Evidence that the past isn't always a Golden Age

It's true that gender equality has still not been achieved in many areas of society, but there have been great improvements over the past several decades. If you don't believe me, look at these adverts from the past:

Faith -- what does it now mean?

There was a time not that long ago that people were described as "religious" or "not religious", but nowadays the fashionable phrase is "people of faith" or "not of faith".

Those phrases are not just inaccurate, but insulting. I have faith in all sorts of things -- not least that there are more good people than evil people in this world -- but I most certainly do not believe that there is an all-seeing god somewhere out there directing the lives or each and every one of us. Nor do I believe that there is a heaven or a hell awaiting all of us when we die.

A friend of mine prefers to call people who believe in God as "religionists". This seems a sensible description and tucks in nicely with other accepted "ists" such as "atheist" and more than 1000 other descriptions ending in "ist": http://www.morewords.com/ends-with/ist/

LATER: Minutes after publishing the above, this interesting article from the Washington Post was drawn to my attention: http://bit.ly/WashingtonPostAtheism

Memories of a very recent past

Who would have thought 10 years ago that Google would become a verb? A fun picture shared by The Educator's Room:

Ooops! Did I really mean that?

Australia's Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott, may take a while to live down this gaff. Perhaps he should invest in a dictionary.

This modern world

We went out for dinner with friends a couple of nights ago. A family was seated at the next table. Mother was chatting away, but no-one was listening. Father was on his mobile, daughter was texting and son was playing a video game.

We have since learned that this is now a common scene in restaurants.

Australian film deal with God's Triangle

Very nice to get some publicity in Australia and London about the film deal for my book, God's Triangle: http://www.godstriangle.com/