see change?

'Sea Change' was a popular Aussie TV series a few years back, in which a city lawyer quit her job and opted for the supposedly more laid-back life of a small coastal town. The term 'sea change" became common usage to describe the increasing number of people who decided to leave the rat race and the wealth it provided and give greater emphasis in their life to more personal values.

In an interesting set of articles, last Saturday's Sydney Morning Herald told the stories of a bunch of influential politicians who have found life more fulfilling away from the corridors of power.

Philosophical arguments for the existence of God

If you want to check out well-prepared and easy-to-read arguments for the existence of God, I recommend Existence of God.

Tim was an atheist until he studied philosophy at university to post-graduate level, but he found the evidence and the philosophical arguments so persuasive that he was convinced of God's existence. He is now a christian, and has set up his site to present the same arguments to others.

He covers all the standard arguments for God's existence - first cause, design, moral, ontological and two arguments about Jesus - and also considers five arguments for atheism. If you want a simple statement of complex arguments, I recommend it.

john dickson on why people believe things

People may hold their political, religious or ethical beliefs for all sorts of reasons, but we all like to think that we are very rational in the way we come to our own views. But some recent studies suggest few of us are as logical as we might think, as historian John Dickson reported in a recent article in the Sydney Morning Herald.

the cost of climate change

Australia is currently engaged in (or suffering under?) a political debate on how we should address the issue of climate change. It isn't so long ago that many conservatives did not believe the scientific evidence that earth is warming at an alarming rate, and this will have disastrous consequences within a century. Then the argument shifted to whether the predicted changes were human-induced. Now we seem to be arguing about how much we should change our way of life, and how much we should pay, to address the problem. But the fact remains that Aussies, per capita, are among the world's biggest contributors to global warming.