Centre for Inquiry Canada (CFIC)
Your humanist community for scientific, skeptical, secular, and rational inquiry.
Sandra Dunham Memes abound about our race to kick 2020 to the curb. What a year it was! Nothing filled our minds more than the pandemic. But was it really that bad? According to National Geographic, we have a tendency to view every year as worse than the last. While there is no doubt it…
Mark Maharaj The philosopher Judith Jarvis Thompson died on November 20, 2020. She was 91. Known for her work on a variety of issues in normative ethics, applied ethics, meta-ethics, and metaphysics, Thompson was professor emerita at MIT. She was the originator of the “Violinist” thought experiment used to demonstrate the concept of bodily autonomy…
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…
Read More “Dr. Narendra Dhabolkar: The Indian James Randi” »
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…