Who are you?

Julian Baggini on the chimerical self. We're all literally no-thing. That's the Buddhist and Humean view, and neuroscience backs them up. Brains give rise to the sense of self, but there's much more (and less) to a person than a brain. This doesn't mean you're not real or that nothing is real. Nothing is, but impermanence is not unreality.




Maybe Lawrence Krauss can help disentangle the verbal morass we tend to fall into when we try to make sense of ourselves as relational beings. Or maybe it just takes a mystic.

Coming out

Julian Baggini reports on Atheism in America:

A report from the Pew Research Center last November showed that 53 per cent of Americans say it is necessary to believe in God to be moral. That is one reason why many are afraid of coming out...

But coming out they are, in ever-increasing numbers. The New Atheists are one reason, but it's the Internet that's responsible for shining the biggest spotlight into those dark closets.

 “The reason that atheism is on the rise is because there is no way that a person who is an atheist can think they’re alone any more. When I was growing up, I was the only atheist I knew. I had to get on my bike, ride to the public library and take out the one atheist book that they had in the whole library: The Case Against God by George Smith. Now any atheist can go on Facebook or Myspace and find literally millions of friends.”

 So the next time someone says something snarky about the devaluation of friendship on the web, I'm going to speak up more vocally for this medium. Free people should not live in closets.

stairway from heaven

Or is that a stairway to heaven-on-earth, to eternity here-and-now? Julian Baggini, Atheism: A Brief Insight