- 9-11 Terrorist attacks
…d they were performing an act of worship for which they would be rewarded after death. See for the effect this had on my own views, and . Rejected Positions I reject…
- COVID-19 Origin
…across the world. Excess mortality statistics, which do not depend on cause-of-death attribution, show around 15 to 20 million more deaths than expected worldwide i…
- Holocaust Denial
…n detail at the Irving trial. The figure of six million is invented Claim : The death toll is a symbolic number with no basis. Basis : The precision of the figure; t…
- The 2020 US Election Steal and January 6
…rgia were driven from their homes. A Secretary of State and his family received death threats for counting correctly. Officials who certified honest results lost the…
- Communism
…ion, Maoist China, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, North Korea, and others. The death toll from famine, purge, and forced labour runs to tens of millions. The respon…
- Israel Palestine
…y; those proceedings were subsequently terminated following confirmation of his death. An arrest warrant is not a conviction. The distinction between credible allega…
- Biblical Morality
…t and bequeathed as property (Leviticus 25:44–46), and a slave may be beaten to death provided he lingers a day or two (Exodus 21:20–21). A disobedient son is to be…
- Demons, Possession and Exorcism
…yer to drive out his demons. Victoria Climbié, London, 2000: eight, tortured to death by relatives who believed her possessed, having been taken to a church for deli…
- Heaven
…aniel 12), and the New Testament never settles whether the dead go somewhere at death or sleep until a judgement, whether they are disembodied souls or resurrected b…
- Hell
…s Duat : the Ancient Egyptian underworld, through which the soul journeys after death to be judged by the weighing of the heart. Naraka : in Hinduism, temporary hell…
- Islam
…of the Prophet survives through an edition made a century and a half after his death. This is the same evidential situation as the New Testament ( ), and I treat it…
- Life After Death
…e is no reason to believe that consciousness exists without a brain (see and ). Death is the permanent end of the individual. I find this neither frightening nor dep…
- Near-Death Experiences
…eproduced in people who were in no danger of dying. A person who reports a near-death experience did not die. The word "near" is doing all the work. Notes The featur…
- Reincarnation and Karma
…Positions There is no good reason to believe that any part of a person survives death to be born again, and I do not hold that it does. Karma, understood as a cosmic…
- Argument from Fulfilled Prophecy
…accuracy. Daniel describes events down to 167 BC in precise detail and gets the death of Antiochus IV, which came next, wrong. That is the signature of a book writte…
- Argument from Martyrdom
…vangelical apologetics: The apostles claimed to have seen Jesus alive after his death. They were persecuted for the claim and most of them died as martyrs rather tha…
- Argument from Meaning and Purpose
…life has no objective meaning, value, or purpose. The universe will end in heat death, every achievement will be erased, and nothing anyone does ultimately matters.…
- Argument from Prophetic Character
…remise 1 rests was written by Ibn Ishaq some hundred and twenty years after the death and survives only in Ibn Hisham's edited version from the ninth century: the po…
- Lewis's Trilemma
…insane, or telling the truth. Jesus was not a liar: his moral teaching and his death for his claim rule it out. He was not a lunatic: his wisdom, calm, and insight…
- Preservation of the Quran
…ling and stoning was under her bed and was eaten by a sheep after the Prophet's death (Ibn Majah 1944). These are not sceptics' inventions; they are canonical hadith…
- Souls
…is the seat of personality, memory and moral character, and it is what survives death. But personality, memory and character are demonstrably brain-dependent. Phinea…
- The Historicity of Jesus
…on and which Matthew and Luke visibly struggle to explain; and crucifixion, the death of a slave, which Paul calls "a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to…
- The human need for religion
…ccount of religious belief. The relationship between religion and anxiety about death also requires care. A meta-analysis of 100 studies found a weak association bet…
- Dietary Supplements
…mins have been tested in large randomised trials over decades and do not reduce death, heart disease or, to any useful degree, cancer. A few work, for specific peopl…
- Nuclear Power
…fety envelope, in a political system that suppressed information. Its confirmed death toll is in the dozens, with estimates of eventual cancer deaths in the low thou…
- Abortion
…abortion is restricted, and that unsafe abortion is a leading cause of maternal death. The countries with the lowest abortion rates are those with liberal abortion l…
- Assisted Dying
…have moved in the same direction. The evidence from elsewhere. Oregon has had a Death with Dignity Act since 1997. Fewer than one per cent of deaths use it, a third…
