Critical Thinking

Top 5 Non-Religious Books on Living a Good Life

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There is a prevailing, and fairly common belief, that we need religion to live a truly ethical and moral life, and that a life without a god (pick any, they all claim it), leads you down the road to immorality. It is pure nonsense of course, and tempting as it might be to explain why, my immediate motivation for this post is not to go there, but rather to highlight a rather interesting list of secular books on the topic of living a good, and yet completely godless, life.

Well-known British philosophy professor, A.C. Grayling, has had a lifetime ambition to distill into one volume the very best secular thoughts, and so after many decades of work, he finally completed it, (if curious, you can click here for more details on his new publication “The Good Book”). Anyway, my point is not to point you at that specific book, but since I’m on the topic, do check it out. Instead I want to make the observation that he spent a heck of a long time  plodding through thousands of texts to complete his book, so he has now got specific recommendations – a Top-5 list of books “on how to live a satisfying and morally good life.” …

I was quite surprised at a couple of them.

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Sharia law: an eye for an eye

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What exactly is Sharia? Ask a believer and you will be told that it is “God’s” law. Now, what makes this interesting is that if you attempt to drill down into the details, you make the fascinating discovery that there is no actual agreement on it. Modernists, traditionalists and fundamentalists all hold different views, as do adherents to different schools of Islamic thought and scholarship. Even when its the same school, if you look across different countries and cultures you find varying interpretations.

Apparently God can’t quite make up his mind.

A long term goal for many Muslims is to enforce Sharia, but without being able to nail it, you end up with a specific interpretation being the goal for those who pursue this.

Anyway, why am I babbling on about all this? Well, because of the latest news out from Iran. Here are the details …

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UFO Alien abduction – proof?

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There is a report of Alien abduction from about a month ago that I have just come across.

It concerns a chap who wandered into his garden in the middle of the night, and found that he had lost an hour. Apparently he really had lost an hour and had solid proof, his watch was one hour out of sync with the rest of the world, in fact he was quite astonished to discover that he had  leap forward into the future. So he contacted the Ministry of Defence to report a UFO abduction.

The details read as follows:

It was an ”unseasonably mild” night in late October when the man from Barnes, south-west London, could not sleep so took to his garden with the drink. ”After a few moments I heard a distant roar of engines getting louder and louder,” he told the Ministry of Defence.

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#SuperInjunction

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Now that the concept of super injunctions is falling apart in the UK, I can  reveal that I am not having an affair with Jeremy Clarkson. Also, it has now been disclosed that Clark Kent is Superman.

(OK, tongue placed firmly in cheek, but stick with me here, I have a skeptical point coming up later on)

Folks not in the UK might be wondering what this is about, so as a quick aside I better explain. In the UK if the press catch you doing something you should not have been doing (think shenanigans one night with a supermodel), you can take out a legal injunction to prevent publication. However, what can then happen is that the press can be a bit sneaky and report that there is an injunction in place that prevents them reporting something and so they name names without actually saying what happened. To prevent this, there is the concept of what is now known as a super-injunction to prevent them reporting on the very existence of  the injunction. To do that costs about £50K.

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Relativity a myth? – Conservapedia claims it is.

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I’m sure that I need not tell you about “Conservapedia”, the degree of craziness is well-known, but just in case you don’t (yet) know, its the home website for all the right-wing theist kooks. Everything you might expect is there, for example …

  • Anti gay bashing
  • Obama bashing
  • Misleading anti-abortion rhetoric
  • Creationist stance and opposed to evolution
  • Claims that dinosaurs and humans co-existed
  • Claims that Fox News is fair and balanced
  • Etc …

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Saying sorry for something somebody else did

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An apology has been offered for the Spanish Inquisition.

Can you actually apologise for the actions of others? It is debatable, but to a degree perhaps yes, for example some corporate representative says or does something inappropriate, then later when discovered, a career is terminated, and another representative for the same organisation steps in to grovel, apologise, and explain that such behaviour is not part of their culture. Ah, but what happens when somebody starts to apologies for actions that took place centuries ago?

The latest example of this is reported in today’s telegraph, “Jews receive apology over Spanish Inquisition execution“. It reads …

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