14 August 2008 21:06
#  2005 was the warmest year ever recorded, closely followed by 1998 and 2007. Twelve of the 13 warmest years on record were between 1995 and 2007.
# The reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are based on the peer-reviewed, published work of 2,500 scientists in more than 130 countries.
# Climate is average weather. It’s what all the weather adds up to over time, to give averages for temperature, rainfall, snow and frost.
# The difference in climate between a warm period and the middle of an ice age is between 4°C and 6°C.
# 125,000 years ago (during the last warm period between ice ages) temperatures were around 1.5°C higher than they are now; the sea level was 4-6m higher.

14 August 2008 20:41
Professor Flew has recently written his forthright views on Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion. His article, reproduced below, shows Professor Flew’s key reasons for his belief in a Divine Intelligence. He also makes it clear in There is a God (page 213) that it is possible for an omnipotent being to choose to reveal himself to human beings, or to act in the world in other ways. Professor Flew’s article is offered here as testimony to the developing thinking of someone who is prepared to consider the evidence and follow its implications wherever it leads.

8 August 2008 19:22
1) If in doubt – ask a question.
Don’t be afraid to question things. Don’t be afraid to offer a question even though other people in your peer group have not questioned before.
2) Place experience over authority.
If one reflects upon what the authority figure is conveying to you, does it pan out with your real life experience? For example, if someone tells you that all red heads are moody – have you experienced this in your life?
3) Understand People.
Does the person communicating with you have an agenda that might be influencing what they are telling you? What is motivating this person? Why do you think they think this way?

7 August 2008 23:49
Authors like Weinberg and Dawkins helped me maintain a kind of physical addiction to the atheistic outlook. I certainly took pleasure in reading them far beyond what was justified by the content, which, as we’ve seen, was deeply pessimistic in tone and without value as argument. Thus there was probably something chemical going on in my brain… Just as smokers continue to light up in order to relieve nicotine anxiety… so did I find comfort in reading such statements, though small comfort, from the ever present sense of despair that came with my bleak view of the universe as a place without meaning.