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Also, long threads like 'Does God Exist?' tend to repeat themselves as each new generation of BoS kids come through, but I don't really see a problem with that.

(1) Trolls abound (2) Disagreement tends to be more enlightening than a mutual admiration society (3) Perhaps it has more to do with the nature of debate in general rather than being a function of BoS culture?

Just like my right hand! (peek-a-boo)

That shouldn't be surprising either way. In the case of the atheist one can simply posit that humans have a natural propensity to find certain things meaningful (love? sex? moral engagement? prosperity? community?). In the case of the theist this propensity is instead held to be of divine origin.

Sure, but you can only speak of such 'attribution' if you assume that the higher being/purpose they posit is essentially fictional or subjective. If god happens to exist then, within a theistic framework, the meaning is presumed to be god given.

To believe that you were created with a purpose, simpliciter, is already to cultivate a belief that there is a meaning for life (however mundane). As far as I can tell most people assume that this meaning amounts to living a life which is either (1) in praise of god or (2) morally sound, or that...

Probably because religion typically provides some kind of semi-defined goal, i.e. 'to live the good life is to *fill in the blank*'. It is easy to introduce existential absurdity if you then keep asking 'why?' of everything, but at a superficial level religious ideals provide a convenient anchor...

We're going to candy mountain?

In what sense do you mean finite? The picture you conjure up makes me think of an open set. A basic example would be the set of points (x,y) defined by x2 + y2 < r2 , generating an infinite set that describes a space with a finite area and which is circumscribed by a conceptual boundary (x2 + y2...

You just reminded me of a brilliant analogy which I first encountered, if I remember correctly, in the physicist Brian Greene's book The Elegant Universe. It went something like this: Suppose that you have a racecar hurtling along a desert plane at a fixed speed S. For all intents and...

Oops, I forgot to finish what I was writing on Axelrod. As above, he makes the statement that reciprocity has the potential to be spontaneous, i.e. allowing morality to be 'self-policing'. However, the problem is that this spontaneity is not universal and instead depends on such factors as...

Gosh, this is a fairly large undertaking in itself, but fine. For a straightfoward review of the nepotistic streak in morality see pp. 45 - 50 of Richard Joyce's The Evolution of Morality. The paper Sympathy and Callousness provides an interesting look at our tendency to provide less...

Chimps don't have guns, to start. This is simply what I have garnered from research into this area. If you disagree, that is fine, but I would be interested to see whether you can provide more than intuition. Sure, but they still leave me doubting the inherent stability of anarchy. In any...

This is more or less why I am a vegetarian (and why I don't buy blood diamonds). If the industry is corrupt then the informed consumer is complicit.

Chimpanzees do wantonly kill each other. Many animals, chimpanzees included, kill one another for some combination of territory, resources, sex and security. In evolutionary terms our tendency is to cooperate with family and those in close proximity, not humankind in general, which is perhaps...

And proud :). I can't help but doubt that the private defense forces mentioned early in that article will actually protect liberty. I'm sure that they would protect the liberty of the wealthy that can afford them, but I am less hopeful for the poor or defenseless. To me it sounds somewhat...

The Greens.

Pessimistic. To my eye it would seem that the economic powers that be have the upper hand. The idealist in me would like to believe that we can 'perfect' society over time through small political gains, by realistically I feel that deviations from the status quo will probably require crises in...

The average rating for teaching at UNSW is 7.

Indeed, my choice after medicine would have been philosophy and mathematics.