Our path toward a more compassionate world for those suffering from mental illness can be illuminated by the light of acknowledging the illusory nature of free will.
Tag: humanism
Baby Asha: How You Can Support Her
Published in the Independent Australia, 26th February 2016: Baby Asha: How you can support her Excerpt: “Empathy can kindle the flames of compassion, but we require someone to thoughtfully and dispassionately fan those flames in the right direction. Left to our own devices in a third-world country, we would disproportionately give to an individual. Charities use…
Baby Asha Decision Sets Risky Precedent
Published in the Sydney Morning Herald, 22nd February 2016: Baby Asha Decision Sets Risky Precedent. Excerpt: “The problem here is the irrationality of empathy: the imaginative capacity to place ourselves in another’s situation. As psychologist Paul Bloom has said: “If you want to be good and do good, empathy is a poor guide”. Empathy favours an individual…
‘Vegan’ and ‘Veganism’: Ideas Versus People in the Wider Fight For Progress
Published in The Daily Banter, 17th January 2016: ‘Vegan’ and ‘Veganism’: Ideas Versus People in the Wider Fight For Progress. Excerpt: “When one demands their right to criticize religion, they can do so by appealing to their fundamental right to lambast any idea. In the words of Maajid Nawaz, “No idea is above scrutiny, just…
New Atheists Must Become New Vegans: Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and the extra burden on moral leaders
Published on Salon, 10th January 2016: “New atheists must become new vegans: Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and the extra burden on moral leaders”. As some of you might know, Salon altered the title of the article without my consent to include the words “must”, “moral leaders”, and include the names of Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins. This was misleading,…
Discovering Our Global Tribe
[Photo credit: Y. Beletsky/ESO] Are we alone in the universe? We have reached a time in history in which this ancient question is coming out of the darkness of pure philosophy and into the light of empirical science. With each passing year it is becoming increasingly possible to answer, and after some leading astronomers recently…
Buying Happiness
(Artwork by Najin Jun) I recently viewed some posts on my Facebook newsfeed that made me think – one status was by a friend announcing that they had just bought a new house, underneath this was another friend publicizing a charitable donation they had just made, and upon scrolling further down the page was a…
Steve Stankevicius 