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Entries Tagged as 'Investigate Magazine'

Contra Mundum: Dawkins and Secular Hypocrisy

July 7th, 2012 105 Comments

When I was a non-Christian I was forever hearing about how Christians are hypocrites. When I converted to Christianity at 17, one thing that struck me is how often these charges were often a case of the pot calling the kettle black. While there is undoubtedly some hypocrisy within the church, it is also pervasive […]

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Contra Mundum: After Birth Abortion

April 5th, 2012 4 Comments

“What we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn baby) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.” These words, published in the prestigious “Journal of Medical Ethics” by ethicists Dr Francesca Minerva and Dr Alberto Giubilini, sparked outrage around the world. After-birth abortion is, of […]

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Contra Mundum: When Scientists Make Bad Ethicists

October 10th, 2011 399 Comments

One thing I find particularly frustrating is reading commentary on theology and philosophy written by scientists. To be fair, some scientists I have read are informed and do offer astute and insightful comments; commonly, however, one finds a person who is undoubtedly brilliant in their own field, writing with confident gusto, articles that fail to […]

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Contra Mundum: Separating Church and State

September 2nd, 2011 87 Comments

Co-authored by Matthew and Madeleine Flannagan The late Philosopher Richard Rorty once described religion as a “conversation stopper”, something that polarises discussion and ends or prevents fruitful dialogue. Rorty was an advocate of, “the happy, Jeffersonian compromise that the Enlightenment reached with the religious. This compromise consists in privatizing religion — keeping it out of […]

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Contra Mundum: Consenting Adults and Harm

August 6th, 2011 85 Comments

In debates over abortion, homosexual conduct, euthanasia, prostitution, drugs, those who call themselves liberals often mount the same basic argument; a socially or morally permissive stance is necessitated towards such practices because people have a right to choose do what ever they like with their own bodies. As John Stuart Mill put it in his […]

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Macsyna King, Representative of the Coming Race

July 8th, 2011 13 Comments

We are simple souls, and so find ourselves “conflicted” (to use pop psych jargon) over the public vituperate venting about one Macsyna King.  How we love a mob.  All heat and no light.  A dirty bomb. Macsyna is coming out of the closet via a book, Breaking Silence: The Kahui Case, written by Ian Wishart.  The mob […]

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Contra Mundum: Pacifism and Just Wars

July 5th, 2011 27 Comments

Comedian Bill Maher recently berated Christians for being hypocrites for supporting military action against terrorists in his “New Rules” segment on the U.S. TV show Real Time (transcript here). Jesus, Maher contended, was a pacifist; “Jesus lays on that hippie stuff pretty thick. He has lines like, “do not repay evil with evil,” and “do […]

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