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Science, then, has its limits, but when dealing with claims that are testable within the methods of science, such as medical claims, to demand scientific evidence is simply to hold everyone to the same standards as the scientific community holds itself to. To cry scientism in this case shows disregard for the scientific method.

Mr Ahmed says there is a wider principle about the raising of interest rates and increasing debt for students, which he describes as "unethical". "People are already drowning in debt," he says. "We don't want people to be priced out of university."

Mr Ahmed highlighted how this debt would stretch across generations. Many students will be in their fifties when they finish paying for their degree courses - at which point they might then be expected to support their own children at university.

the original letter submitted by Mr Tobin read (emphasis):"The reality in societies around the world is that there is either no difference between non-believing youth and the religious youth in their propensity toward violence or there is actually higher levels of violence among those who identify themselves as "religious" or "faithful." [See, for instance, the studies cited in Michael Shermer’s book “The Science of Good and Evil” 2004 pp. 235-236]"

MacIntyre begins his Cambridge talk by asserting that the 2008 economic crisis was not due to a failure of business ethics.

he has argued that moral behaviour begins with the good practice of a profession, trade, or art: playing the violin, cutting hair, brick-laying, teaching philosophy.

In other words, the virtues necessary for human flourishing are not a result of the top-down application of abstract ethical principles, but the development of good character in everyday life.

After Virtue, which is in essence an attack on the failings of the Enlightenment, has in its sights a catalogue of modern assumptions of beneficence: liberalism, humanism, individualism, capitalism. MacIntyre yearns for a single, shared view of the good life as opposed to modern pluralism’s assumption that there can be many competing views of how to live well.

In philosophy he attacks consequentialism, the view that what matters about an action is its consequences, which is usually coupled with utilitarianism’s “greatest happiness” principle. He also rejects Kantianism—the identification of universal ethical maxims based on reason and applied to circumstances top down. MacIntyre’s critique routinely cites the contradictory moral principles adopted by the allies in the second world war. Britain invoked a Kantian reason for declaring war on Germany: that Hitler could not be allowed to invade his neighbours. But the bombing of Dresden (which for a Kantian involved the treatment of people as a means to an end, something that should never be countenanced) was justified under consequentialist or utilitarian arguments: to bring the war to a swift end.

MacIntyre seeks to oppose utilitarianism on the grounds that people are called on by their very nature to be good, not merely to perform acts that can be interpreted as good. The most damaging consequence of the Enlightenment, for MacIntyre, is the decline of the idea of a tradition within which an individual’s desires are disciplined by virtue. And that means being guided by internal rather than external “goods.” So the point of being a good footballer is the internal good of playing beautifully and scoring lots of goals, not the external good of earning a lot of money. The trend away from an Aristotelian perspective has been inexorable: from the empiricism of David Hume, to Darwin’s account of nature driven forward without a purpose, to the sterile analytical philosophy of AJ Ayer and the “demolition of metaphysics” in his 1936 book Language, Truth and Logic.

the state’s reaction is typical: legitimise the violence by classifying the purported article as the culprit rather than those who took offence at it and engaged in violence. While our laws on speech undertaken with the malicious intent to give offence, or those governing attempts to produce enmity, are well intentioned, they have made the climate for free speech more, rather than less, precarious.

the simple fact that the state signals that it will easily punish those who engage in offensive speech creates incentives for offence mongering. Instead of sending a signal that a very high bar has to be crossed before speech is proscribed, the state essentially tells the people: if you can incite violence, or show that you are deeply offended, you will have your way.

A lot of representations of religion are needlessly gratuitous. But if we legitimise the taking of offence there will be more provocations, not less. The law should send a clear message that we live in a world where people cannot be protected from assorted things like Danish cartoons, Husain paintings, burqa lampoons or speculative novels on godly love. And religious believers commit the ultimate blasphemy by thinking that they need to protect their gods rather than their gods protecting them

Generally speaking, it is rational for us to act in ways that accord with our reflectively-endorsed desires or values, rather than in ways that maximise our reproductive chances or in whatever ways we tend to respond without thinking.

Admittedly, our evolved nature may affect this, in the sense that any workable system of moral norms must be practical for the needs of beings like us, who are, it seems, naturally inclined to be neither angelically selfless nor utterly uncaring about others.

our evolved psychology may impose limits on what real-world moral systems can realistically demand of human beings, perhaps defeating some of the more extreme ambitions of both conservatives and liberals. It may not be realistic to expect each other to be either as self-denying as moral conservatives seem to want or as altruistic as some liberals seem to want.

realistic moral systems will allow considerable scope for individuals to act in accordance with whatever they actually value.

