The Global Secular Council is getting much much better at remembering that “Global” has to include people who aren’t from the US or the UK or even Sweden; much much better at following the news from other parts of the world and sharing voices from there.

Or, not.

 … Read the rest

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Wow, the Global Secular Council and its parent the Secular Coalition for American sure is doing a great job of representing US secularists.

Secular Council @SecularCouncil June 2

Thanks, @RichSandersen, for understanding we had been trying to answer Ofie’s questions, but had not been heard!

“Ofie”

That’s what the harassers call me. Sometimes they vary it to Oafy, just like any 5-year-old.

And the Global Secular Council thinks it’s appropriate to follow their lead.… Read the rest

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Sometimes I ask myself : Are Africans returning to a dark age? Are we moving towards or away from enlightenment, from civilisation? These questions have become necessary if one is to put into context the magical and superstitious beliefs that are ravaging the continent.

Recent reports from Burkina Faso and Nigeria (not just about Boko Haram and the missing girls) have caused me to wonder as to where this African continent is heading in this 21^st century. Africans, just like people in other regions of the world, entertain magical and mystical beliefs. They also hold spiritual and supernatural opinions. But the superstitious currents in Africa appear to be taking on a different dimension. I mean the situation is getting … Read the rest

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Leo Igwe is doing a speaking tour in the Ohio-Indiana-Chicago-Michigan area in July. Don’t miss this if you are in that rectangle!

July 11-13: SSA conference in Columbus
July 14: CFI of Northeast Ohio
July 15: Freethought Dayton
July 16: Humanist Community of Central Ohio in Columbus
July 17: CFI Indiana in Indianapolis
July 18-20: FBB conference in Chicago
July 21: CFI Michigan/Society for Humanistic Judaism in Birmingham, MI
July 23: CFI MIchigan in Grand Rapids… Read the rest

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A word of advice. If you’re attempting to write a panegyric in defense of someone who is useful to you but a blister on the heel of many other people – the first thing you want to pay attention to is verisimilitude. You want to make it believable. You see what I’m getting at? You don’t want to say “my friend is a saint, and for this saintliness he is roundly punished.”

You don’t want to say that because right away you’re going to get doubts and questions. “Huh?” people will say. “Why would that happen? Why would anyone punish your friend for saintliness?”

And then they’ll start to wonder if you’re just blowing smoke, and then you might … Read the rest

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Patricia Churchland responds crisply to Colin McGinn in the New York Review of Books. (Colin McGinn. You’d think he’d go quiet for awhile, wouldn’t you, to let people’s memories fade.)

Other scientific disciplines are also extremely important in understanding the nature of the mind: genetics, ethology, anthropology, and linguistics. Philosophy can play a role too, when the philosopher sees it is rewarding to get out of the armchair. Some philosophers, such as Chris Eliasmith, for example, have truly made progress in computationally modeling how the brain represents the world.

Nevertheless, there are nostalgic philosophers who whinge on about saving the purity of the discipline from philosophers like me and Chris Eliasmith and Owen Flanagan and Dan Dennett. What do the

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Here’s a much-needed campaign, run by CFI.

Yes, do.

Right now health care is beset by two plagues:

1. The imposition of religious dogma on health care, resulting in limited access to and even the denial of medical services;
2. The shameless marketing of sham remedies, sold as “natural” or “traditional” cures, often accompanied by the rejection of scientifically proven treatments.

We need to come together to fight for health care based on sound, scientific principles.

We need a campaign to keep health care safe and secular.

Keep Health Care Safe and Secular is harnessing the talent, intelligence, and enthusiasm of people who want to ensure that our health care is focused on effective remedies and proven outcomes. We’re educating the public,

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Originally a comment on To hell with making sense, eh?

Ah yes, Wimmin’s Lib. Burning bras. Damn uppity women jumping in front of the king’s horse. Patronising sitcoms. Patronising sketch shows. Bluff, honest CEOs explaining why they can’t possibly pay women the same as men because babies, menstruation, hormones and they’d only spend it on fashion and hair anyway.

I spend half my time being genuinely shocked on remembering that we live in the 21st century and the other half being even more surprised that we obviously still live in the fucking 70s.

I grew up in those exact fucking 70s in the UK. The very concept of feminism was widely and blandly treated as a joke. Why, feminists didn’t … Read the rest

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Gwyneth Paltrow thinks water thinks you are thinking about it, and that it can tell when you are thinking mean things about it versus thinking nice things about it.

Gwyneth Paltrow loves nothing more than imparting life advice to her followers, and while that advice has dabbled in the pseudoscience before, it’s rarely been as totally off the rails as the May 29th edition of her newsletter goop. Paltrow begins:

I am fascinated by the growing science behind the energy of consciousness and its effects on matter. I have long had Dr. Emoto’s coffee table book on how negativity changes the structure of water, how the molecules behave differently depending on the words or music being expressed around

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This is what I mean. kellym linked to a bit of Twitter harassment of Pamela Gay, so I took a look at the guy doing the harassing, and this is that guy.

one can speak either yes and no about everything… My social views: I am against racism, homophobia, capitalism, fundamentalism, and feminism

This is what I keep saying. People who recoil in horror at the very idea of being racist or homophobic…proudly declare themselves opposed to feminism. That’s what I don’t get.

