This week, in the last Quantum for 2016, David Robertson looks at some of the world view messages that we're hearing (or not hearing) being expressed through the media.

 

 

1) Gender / Transgender Update.

Christian Institute - 9-year-old given puberty blockers after watching CBBC programme

 

 

BBC - Transgender child: The boy putting his female puberty on hold

 

 

The Times - 'He' and 'she' are now 'ze' at Oxford

 

 

BBC - Malta bans 'gay cure' conversion therapy

 

 

Council of Europe - The Istanbul Convention

 

 

 

2) University and Education

 

"Social constructionism is the doctrine that all human roles are socially constructed. They’re detached from the underlying biology and from the underlying objective world."

Dr Jordan Petersen

 

 

C2C Journal - ‘We’re teaching university students lies’ – An interview with Dr Jordan Peterson

 

 

National Post - Conrad Black: Jordan Peterson speaks for those of us that refuse to follow the ‘great liberal death wish’

 

 

Herald Scotland - Pro-life students from Strathclyde University banned from becoming an official club

 

 

The Guardian - Graduate sues Oxford University for £1m over his failure to get a first

 

 

Spiked Online - There's more to university than getting a good job

 

 

 

 

3)  Secular swimming pools

 

BBC - Funds raised to open pool in Lewis on Sabbath

National Secular Society - Sabbath swimming campaign succeeds, thanks to islanders and secularists

SPIN ALERT - Of course, another way of looking at this story is that, since the Indiegogo 60 day crowdfunding campaign was about to expire without meeting its fundraising pledge target, the 'All-or-Nothing' campaign would have collapsed without raising a penny unless the NSS had stepped in at the end to fund 20% themselves.

 "The special mark of the modern world is not that it is skeptical, but that it is dogmatic without knowing it. It says, in mockery of old devotees, that they believed without knowing why they believed. But the moderns believe without knowing what they believe - and without even knowing that they do believe it. Their freedom consists in first freely assuming a creed, and then freely forgetting that they are assuming it. In short, they have always an unconscious dogma; and an unconscious dogma is the definition of a prejudice."

G.K. Chesterton, from an article in the Illustrated London News, March 15, 1919.

 

 

 

 

4) Conflict in Syria - Alleppo.

 

 

 

 

 

5) Deaths.

 

New York Times - John Glenn, American Hero of the Space Age, Dies at 95.

 

BBC - Weatherman Ian McCaskill dies, aged 78

 

Greg Lake