Indeed, without emotion it seems unlikely we can even have morality.

Untested assumptions and lazy habits of thought can be shown up, once put in a spotlight of a different hue.

Traditional arguments for the existence of God and contemporary attempts to use fine-tuning and cosmology to back up the case for his existence always strike me as kinds of games, since hardly anyone believes on the basis of these arguments at all.

I think that internet technologies are making everything so transparent. The arms race of deception and spin against the public trying to keep up with it - I think the forces of spin have to lose. In the corporate world people are finding this. Corporate social responsibility has been on the agenda for a very long time - and a lot of people say it's a kind of green-wash or white-wash - but because there's nowhere to hide anymore, people are coming around to the realization that the only way to be seen to be good is to be good. You can't fake it.

Trying to keep up with health advice can feel like surfing the Net for weather forecasts: what you find is always changing, often contradictory and rarely encouraging.

On social networking sites, we may expose ourselves, but we choose to do so. We are in control and, often wrongly, we do not feel we are giving away tradable data.

Rules matter, and to be rules they need to be universal in form: always do this, never do that. But it is foolish to rule out in advance the possibility that an occasion might arise when normal rules just don't apply. Rules are not there to be broken, but sometimes break them we must.