Flashback
Fashionable nonsense has been with us since the time that
prehistoric man first transcribed Of Grammatology on
to the walls of the Lascaux caves. Here we cast an eye back
at some historical highlights.
Anthony Gottlieb on Gods and Gardens
If the idea of God is inexpressible, just get on with the gardening.
Columbia University ‘Miracle’ Study: Flawed and Fraud
Even a cursory review of the report reveals many potential flaws.
Role of US evangelists in Uganda's 'kill the gays' bill
It is not being homosexual but the prevailing atmosphere of homophobia that makes some people miserable.
On misogynist language
'Racial slurs would not be tolerated or defended, but the use of sexist language was acceptable.'
The Hunt for the Hat Gene
If there's a God gene, there must be a hat gene, and a jeans gene, and a singing gene, and...
Ratzinger's 2001 letter to the bishops
More concerned about the 'eucharist' than about the molested 'minors.'
Lawyers for victims say pope obstructed justice.
In 2001 Ratzinger issued an order ensuring the church's investigations into child sex abuse claims be carried out in secret.
John Hartung on 'Love thy Neighbor'
Thy neighbor is not everyone, it is thy group.
Communal justice in Bolivia
Cases include death sentences for women accused of adultery and the beating, stoning, hanging, and burning of an elected official accused of corruption.
Being a new atheist means not saying you're sorry
It seems as if in order to be a 'good' atheist one has to feel bad about not believing in god.
Frontline's 'Prisoners of Silence'
Double-blind testing show it's the 'facilitator' who is typing.
Theocracy in America
Catholic bishop tells a Representative what to do.
Raw Nerve Apologizes to Peter Tatchell
'Mr Tatchell is not Islamophobic and is not “part of the Islamophobia industry.” Nor is OutRage!'
Pseudoscience is not a valid educational choice
A curious working definition of ‘diversity’ now includes funnelling public money to an occult society.
Robert Wright on Dennett at Beliefnet
Dennett 'declared that life on earth shows signs of having a higher purpose.' Not.
Tim Sandefur on Robert Wright on Dennett
Dennett admitted there's a Higher Purpose! No he didn't.
Tehran Plans to Execute Protesters
The news of death sentences sparked immediate condemnation from international human rights groups.
The War on Women: Afghanistan and Eastern Congo
There are certain realities we should not lose sight of and certain people we should not sell out.
Susan Haack on 'Irreconcilable Differences'
Between science and law.
Polish woman was refused an abortion
Despite warnings that having a baby could make her go blind.
Karen Armstrong explains about God.
'Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians have insisted for centuries that God does not exist.'
Controversy over Tariq Ramadan
Ramadan, integration advisor for Rotterdam council and a guest professor at the city’s Erasmus university, is under fire for presenting a weekly talk show on the Iranian channel Press TV.
IHEU on superstition and witchcraft in Africa
Attacks on witches, persecution and killings still take place. Most of the victims are women and children.
Stepping Stones Nigeria on Child Witches
An increasing number of children in the Niger Delta are being forced to the streets and trafficked as a result of a deeply held belief in child “witches”
Free Speech and its Postmodern Adversaries
The theoretical stimuli for multiculturalism owe something to theories about "difference"
David Colquhoun on the problem of causality
The problem is traded on by the vast and unscrupulous alternative medicine industry.
Sholto Byrnes criticizes secularism on the left.
For all the talk of tolerance, there are some who believe that certain subjects simply cannot be aired. And foremost among them is God.
Letter from a Birmingham jail
'Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.'
Fadela Amara and 'Ni putes ni soumises'
"The veil symbolises submission to male dominance," Fadela Amara explains.
Christine Toomey on gender genocide
Far from the shortage of women increasing their worth and standing in society, as some might imagine, the result is the opposite.
Turkey's forced 'suicides'
A growing number of girls and women are being locked in rooms by their families, with a gun, poison or a noose, and left there until they kill themselves.
Catholic Bishops and Sex Abuse
19 of the bishops are among the 61 who signed a petition against Obama's honorary degree at Notre Dame.
