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I’m currently watching Torchwood “Children of Earth” day four. It’s very interesting… but note that spoilers are contained within. So if you haven’t seen it yet, now would be a good time to stop reading ;)

The story so far: the 456 (or four-five-six, the aliens) have demanded 10% of the world’s children. It seems that they’re running some sort of protection racket: give us what we want, or we’ll wipe out your species. What I don’t quite understand is… if they want children so badly, why don’t they just wipe out the population and take them? If they do indeed have the power to wipe out everyone on the planet, why don’t they just do it?

I think they’re bluffing. But we’ll see!

One other thing about Torchwood I forgot to mention the other day which annoyed me. When Gwen was interviewing the doctor who wanted to join Torchwood, he said that one of the reasons he was interested was because of a woman who committed suicide. Apparently she was a devout Christian, and when she found out that aliens were real she couldn’t take it… “science had won”, she said. She realised that her place in the universe was, well, tiny. This annoyed me, because even if there were aliens, that would say nothing about the relationship between science and Christianity. It seemed bizarre – it was just perpetuating the myth that science and religion are in conflict. Lazy writing, in my opinion! Anyway, just a little rant.

I blame all this on Richard Dawkins and the so-called “new atheists”, they have a lot to answer for. Anyway, I’ll stop rambling on about Torchwood and science and stuff ;)

I’ve been having a discussion in the comments thread of Caity’s blog post on Kindness. The discussion revolves around the concept of morality: can we be ‘moral’ if there is no God?

My contention is that without the concept of God, there can be no absolute morals. By that I mean, no morals which would apply the world over. So, to take a topical example, suicide bombers could not be said to be acting immorally because they believe that it is right and moral for them to do so. There is no ultimate standard by which we can make value judgements on morality, therefore claiming that someone else’s action is immoral is actually illogical because you are only making judgements based on your own standard.

All of this hasn’t yet reached the point of Christian morality: all I’m doing is pointing out what I perceive to be inconsistencies in atheistic morals, and not defending Christianity as such.

However, Caity pointed out this quiz on Biblical morals, and I suggested that the writers of the quiz have got their theology wrong. She invited me to follow up this comment with something more detailed, so as a result that’s what I’m going to try and do.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been my experience that a lot of people who work in the IT and general technology sector are atheists. For example, The Register seems to adopt a fairly passive anti-religious tone in its articles (and a lot of the commenters follow suit, except they are usually less passive).

In technological circles particularly, bashing religion seems to be de rigeur. However, I’ve come across a lot of Christian people – some in fairly influential positions – who work in the field of IT and Computer Science. It is my contention that there are actually just as many Christians in IT as there are in other disciplines.

Here are a few people I’ve found. Some of them you may have heard of, some of them I’ve just sort of stumbled upon because I’ve been searching for something computer-related and browsed through the rest of their website, only to find out they were Christian!

• Jon Skeet. You have probably never heard of him, but he’s a bit of a legend over at Stack Overflow.
• Larry Wall. The creator of a language called Perl, you may have heard of it…
• Simon Cozens – speaking of Perl, Simon used to run perl.com and has written several books on Perl.
• Donald Knuth. This guy is the godfather of algorithms, his seminal “The Art of Computer Programming” is a classic, and he is respected by many programmers the world over.

I have found many such examples when searching the internet for help on computer-related problems, or browsing the biographies of famous programming people. Just goes to show, God loves everyone – even computer scientists!

There’s a new study out which shows a link between IQ and atheism: the higher the IQ you have, the higher the chance that you are an atheist.

The implication a lot of people seem to be drawing from this is that “Religion makes people thick”, or, “only thick people believe in God” (see the article on The Register for more on that line of reasoning).

Ignoring the various flaws in the line of reasoning the study seems to be taking, I just think the whole premise is absurd. So absurd, in fact, I’m not going to bother ranting about it (shock!! horror!!)

Sam Harris is requesting people complete surveys on his website. You are requested to complete a survey (there’s more than one of them) if you are either (a) an atheist, (b) a dedicated Christian.

The reason I’m posting this here is because I think with a lot of these surveys, the only people who bother responding are (a) atheists, (b) Christians who I wouldn’t agree with on a lot of things.

