Published on
5 November 2012
Posted in Conscience, Culture, Education, Marriage & Family, Moral Philosophy
School nurses have given [contraceptive] implants or jabs to girls aged between 13 and 16 more than 900 times in the past two years, a survey by The Daily Telegraph has found… A further 7,400 girls aged 15 and under have been given contraceptive injections or implants at family planning clinics… Under the patient confidentiality […]
Published on
29 October 2012
Posted in Culture, Freedom, Human Life, Social Commentary
In a recent lecture at Davos Julian Savulescu argued that it is not beyond the reach of modern science to create human beings with considerably greater powers of intelligence, physical strength and even moral rectitude. It was possible, he suggested, to create a ‘super-human’, a person, or kind of person, capable of transcending ordinary biological […]
Published on
25 October 2012
Posted in Culture, Education, Music & Art
Some readers may have had the pleasure of viewing this picture which has been doing the rounds on social media. Like many of my musician friends I ‘shared’ it, and that promptly started a discussion with two others, not musicians themselves but both well-attuned to current social mores, as to whether there was anything wrong […]
Published on
1 October 2012
Posted in Christianity, Civil Liberties, Culture, Philosophy, Religion, Social Commentary
The idea that there exists today a Christendom such as existed in the pre-modern era is as fanciful as the suggestion that the followers of Mohammed have established a truly global Caliphate. Nonetheless, to cast the recent rioters against portayals of Mohammed perceived as insulting and their political leaders as only mere descendants of clannish […]
Published on
13 September 2012
Posted in British Politics, Culture, Human Life, Moral Philosophy, Same-Sex Marriage, Uncategorized
For many supporters of same-sex marriage (SSM) in the UK their opponents are ‘bigots’. They are entitled to their opinion but the epithet in question is, to parody Samuel Beckett, fast becoming a word in search of some meaning. The assumption is that there are people who want something, and that there is no problem […]
Published on
5 September 2012
Posted in Culture, Human Life, Moral Philosophy, Uncategorized
There is a school of thought that holds we are at our most honest, and most essentially human, when at our most animal level. This, at least, is a suggestion made by Marc Cooper in his book, The Last Honest Place in America, about high-stakes poker games in Las Vegas. ‘Its thesis’, writes David Flusfeder, […]
Published on
16 August 2012
‘Modernity’, wrote Hegel, ‘is the secularisation of religion’. In many ways this is true of twentieth-century Europe during which we saw one responsibility after another pass from churches into the hands of government. Chief among these was, of course, the Welfare State, but education and moral authority followed not far behind. The last-mentioned is most […]
Published on
31 May 2012
Posted in Culture, Education, Social Commentary
There was a famous sketch performed long ago in an episode of the Frost Report where three men standing alongside one other represented the three then generally accepted socio-economic classes within society. Each was a caricature based upon traits commonly taken to have been present in individuals of that particular class. It is most likely […]