People aren't usually machines. They make choices. Was James Eagan Holmes * insane, driven by madness? He was born on December 13, 1987; on midnight of July 19 and the early morning of July 20, 2012, he killed 12 people and injured another 59 in a movie theater in Denver, Colorado, at a showing of the latest Batman film, a midnight premiere of The Dark Knight Rises. Was he insane? Let's tackle the difficult part first.

The blogger The Last Psychiatrist once said in connection to...

Malcolm Bowden is a man who does not seem to have any medical training at all. That doesn't stop him dictating on medical issues; like someone with no experience nor knowledge telling you what to do with your appendix, you would be very well advised to be very wary of him. Bowden, a self-declared Evangelical Christian, has a strange website up advertising many of his off-the-wall opinions, ranging from on geocentricity of all things, to Young Earth Creationism, to stellar parallax and redshift variations,...

PC David Rathband apparently committed suicide yesterday, after a long period of dealing with being blinded. He had been shot in the face by Raoul Moat almost 2 years ago, rendering him permanently blind; apparently, in what should have been a huge warning sign, he separated from his wife and family in November 2011. From the sketchy reports it seems he suffered from severe depression. A brief report on his suicide is here, a previous news report on his struggle with blindness is here.
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Hi guys,
Mark Driscoll (@pastormark) of the Mars Hill Church, Seattle, Washington (not to be confused with the Mars Hill Church, Grand Rapids, Michigan, of Rob Bell), made a whole long blog post all about himself, Mark Driscoll, and then said it was all about Jesus. His blog post is "A Blog Post for the Brits". Now, you might think it a bit odd for me to reply to all you American Christians and to Mark Driscoll, but bear with me.

Poor old Mark Driscoll is complaining there...

Every time I look again at cases like that of Mark Rife, I come up with different views. I blogged on how I disagreed in part with Pastabagel over that case; now Pastabagel's fellow blogger on the Partial Objects site, The Last Psychiatrist (TLP), has weighed in with a comment under Pastabagel's post. TLP makes one obvious criticism, leastaways obvious to those who know the Partial Objects and TLP's own original blog well, that being that: "The essence of Mark Rife’s problem is that he tried to...

You may not have heard of Mark Rife yet, but even if you close down this screen and never come back, you will hear of him. And you can either decide what it should mean for you, or have it decided for you by mere accident of personal history. Mark Rife recently committed suicide just shortly after one thousand days — 1,000 days, which is two and three-quarter years — after the death of his wife, Sarah Ann Rife née Testa, who died August 25, 2008. He waited so long because of a remark his wife had...

As people struggle to cope with Breivik's deeds, they often call him "deranged" and "insane", which is simply wrong, unscientific empty name-calling, and adds to the demonization of the actual mentally ill - most of whom will never hurt anyone but themselves if anyone. Most of us can agree that Breivik is evil, but evil is a very loose concept, often misused by people, adding to the confusion. Many of us can agree that there is no point in describing natural events or sheer randomicity as evil;...

Terrorism is the use of violent acts intended to create terror and which deliberately target or disregard the safety of non-combatant civilians, in pursuit of any alleged goal. By that and by any other reasonable definition of terrorism, Anders Behring Breivik is a terrorist. There is no excuse; he is a terrorist. The murder of innocents; Breivik went out of his way to specifically murder innocents, whether in Oslo or in Utøya, many of them young teenagers. He is also a classical narcissist, unable...

I came across a great new phrase today - poutrage posse. In relation to some in the USA constantly attacking President Obama, and claiming to be doing it from the left. Let's get a few things straight. President Obama can only accomplish most what Congress allows or helps him to do so. Of what he can do on his own, he's done a hell of a lot already. The bottom line is also he is far better than the alternatives. That goes for USA federal and state elections too; whatever you want, you must persuade...

By now, a good many people will be aware of the trash-talking that Richard Littlejohn indulges in. Littlejohn is a British hack who routinely trolls in a twice-weekly column for the tabloid The Daily Mail. It's important to realise that he trolls -- he is only assuming racist and other bigoted stances such as hinted homophobia just to annoy the public, and to gain supporters pathetic enough to need to live vicariously through Littlejohn, to make their little wieners feel longer. Moreover the Daily...