A rational and realistic approach to morality, based on our actual, reflectively-endorsed desires and values, and how they are best realised in current circumstances, might deflate some expectations. It might also diverge from familiar moral teachings, handed down through religious and cultural traditions. Much that is found in traditional Christian morality

But realising all this need not be shocking. If it leads to some deflation of extreme political expectations and to some reason-based correction of traditional morality, we should welcome it.

For 20 years, evidence about global warming has been directly and explicitly linked to a set of policy responses demanding international governance regimes, large-scale social engineering, and the redistribution of wealth. These are the sort of things that most Democrats welcome, and most Republicans hate. No wonder the Republicans are suspicious of the science.

Think about it: The results of climate science, delivered by scientists who are overwhelmingly Democratic, are used over a period of decades to advance a political agenda that happens to align precisely with the ideological preferences of Democrats. Coincidence—or causation?

How would a more politically diverse scientific community improve this situation? First, it could foster greater confidence among Republican politicians about the legitimacy of mainstream science. Second, it would cultivate more informed, creative, and challenging debates about the policy implications of scientific knowledge. This could help keep difficult problems like climate change from getting prematurely straitjacketed by ideology. A more politically diverse scientific community would, overall, support a healthier relationship between science and politics.

American society has long tended toward pragmatism, with a great deal of respect for the value and legitimacy not just of scientific facts, but of scientists themselves.

Yet this exceptional status could well be forfeit in the escalating fervor of national politics, given that most scientists are on one side of the partisan divide. If that public confidence is lost, it would be a huge and perhaps unrecoverable loss for a democratic society.

A democratic society needs Republican scientists.

I have to imagine 50 years ago there were a lot more Republican scientists, when the Democrats were still the party of Southern Baptists. As a rational person I find it impossible to support any candidate who panders to the religious right, and in current politics, that's every National Republican.

Bishop Olmstead is not only castigating Catholic Healthcare West, the group that runs St. Joseph's Hospital, for saving her life but threatening them in order to force them to promise that doctors will never save a woman's life if it requires an emergency abortion ever again.

In a letter (PDF) to Lloyd H. Dean, President of Catholic Healthcare West, Bishop Olmstead calls the life-saving procedure "morally wrong" even though he doesn't deny that it almost certainly saved her life. The ACLU notes that he then "threatens to remove his endorsement of the hospital unless CHW "acknowledge[s] in writing that the medical procedure that resulted in the abortion at St. Josephs' Hospital was a violation" of the policy that governs all Catholic hospitals and "will never occur again at St. Joseph's Hospital."

it seems as if Dean and CHW have stuck to their position that not only were their actions moral and just, in this circumstance, but that they certainly would not promise not to save a woman's life or health if presented with a similar case in the future. In fact, they presented both religious and moral ethicists' opinions as support for the hospital's actions.

The ACLU claims that Olmstead's insistence that the hospital must never provide an emergency abortion procedure is actually a violation of federal law. Alexi Kolbi-Molinas, staff attorney for the ACLU, said in a statement this week: "Religiously affiliated hospitals are not exempt from federal laws that protect a patient's right to receive emergency care, and cannot invoke their religious status to jeopardize the health and lives of pregnant women. Women should never have to be afraid that they will be denied life-saving medical care when they enter a hospital."

The federal law, in specific, to which Kolbi Molinas refers is the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act. The law protects patients' rights to receive emergency reproductive health care and Catholic hospitals cannot opt out. The law is necessary given that Catholic hospitals operate 15 percent of all hospital beds, according to the ACLU, and may likely provide the only or closest emergency care in a region.

the ACLU requests an investigation into violations of the federal law - not only as a result of the incident at St. Joseph's but after numerous reports of horrendous scenarios: We know that what happened at St. Joseph's was not an isolated incident. Catholic-owned hospitals across the country have refused to provide emergency abortions, as documented in a recent article in the American Journal of Public Health. For example, a doctor in the Northeast decided to leave a Catholic-owned hospital after he was forced by the hospital's ethics committee to risk a pregnant patient's life. The woman was in the process of miscarrying at 19 weeks of pregnancy. She was dying: her temperature was 106 degrees, she had disseminated intravascular coagulopathy, which is a life-threatening condition that prevents a person's blood from clotting normally and causes excessive bleeding. This patient was bleeding so badly that the sclera, the whites of her eyes, were red, filled with blood. Despite the fact that there was no chance the fetus could survive, the ethics committee told the doctor that he could not perform the abortion the woman needed to save her life until the fetus's heartbeat stopped. After the delay, the patient was in the Intensive Care Unit for 10 days, and developed pulmonary disease, resulting in lifetime oxygen dependency.

