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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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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Edan Tasca On October 20, one of the skeptical community’s fiercest members, James “The Amazing” Randi, died of natural causes. He was 92. Born in Toronto in 1928, Randall James Hamilton Zwinge was skeptical from a young age, having quit summer school as a child because his teachers couldn’t offer proof of the teachings of…