Introduction

This is the personal website of Gavin Orland. I was born in England in 1973 and divide my time mainly between London and Florida. I’ve lived in London since 1991 and have visited many other cities around the world too.

For work (and enjoyment) I’m a Flash developer and instructor, with my own limited company (find out a lot more about my work here). I love working with Flash because it exercises both logic and creativity and enables communication on a global scale. I also have a first class degree in Philosophy from the University of Durham and a background in advertising and design.

I come from a happy family and am not motivated solely by money. I have one brother, who is married and lives in the English countryside, my parents live in the middle of England (with another house in the north) and my multi-talented fiancée is from Florida.

I’m a humanist and care about the state of the society I see around me in London and often reflect upon it here on this site. I’m against political correctness and believe it is important to defend reason and compassion against superstition and faith. While I’m completely open minded to evidence, I’m against any kind of superstition, from tetraphobia to feng shui, ghosts, rain dances, ionized bracelets, astrology, lucky charms, magic spells and religion. There’s extremely strong evidence that these are all completely unfounded.

I’m especially concerned about religion, which I regard as baseless, arrogant, unnecessary, demeaning, stultifying, backward, irrational and immoral. As such, I consider it to be the number one obstacle to peace and the primary threat to humankind in the world today. I am also against PR spin, idiotic advertising and political correctness, which are other kinds of lying.

Sometimes I make my own music and, aside from philosophy and Flash, other things I enjoy include:

• Music
• Humanism
• Science
• Secularism
• Nature
• Cinema
• Real ale
• Travel
• History
• Art
• Socialising
• Current affairs

There is a work page here but the site serves principally as a platform for my personal writing, which (though often controversial) is humanist in nature. I edit what I write whenever I like - revisiting, honing and improving. I hope you find my articles an interesting read.