Another Bangladesh blogger killed by machete

The sad news is that yet another blogger in Bangladesh, Niloy Chakrabarti, has been hacked to death by a gang of Islamist thugs. The Guardian reports the horrific details … A well-known secular blogger in Bangladesh, who has been murdered at his home in the latest such attack, had told police of threats against him and requested … Read more

The GOP Debate … what did they say and who won?

OK, so there is plenty of coverage of the GOP candidate debate and so I need not cover it in too much detail except to perhaps add a few additional rather obvious observations. As a hint, the picture above more or less sums it all up. So what did they actually say? Every candidate more or … Read more

quantum consciousness … what the heck is that?

Stuart Hameroff has a HuffPo article within which he writes an open letter to Richard Dawkins and Michael Shermer, and having looked, I really can’t resist the urge to plug in a few additional thoughts … Dear Richard and Michael, I read your lament that some people leave religion for ‘something worse,’ Deepak Chopra’s spirituality.  I would say … Read more

Human Rights Violations continue in Sudan

Amnesty International reports that the campaign against women and minorities in the Sudan continues unabated. We all perhaps remember the case from about one year ago of Meriam Ibrahim, the young pregnant woman sentenced to die when she refused to renounce her Christian faith, but that was not an isolated case, but rather one of many. On … Read more

Health Warning: Believing the Bible can cause you serious harm or even death

There is a verse within the bible that reads … they will pick up snakes with their hands; and when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them at all; – Mark 16:18 … and rather astonishingly there is a strand of religious belief that picks this up, quite literally, and runs with it as a … Read more

The Satanic Temple … are dark forces rising up?

A couple of days ago the Satanic Temple unveiled a nine feet tall statue (pictured above) to a crowd of hundreds who had turned up to see this in Detroit. When compared with other events it was a tiny gathering, and yet at the same time was also culturally huge, so much so, that Time magazine felt that it … Read more