Your humanist community for scientific, skeptical, secular, and rational inquiry
John Varghese James “The Amazing” Randi’s death last month, after a lifetime of exposing charlatans and chicanery, raked up a seven-year-old wound I didn’t know I was carrying. In August 2013, a similar life of struggle against irrationality, superstition, and exploitation of the credulous ended when Dr. Narendra Dhabolkar, a mild-mannered, soft-spoken rationalist was shot…
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Leslie Rosenblood The Canadian Commission for Democratic Expression (CCDE) is a project of the Public Policy Forum, which seeks to “study and publish advice on how to prevent and mitigate the negative effects of illegal and other forms of harmful online content on democracy in Canada while encouraging robust democratic debate and dialogue.” Seven Canadian…
Scott Douglas Jacobsen If you want to murder someone with an illegitimate excuse, then a decent manner in which to do so is the excuse of the State, as such, whether secular-authoritarian or theocratic. Navid Afkari was executed. Afkari was a wrestler accused of murder who had “international appeals for him to be spared.” In…
Leslie Rosenblood On November 2, the Quebec Superior Court began hearing arguments for and against the constitutionality of Bill 21, which (among other things) forbids the wearing of religious symbols for many civil servants in the province. (See here for a brief history of the legal challenge of the bill to date, and here for CFIC’s official stance…
Sandra Dunham In my home, the dialogue about COVID-19 and the rapidly increasing case numbers follows the narrative of “Why can’t people just do the right thing? Don’t people realize that their behaviour is making this worse?” And yet, when carefully examined, our own behaviour is, at times, less than stellar. So, why, when the…
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