Hmm. Paul Sims at the New Humanist is still enthusiastic about the possibilities of dialogue between believers and non-believers. I agree that that can be a fine thing, or an anodyne thing, much of the time…but there are limits. I’m not sure Paul is sufficiently aware of what the limits ought to be.

Last night, I attended a meeting between representatives of Catholic Voices and members of the Central London Humanist Group (CLHG), which took place in the hall of St Saviour’s Church in Pimlico. It was the second such event, the first having taken place in central London last October – the point, as I explained in a piece in the current issue of New Humanist, is to

The president of the Catholic Health Association, “Sister” Carol Keehan, is proud and happy to uphold the “authority” of Catholic bishops to tell medical personnel and hospital administrators what to do, including, of course, telling them to let pregnant women die if it takes an abortion to save their lives. “Sister” Carol Keehan is saying yes, bishop, it is right and good that you and your bishop friends should be able to forbid doctors to save women’s lives. “Sister” Carol Keehan is endorsing the bishops’ wish for more women to die; she’s agreeing with them that that woman in Phoenix (with four young children) should be dead. With a “sister” like her who needs enemies?

Thank you again for taking

It won’t do, you see. The Wikipedia gender imbalance thing – when taken with all the other gender imbalance things – won’t do.

Jane Margolis, co-author of a book on sexism in computer science, “Unlocking the Clubhouse,” argues that Wikipedia is experiencing the same problems of the offline world, where women are less willing to assert their opinions in public. “In almost every space, who are the authorities, the politicians, writers for op-ed pages?”…

According to the OpEd Project, an organization based in New York that monitors the gender breakdown of contributors to “public thought-leadership forums,” a participation rate of roughly 85-to-15 percent, men to women, is common — whether members of Congress, or writers on The New York

I’m back. The CFI talk was good fun. CFI Vancouver did a great bit on the CBC’s Marketplace a couple of weeks ago: they gathered outside a hospital emergency room (“just in case”) and took an overdose of homeopathic “medicine.” 

It rained almost the whole time on Friday, and the same Saturday. It was a bit tragic, because I was staying in a borrowed apartment on the 34th floor of a tower next to the harbor, which was spectacular, but I knew it would be considerably more spectacular if it were clear, and it seemed that it was never going to be clear. But then Saturday evening, after I’d gotten thoroughly soaked three times, it started to clear and then … Read the rest