Still, Bishop Olmstead and the Roman Catholic Diocese are steadfast in their insistence that physicians and hospital administrators acted immorally when they saved the life of a pregnant mother of four children and are determined to ensure that pregnant women are not safe in the hands of Catholic hospitals across the country.

Outsiders might consider it incongruous that a country with a reputation for limited free speech could foster such creative cuisine. But I maintain that it is precisely those limitations that make Singapore’s food scene so dynamic; it’s simply the safest outlet for no-holds-barred expression. In politics and religion, silence might be best in Singapore, but with food there are no restrictions. “Is there freedom of speech in Singapore?” responded Willin Low, chef of the well-regarded “Mod Sin” (shorthand for Modern Singaporean) restaurant Wild Rocket. “I don’t know about that because I have only one mouth and I am busy eating.”

t food has great symbolic power in Singapore. “We were an immigrant society where the most important thing was having enough to eat,” says Violet Oon, the Julia Child of Singapore. “So the greatest sign of success was having a fat baby.” (I remember unsuccessfully trying to explain this concept to an American boyfriend who got tremendously miffed whenever my parents showed up for a visit and remarked with big smiles, “You’ve put on weight!”)

What makes the Scientology situation so egregious is that no independent theological, philosophical or critical reflection can happen when the text is locked away. There seems to me to be a conflict here. If you believe you have access to a truth that has the ability to save people in the afterlife or to dramatically make their life better in this one, you have some kind of duty to share it. Or rather, if you are keeping your religious truths to yourself and not sharing them, people have very good reason to believe you might be a huckster.

But I found out today that Scientology is not alone in locking up their teachings behind the wall of copyright. The Catholic Church does too. All of the copyright in the papal writings of Pope Benedict XVI now belong to the Vatican publishing house, Libreria Editrice Vaticana.

The writings of the Pope will not go out of copyright until 70 years after his death.

What benefit is this to anyone? Did the lack of copyright protection for writings of Popes before the current copyright regime prevent the spread of Catholicism? If everything the Pope wrote was in public domain, would it prevent the development of the “useful Arts and Sciences”, as the U.S. Constitution puts it? The motivation of the Pope is really not the same as the motivation of the Walt Disney company. Without copyright protection, the Church will not fall to bits. Indeed, one interesting question is what the copyright status of the Catholic Catechism is. This is the basic doctrine of the Catholic faith. I would presume it is copyright in much the same way. If we criticise Scientology for locking it’s scriptures up behind copyright, surely the same could be said for the Catechism? For a body like the Catholic Church, it would seem totally reasonable and straight-forward to simply release all their materials completely as public domain.

we should welcome this decision even though it protects bigots of limited reasoning ability about cause and effect who are indifferent to the feelings of the recently bereaved. The best response to hateful speech is surely counter-speech. At many recent military funerals, counter-protestors have arrived early in their thousands and occupied the prime spaces in the surrounding area. That is a far better reaction than a legal gagging order.

The biggest effect was with those people who scored high on the "God as locus of health control" measure - that means people who agreed with statements like "Whether or not my HIV disease improves is up to God." Although this had no effect on medication taking at 3 months, the halfway point of the study, by the end of the study (at 6 months) people who scored high on this measure were 42% less likely to be taking their medication regularly.

This study is interesting because these aren't folks who have any crazy ideas that medicine is useless. Remember, they signed up to take part in a drug study, presumably because they thought they might benefit. What's more, they stayed in the study right to the end, and did take their medicine most of the time. It's just that they were more likely than others to 'forget' it.

Now, this is a complicated picture in other ways. People who are at death's door (unlike the mostly healthy people in this study) seem to be more likely to ask for 'heroic' interventions to try to keep them alive if they have strong beliefs in God's will.

Maybe confronting your own imminent death triggers some reconsiderations about the mysterious workings of the almighty!

Other Anonymous targets include the Church of Scientology and, most recently, cyber-security company HBGary, which attempted to infiltrate Anonymous. In response, the lose-knit hacker group released 71,800 HBGary emails, which revealed highly dubious activities by the company, almost instantaneously destroying HBGary’s reputation and potentially setting it on a path to financial ruin.

Each new prophet can explain why his prediction is going to come true where all previous predictions (sometimes including his own) have not.