I see that a video of the recent debate between Alister McGrath and Peter Atkins is now available here. The topic of the debate is: Darwin and Humanity: should we rid the mind of God?

 

The sound quality is somewhat suspect for Peter Atkins, but stick with it. Clearly God is on McGrath’s side – or at least the sound engineer is. 

 

I have to say that I was very unimpressed by McGrath – he sounded just like a trendy vicar giving a sermon, with the amount of his handwaving counterbalanced by the shallowness of his arguments. And I marvelled when he said:

It sounded to me as though he needs God so that he has meaning to his life. I don’t. When I look at the night sky, I too realise the same fact about stellar distances, but that to me is amazing, not melancholic, and, I might add, that knowledge has come through scientific advance and not through theology.

I would like to think that this gentleman is being ironical, but I fear that he is being absolutely serious… Clearly, care in the community is going too far…

 

 

However, good to know where he stands. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry after listening to this codswallop. However, I know that he just can’t help it. Oh, and he’s an ex-policeman apparently. Makes you feel proud, doesn’t it?

Further to my comment the other day that Poland seems intent on marching forward into a new Dark Age, Doug Ireland has an excellent in-depth piece covering the background to the new anti-gay bill.

Via Not Saussure, here’s a pointer to an interview with Adam Curtis about his latest work, The Trap. Worth reading.

Reginald Dwight, better known as Elton John, turns 60 this weekend. While that’s a sobering thought in itself, he uses the occasion to bring our attention to something far more sobering – the continuing abuses of the human rights of gay people around the world. Go and read the article – it’s a good one – and then read some of the comments left on it. It is clear from them, as Elton says, that homophobia is far from dead.

Another reason why I feel that Poland appears to have a lot of growing up to do.

I’m a bit late in noticing it, but yesterday the Baghdad Blogger – Salam Pax – had an article published in The Guardian. Go and read it.

The concept of the Me Generation is not particularly new – it’s been around since the 1970s, but I wonder whether the intensity dial isn’t being turned up a notch or two higher by our technology.

 

Danah Boyd, over at Apophenia, has been wondering something similar, and as usual explores the issues in a thoughful way. She comes to the conclusion that technology isn’t the culprit, rather it’s ourselves.

That was the subtitle of the second part of Adam Curtis’ new series on BBC2. Another hour of exposition of theory illuminated (mostly) by a dense weave of archive footage. This second part struck me as being somewhat easier to grasp than the first, but it’s still tough going for me. Still, I shouldn’t complain at having something on the telly that deserves to be well-chewed and savoured. It makes a welcome change from the usual diet of pap.

 

There were some good moments in it. I screamed an obscenity at the point in the interview with James Buchanan, when Curtis poses the question to him on whether some politicians could act out of idealism. Buchanan’s point of view is that politicians and bureaucrats are self-serving and that public duty is a myth – it is impossible for them to interpret and express the general will of the people. Buchanan’s reply to Curtis was one of puzzlement and denial that idealism could ever exist – a "it does not compute" reaction. My scream was powered by the certain and personal knowledge of one politician – my father – who certainly was never self-serving, and went into politics out of a sense of duty. He may well have been a rare bird, and perhaps these days his breed is even rarer, but for Buchanan to deny even the possibility of the existence of such a species was too much for me. 

 

Not Saussure and Fixed Point have more, much more, in-depth analysis on The Lonely Robot. Recommended reading.

I see the leaders of Poland are determined to turn the clock back. They want to introduce a law to ban discussions on homosexuality in schools and educational institutions across the country, with teachers facing the sack, fines or imprisonment.

 

It’s only a few years since the pernicious Section 28 law was at last repealed in the UK, and now another EU country wants to go back down that road. And as proof that being a leader of a country is no obstacle to being barking mad, we have President Lech Kaczynski, the twin brother of the prime minister, supporting the law, claiming that:

Er, Lech, fat chance. Life doesn’t work that way. But then, rational thought clearly doesn’t seem to be his strong point.