Fuambai Ahmadu cheers Bondo women
For protesting 'a brazen attack by anti-FGM activists against female initiation.'
Afghan women protest law despite bullies screaming 'whores!'
One provision makes it illegal for a woman to refuse to “make herself up” or “dress up” if that is what her husband wants.
Journalists in shock after abduction by FGM group
Head of group said the women were taken into "our custody because they spoke unfavourably on radio against FGM"
FGM group kidnaps female journalists
The female kidnappers accused the journalists of insulting their traditions by criticising the practice.
Sierra Leone: women journalists kidnapped by pro-FGM group
The group regarded their questions and comments as a sign of disrespect for their traditions.
Escaping the Amish
Rape, incest, sexual abuse; physical and verbal abuse; women have no rights; rudimentary education; animal abuse.
Submission in advance
A gigantic taboo zone has been created, repeatedly reiterated and expanded with the well-intentioned collaboration of Western intellectuals.
Pitcairn Island: 6 Found Guilty Of Sex Abuse
Six men were convicted of charges including rape and indecent assault in trials that exposed a culture of sexual abuse on Pitcairn.
Diary of a Pakistani Schoolgirl
3 January: I am afraid. 14 January: I may not go to school again.
BBC boss says Islam should be treated differently
Also says his Christian beliefs guide his judgments.
Scalia on the death penalty
For the believing Christian, death is no big deal.
Colorado senator opposes AIDS testing.
If the baby has AIDS, the mother will feel guilty, and that will be good.
Gerald Weissmann on Homeopathy and the Prince of Wales
When Prince Charles uses terms such as 'integrated therapy' he is following the lead of creationists who hide under the term 'intelligent design.'
Prince of Wales joins 'detox' fraud
The word detox has no agreed meaning. It is a marketing word, designed to separate the gullible from their money
IHEU and CFI defend the rights of women
IHEU also attacked the culture of censorship that now prevails in the UN HRC.
IHEU against OIC censorship at the UN
EU will not accept that the notion of defamation of religion be integrated into the framework of human rights
Nepotistic succession in the political class
Nepotism diminishes the role of merit and the need for democratic persuasion in how elected leaders are chosen.
The Tragic Human Cost of Political Idiocy and AIDS Pseudoscience
The desperate consequences of delusional thinking about medicine…when the deluded are the people running the country.
Alan Wolfe admires Rick Warren
Because he tells a Jewish woman she will go to hell.
Scientist dismisses 'detox' diets
Detox-based diets can include the use of tablets, socks, body wraps, diets, eating nettle root extract or drinking herbal infusions or "oxygenated" water.
The dangers of too much 'detox'
The evidence supporting the whole 'hydration industry' is flawed.
Belief in hell
79.7% in Ireland, 74.6% in the US, 58.3% in the UK.
Brad DeLong on books as people
'As long as I think of these as "texts," they are dry and boring. But there is a key to making them exciting: to remember that they are not texts: they are people--people urgently trying to talk to me, to tell me something very important that they think I desperately need to know.'
LRA accused of selling food aid
ICC prosecutor says the rebels are using the money they make to rearm.
Flora Terah: beaten and tortured for running for office
'In Kenya, and especially in the Ameru community I belong to, women are not supposed to get leadership positions.'
'Honour' killing rewarded with prize of 3 girls
Guy kills wife, gets 3 underage girls in 'compensation.'
Katha Pollitt talks to Der Spiegel
Feminism created a new normal.
Charles Murray is Deeply in Love With Sarah Palin
The last thing we need are more pointy-headed intellectuals running the government.
Katha Pollitt on Palin the Affirmative Action Babe
There's the fun of watching conservative pundits scramble to deny the obvious.
Dick Taverne rebukes Prince Charles
A democratic country cannot tolerate a monarch whose views command notice not because of expertise, but because of his birth.
Saudi Arabia: more female graduates, no more jobs.
Only 16% of Saudi women work, mostly teaching in segregated classrooms.
Swimming in Saudi Arabia
Foreign woman demands to use pool in international hotel, succeeds.
Maryam Namazie on the veil
The veil is a tool for the suppression and oppression of women.
Rape victims are guilty of zina; their rapists go free.
