Grombles

Had an interesting discussion with a Muslim friend today about the ethics of killing. Could it ever be morally justifiable? Abrahamic scriptures, especially the old testament, are awash with murders and killings, some sanctioned by the prophets and assorted mouthpieces for god. Some killing is even mandatory. For example all Jews are instructed in the old Testament to kill everyone belonging to the 7 Canaanite tribes for example - Deut 20:17 , or to slaughter Amaleks, especially their children - Deut 25:19 . So accepting for a moment that these draconian instructions were written in times when tribal leaders had fewer options available to them with respect to managing miscreants and maintaining some sort of law and order, I suspect that most people today would agree that killing people is a bad thing and should not be condoned except under extraordinary circumstances. My friend and I then proceeded to try to list those circumstances. We started with self-defence or perhaps protecti...

If someone cut off part of your child's body, without anaesthetic, because they heard voices that told them to do it, there would be an international outcry. It would make front page news in free media throughout the world. If caught, the perpetrators would be strung up from lampposts for extreme child abuse or at the very least locked away for the rest of their sorry lives - and in solitary confinement for fear of fellow inmates finishing the job that the baying lynch mobs would have obliged the public on the outside. Evil, evil people use knives on children. Period. But if the people who commit this horror are the child's own parents, the whole world turns a blind eye because "it's their tradition". We can't interfere with a parent's right to butcher their children if bearded nutters put the instruction in so called sacred books. Collective and total madness in the name of preserving balmy cultural heritage. It is estimated that over 20,000 young gir...

I am an atheist. Not an agnostic, an atheist. THERE IS NO GOD. At least not a supercomputer-in-the-sky fairytale type of god. And certainly not one defined by a bunch of bearded blokes thousands of years ago. I'm not going to go into the arguments which support my lack of faith in there being any possibility for a deity (there are many better arguers for atheism around) suffice to say that I believe we all have the potential to understand every unexplained mystery. We are surrounded by stuff today that would blow the minds of those beardies for which they invented gods to explain, but where we now have scientific explanations (science means 'know', not 'have faith'). Where organised faith is concerned, I believe there are two types of people in this world. Those who need to ring-fence things they don't understand by assigning them to a god (who does the understanding for them - otherwise referred to as the 'god-of-gaps'), and those who refuse to assign...