us understood but seemed so right we could not help but applaud it. What did it mean? Some […]

August 12, 2016

In Praise of Mystery


It seems innate in human beings to have a sense of wonder. Being confronted with mystery however brings out different responses in people. The left-brain dominant determinists and materialists are uncomfortable when they can’t answer the questions of “why” and “how”. For that we probably should be grateful because such people have done the legwork […]

August 6, 2016

Detention and Indigenous Disadvantage


Malcolm Turnbull is no doubt justified in initiating a Royal Commission into the treatment of young people in the Northern Territory’s detention centres. The inmates of these facilities have been treated appallingly and we need to see that the welfare of the young men incarcerated in these institutions is protected. No civilised society should condone […]

July 29, 2016

A Little More on Religious Tolerance


In last week’s essay, Religion in the Modern World, I cited the works of John Locke who argued for religious tolerance and played an important role in promoting the basic freedoms that our modern democratic society is based upon. I thought this week I might expand on that theme a little more. Inevitably, in such […]

July 23, 2016

Religion in the Modern World


As you who read my blogs regularly would have ascertained, (both of you) I am not a religious person in the conventional sense of the word. I am however deeply spiritual. My spiritual needs, just like those of most people, demand attention. If our spiritual needs are so demanding let us just spend a moment […]

July 16, 2016

Deluded Through Distraction


It is claimed by some that the 18th century, Dutch enlightenment philosopher, Baruch Spinoza was the pre-eminent writer on eternity. He was certainly one of the initial philosophers in the West to try to come to grips with the notion of Self. His work is credited with initiating biblical criticism.   Spinoza proclaimed, “Only intense […]

July 9, 2016

Globalisation, Chaos and Political Instability


When we step back to analyse what is going on socially and politically in the world it is hard not to be dismayed by the contradictory trends. On the one hand we have the seemingly inexorable move to globalisation. Both the world’s capital markets and labour markets are seemingly growing more encompassing, demolishing national borders […]

July 2, 2016

Offense and Other Nonsense


This is an era when the rarest commodity is a person who says what they think and thinks about what they say. There is a sense that we are being deafened by a cacophony of multimedia noise at the same time we are being crushed into conformity. Chris Kenny, Associate Editor, The Australian The good […]

June 26, 2016

Challenging the Dangerous Ideas of Radical Islam


Well the USA has just suffered another radical Islamist inspired atrocity. The appalling loss of life in the Orlando club massacre at the hands of a gunman who swore allegiance to the Islamic State, reminds us again of the terrible danger we face at the hands of Islamic fundamentalists. Rather than analyse this specific case, […]

June 18, 2016

It’s Time to Listen


I have written quite a few articles on free speech in recent times, but it has suddenly occurred to me that I might have been unknowingly pursuing the wrong objective. Whilst I would surely argue that that we should be able to speak our minds without undue impediment, that is unlikely to help unless people […]

June 11, 2016