Most of these essays date from my Christian days, and are therefore rather out of date since I'm not a Christian any more. First of all, the ones that either don't have much to do with Christianity or postdate my apostasy and therefore aren't too obsolete:
- Utilitarianism
- Some thoughts, neither very deep nor very original, on its good and bad points.
- Cui Bono?, or, Avoiding the Repugnant Conclusion
- One way of getting round Derek Parfit's argument which seems to show that a world containing a huge number of people leading drab lives would be better than this one.
- Why I am no longer a Christian
- As of early June 2006, I am no longer a Christian. This is a brief explanation of why, with some comments. Note: this development means that some of the items above are in a sense outdated; I'll be fixing them up gradually.
- Alleged pre-Christian parallels to the Jesus story
- Brief investigation of what appears to be a rather silly list of pagan stories allegedly just like Jesus's.
And the rest, with which I now disagree more or less radically.
- Why I am not A Calvinist
- Pretty self-explanatory. Dates from, er, 1990 or thereabouts. Some of the positions I attribute to Calvinism are probably not shared by all Calvinists. For hysterical raisins, there's also a plain text version.
- In praise of ignorance
- Some people, including me, get too hung up on having the answers to everything. This can easily lead to sloppy thinking or lack of charity, and I don't think the satisfaction of Having an Answer is always enough to make up for that. (The particular issues discussed here, and the particular slant I took on them, are specifically Christian, but the basic principle still seems correct to me.)
- Some of my favourite bits of the Bible
- I still think some of these are pretty good, though unsurprisingly my comments on them now seem hyperbolic.
- Why I am not an inerrantist
- Much more recent than the next item. Unfinished, and at this point probably never will be.
- Random reflections on the [in]errancy of Scripture
- A piece of my brain from, I think, some time in the mid-1990s. Might be interesting to people who enjoy reading others' half-formed thoughts.
- Reflections on Dembski's "Vise Document"
- William Dembski, a leading representative of the "Intelligent Design" movement, suggests that his fellow-travellers should "squeeze the truth out of Darwinists" by asking difficult questions and revealing their objectionable presuppositions, character flaws or internal contradictions. Being a "Darwinist" myself, I thought it would be an interesting exercise to see whether Dembski's proposed questions embarrass me. It turns out that they don't. (There's not much here that I disagree with post-apostasy, and the things I do still seem to me like perfectly reasonable answers for Christian evolutionists to give.)
You might also be interested in some shorter remarks.