June 25, 2008

The more people sift through the sands of the Holy Land, the more artifacts they turn up - silent witnesses to the lives and times of the razor-thin slice of humanity captured in the Bible. But also there is more opportunity than ever to generate meaningless but lucrative controversies by pretending to dig up material [...]

April 27, 2008

Recently, a clever ad campaign flooded the Toronto transit system. We were told that the makers of WhyBecauseISaidSo had put out a new pharmaceutical product called OBAY, which eliminates the dangerous tendency of teenagers to think for themselves. One of my special favourites shows a middle-aged dad hugging his cute—but now idea-free—teenage son, positioned above [...]

April 19, 2008

Nineteen fifty-four was a great year for new directions in medicine. At least, according to the traditional script.
American physician Joseph Murray transplanted a kidney from recently discharged soldier Ronald Herrick to his identical twin Richard, who was dying of kidney disease. Richard, fearing for his brother’s life, wanted to call off the operation. But Ronald [...]

February 10, 2008

If you have a kid who wants to go into science, you and the kid had better see this documentary, to be released in April. Either your kid should just sell out now and become an atheistic materialist or your kid needs a strategy to survive an astoundingly hostile atmosphere.
Recently, theExpelled movie’s line producer [...]

February 3, 2008

Abstinence education programs have been in the news a lot lately because there are a lot of them out there, and they seem to be having an effect. And, predictably, efforts are made to discredit them. After all, early teen sex is an excellent business op for venders of hookerwear (for every day, not just [...]

January 12, 2008

Levant is the Alberta-based publisher who printed the Danish cartoons that sparked a furore in some majority Muslim countries, where mocking Islam or the Prophet is not permitted, and he now faces human rights charges in Alberta:
Some excerpts:
When the Western Standard magazine printed the Danish cartoons of Mohammed two years ago, I was the publisher. [...]

We hear about the Christian Right all the time. Books are written about the danger it supposedly represents. But when I looked into it while researching The Spiritual Brain, I discovered a number of facts such as these:
… there is a widespread belief among academics (who are much less likely to be religious believers than [...]

January 10, 2008

I’ve been a journalist all my adult life, and I know when things don’t add up. The Darwinian evolution story that is taught to kids in public school systems (at our expense) does not add up.
If you want to know why I think so, have a look at some of these stories:
There is an scholarly [...]

December 29, 2007

Science journalist John Horgan created a minor stir a decade ago with his book, The End of Science, arguing that the major science discoveries are all behind us. Now that was hardly a popular thesis. As he recently recalled,
“One of my most memorable moments as a journalist occurred in December 1996, when I attended the [...]

December 25, 2007

Suzanne Fields, Washington Times columnist, reflects on how the legacy of Ann Frank, the doomed girl whose diary illuminated the lives of Holocaust victims, is becoming politicized:
We’re asked to vote “yes” or “no” on a series of complicated issues such as defining permissible degrees of censorship, rights of privacy and religious freedom, all framed in narrow [...]

December 23, 2007

Well, it’s Christmas again. And there seems to be a stirring in the air. I don’t know whether you have noticed it, but I certainly have. Many people are less afraid than they used to be to say “Merry Christmas.” But some people are still really challenged, according to Kristen Fyfe.
For example, did you know [...]

December 19, 2007

Why did the world’s most important atheist scholar, Antony Flew decide in his eighties that there is a God after all?
The New York Times was quick to suggest senility, but reading his book with Roy Varghese, I don’t think that will wash. Their slender hardcover, There IS a God (Harper One 2007) introduces us to [...]

December 15, 2007

Recently, a friend who lives in California wrote me a heartbreaking note. His daughter had gone on a mission trip to a poor district in Mexico and discovered, among many needy people, a child who appeared to be abandoned and starving. The child became very attached to his daughter and called her “Mother.”
He mused, “How [...]

December 5, 2007

In case you think nothing is changing in society, here’s a quick overview of two changes that are likely to make a difference in the long run: Who actually has kids and what do the kids think?
Who actually has kids?
That is a highly political issue. Some - for example, Pennsylvania State’s Philip Jenkins - argue [...]

December 1, 2007

If you live in a jurisdiction that enforces political correctness, consult your human rights advisor about whether you are permitted to read any of the following items of information:
Robert Knight asks the questions many won’t ask about AIDS:
One would think a 10 percent failure rate against a 100 percent fatal disease would continue to make [...]

November 23, 2007

In a recent post at TCS Daily (Technology. Commerce. Society), John Luik takes on the food fascists. About time, too.
In “Fat and Happy: The Weight Story No One Wants to Talk About”, he observes,
It’s been a tough time the last little while for the fatties among us - which is supposedly most of us. According [...]

November 19, 2007

Like many Christians, I have been suspicious of psychology, principally for the same reason that philosopher of science Karl Popper was: In its twentieth century incarnations, it was typically not falsifiable. For example, if you doubted that some Freudian theory was true, you were “defensive” about it, and therefore the theory must be true. If [...]

November 17, 2007

A recent Decima poll shows that Canadians are pretty evenly split on whether God created us, and if so, when.
Twenty-six percent of Canadians believe that “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.” A dramatically larger percentage of Americans (46%) believes that.
Thirty-four percent [...]

November 14, 2007

Recently, while working on The Spiritual Brain, I had a chance to study “altruism,” a technical term for the quality that causes people to prefer others’ welfare to their own, even if the others are unknown strangers.
Much social science literature on altruism is not worth reading because it proceeds from a fundamentally wrong assumption: Concern [...]

Why the recent spate of popular “anti-God” books? Books like Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (Daniel Dennett), The God Delusion (Richard Dawkins), God: The Failed Hypothesis (Victor J. Stenger), God Is Not Great (Christopher Hitchens) and The End of Faith (Sam Harris) dominate the charts, with some help from conferences such as [...]