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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Taken for Granted


I have always enjoyed sport. When I was young I played cricket, rugby league and basketball with varying degrees of success but with considerable enjoyment. The teams I played in were not champion teams and we probably lost more often than we won. But that was character building as well. I also competed in athletics […]

January 9, 2016

It’s About Time!


So, another year has passed. There is nothing particularly special about that but I am heartily sick of people saying to me, “Where did the year go! It seemed to go so quickly.” In fact it went where every other year we have experienced went. (It is as though they expected to turn a rock […]

January 2, 2016

Can You Believe That?


“If you open your mind too much, your brain may fall out!” Attributed to The Telegraph commenting on a video purporting to show an alien body being dissected. (Although I have also noticed someone recently attributing it to G K Chesterton!) It seems a harmlessly endearing quality of the human race that it seems capable […]

December 19, 2015

The Inevitable Changes in Religious Demography


Every national church or religion has established itself by pretending some special mission from God, communicated to certain individuals. The Jews have their Moses, the Christians their Jesus Christ, their apostles and saints, and the Turks their Mahomet, as if the way to God was not open to every man alike. Each of those churches […]

December 12, 2015

So, What Can I Say?


In the early 1960’s, as I remember, the American comedian, Stan Freberg, was quite popular and his recordings were regularly played on Australian radio stations. One such piece (which I think was taken from his radio show in the US) was a bit of a spoof of him attempting to sing the Jerome Kern standard […]

December 5, 2015

Keeping the Bear at Bay


It is said that the eminent Russian writer, Fyodor Dostoevsky was famous for the psychological insights of his writing. In his Winter Notes on Summer Impressions he mounted the following challenge: Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that cursed thing come to mind […]

November 28, 2015

Fronting up to Islamist Extremism


Woe to them who fake Scriptures and say ‘This is from God’ so that they might earn some profit thereby. The Koran   Most of us are familiar with the famous painting by Michelangelo on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. It was commissioned by Pope Julius II, a commission only reluctantly […]

November 20, 2015

Another Look at Education


I have written a few essays on education in the past, being an area of some interest of mine. I have been thinking lately, that perhaps we should go back and ask some basic questions about education. It is a very ambitious task, I know, but I am going to attempt to address the following […]

November 8, 2015

The Future of Marriage


Fiddle de dee, fiddle de dee, The Fly has married the Bumblebee Children’s Nursery Rhyme Evolutionary psychologists tell us that monogamy is the most likely natural disposition of human beings when their mating patterns are considered. They draw this conclusion from the fact that whilst men are on average slightly bigger than women and generally […]

November 1, 2015

Moral Relativity


The conventionally religious have historically believed that morality is handed down as a prescription by God. They think that Mankind is so debauched they could not possibly develop a moral code that got beyond individual benefit. Plato had a higher opinion of Mankind and believed that human beings were imbued with ideals that were innate […]

October 25, 2015