Tag: Center for Inquiry

  • Show your solidarity with those with the courage to speak out

    CFI is throwing a dissent party all week in honor of blasphemy day Friday.

    This week, let’s take a stand for the right to question and criticize ideas and beliefs, and demand an end to the attacks and arrests of those who exercise that right.

    International Blasphemy Rights Day is this Friday, September 30, and in the days leading up, we invite you to be a part of the fight for this most fundamental of human rights. On Friday we’ll make a very important announcement to help us do even more.

    In too many countries around the world, criticizing religion is illegal. We’ve seen the consequences of these laws too many times — when a tweet or a post on Facebook declaring one’s atheism or questioning a tenet of religion leads to arrests, beatings, prison, and sometimes death sentences.

    Sometimes religious militants make their own laws, deciding for themselves that expressions of dissent justify brutal killings, like the grisly murders of secularists in Bangladesh, or attacks on religious minorities in Pakistan.

    During the week of International Blasphemy Rights Day, show your solidarity with those with the courage to speak out, and stand in defiance of those who would silence them.

    Starting today, Monday, visit CFI’s Campaign for Free Expression, and keep coming back each day this week. There you’ll find new action items for getting involved in the fight for free expression, and for bringing more allies into that fight. On Friday, we’ll announce something very special for International Blasphemy Rights Day.

    These are the themes for each day of this week:

    • Today, Sept 26: Put Blasphemy on the 2016 Campaign Radar
    • Tuesday, Sept 27: Get Educated
    • Wednesday, Sept 28: Get the Word Out
    • Thursday, Sept 29: Take Action
    • Friday, Sept 30 – International Blasphemy Rights Day: Save Lives

  • Dude – Title II of the Federal Civil Rights Law of 1964

    The Center for Inquiry reports:

    Prejudice against atheists manifested itself again when The Wyndgate Country
    Club in Rochester Hills, Michigan (outside of Detroit), cancelled an event with
    scientist and author Richard Dawkins after learning of Dawkins’s views on
    religion. The event had been arranged by the Center for Inquiry–Michigan (CFI), an advocacy group for secularism and science, and the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science.

    The Wyndgate terminated the agreement after the owner saw an October 5th
    interview with Dawkins on The O’Reilly Factor in which Dawkins
    discussed his new book, The Magic of Reality: How We Know What’s Really
    True    .

    In a phone call to CFI–Michigan Assistant Director Jennifer Beahan, The
    Wyndgate’s representative explained that the owner did not wish to associate
    with individuals such as Dawkins, or his philosophies.

    Oh gee, that’s against the law. CFI has quite a few lawyers on the staff. The owner is in for a bumpy ride.

    “It’s important to understand that discrimination based on a person’s
    religion—or lack thereof—is legally equivalent to discriminating against a
    person because of his or her race,” said Jeff Seaver, executive director of
    CFI–Michigan. “This action by The Wyndgate illustrates the kind of bias and
    bigotry that nonbelievers encounter all the time. It’s exactly why organizations
    like CFI and the Richard Dawkins Foundation are needed: to help end the stigma attached to being a nonbeliever.”

    Stigma? Stigma? STIGMA? What stigma? There is no stigma! Everybody knows that. It’s all just a big cry-baby fuss by gnu atheists. Joe Hoffmann said so last April, and Jacques Berlinerblau totes agreed with him.