Promoting Science and Critical Thinking
It is a clever bit of viral marketing, and yet it is more than that, it is also a wonderfully inventive bit of seasonal fun. Yes, I’m taking a different tack today and am not scribbling my usual daily rant, but am instead sharing some of Raggle’s pictures. Photographer, Peter Thorpe, who is based in Bristol … Read more
A war on what? The first observation to make is that the celebration of Christmas as we now experience it is very much an invention of the victorian era, and historically it was Easter that had far more significance to Christians. Much may in fact has been prompted by Charles Dickens writing A Christmas Carol in which he constructs Christmas as … Read more
Blasphemy laws are meaningless bits of legal nonsense that do nothing except empower a specific religious faction to oppress and stifle almost anything that they decide they are offended about, and that “offence” is never actually defined but is usually sufficiently vague enough to be applied to whatever a random cleric thinks it needs to … Read more
There has been a “10 ‘Non-Commandments’ Contest,” in which people were asked to offer modern and far better alternatives to the famous 10, and the prize on offer for the winner was $10,000. Who is doing this? Lex Bayer, an executive at AirBnB, and John Figdor, a humanist chaplain at Stanford University Why? The cynical might simply make … Read more
A label that some of the religious will often deploy is the term “Atheist Fundamentalist”, but this is a meaningless combination of words. Try these combinations … Atheist Christian Muslim Atheist So what do the above describe? You might for example infer that such combinations apply to individuals who have a specific cultural heritage, but do … Read more
You would think that outside of ISIS themselves, anybody openly criticising ISIS would be commended and supported, even within the Islamic world. Alas, apparently not. The New York Times reports … The chief editor of a prominent Indonesian newspaper, the English-language Jakarta Post, has been summoned for questioning by the police for publishing a cartoon that … Read more