- Blasphemy
…s the death penalty in around a dozen states. Pakistan's section 295-C mandates death for insulting the Prophet; a Christian farm labourer, Asia Bibi, spent eight ye…
- Death Penalty
…ceptable ethical and legal risks. In the United States, 200 people sentenced to death since 1973 have subsequently been exonerated, which is roughly one exoneration…
- Free Speech
…9), chapter I (the " ") "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Evelyn Beatrice Hall , The Friends of Voltaire (1906),…
- Gun Control
…man well-being. They convert a moment of anger, despair, or carelessness into a death, where without them it would more often be an injury, a regret, or nothing. It…
- Apology
…nishment should be free dinners at public expense, and after being sentenced to death tells the jury that the unexamined life is not worth living. "Apology" here mea…
- De Rerum Natura
…and soul, is made of them; the gods, if they exist, take no interest in us; and death is nothing to us, since when it arrives we are not there to meet it. Lucretius…
- Hitch-22
Related (2010) Overview Hitchens' memoir, published eighteen months before his death. It covers his mother Yvonne, whose suicide and secret Jewish ancestry he learn…
- Philosophical Investigations
…umous) Overview Wittgenstein's second great work, published two years after his death, and a repudiation of his first. Where the Tractatus held that language picture…
- The Better Angels of Our Nature
…ticed facts about our species. The first half marshals the data: archaeological death rates, medieval homicide records, the frequency and lethality of wars, and the…
- Existentialism
…hing to do with existence, being, or what it is to be alive: purpose, identity, death and the human condition. Notes The movement's central observation is one I acce…
- Hyperactive Agency Detection
…o not respond to arguments. My position is that this, together with the fear of death and the need to belong, accounts for the origin of religion without remainder (…
- Philosophical naturalism
…The commitments that follow from it in this vault: the mind is the brain ( , ), death is the end ( ), life is the product of , and is a natural phenomenon. Also see
- Nidal Hasan - Fort Hood Massacre and Proposed Televised Execution
…documents. He was found guilty on all counts on 23 August 2013 and sentenced to death five days later. The Supreme Court declined to review his conviction on 31 Marc…
- Blaise Pascal
…ous experience in 1654 he turned to theology; the Pensées , published after his death, contain . The wager is unworthy of the man, who knew better than anyone alive…
- Douglas Murray
…Douglas Murray (born 1979), British conservative writer, author of The Strange Death of Europe and The War on the West . Articulate critic of immigration, Islam and…
- Epicurus
…and that the good life is one of modest pleasure and freedom from fear. "Where death is, I am not; where I am, death is not" is the basis of my attitude to , and th…
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Notes Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), German philosopher who announced the death of God and asked what follows when the moral framework built on him is still st…
- Lucretius
…verse: atoms and void, no divine intervention, and no afterlife to fear. "Where death is, I am not" is the ancient answer to , and still the right one. Wikipedia: Al…
- Marcus Aurelius
…vate notebook survives as the Meditations . Practical advice on handling anger, death and difficult people, written by someone with more of each than most of us. The…
- Mark Twain
…nd a sceptic about religion whose sharpest essays were published only after his death. Also, like , the attributed source of a great many lines he never wrote. Wikip…
- Muhammad
…uslim community at Medina in 622, and had united most of Arabia under it by his death. His existence is not seriously doubted; the detailed biography comes from sour…
- Salman Rushdie
…n 1947), Indian-born British-American novelist. The Satanic Verses earned him a death sentence from Iran in 1989 and, in 2022, a stabbing that cost him an eye. The l…
- Socrates
…( , ) Cynics The questioning method named after him is the ancestor of . Put to death by Athens in 399 BC for impiety and corrupting the young; 's Apology is his def…
- Susan Blackmore
…self is an illusion and that meditation shows it. She appears here for the near-death work and for the honest change of mind. Wikipedia: Also see
- Voltaire
…ut the . He did not say "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"; Evelyn Beatrice Hall wrote it in 1906 to summarise his a…
- The Trolley Problem
…hilosophical thought experiment that explores moral dilemmas involving life-and-death decisions. It challenges how we reason about ethics, particularly (maximising g…
- World View
…I hold that a state which keeps it should have to . For the same reason that my death is mine, I support for competent adults under safeguards; the sanctity of life…
