The British Humanist Association got a grant from the Equality and Human Rights Commission to hold a series of debates about the place of religion in public life.

The four events will include speakers from faith groups but one of the keynote addresses is being delivered by the prominent atheist Professor AC Grayling…

But? Why but? What do they mean ‘but’? That a series of debates about the place of religion in public life should include nothing but ‘speakers from faith groups’? But that would be kind of a stupid ‘debate,’ wouldn’t it? More like a prayer meeting, or a preaching to the choir session? More like a complete waste of time in fact? Why would a series of debates … Read the rest

How Bangladesh went wrong.

Bangladesh began sliding slowly towards Islamism following the assassination of Rahman in 1975. In 1977, references to secularism were deleted from the constitution and the phrase “Bismillah-Ar-Rahiman-Ar Rahim” (“In the name of Allah, the Beneficient, the Merciful”) was inserted. Five years later, General Ershad…introduced the Eighth Amendment, making Islam the state religion. The constitution now states that “absolute trust and faith in the Almighty Allah shall be the basis of all actions.”

Allah, the Beneficient, the Merciful, who (according to them) wants men to treat women like dirt, and treacherous disobedient dirt at that.

I was on a bus yesterday that had an ad inside with that saying on it, along with an injunction to … Read the rest

Mary Kenny must be somewhat impervious to criticism – she’s saying the same absurd things she said last time we took this ride – minus the hilarious gripe about gloomy atheist funerals, to be sure.

‘Atheist bus’* – blah blah –

I found the atheists’ coda “so relax and enjoy life” ludicrously implausible. I’ve never yet met an atheist with a sense of joie-de-vivre (unless, in the case of one well-known public atheist, a certain drunken cordiality) most of them seem to be miserable blighters. Read GK Chesterton’s great poem ‘The Ballad of the Sad Athiest’. It perfectly describes this kind of dreary and austere puritan.

I think I said this last time, but ho hum, I know my duty, … Read the rest

The pope perhaps spilled the beans even more than the Vatican realizes.

[T]he pope said the book “explained with great clarity” that “an interreligious dialogue in the strict sense of the word is not possible.” In theological terms, added the pope, “a true dialogue is not possible without putting one’s faith in parentheses.”…To some scholars, the pope’s remarks seemed aimed at pushing more theoretical interreligious conversations into the practical realm. “He’s trying to get the Catholic-Islamic dialogue out of the clouds of theory and down to brass tacks: how can we know the truth about how we ought to live together justly, despite basic creedal differences?”

How indeed. By thinking about the subject in secular, rational, human-based terms, that’s how. … Read the rest

Oh gee – there might be an irony gap developing. How horrifying, how shocking, how alarming.

Its ill health was noted by, among others, no less an ironist than Joan Didion, the nation’s poet laureate of disillusion. The week after the election, in a talk at the New York Public Library, Ms. Didion lamented that the United States in the era of Barack Obama had become an “irony-free zone,” a vast Kool-Aid tank where “naïveté, translated into ‘hope,’ was now in” and where “innocence, even when it looked like ignorance, was now prized.”

Did she. Well that strikes me as quite a stupid thing to say. Is that ironic?

But Ms. Didion might be on to something. A Nexis