Racial equality; good. Sexual preference equality; good. Gender equality; ewwwwwwwwwwwwww.

Is it just obvious? Racial equality, meh, he doesn’t have to do anything. Sexual preference equality, meh, he doesn’t have to do anything. But gender equality … Read the rest

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Catherine Corless has a synopsis of her research on that Facebook page but it’s hard to read in the FB format. I made an easier to read version.

The Mother/Baby Home Tuam

The Mother/Baby Home in Tuam was opened in 1925 and was run by the Bon Secours Sisters to cater for unmarried mothers and their babies.

This was an era in our history when pregnancy before marriage was deeply frowned upon by church, state and family. The unfortunate woman who found herself in this predicament was quickly sent to an institution such as the Mother/Baby Home out of sight of prying neighbours and relatives.

The Bon Secours Sisters were a nursing congregation who had come from Dublin to take … Read the rest

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Here (a public page on Facebook) you can find an interview with Catherine Corless by Mark Patterson on Radio Ulster May 27.

The children were segregated from other children in the classroom.

He’s asking why she cares, when she doesn’t suspect “foul play.” For some reason neither of them is really talking about the neglect, the malnutrition, the conditions in which infection could spread easily.

At 11:50 they agree that there must have been such “homes” all over Ireland.

There’s a Facebook page Mother/Baby Home Research.

 … Read the rest

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Damion Reinhardt:

Originally Posted by Brive1987
The current tag team efforts against DJ, with no real objective other than to get him fired or grind him into resigning sums up why I loathe the SJ brigade.
Agreed! They really seem to hate his guts, for some reason. Elyse even took a poll of whom they hate the most and he was right up there with Professor “Dear Muslima” himself.

Originally Posted by Brive1987 
Only consolation is that both the CFI and JREF Boards must have become inured to the relentless calls for the sacking and discipline of their CEOs.
It does seem to be a constant refrain. I’d go so far as to wager that Women in Secularism has become

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Oh yay, CAFE volunteers tell you why EQUAL RIGHTS are so great and why they are for EVERYONE and not just some…like…you know…women.

Pay special attention at 15 seconds in – see that guy in the blue shirt next to the guy in the fedora? Handing out leaflets? That’s Justin “oh no not Justin Trottier but a different Justin altogether” Trottier. Justin Trottier, is who that is.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHJIRCAgIvU… Read the rest

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More on the mass grave discovered on the site of a Mother and Baby home for “fallen women” in County Galway in Ireland.

Catherine Corless, the local historian and genealogist, remembers the Home Babies well. “They were always segregated to the side of regular classrooms,” Corless tells IrishCentral. “By doing this the nuns telegraphed the message that they were different and that we should keep away from them.

“They didn’t suggest we be nice to them. In fact if you acted up in class some nuns would threaten to seat you next to the Home Babies. That was the message we got in our young years,” Corless recalls.

They were outcasts. They were shunned. They were treated like … Read the rest

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Another entry in Ireland’s squalid, hateful, brutal history – the discovery of a mass grave holding the remains of 796 infants and children in County Galway. Yes that’s right – mass grave, holding 796 infants and children. A crime scene, in short; a massive crime scene; a crime scene reminiscent of the crime scene at Robert Pickton’s pig farm.

According to a report in the Irish Mail on Sunday, a mass grave has been located beside a former home for unmarried mothers and babies in County Galway. The grave is believed to contain the bodies of up to eight hundred babies, buried on the former grounds of the institution known locally as “The Home” in

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How Iranian state television goes about discrediting a woman who has escaped their clutches: it claims she stripped her clothes off on a London street while her son stood watching, and was promptly raped by three men. Sounds plausible, doesn’t it.

Iranian state television aired a report claiming that the Britain-based journalist Masih Alinejad, founder of the “My Stealthy Freedom” social media campaign against mandatory veiling, had been assaulted and raped in London in the presence of her son.

The broadcast described Alinejad as a “nexus of sedition” for her campaign, which has garnered over 430,000 likes on Facebook. Hundreds of Iranian women from inside the country have posted pictures of themselves taking their headscarves off in public.

State

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Sometimes the gender nonsense just gets too silly. Shrugging off hurricanes because they have girly names? Really?

According to a recent study by University of Illinois researchers, hurricanes with women’s names are likely to cause significantly more deaths than those with masculine names — not because the feminine-named storms are stronger, but because they are perceived as less threatening and so people are less prepared.

So all over Florida, people hear news reports that Hurricane Shirley is headed straight for them and they just laugh because how hard can a Shirley hit?

The researchers examined human fatality numbers for 92 storms that made landfall in the U.S. between 1950 and 2012, excluding Katrina from 2005 and Audrey from 1957 because

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