Christopher Hitchens, whom many of us admire despite occasional differences of opinion, died at only 62 on December 14, 2011. Lawrence Krauss organized an event with four of Hitchens’s friends, all reminiscing about the Great Lion of Rhetoric. The panel was filmed in London on December 13, 2024—just 19 days ago—and I’ve put the video […]
On Friday, the Supreme Court agreed to review a potentially blockbuster religion clause case in Oklahoma Charter School Board v. Drummond. However, there is a catch. While the lawyers representing St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School may need every vote they can get in this heaving contested area, they may have to prevail without Justice […]
The Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) is under fire this week after it censored a leading scientist, atheist, and board member, Jerry Coyne, a professor emeritus of ecology at the University of Chicago. The FFRF took down a column in which Coyne published a column titled “Biology is not bigotry,” a critique of an earlier […]
France’s Sports Minister, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra, has announced that French Muslim athletes will be barred from wearing hijabs at the Olympics. The decision is a gross violation of the religious freedom of Muslim athletes and should be condemned throughout the world.
This item, from the Breaking Views website in New Zealand, is one of the rare cases of a Kiwi speaking up against forcible adherence to Māori customs on the job—in this case, saying Māori prayers. First, “Health New Zealand,” the organization in question, is a government agency that, according to its own description: . . […]
Meanwhile, the fun continues in New Zealand, as this article from Te Ao, which conveys Māori news, attests. In fact, there’s a video, so you can see the whole episode, as well as a transcript of the video. Here’s what happened: A local district council met and one of the participants wanted to recite a […]
This very short article appeared in Waatea News, which I gather is a purveyor of news related to the Māori of New Zealand. (It also runs, I believe, the country’s only Māori radio station.) I’m putting it up for one reason, and then we’ll get a break from the Kiwis and the iwi for a […]
Just recently Ayaan Hirsi Ali announced, after years of professing atheism (and rejecting her earlier Muslim faith(, that she’d become a Christian. This was announced in an article in Unherd, but she also discussed it briefly on a video, both of which I posted. Although she wasn’t explicit about what exactly she believed about Christianity, it’s […]
Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert”. - J Robert Oppenheimer.
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