God's Power Over Life and Death

Pretty much all my life I've been told and have heard people saying, in everyday conversations, that Allah is the only one that decides how and when someone will die. It's usually said after hearing of a death. For most of my life, I , like most people, just ignored it without much thought and politely nodded to the person who said it. However, one day a thought popped into my head that made me think a little more deeply about that simple statement....

Thought experiment: Qu'ran, ethics and morality

Can a religious society that strictly adheres to their holy books ever become a society like modern Britain? Not to say that modern Britain is the epitome of moral and ethical thought and behaviour. No society is or perhaps can ever be perfect. I have no idea what perfection would even look like. Of course, religious societies have and do evolve. However, positive evolution, i.e. towards more liberal, secular and humane society, only happen at the...

Seeds of Disbelief

I recently read an interesting article on the New Humanist website titled 'The rise of Arab atheism'. The author interviewed Arab atheists in the Middle East to try and understand the reasons for them leaving Islam. Some of the reasons provided reminded of my own experiences growing up. Like them, I did not lose my faith because I knew about science and thought about things logically and scientifically. It was things in the religion (Islam) that...

My Truth is Bigger Than Your Truth

I like to think my views on science, philosophy and religion are based on good, fairly solid foundations. I also like to think that I don't think in terms of absolutes. Therefore, rarely do I read or watch something that makes me re-evaluate my core beliefs and positions. That's not to say that I don't learn anything new or that my core beliefs are not expanded or better polished. I want to discuss a video I watched recently that made me shine a...

Should Human Rights Always Outweigh Religious Rights?

This is my second post discussing and commenting on a BBC Big Questions Debate video. The first post was about whether evidence undermined peoples beliefs in their religions. That particular debate covered issues such as evidence, or lack thereof, of god, evolution, the historicity of the bible and supernatural phenomena such as faith healing, resurrections and demons. I felt that that debate was was easy for me to comment on because, in my opinion,...

Under Maintenance!

I'm currently looking for a new template for my blog and will also be tweaking and messing with code which will result in some strange changes and behaviours of the site. Please bear with me. Feedback on the changes and the template is very much appreciat...

Does Evidence Undermine Religion?

Recently I have been binge watching Youtube videos of debates and discussions on religion and ethics. Every time I watch one of these videos I have a million different thoughts rushing through my head and very strong opinions on what's being discussed and I always think to myself that I will put all these thoughts into writing, but for one reason or another I never do. So, this post is the first of many posts where I discuss and comment on certain videos on religion and/or ethics. However, it doesn't have to be limited to those topics, it could...

I'm back!

It has been a while since my last post here. I have not been maintaining the site and many posts have broken links. The main reason why I haven't been posting, one reason amongst many, is that I have been and still am suffering from depression for many years. It has been going on for more than 5 years but it is only recently that I have decided to seek professional help. I didn't even acknowledge that I had a problem until a few years ago. However, I realised that I simply could't ignore it any more and that if I left it for much longer then there...