Catholic Homophobia in Scotland

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The news is that the Equality Network (a group that works for equality and human rights in Scotland) commissioned Ipsos-MORI to survey Scottish attitudes towards marriage and found that of 1,003 people asked, 64 percent supported the idea of allowing gay and straight couples an equal right to marry. Hey, that’s quite good news. Ah but not everybody thinks … Read more

Is X a good movie? – Forget the critics, pay attention to Internet Chatter

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A team of smart folks in Japan have found a mathematical model for the ‘hit’ phenomenon in entertainment. It basically uses the advertisement budget time distribution and also word-of-mouth (WOM) to  work things out. Oh wait, how the heck do you measure WOM? Well they went for the number of posts on social network systems such as … Read more

Common Religious Claim: “No true Scotsman …”

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When you confront some believers with examples of truly outrageous religious behaviour, the common rebuttal is “Ah but they are not real believers, no true believer from my faith would …“. Now that indeed might be factually correct, but they are missing the key point, so let us now take a quick look at all this. First, what … Read more

Indonesian Insanity – Non-believer jailed for 2.5 years after writing “God doesn’t exist” on his Facebook page

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The Jakarta times reports … An Indonesian man arrested after writing “God doesn’t exist” on his Facebook page was jailed for 30 months Thursday for sharing explicit material about the Prophet Mohammed online. Alexander Aan, 30, was found guilty of “deliberately spreading information inciting religious hatred and animosity,” presiding judge Eka Prasetya Budi Dharma told … Read more

Study predicts imminent irreversible planetary collapse

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Some scary stuff is on the horizon …  we’re on a much worse collision course with Mother Nature than currently thought. In Approaching a state-shift in Earth’s biosphere, a paper just published in Nature, the authors, whose expertise spans a multitude of disciplines, suggest our planet’s ecosystems are careenng towards an imminent, irreversible collapse. The … Read more

evolutionary science = ‘the new classics’ – A proposal by Richard Dawkins

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I first heard Richard talk about this two years ago. At the time, I listened, watched the slides and thought, “Nice Talk”, but did not really get it. Well, I’ve changed my mind, there is an article by Carole Jahme in yesterday’s Guardian that clearly explains it all, and so now I think I’m beginning … Read more