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.
This is a reminder of a project I am working on for which I need your help: I was thinking…
At SIN we have a not-so-new-anymore blogger who as joined us: fellow Brit The Flying Scotsman, James MacDonald. Welcome to…
Goodness me, Helen has become a skeptic! We were watching the Game of Thrones with the awesome attack of the…
Profiling is often seen as highly controversial by many. This is the act of looking into the common properties of a particular type of person (criminal, terrorist) and using that knowledge to direct resources into particular areas or people in order to get a maximum return on your investment (cost of stop-checks, border controls, airport security etc).
I did an interview yesterday on the popular UK podcast Godless Spellchecker mainly on the topic of free will, but…
Religion is a highly psychological affair. In fact, I would argue that the entirety of that which religion really is, to humanity, is psychological. Everything that religion is and does for its adherents is psychological in nature. One of the strongest dimensions of religion is its dealings with death. I have talked about this before with regard to Terror Management Theory.
This is something I wrote four years ago on my previous blog, but thought it was interesting to bring up again. I thought about it in response to a comment over on fellow writer Rebecca Bradley’s Lateral Truth piece, “Social Justice: A Millenarian Movement”:
Recently, the PFA (Professional Footballers’ Association) has been toying with the idea of employing the Rooney Rule when shortlisting and interviewing candidates for managerial positions in football clubs in England. The rule demands that clubs must interview at least one black person for manager when recruiting.
This fascinating Dutch article (to which I do not have a link, unfortunately) was translated by a facebook friend Leon Korteweg:
My translation (aided by Google Translate) of an article that appeared in the Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant. Reading and translating this article made me somewhat emotional: I’m delighted by the rise of atheism exactly where it is most needed, which gives me hope, but I’m also saddened by how many victims it takes to make that change happen.
I was recently listening to the latest Reasonable Doubts podcast featuring an interview and some songs by Australian singer-songwriter Shelley Segal. Segal comes from an orthodox Jewish background, but came to reject theism in favour of atheism, and became involved in atheist activism. This, as is usual for songwriters, permeated her music and lyrics to the point that she wrote a mini-album, “An Atheist Album”.
I have just had an article published in the “Free Inquiry” magazine, looking at whether society is coming to grips…
I have been very busy lately and then the call from OFSTED, the government school inspectorate, came this week, I ended up camped at work for 3 days. It’s over now. To get the ball rolling again is a guest post from ML Candelario. It is interesting toying with the idea of moral nihilism, which all depends on how you define objective or ontic reality. Anyway, over to Cendelario:
Apologies as I have been away for a break on the nearby Isle of Wight with my family. I’m back,…
The general election is only just over, and I am sorry for being off my usual topics. I will return to them shortly. I would like to provoke thought on what motivates voters to vote for particular parties, briefly and rather anecdotally and theoretically.
Bangladesh is not the place to be for freethought. What is to be done against this vicious brand of anti-intellectualism and attack to freedom of thought?
From The Guardian:
James A Lindsay, whose awesome book Dot, Dot, Dot: Infinity Plus God Equals Folly I edited, recently penned an article with PEter Boghossian and the late Vic Stenger, which has just been released by Scientific American. The article is called “Physicists Are Philosophers, Too”.download (4)
Here is an excerpt:
Pun intended.
My depressed sadness has turned into anger.
Today is a bad day for fairness. It is a bad day for democracy (think AV/PR). It is a bad day for the electorate who seem far less politically educated than I realised (and if my school has anything to go by, very very ill-equipped to be responsibly voting)
In the first part, I looked philosophically at the debate. I will now continue by considering my own country, the UK, in terms of the EU and economics, amongst other things. This takes off from the last post which looked at how borders are arbitrary and the luck of birth place is not enough to warrant privilege.
Britain and the EU and Economics
With the rise and rise of UKIP, even despite their consistent foot-in-mouth propensity (and perhaps because of it), I have written a piece looking at UKIP in a skeptical light and am now due to write about the subject which concerns them the most. Immigration. This is quite a useful thing to do because in some respects I am not fundamentally sure where I stand on the minutiae of this core election Pandora’s Box.
This is worrying. From the BBC:
Populations of some of the world’s largest wild animals are dwindling, raising the threat of an “empty landscape”, say scientists.
About 60% of giant herbivores – plant-eaters – including rhinos, elephants and gorillas, are at risk of extinction, according to research.
Analysis of 74 herbivore species, published in Science Advances, blamed poaching and habitat loss.
A previous study of large carnivores showed similar declines.