{"id":448,"date":"2013-02-24T16:45:38","date_gmt":"2013-02-24T05:45:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/?p=448"},"modified":"2013-02-24T17:20:53","modified_gmt":"2013-02-24T06:20:53","slug":"advancing-secularism-in-australia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/2013\/02\/24\/advancing-secularism-in-australia\/","title":{"rendered":"Advancing Secularism in Australia"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>On 21 March, I&#8217;ll be appearing at Macquarie University <a href=\"http:\/\/www.trybooking.com\/Booking\/BookingEventSummary.aspx?eid=43039\">on a panel about &#8220;Advancing Secularism in Australia&#8221;<\/a> &#8211; along with Sean Faircloth, Max Wallace, Jane Caro, and John Kay, chaired by Stephen Mutch. If you&#8217;ll be in Sydney that day, please come along. I&#8217;m looking forward to the discussion, and particularly to meeting <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Sean_Faircloth\">Sean Faircloth<\/a>,\u00a0author of <em>Attack of the Theocrats!<\/em>, and\u00a0Director of Strategy &amp; Policy for the US arm of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science.\u00a0I&#8217;ve\u00a0corresponded with him, but we&#8217;ve never\u00a0met in person. Of the others, I know Jane Caro best\u00a0(along with Tamas Pataki, we formed a\u00a0team in a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.iq2oz.com\/events\/event-details\/2011-series-sydney\/september.php\">nationally televised debate <\/a>about atheism, back in 2011).\u00a0In all, it is fine line-up of speakers with different emphases and areas of expertise.<\/p>\n<p>The topic\u00a0relates to something that has been a pet interest of mine for some time now: the question of what a truly secular Australia would look like. For a start, it would not have <a href=\"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/2013\/02\/22\/religious-education-upheld-as-legal-in-victoria\/\">religion classes, taught from a devotional viewpoint, in public schools<\/a>! However, there is far more to say, and I imagine that there will be a certain amount of controversy even among these speakers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On 21 March, I&#8217;ll be appearing at Macquarie University on a panel about &#8220;Advancing Secularism in Australia&#8221; &#8211; along with Sean Faircloth, Max Wallace, Jane Caro, and John Kay, chaired by Stephen Mutch. If you&#8217;ll be in Sydney that day, please come along. I&#8217;m looking forward to the discussion, and particularly to meeting Sean Faircloth,\u00a0author [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[42,6,18],"tags":[185],"class_list":["post-448","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-announcements-2","category-personal","category-politics","tag-secularism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/448","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/37"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=448"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/448\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=448"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=448"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=448"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}