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Category: Latest News
Welcome to our archive of news stories relevant to the project of fighting fashionable nonsense. The stories are drawn from the electronic pages of the world’s media. On this page, you’ll find links to those stories that have been featured on Butterflies and Wheels during the current year. At the bottom of the page, you’ll find links to separate archives of stories from previous years.
We’re always pleased to hear about news stories that you think should be featured on Butterflies and Wheels. Just send an email here, if you want to point one out to us.
A note about links
Inevitably links go out of date. We suggest, therefore, that you make hard-copies of the stories that particularly interest you.
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Yes there are too so atheists in foxholes
There are more humanists in the military than Muslims, Buddhists, Jews and even many Christian denominations. Why no humanist chaplains?
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India: 2 women charged with daughters’ murders
Zahida, 19, and Husna, 26, were strangled last week after they returned home to make peace with their families. They eloped with Hindu men.
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Burma: slap in the face to political prisoners
A small reduction in sentences for people who should never have been charged is not an “amnesty.”
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He loves you, he beats you
HRW report documents brutal and long-lasting violence against women and girls by family members and the survivors’ struggle to seek protection.
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Bishop says we are not trying to convert kids
Access Ministries are in Victorian government schools just to…to…to teach values, yes, that’s it.
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Muslims for burqa bans
Tarek Fatah, Taj Hargey, Qanta Ahmed, Mona Eltahawy, and Naser Khader to name a few.
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Circumcision party in the Philippines
Health officials chopped about 1,500 pre-teen boys (not infants, but half-grown boys) in bid for Guinness Book of World Records.
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Xian student flips out to prove god exists
Loiters around “ask an atheist” table, stabs self in hand, fights cops, kicks out window in cop car, assaults 2 cops. Therefore god exists.
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Strauss-Khan arrested, accused of sexual assault
Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the IMF, was arrested on a plane at JFK airport accused of a sex attack on a hotel maid earlier in the day.
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Zurich voters overwhelmingly reject bans
Only 15.5% of voters in the local referendum backed a ban on assisted suicide, while nearly 22% supported a ban on “suicide tourism.”
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Zurich votes no on bans on assisted suicide
Concerns about suicide tourism carry less weight with voters than their conviction that the right to die is universal.
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NY Times on Synthese, ID, Forrest, and that statement
Three philosophers have admitted complaining to the editors about Forrest’s article; one was Alvin Plantinga.
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Grayling’s top books for a secular good life
Aristotle, Gibbon, Mill, Hazlitt – enjoy.
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Deepa Mehta films “Midnight’s Children”
The BBC tried to make it as a five-part miniseries in 1997, but the government withdrew permission for that production after Muslim protests.
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Belarus: former presidential candidate jailed
Leading Belarusian opposition politician Andrei Sannikov has been sentenced to five years hard labour for “organising mass disturbance”.
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Patricia Churchland on science, philosophy and morality
Tension is inevitable, because caring broadly raises challenging, practical problems: all those competing moral obligations need to be balanced out.
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Massimo Pigliucci on Jonathan Haidt
Haidt has a tendency to step over from “is” to “ought” in the sort of seamless way that rightly annoyed David Hume.
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Oxford study finds religion pervasive, inescapable
And guess who paid for that study.
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Interfaith leaders meet in Istanbul
“When a supreme body that will force all to act according to the Creator’s will shall be formed, the level of religious extremism will drop.” Srsly.