Sticky Posts: Old Ones Resurrected

“True Islam” and violent extremism – redux

I am reposting this in response to the terror attacks in France last night, resulting in the deaths of over one hundred people. As ever, the internet is awash with right-wing shouts to “kill all Muslims” and refugees, to the left-wing shouts that it is the Imperial West to blame and not Islam or Muslims. Neither of these positions are correct. It is obviously thoroughly complex, indeed involving international politics. However, to deny the Qu’ran, Muhammad and the Hadith causal responsibility in these atrocities is to deny the self-determination of those very terrorists who claim that they are doing these actions in the name of Islam and their god.

Real Conversion Story #8 – Kaveh Mousavi

Kaveh Mousavi is a blogger over at Freethought Blogs (FTB) who very kindly reviewed my Beyond An Absence of Faith book on his One the Margin of Error blog. He is an atheist living in Iran; I have a lot of respect for such courageous people. Here is his account:

I already have written a very long book as my memoir to narrate my experience as an atheist in the theocratic Iran, and its name is the same as my blog, On The Margin of Error. First I wanted to choose some various excerpts for this guest post, but ultimately decided to choose one single excerpt which chronicles my deconversion. This is in the honor of Jonathan’s (and Tristan Vick’s) book, Beyond an Absence of Faith, a book which I greatly enjoyed. Chapter three of the book is the shortest chapter, and here it is.

What is fundamentalism?

The term fundamentalism is bandied about with wild abandon, but what does it really mean? We have an intuitive sense of what it means, perhaps. When I use the term, I have in my mind ideas of hardliner, fanatical beliefs, adhered to by uncompromising believers in a dogmatic insistence that a particular (holy) text and/or ideology is correct.

Just a reminder – 13 Reasons to Doubt

Our ebook, soon to be paperback, with 13 chapters contributed by authors here at SIN, is out on arious e-formats. It has received good reviews, if you discount the trolls, such as JoeG who used to hang out here on occasion, losing a $10,000 bet to Andy.

Top down or bottom up?

‘Rationality is useless if it is not sound. This is what Martin Luther meant when he called reason a “whore”. Pick the wrong premises, and rationality is utterly screwed. Therefore, merely that someone is “rational” means absolutely nothing about whether that person is well-connected to reality.’

The exactitude of human evolution up in the air

So human evolution in its African context has been hotly researched, but the research is necessarily slow. Fossil digs take a ling time and are few and far between. New finds from 2000 onwards in Georgia are throwing a lot of theories up in the air. What were once thought to be different species of early human ancestors might have been variations in the same species. As the Guardian reports:

Sara Firth quits RT over “lies”

This is yet another case of a defector from RT, the Russian news media organisation. Liz Wahl recently quit over the Crimea conflict and demands on her journalistic integrity in the context of what management and Putin were demanding of the network and its conclusions: