I hate NetLibrary. It’s rubbish. What idiot decided to design an ebook site where reading sessions time out in about 15 minutes, after which it doesn’t even remember what book you were reading, let alone what page you were on? Ridiculous. I wouldn’t have thought it was that unusual for people to have about four books open at once and to dip into ( Read more... )

Today I am attempting to read and absorb a portion of a book by a deliberately obfuscating moron of a theologian, John Milbank. His theology may be very interesting, but I cannot take anyone seriously who writes sentences like these and uses inverted commas in this way:

“Yet even the Church can only enter a defining discourse in abstract, ‘ ( Read more... )

Way behind the rest of the UK, I just watched Jon Ronson’s Channel 4 Revelations programme about the Alpha Course, How To Find God. I also currently happen to be re-reading professional sceptic Michael Shermer’s acclaimed (but in my view, slightly overrated) book, Why People Believe Weird ThingsAccording to Jon Ronson, The Alpha Course has a pretty ( Read more... )

A lovely quotation from Recent Criticisms of Consciousness in The Analysis of Mind by Bertrand Russell ( Read more... )

I was expecting to find this assignment difficult, but... I'm not. It's about natural law and conscience in the Summa Theologica, and, dull though it is, it's also pretty simple.

Want to see a picture?

( God's making the rules. )

The brilliant SparkNotes on Kant's Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals: "[A] secure understanding of morality must be based on the "pure," a priori concepts of reason. ... If moral ideas were drawn from experience, then they could not be assured universal validity, for they would be based only on the limited set of events that we have ( Read more... )

As always, I know I will not go out, but I like to pretend that there is still a choice.

Today I was feeling peckish, and then I suddenly remembered that I had some dark chocolate digestive biscuits! It was a wonderful moment :)
Dear Mr Locke ( Read more... )