Religion is a design fault; the product Homo sapiens sapiens was shipped with a bug. Let us download the patch.
Archive of posts filed under the Guest columns category.
Counting the Take
Fifth and final Hugo Grinebiter essay in the Hugo Days series here on the Daily Gripe. To the idea that religion is mostly a form of economic activity may be objected that many churches are poor and struggling. This, however, does not prove that churches are not essentially devices for extracting money from the punters; [...]
The family firm
Fourth in the Grinebiter essay series. Even the most cursory reader of the New Testament will probably notice the lineaments of a family business: not only did John the Baptist select his own first cousin for special treatment, but the first head of the Church was Jesus’ brother James. John the Evangelist was also the [...]
Mad, bad or God?
Third in the Hugo Grinebiter series of guest essays. The classic argument for the divinity of Jesus, as popularised by G.K. Chesterton and by C.S. Lewis after him, is that he claimed to be God; but if he wasn’t God then he was either a liar or a nutcase; and the Gospels do not give [...]
Faith: Credo quia impossibile
Continuing Hugo Days on the Daily Gripe, here is the second part of Hugo Grinebiter’s five-essay series. Religious people often defend the concept of “faith” against the charge that it means wilfully or negligently believing something that is not true by equating it with “trust”, that is, with a personal relationship of confidence and reliance [...]
Faith: trust in or delusion that?
Hi folks, Dwasifar here. It’s Hugo Days on the blog, wherein I offer a series of interesting and interconnected guest essays by our friend Hugo Grinebiter. Hugo writes a tremendous lot, so this might clear some of the backlog. Enjoy. The English word “faith” is ambiguous. It can mean either an emotional or a [...]
Spirit – A word for nothing
Some people think themselves composed of two elements, which they call variously body and mind, or body and soul, or body and spirit. For we have been taught to experience ourselves as something that inhabits a body; and a dead body is undeniably missing some je-ne-sais-quoi. Many other people, however, posit not two but three [...]
The soul as syntax error
A major reason for believing in the immortality of the soul may be linguistic bias. Human languages tend to be based on a grammatical subject, to which are attached predicates. And, in defiance of all logic, existence itself is treated as such a predicate. That is, “Paul exists” is treated as the same kind of [...]
The unimaginability of death
Our heads are not tabula rasa, open to consider the world without prejudice; information can only be processed by the brain designs that we actually possess. Natural selection in the human social environment may have produced an organised cognitive system responsible for the illusion of both personal immortality and personal destiny. For there is experimental [...]
Rock music
Hi, folks. Dwasifar here. What follows is a guest piece from Hugo Grinebiter. I feel compelled to point out for this one that the opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of the management; in fact, I plan to post a reply to this piece shortly. But here it is just the same; I [...]