Maryam won! Maryam Namazie is Secularist of the Year. Ya-hoooooo. Sorry to be so American, but I’m really really pleased. As a matter of fact, I’m also damn smug. Here I’ve been publishing her articles like mad all this time, which I haven’t noticed the Guardian or the Independent bothering to do. Well? Well??! Wouldn’t you be smug? Wouldn’t you? Who has the better judgment? Eh? Eh? Which would you rather have published – Dilpazier Aslam, or Maryam Namazie?

Well maybe now they’ll start publishing her. Maybe this will be the push they need. Kenan Malik said, you know. Remember that? In the Guardian (she said pointedly). All the way back in January.

It also creates a climate

Some more on that terrific Simon Blackburn article ‘Religion and Respect’. So much of it is so exactly what I think myself, and have been saying here with tedious iteration – naturally I think it’s terrific. But it is, all the same.

But, I argued to myself, why should I
“respect” belief systems that I do not share? I would not be expected to respect the beliefs
of flat earthers or those of the people who believed that the Hale-Bopp comet was a recycling facility for dead Californians, and killed themselves in order to join it. Had my
host stood up and asked me to toast the Hale-Bopp hopefuls, or to break bread or some
such in token of

Yippee!

You know how I’m always asking why people like Azam Kamguian and Maryam Namazie don’t get the kind of attention the MCB gets? How I’m always saying the BBC and the Guardian and, you know, the government, ought to talk to them as well as or in fact damn well instead of a lot of fundamentalists? You know? Well – well you already know what I’m going to say, probably, since I just put it in News. But I want to yell and squeal and dance and hop for a minute anyway. Bear with me. The day didn’t begin well – it began with the horrid shock of going online and finding dear old B&W turned into a mocking … Read the rest

We’ve been hacked, so I’m going to have to take the server down for a while. I’ll get B&W up and running asap.

Bastard Spammers!… Read the rest

Here we go again. I still don’t get it. I don’t understand the basic point.

Unlike many pro-evolution types, however, he agrees with creationists and intelligent-design advocates that evolution often operates as not just a scientific theory about species, but also as a worldview that competes with religion.

One: and? If evolution does ‘operate as’ a worldview that competes with religion – what of it? Why should the worldview of religion not be competed with? Because fundamentalists don’t like it, yes, I get that, but why else? Two, if evolution does provide a better (more coherent, more warranted, less full of holes) explanation of how we got here, then it does. Why is that not part of the science, … Read the rest