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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Especially Ordinary


Especially Ordinary Despite our supposed sophistication, vanity is endemic in modern society. I see no end of examples of people who want to look attractive, be seen as important or have some special world-shattering unique characteristics. It seems to me to be a comforting feature of old age to eschew such meaningless pursuits. But then […]

May 17, 2015

A Few Crocodile Tears


Crocodiles are remarkable evolutionary survivors. They have inhabited the earth in their current form for millions of years. On top of that (or maybe because of that) they are quite ubiquitous, continuing to survive in healthy populations in Africa, Asia and Australia. Their predominant diet is fish but they are very partial also, when the […]

May 11, 2015

The Indonesian Executions


Well it has finally happened – the two Australian drug traffickers have been executed by an Indonesian firing squad. I abhor capital punishment and this particular event seemed, because of some of the Indonesian incompetence, more barbaric than it need to have been. Despite my feelings for Chan, Sukumaran and their families and loved ones, […]

May 1, 2015

The Enlightened Mind


In previous essays, I have proposed that the defining characteristic of our humanity is our consciousness. Because we not only have the ability to think and make decisions but are also consciously aware of these mental processes we have what is sometimes called a “theatre of mind”. Consequently we are forced to deal with two […]

April 25, 2015

Men Behaving Badly


Most people who have any familiarity at all with the subject of human behaviour will know of the “Nature vs Nurture” debate. The argument was about whether our biological history or our social conditioning determines how humans behave. We now know however, that both contribute to our behaviour. In fact the influences are so closely […]

April 18, 2015

Tiptoeing Around the Lake Of Happiness


My long-term, long-suffering readers will understand that I (and most likely all of us) have had an abiding interest in happiness, what promotes it and how it may be attained. Indeed if you search the archives of my blog posts you will find a number of essays on this topic. My essay this week will […]

April 12, 2015

Avoiding the Issue


It was one of the most pitiful sights I’ve seen for a long time. Former Rugby League player, State of Origin and Australian representative, Glenn Lazarus was sitting in front of the TV cameras trying to look hurt and demanding that Tony Abbott apologise for his remarks about a “feral” Senate, and this coming from […]

March 28, 2015

Understanding Human Behaviour – Some of the Mistakes We Make!


In our little book Humanity at Work and its subsequent sequel The Myth of Nine to Five the good Dr Phil and I outlined the prime human needs as: Physical needs, Social needs, Intellectual needs, and Spiritual needs. I won’t waste your time going through these as they are largely self-evident. But in this essay […]

March 23, 2015

So, Who Wants To Be a Jihadist?


Hands up all those who would like to live in an Islamic Caliphate under Sharia law? Mm – I don’t see many takers. Wouldn’t you enjoy living somewhere where you could be executed for apostasy, being homosexual or insulting the Prophet Muhhammad? Wouldn’t you be thrilled to have our women subjugated as second class citizens, […]

March 15, 2015

Fashioning Our Realities


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 […]

March 7, 2015