The room was heaving in Conway Hall last night as British Humanist Association (BHA) President, physicist and broadcaster Professor Jim Al-Khalili gave this year’s Voltaire Lecture on the theme of ‘Lessons from the past: science and rationalism in medieval Islam.’ The lecture was chaired by his pred
Tihs has come up in conversation elsewhere, so I thought I would resurrect this old post from my old, old blog. I have recently been involved in an argument online which is a
The other day, the CEO for Mozilla had to step down. This was due to influence from social media – a sort of power to the people. Basically, Mr Elch has held private views on gay marriage which have subsequently become public.
I, as you may well know, contribute to the Skepticule podcast by recording a counter-apologetics segment for them, Pearced Off. My segment is always followed by an interesting discussion of ideas brought up by the 'panel' of Pauls.
This article in Mother Jones builds on work which I, myself, talked about in my book Free Will? It is certainly the case that we can predict political leanings using disgust sensitivity. As I state in my book (p. 153-4):
H/T to Gandolf for this one, in response to the article about the girl being taken out of a Christian school because she didn't look girly enough. God move for the European Union to be tackling such issues. This is from the Parliamentary Assembly Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights. Read
Being a Christian, or any non-Muslim, in Pakistan is hard. Blasphemy laws restrict any kind of free speech and freethought. Here, the BBC reports on yet another case of backwards thinking. It makes me so sad.
Bloody awesome. [H/T Zoe Flanagan] OK, this is UK-centric. But man, this fricking NAILS everything which is wrong with education at the moment. Most of that comes from those in power. Gove.
In reading Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works, which has been a slow burner (both in terms of time taken to read it and time taken to get into the really interesting stuff [Now long finished]), I have just started to read about the importance and ontology of emotions. I
My skeptical publishing company, Onus Books, has so far got Worldwide print distribution (being printed on three continents), Amazon ebook, pdf ebooks on various channels, and recently, Kobo distribution.
Good stuff: http://youtu.be/W96AJ0ChboU
I was worried recently when I read the phrase “goal-directed evolution” in some philosophy writing. This annoys me since it shows what I consider to be a fundamental misunderstanding of what evolution is and does, and philosophers should know better.