You and Yours - BBC Radio Four

I was on today's programme on the panel for an hour-long phone in and discussion on organised religion. Listen again is available here for one week.

Thought for the Day - BBC Radio Bristol

Text of this morning's thought, which you can listen to here, at 1:50:45

Yesterday an English Oak was planted in Bristol’s Leigh Woods to commemorate the centenary of its ownership by the National Trust. 100 years may be longer than most people’s lives, but it’s barely middle aged for the oldest trees in the Avon Gorge.

Woodlands have a wonderful way of changing our perception of time, making us think of the longer run. In that respect, they have something in common with churches and temples, which have the capacity to fill us with wonder, and encourage us to see things through the eye of eternity.

However, for me, forests do those jobs better than religious buildings. For one thing, for all the awe they may inspire, churches are clearly human constructions. Woodlands, in contrast, may be managed by us, but they are not fundamentally our work. They show the natural as it is, not the supernatural as we imagine it to be.

But more importantly, woodlands do no not present us with an illusion of permanence. Churches, with their stone walls, are reassuringly solid and unchanging. Woodlands, however, are constantly changing, from season to season, from year to year, from decade to decade. They remind us that human lives are just a blink of an eye to nature, but also that everything that grows is also subject to decay.

This, I think, is more truthful and more life-affirming than the idea of life everlasting. When I breathe in the air and look at the beauty around me, realising that the moment cannot be captured, I value being alive much more than I would if I thought I had forever to repeat the experience. That’s why for me a walk in Leigh Woods is not a religious experience: it’s better than that.

Not doing it for the kids

"The goods of the childless life reflect something very important about the good life for everyone. Humans have the capacity to rise above the biological imperative to reproduce. That we do not place the highest value on passing on our genes is part of what makes us different and, yes, in some sense superior to our fellow animals. Yet society does not celebrate our freedom to do this. Reproducing is still seen as the healthy norm, "failing" to do as an aberration. If many more of us do not have grandchildren, then perhaps we will make it clearer that sexual reproduction may be the meaning of animal life, but it sure ain't the best or only reason for humans to get up in the morning: refreshed, after a night uninterrupted by the cries of little angels."

My latest post at the Guardian's Comment is Free has attracted over 600 comments and counting. I think it's the subject, rather than me. Judge for yourself here. (UPDATE: The piece has also provoked this response by the Telegraph's Ed West.)

Thought for the Day - BBC Radio Bristol

You can listen again to yesterday's Thought for the Day by clicking here and going to 1:43:07

The State We're In - Radio Netherlands Worldwide

Talking about complaint on Jonathan Groubert's show. You can listen again to the whole programme here or download an MP3 of my segment here.

Should you judge this book by its cover?

My new book is now out. From the preface:

The aim of this book is to make proverbs and other familiar sayings speak their wisdom afresh, and to clear away some of the mistaken ideas they can give rise to. In order to achieve this goal, it is important that I do not try to replace one set of pat interpretations with another. Rather, I want to stimulate the reader to think for herself about the ideas within, as if for the first time. That is why I make no attempt to make my discussions exhaustive. Nor do I spell everything out: the point is to make the reader check her own spelling. This is a book to argue and converse with. It is not a reference book, manual or a self-help guide. It exists simply to fuel the thinking of those who think for themselves.

You can buy the book from Amazon , The Book Depository or your preferred online or high street vendor.

I've also made a short film about the book...

Newshour - BBC World Service

Talking about DNA again, on yesterday's programme. Listen again available here for a week. (item is at at end of programme, at 47:50)

Today - BBC Radio Four

Talking about how DNA fingerprinting has changed society with Ian Rankin and James Naughtie on yesterday's programme. Listen again available here for a week.

Thought for the Day - BBC Radio Bristol

Here's the text of yesterday morning's thought, which you can listen to by clicking here and forwarding to 1:42:00

“That’s it! It’s ruined!”
Many of us have said this, and surely almost all of us heard it, as an over-reaction when something goes wrong. You hear it most at weddings, and on holidays and birthdays, when people are so keen that everything runs perfectly that any little set-back can seem like a disaster.
One man who I suspect doesn’t go in for this kind of catastrophising is Luke Jerram, the artist who has planted pianos in various corners of Bristol. Yet he could so easily have succumbed to despair after seeing for himself how one of his upright Joannas in Bedminster’s Dame Emily Park was smashed up by vandals.
In fact, Jerram was pretty philosophical. "The aim of the project is to reach a broad and diverse audience,” he told Radio Bristol, “and that involves taking some risks." Lots of people play the pianos, he added, and there are bound to be a few bad apples among them.
He even met the kids who did it, reporting that they looked bored and that "kids just go through a stage in their lives when they don't know how to entertain themselves."
I take my hat off to Luke Jerram. Big hopes and big ideas often come with big fears and huge disappointments. So often we let the fear paralyse us, or refuse to face it and then get crushed when some of that fear is realised.
Jerram shows us that the right attitude is to go into things accepting that not everything will go to plan and being content with whatever does work out. Perfection is not a requirement: we should strive for the best, but be content when what we do is merely good enough.

When is honesty the best policy?

English criminal law rests on the idea that there is a common standard of decent behaviour. The "Ghosh" test – named after the defendant in the 1982 trial that set the precedent – requires that juries consider whether the defendant's conduct was "dishonest according to the ordinary standards of reasonable and honest people". If these standards don't exist, then the whole basis of the law disappears.

New blog post at Comment is Free

Thought for the Day - BBC Radio Bristol

This is the text of this morning's thought. You can also listen again by clicking here and going to 1:51:00

George Bernard Shaw once said that “Words are only postage stamps delivering the object for you to unwrap”. So how should we unwrap the verbal stamps that say the British government did not want the Lockerbie bomber to die in a Scottish prison?

“Not wanting” can mean simply lacking a desire for something. For example, I don’t want you to eat beetroot, not because I’d be annoyed if you did, but simply because I have no particular desire that you do.

But “not wanting” might also mean that we have a desire that something doesn’t happen. I don’t want to eat beetroot, for example, because I hate the taste of it.

Once you appreciate this important difference, you can see that it is not clear what it means to say that the British government did not want the Lockerbie bomber to die in a Scottish prison. It could mean, as the Foreign Secretary David Miliband said yesterday, that the government was simply “not actively seeking” the death of Abdelbasset al-Megrahi in prison. Or it could mean, as most have assumed, that they really wanted him not to do so.

The difference, however, matters beyond this specific debate. In a diverse society, our capacity to live together, as people with different desires, depends on our ability to see that, just because we don’t particularly want something to happen, that doesn’t mean we should want it not to happen. More than that, mutual toleration requires that we do not actively seek to prevent everything that we actively seek to avoid.

We should therefore be careful how we unwrap the word “want”, because the result of confusing not wanting with wanting not is unnecessary intolerance.

The Atheist and the Bishop - BBC Radio Four

My programme with Bishop Richard Harries, chaired by Jane Little, was broadcast today and is available to listen again here, for at least seven days. It is also repeated this Saturday at 22:15.

La ciudad de las Ideas, Mexico - 6 November

Speaking at this three day conference in Puebla, on a programme that flatters me. Other speakers include Dan Dennett, Philip Zimbardo, Francis Fukuyama, among others.Full details here.