Promoting Science and Critical Thinking
Saudi Arabian blogger Raif Badawi continues to face 950 lashes and a decade in prison – simply for calling for free speech. The UK government has so far failed to call for Raif’s freedom, despite knowing of and speaking on his case – alongside a visit to Saudi Arabia by the Prime Minister. Ask our … Read more
OK, nothing too serious today, but instead a bit of entertainment. Because he is rather well-known, Richard Dawkins, tends to attract some rather amusing “fan mail” from those who vigorously disagree with him … except of course, being more that a tad eccentric, their strident and rather abusive criticism is actually quite entertaining. So dive in and … Read more
Maajid Nawaz (pictured above), a former radical Islamist, now a liberal counter-extremism activist, and author of his autobiographical book ‘Radical’ , held an AMA (ask me anything) over at /reddit/r/books a few days ago, here are some of the questions and answers from that session. The Introduction to the AMA opened with this … My name … Read more
Now be warned, I have some serious doubts that this is real, and I would advise an appropriate degree of caution being applied, I strongly suspect somebody manufactured this to simply stir up a bit of attention. So the story is that an anonymous poster popped up on Reddit seeking legal guidance, in fact here … Read more
Derren Brown, the famous illusionist, came out as gay back in 2007. At the time the rather inevitable happened; because he is famous, some of the tabloids ran with it …. In 2007 he did a “discreet” interview with The Independent where he officially came out. “If you don’t do anything at all then suddenly it’s … Read more
At a deep psychological level people tend to flow with the cultural tide, and so we have the observation that the religious belief people embrace tells us a great deal about their geographical location and the micro-cultures they inhabit, and not much else. Those born into a Sunni family will generally tend to be Sunni … Read more