Richard Littlejohn is a British, rightwing hack who writes a twice-weekly column for the tabloid the Daily Mail. He delights in trying to troll the public, but his childish narcissism has now reached rock-bottom; he has stated in effect Japan deserves no help from outside after the earthquake -- because of World War Two. Since WW2 ended over 65 years ago, you might think it's somewhat irrelevant. Since one whole lot of Japanese children died in the tsunami and its wake after the earthquake, you...

A new study, done by the Brookings Institution together with the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), has found a huge majority of white Evangelicals believe in American exceptionalism. Not only that, but the study found 58% of polled Americans overall believed in American exceptionalism. You can read more about that study here, here and above all here,

Robert P. Jones of the PRRI said of the poll results:
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The Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert "Rally To Restore Sanity And/Or Fear" took place yesterday, on Saturday 30 October 2010, on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., USA. It apparently went very well indeed. It looks like well over 200,000 people attended that rally yesterday, which compares brilliantly well with the only 87,000 at Glenn Beck's Tea Party rally back in August.

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Another day, another (smallish) piece from me inside a Panel Debate piece, in the Guardian, Cif section. Arguing about moderating on a board or similar is a bit like sporking yourself through the eyeballs; the more you do it, the more you wonder just why you are doing it. There are no less than 983 comments in the thread under that Panel piece; one bloke who did a lot of the running in the comments, and who made good sense, was MartynInEurope.

When I look through all those 983 comments,...

If you're ever in a relationship with someone, and they keep bopping up to you and complaining, "I'm not happy about the relationship", at some stage you're really going to want to thwack them over the head hard and ask them, "Do you think you could possibly be a bit more specific and a bit more helpful?" If they can't get more specific and actually cooperative, you're going to be fully in your rights to see them as being very damned egocentric, narcissistic and simply using you. Anyone who keeps...

So I flew off to London to go to the big RSA/New Humanist event. I'm busy at the moment writing up a report for it for my blog, but it takes a bit of time, so you get this in the meantime, and I should have my report up on my blog later today. My planned report/blog post later today will be factual, well-sourced, and with every preposition fully justified in proof and given some link or 'tother. This blog post isn't. This blog post is just me rambling away, no links, bugger all explanation. You...

This blog post is prompted by a couple of recent comments on my blog, as well as by the long, long debate within the fragmenting atheist movement -- fragmenting largely as a result of the antics of Gnu atheists (the term New Atheists being only properly used for five people only), but more on that fragmentation in a separate blog post soon. The central issue surrounding the Gnu atheists is personal abuse (more than enough examples have been given in my blog, elsewhere, and looked at in depth)....

Since I'm going to be doing several blog posts very soon on certain recent incredible antics by wannabes, I am going to provide here definitions of some of the phrases currently tossed around in hapless word-salads on many atheist blogs and boards.

• Atheism: Anyone who vocally rejects belief in all gods is an atheist. I am just such an atheist.
  
  Identification: most often self-applied, sometimes a label applied by others.
  
  
• Antitheism/Anti-theism:

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At the same time of the ongoing fuss about Raoul Moat in Britain, over on the other side of the Atlantic, there is a Marie Claire article about honor killings in the USA, there is a campaign there called Leave Islam Safely, and so on and so on. When such murders happen associated with some non-religious and very rich guy in the USA, they're called O.J. Simpson (see footnote below); when they're associated with some not-so-rich and non-religious bloke in Newcastle in England, they're called Raoul...

I blogged recently about the rage of a narcissist being unpredictable, in connection with Derrick Bird and the Cumbria shootings. Now all too soon yet another narcissist has gone on a killing spree, Raoul Moat. After being released from prison after serving time for assaulting a child of his, Moat shot his former girlfriend Samantha Stobbart, wounding her very severely, and shot her current boyfriend Chris Brown, lethally. Raoul Moat also shot PC David Rathband, wounding him very severely; in all...