Sorry Peter but can you tell me what was said on Ockham that is in the same class as somebody demonstrating racial prejudice? ("You can be sure that if I wrote about the genetic inferiority of native peoples then free speech would quickly go out the window.")
Surely holding on to a particular idea (i.e. religion) is not the same kind of attribute as skin colour?

This is akin to the statement:-"I/he/she was born a Christian/Muslim (etc).
Nobody is born with an idea but they are born with particular body features.

Peter

I listened to the Ockham's Razor programme via online today before your email came through. It had the sub par quality of those programmes that carry the angry but sterile utterances of American southern evangelist talking of the evils of "the liberals" and the "Darwinists".

I recommend the other programme hosted by Robin Williams, the Science Show, titled "Controlling the Future.." an address by Lord Rees President of the Royal Society of London.

Question: Is the Future to be controlled or is it to be lived?

"The Science" says it will be about control. And who informs us what is to be controlled, released and restrained? I assume the World Human Charter of Rights. Who appoints and promotes the Tribunal Members who will oversee those rights for those that need them There will surely some that do not. Such is the folly of sandy foundations.

"The Faith" says the future, the Human Project - Integral Human Development , will be about living as it unfolds with all of the human inquiring, ingenuity and endeavour that flow from riches endowed to us in our story so far founded in the Risen Lord.

Which "Ponder" is Sellick discussing?

The way the ABC embraced the global warning scam should be enough to inform any thinking person how blatantly biased and unbalanced aunty is. The political bias is another thing that is very plain for all to see except for those who champion there cause. Why should they be honest about the evolution myth when they are dishonest on many other issues? Could you imagine them giving a balanced report on the Middle East or US politics.

>> Religion is seen as such an easy target that no effort at all is required to pull it down.

sellick, if you don't want religion to be an easy target then you simply must argue the merits of religious belief. it's not that religion is torn down, it's that we can't see anything there to tear down: the emperor's church has no bricks.

you never do say what is the value of the *religious* aspect of your beliefs. other promoters of religion never do. you pretend to: god knows you never shut up. but you never ever actually state clearly your religious beliefs, or argue why anybody should take them, or you, seriously.

if your beliefs are dismissed with the flip of a phrase, you have only yourselves to blame.

Sells: "My article is not about freedom of speech, it is about the honest search for truth which seems to have gone the way of God".

If your still harking after "truth", as if it was some manifest holy grail to be (re)discovered, then you're merely indulging a stuborn anthropocentric mythos, long since discredited in our antifoundational age. Truth, so the argument runs, is not something identifiable, not something discoverable, but something created, and not by God. All human rationale is just that. Language "goes all the way down", according to Rorty--there is no access to thingness in itself, that is phenomena unmediated by language (and human language has all the universality of whalesong). All our strivings to ground our aspirations (or angst) in an ultimate truth (ala Kant, Hegel et al) amount to the dregs of human hubris; an inability to let go and accept that the universe is utterly indifferent and opaque to us. We have to strike our own path, construct our own meaning, posit our own truths, according to our lights, and make our own way. This is why we have religions and the search for "truth", because we just can't face the confronting fact that there is no point to us. "Truth", and other absolutes, are cultural constructs that mean SFA in the scheme of things, or so it seems, yet we continue arrogantly on searching for it in order to complete ourselves. Vanity of vanity, all is vanity, a chasing of the wind.
Robin Williams has a right to make fun of you lot, you're a laughing stock--"he" has no hopes of eternal life. Where is that humility you Christians prize so highly? It's ersatz, token humility, to get you through the pearly gates; the "truth" is your arrogance and self-importance, your refusal to observe "real" humility. You not only want eternal life, you want the kudos you think is complementary, and whatever earthly robes and regalia you can strut about in into the bargain. Oh God! Why hast though forsaken me!