Festival Of Ideas

This is the final in our Adelaide Festival of Ideas series - the brainfest begins today. In this column Paul Collins talks about how important it is to recognise and protect religion pluralism.

Richard Dawkins and his atheist mates have done us a real disservice by caricaturing all religion as fundamentalist claptrap. The problem is that by pretending that all religions are the same, he obscures the important differences that have to be negotiated if we are going to live in a more peaceful and tolerant world.

This is especially true when we come to negotiate that most important contemporary divides between the West and the Islamic world. At the heart of this is the negotiation between Christianity and Islam, two faiths that really need to talk to each other for all our sakes. But this isn’t going to be easy.

Continue reading "Religions: Not same same, but different" »

According to Andy Warhol, everyone has their “15 minutes of fame”. Looking back at four decades of work as a health scientist mine will probably be the development of ‘GutBusters’, the world’s first men’s “waist loss” program in 1991.

GutBusters lasted for over a decade before it was taken over by Weight Watchers and closed down for being unprofitable (men won’t admit to having anything wrong with their health and hence won’t pay for it).

This is despite the fact that it achieved (and still has) world-wide acknowledgement as an ethically-based and economic scientific weight loss program. Those are rare, by the way.

Continue reading "Economic growth is making you really, really fat" »

Nothing inspires murderous mayhem in human beings more reliably than sexual repression. Denied food, water, or freedom of movement, people may lash out at what they perceive as the source of their problems, albeit in a weakened state. But if expression of sexuality is thwarted, the human psyche tends to grow twisted into grotesque, enraged perversions of desire.

Unfortunately, the distorted rage resulting from sexual repression rarely takes the form of rebellion against the people and institutions behind the repression. (If it did, perhaps we’d be reading of abused priests rather than priests as abusers.) 

Instead, the rage is generally directed at helpless victims sacrificed to the sick gods of guilt, shame, and ignorant pride.

Continue reading "Sex and masturbation evil? Get your hand off it." »

Mental health surveys consistently show that around one in five of us will experience an episode of significant distress and dysfunction in any year. It saddens me that this suffering is mostly labelled as mental disorder and that we are encouraged to seek medical treatment for it. 

No one likes suffering, but to suffer meaninglessly is worse. We should therefore strive to help people make sense of their distress; instead contemporary psychiatric practice is to rob actions and experiences of their meaning by applying simplistic labels and glib biological explanations. 

Of course biological understanding can impart meaning, sometimes dramatically.

Continue reading "You may not be as crazy as you think" »

It is one of the most resonant phrases in our national mythology: “Lest we forget”. On November 11 each year and on Anzac day we say it or think it.

But forgetting lies at the heart of this country. We have constructed a myth about ourselves which cannot survive unless we forget some painful truths. A veil of comforting amnesia protects our vanity and the comfortable dream we have conjured for ourselves.

Since John Howard saw the votes to be had by appropriating some of Pauline Hanson’s racism, boat people have been tagged “illegals”. Howard won the 2001 election on it; Abbott persists in it. Gillard and Bowen go along with it, hesitating between decency and victory, but for their troubles are likely to be denied both.

Continue reading "Lest we forget our values in the asylum seeker debate" »

Drugs are bad! Drugs are bad for individuals and they are bad for societies. This seems to be the opinion of most, but it is very hard to get to the bottom of why so many people have this view. In the case of a street drug like heroin it is quite easy to see the high cost to an addict’s life and family, but there are countless other examples where the cost/benefit tradeoff is far more favourable.

Drug use falls into three main categories: 1. Medicine 2. Enhancement, and 3. Recreation. Medicinal use of drugs is not at issue here, as society already seems to be willing to engage in honest and open discussions about the risks, benefits and side effects of drugs for medicinal purposes.

Things get far trickier when it comes to the use of drugs for enhancement and recreation.  Drug companies around the world are spending billions of dollars trying to develop drugs that will reduce our need for sleep, bolster memory power and simply make us feel happier. Do we want to live in a society where such drugs are available for everyday use?

Continue reading "What if you could give your kids some really good drugs?" »

This is the first in a series of pieces The Punch will run featuring speakers from the upcoming Adelaide Festival of Ideas. This week, oncologist Ranjana Srivastava writes about the last days of a terminally-ill patient.

Surprisingly, it takes until mid-morning for the code blue call. The way he has declined, I would have expected him to have breathed his last by now.

Aghast at the code, I climb the stairs two at a time to get to Mr Johnson’s bed side. There he lies, surrounded by a throng of doctors, each moving to a different part of his body, to bring it back to life.

“Quick, is he breathing?” asks one. “The pulse, the pulse”, presses another, already plucking open the patient’s gown. “Mr. Johnson, wake up, wake up darling,” urges his lovely, white-haired nurse.

Continue reading "When letting go is the hardest thing to do" »