Dammit! Damn, damn, damn.

A leading Afghan official working on women’s rights has been shot dead in the southern province of Kandahar…She had served as head of women’s affairs in Kandahar’s provincial government since the Taleban government was toppled by US-led forces in 2001. An eloquent public speaker, Safia Amajan was fierce in her criticism of what she saw as the Taleban’s repression of women. After the US-led invasion in 2001, the former teacher took charge of women’s affairs in Kandahar’s provincial government. In a conservative region where most families keep wives and daughters cloistered indoors, she was able to attract hundreds of women to schools and vocational courses. Her requests for secure official transport and personal bodyguards had not

Why do people think there is a deity? (Small question. I’ll just knock off the answer in a few hundred words here. No biggy.) Partly (only partly) because of the thought that something must have created the universe – that there must be Mind behind it all. There is the regress problem – what created the mind then? – but many people simply find it more plausible to start with a mind than to start with a brute fact, or a Big Bang. Okay – but then you have to ask what kind of mind is it, and what kind of deity is it?

That’s one place you get the two-step. Mind in the form of an Intelligent Agent must … Read the rest

The Guardian gives us an extract from Dawkins’s new book, in which he talks about things I’ve been pondering myself for the past couple of days, I suppose prompted by that long discussion on ‘Explain’.

All Sagan’s books touch the nerve-endings of transcendent wonder that religion monopolized in past centuries. My own books have the same aspiration. Consequently I hear myself often described as a deeply religious man…Steven Weinberg made the point as well as anybody, in Dreams of a Final Theory: “Some people have views of God that are so broad and flexible that it is inevitable that they will find God wherever they look for him. One hears it said that ‘God is the ultimate’ or ‘God

Why did no one (until G Tingey in comments today) tell me Richard Dawkins has set up a foundation and a website? It’s apparently (judging by the dates on some of the postings) been there since May. This is September. I’m out of touch.

So it republishes this Johann Hari piece about the real reasons to feel disapprobation for the pontiff. Here’s an item that stirred a certain amount of distaste in me.

For over a decade now, he has been one of the primary defenders of priests who go to the poorest, most vulnerable people in the world and tell them condoms are the cause of AIDS. In the past year, I have sat in two Catholic churches