I know there are a few Christians who read this blog who I do agree with on a lot of things, hopefully by filling out the surveys it will give them a more balanced view :-)

No, not me — I know I’m not normal! I’m talking about the program “Am I Normal” which aired on BBC2 last night. I managed to catch about the last two thirds of it. This is a brief synopsis of the programme:

Dr Tanya Byron explores what some consider the fine line between religious devotion and psychiatric disorder. She sees what happens when rational scientists try to analyse religious phenomena like Speaking in Tongues and Hearing Voices. And she considers the beliefs of faith healers who claim miracles happen, and those who believe they can cast out the malevolent spirits of the dead from within the living. (Source)

Now, although I didn’t see the entire programme, it did annoy me somewhat. The problem with these shows is the assumed atheism. The whole feeling I got from the show was, “let’s investigate these nutcases who call themselves Christians and show how unscientific and ridiculous it all is.” It was quite clear that the woman presenting the programme was highly skeptical of religion, and it came across.

The problem with these programmes, though, is not so much that they pick on Christianity – it’s more that they don’t present anyone making a good case for it. In what I saw of “Am I Normal” last night, they had a few examples of people talking about their experiences – but not one of them made anything like a case for why belief is rational. So, in other words, if someone was watching who was curious about Christianity, they’d probably be left with the feeling that we’re all a bunch of idiots with absolutely no rational grounds for belief whatsoever.

I feel particularly strong about this because of the talk we went to on Sunday night about the evidence for Jesus!

*sigh*

Ah well, if people want to find out about what Christianity actually is, there are plenty of options: Christianity Explored, for one.

The saddest part of the programme for me was the people hearing voices in their heads. She spoke to one who seemed to have a demonic voice in his head – he had been diagnosed as a schizophrenic. What saddened me was that he probably could have had help if he’d gone to a Christian counsellor. Sometimes problems of this nature are not purely mental – I believe there is a spiritual realm as well. I wish I could find a quote about this, it’s in one of my books, I might try and dig it out later!

Anyway, I think that’s enough ranting for now.

Jeremy Clarkson has written an article entitled “Unhand my patio heater, archbishop”, in which he responds to a sermon by Archbishop Rowan Williams talking about global warming. The gist of his argument is basically that religion has killed far many more people than global warming ever has, and so we should give up religion rather than our patio heaters (etc).

I know that Jeremy Clarkson is… well, let’s just say I don’t think he’s beyond saying something controversial just to get people going. In fact, I think it wouldn’t be going too far to say that he actively courts controversy, just because it’s amusing. Given that, it’s probably not wise to dignify one of his articles with a response because it was written just to get people going. Having said that, I’m going to do a sort of response anyway because it ties in with something else I’ve been thinking about recently — whether religion is the cause of wars or violence. There are a few other points he makes though, which I also want to mention.

Firstly, Clarkson says “Many, many more people have died in the name of God than were killed in the name of Hitler.” Were they really? Could not there have been some other factors – politics, for example? I’ve found an interesting article entitled “Does Religion Cause Violence” (PDF), which has some interesting thoughts:

In the course of a detailed historical study of the concept “religion,” Smith was compelled to conclude that in premodern Europe there was no significant concept equivalent to what we think of as “religion,”and furthermore there is no “closely equivalent concept in any culture that has not been influenced by the modern West.”

And then goes on subsequently to talk about the issue of religion and violence, which is worth reading and I won’t bother repeating the points made in the article here!

The other thing I should mention here is that you shouldn’t judge a religion by what its adherents do, you should judge it by what it tells them to do. Is Christianity a violent religion? I don’t believe it is. Anyone who has perpetrated violence in the name of Christianity surely has had another agenda.

Back to Clarkson: “I genuinely believe we are born with a moral compass and we don’t need it reset every Sunday morning by some weird-beard communist in a dress”. The whole point of Christianity is not that we don’t have a ‘moral compass’ – but that we often choose to ignore the ‘moral compass’. The problem isn’t that we don’t know what’s right and wrong, the problem is that we do what’s wrong rather than what’s right – knowingly. This goes right back to the garden of Eden – I’m rather disappointed in Jeremy here ;-)

Well, I think I’ve rambled on for long enough now, so I’ll leave it there!