Across rural India, it’s easy to find people who revere sati as the ultimate demonstration of womanly honour, devotion and piety. … Read the rest

Ben Goldacre asks: Where’s your ethics committee now, science boy?… Read the rest

Durban I degenerated into open expressions of intolerance and anti-Semitism that undermined the very goals the conference sought to achieve.… Read the rest

‘As long as I think of these as “texts,” they are dry and boring. But there is a key to making them exciting: to remember that they are not texts: they are people–people urgently trying to talk to me, to tell me something very important that they think I desperately need to know.’… Read the rest

Article 37 of Maryland’s constitution provides that “no religious test ought ever to be required as a qualification for any office of profit or trust in this State, other than a declaration of belief in the existence of God”… Read the rest

Michael Foot, A C Grayling, Tom Paulin, Andrew Motion, Ian Mayes at ceremony to do that.… Read the rest

Is It Wrong Everywhere, Always, and for Anyone to Believe Anything on Insufficient Evidence?… Read the rest

Tahir Aslam Gora suggests an outline for the new Islam.… Read the rest

The use of cultural evidence risks a dangerous balkanization of the criminal law.… Read the rest

This is a popular trick of totalitarian movements: Label any critique or call for debate as an insult and punish the offenders. … Read the rest

‘This is about women and elevating the status of women and making them equal human beings.’… Read the rest

79.7% in Ireland, 74.6% in the US, 58.3% in the UK.… Read the rest

God didn’t do it, he wasn’t there at the time, and besides he’s sorry.… Read the rest

A ministerial working group in the Home Office charged with injecting religious ideas ‘across Whitehall’. … Read the rest

TV is popular culture, the working class likes it, so put down that book.… Read the rest

Women in Algeria were slaughtered in the thousands by fundamentalist armed forces throughout the nineties, because they refused to be forcibly covered.… Read the rest

In their hearts these people were with us, but they were scared to show this. … Read the rest

Does a religion have the right to impose its religious taboos onto the public domain?… Read the rest

Universal means universal.… Read the rest

The evidence supporting the whole ‘hydration industry’ is flawed. … Read the rest