Sorry, things will go dead for awhile. I somehow got a spyware invader (despite antivirus and spysweeper) and it prevents me from getting online so I can’t download the tools to fix it so…I don’t know when I’ll be back.
Sorry!… Read the rest
Sorry, things will go dead for awhile. I somehow got a spyware invader (despite antivirus and spysweeper) and it prevents me from getting online so I can’t download the tools to fix it so…I don’t know when I’ll be back.
Sorry!… Read the rest
Is it possible that those people with smaller hippocampal volumes are more likely to have specific religious attributes, drawing the causal arrow in the other direction?… Read the rest
A senior Egyptian general told CNN that women detained on 9 March at Cairo’s Tahrir Square had been forced to undergo ‘virginity tests’.… Read the rest
Magdalenes? What Magdalenes?
…it was Ireland’s hidden scandal: an estimated 30,000 women were sent to church-run laundries, where they were abused and worked for years with no pay. Their offense, in the eyes of society, was to break the strict sexual rules of Catholic Ireland, having children outside wedlock.
Their “offense” – but it wasn’t a mere offense, was it, it was a crime. We know this because of what the passage says: the women were imprisoned for years. They got the kind of sentence a convicted murderer gets. They were locked up, for years, and abused and worked for no pay. That’s an extremely harsh prison sentence – for having children outside marriage.
… Read the restUntil recently, the
Ireland has failed to investigate a 70+-year system of torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of women and girls in the Magdalene laundries.… Read the rest
“The fact is that the war has not been won by either side. The only correct term would be that it is a frozen conflict.”… Read the rest
Hmm.… Read the rest
Idea was to find common ground by saying Islam believes in Jesus, but billboard saying “Jesus: a prophet of Islam” has a bishop all upset.… Read the rest
A couple of indignant wanna-be bureaucrats of atheism complaining about those cranky, rough-hewn gnu atheists.… Read the rest
More Stedman and McLaren. Sorry. Fair warning, so that you can stop reading now if you’re fed up to the back teeth with them.
Stedman is annoyed that gnu atheists don’t take his and McLaren’s advice on what “will benefit the atheist movement” but instead dare to offer “disagreements and accusations that McLaren, Luna, I (and many who affiliate with us) don’t have the best interests of the atheist movement in mind.”
That’s an odd complaint. It seems like a tangent. I don’t really know what they have in mind, I know only what they do, and what they do is talk a lot of nasty smack about gnu atheists, most of which is exaggerated at best.
Then Chris … Read the rest
The BWF now says it will not introduce the new rule, pending a general review.… Read the rest
With much talk of freedom.… Read the rest
A group of ultra-Orthodox Christians attacked the protesters, so the police arrested…the protesters.… Read the rest
Patrick Strudwick went undercover, investigating therapists who practise so-called conversion therapy – who try to “pray away the gay”.… Read the rest
Oh the self-admiring moral bankruptcy of the Catholic church…
It’s doing a conference on AIDS this weekend. It’s as obstinate and evil as it’s been all along.
A Vatican cardinal opened an international conference on AIDS by strongly defending the church’s two-pronged strategy against the disease: education of consciences and mobilization of Catholic health resources for patients.
That is not a strategy. People can be infected by their partners, so educating consciences is not good enough. A woman can be entirely monogamous and still be infected by a non-monogamous partner – obviously, and as everyone knows – so prattle of conscience is just conceited obfuscation.
… Read the rest“Educating people to avoid high-risk behavior, when based on solid moral principles, fully demonstrates
“The cardinal did not mention the question of condoms in AIDS prevention.” Scum.… Read the rest
I was re-reading a bit of Karen Armstrong’s The Case for God this morning, and I encountered something odd. It’s in chapter 12, “Death of God”; she gives an account of Stephen Jay Gould’s NOMA and how it works, and then says:
But the new atheists will have none of this, and in his somewhat immoderate way, Dawkins denounces Gould as a quisling.
There’s no reference. Well where did he say that? I wondered. I knew he’d used the word at one point, but I didn’t think it was about Gould. I read the bit about NOMA in The God Delusion, and it’s not there. When I got on the computer I googled it, and got nothing.
I don’t … Read the rest
If you don’t know which of two reasonable interventions is best, and you want to find out, a trial will tell you.… Read the rest
Several evangelical Christian members of Brazil’s chamber of deputies said the sex education packs encouraged homosexual behaviour.… Read the rest