Welcome to the monthly digest for January
Hi ,
We hope you enjoyed the end of our holiday series, 'The season for reason', featuring republished articles from the Australian Rationalist journal.
You can catch up on all of the articles in the series here.
Another highlight from the past month was a piece by Ian Robinson about the debate over Australia Day.
Si Gladman
Editor
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Highlights from Rationale
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| Suicide as catastrophe and as calculation (PREMIUM)
By Paul Monk
The August 2021 issue of Harper’s magazine has a cover story headed ‘What are the odds? The Troubled Quest to Predict Suicide’. The essay was by Will Stephenson, an associate editor of the magazine.
Towards the end of the article, he recounted the stories, in brief, of two male friends of his (B and J, he dubbed them) who had committed suicide when they were all very young.
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| Why I won’t be celebrating Australia Day on 26 January
By Ian Robinson
Most nations on their national day celebrate something significant which they achieved – the day they stormed the Bastille, or trudged on the Long March, or wrote the Declaration of Independence. Australia is the only nation on the planet whose national day celebrates another country’s achievement.
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MBJ's view on current affairs
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| Cracks in the defence of democracy
By Trevor Bell
When talking about ‘democracy’, ‘capitalism’ and ‘market economies’, many people confuse the terminology and the benefits that flow from these ideas while assuming they are necessarily tied in with each other. A prime example of this can be seen in the article ‘In defence of democracy’ written by Carrick Ryan and published in the Rationale magazine in November. Ryan wrote a few things that I have problems with.
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| The age of reason: Polarisation is undermining rational debate (2015)
By Louis Coutts
With such a chasm between one view and another, it is not possible to have a unified approach to climate change. Consequently, little is being done in the world to redress global warming. There is no reasoning mechanism that enables constructive discussion between polarised entities. It seems that this has always been thus.
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| A fundamental examination of the intersection of reason and belief (2016)
By Hugh Harris
I’m inspired by Nick Trakakis’ thoughtful account of his struggle to reconcile his faith with philosophic inquiry in ‘Why I am not Orthodox’ on ABC’s Religion & Ethics, 7 December 2015. Trakakis concludes that faith commitment to the main forms of organised religion is “incompatible with the pursuit of truth and wisdom”. The idea that faith contains epistemic value is the mirage of organised
religion.
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