Four male witnesses of good standing are required to prove rape. Charging rape is proof of zina - by the woman only.
Women's lives in Afghanistan
More than 60% of marriages are forced; 57% of women marry under the age of 16.
Woman's Hour on women in Afghanistan
Maternal mortality and female illiteracy rates are among the highest in the world.
Primacy of the UDHR
Universal means universal.
Nahid Toubia fights against FGM
'This is about women and elevating the status of women and making them equal human beings.'
Canada will not participate in Durban II
Durban I degenerated into open expressions of intolerance and anti-Semitism that undermined the very goals the conference sought to achieve.
Muslim students file rights complaint against Maclean's
Faisal Joseph, a lawyer from the Canadian Islamic Congress who is representing the four students, argued that journalists can't write just anything.
Got a complaint? Call 1-800-Human-Rights.
The Canadian Islamic Congress has a new partner in its censorship campaign: the state
The Candidate
The New Yorker on Obama in May 2004
Reading Karen Armstrong
History is for Karen Armstrong not so much putty as Playdoh.
Little help available for minors fleeing FLDS
Service providers cannot help them because they're minors and runaways.
Pope Says No to Gender-neutral God
Anyone baptised using terms such as "Creator", "Redeemer" and "Sanctifier" would have to be re-baptised using the traditional ceremony.
Pragna Patel: Failed by religious law
The sentiments expressed by the archbishop are indicative of those who call themselves "progressive" or "liberal" but who are often the most insidious.
Hanan Dover notes that homosexuality is haram in Islam.
'The acceptance of one's God-given sex is a form of surrender to God or sumission to Allah.'
Friendly Feudalism: the Tibet Myth
Young Tibetan boys were regularly taken from their peasant families and brought into the monasteries to be trained as monks. Once there, they were bonded for life.
Universal Human Rights and
"Human Rights in Islam"
The Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam claims supremacy over the UDHR, based on divine revelation.
On Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam
Right from the start of the Cairo Declaration, it is made clear the world is divided into Muslims and infidels.
Khadim Hussain on Swat Valley After Emergency in Pakistan
The people of the whole valley feel themselves hostage to the firebrand Maulana Fazlullah
Southern Baptist Seminary Offers 'Homemaking' Degree for Women
'We are moving against the tide in order to establish family and gender roles as described in God's word for the home and the family,' seminary president said.
Flemming Rose on the cartoons
Does a religion have the right to impose its religious taboos onto the public domain?
Flemming Rose on why he published the cartoons
This is a popular trick of totalitarian movements: Label any critique or call for debate as an insult and punish the offenders.
Research? hmm. Torture? go right ahead.
Ben Goldacre asks: Where’s your ethics committee now, science boy?
Shazia Qayum is spokeswoman for the Forced Marriage Unit.
She was locked in a room for a year for refusing a forced marriage, spent five years living in shelters hiding from her family.
Who should be able to stop a forced marriage?
Bridget Prentice and Jasvinder Sanghera discuss on Woman's Hour.
WHO study on risks of FGM
WHO study shows FGM exposes women and babies to significant risk at childbirth.
WHO/UNICEF/UNFPA statement on FGM
Confirming the universally unacceptable harm caused by FGM, and issuing an unqualified call for the elimination of this practice in all its forms.
Women constantly under threat in Afghanistan
The state cannot protect women and ensure that they can go about their work safely.
The Power of One: An Interview With Shukria Barakzai
Shukria Barakzai, founder and editor of a newspaper for Afghan women, was named Worldpress.org’s 2004 International Editor of the Year.
A chat with Rome's Exorcist
'If the pupils are looking up, the demons in possession are scorpions. If looking down, they are serpents.'
Syed Soharwardy's complaint to AHRC
against the publishers of Jewish Free Press and the Western Standards for sighting [sic]hate against Muslims
Fauziya Kassindja fled Togo to escape FGM
She was to be mutilated at the behest of a man who wanted to make her his fourth wife.
Natalie Angier on the matriarchal myth.
Despite evidence that contradicts the story of a prelapsarian gynecocracy, and a glaring lack of evidence to support it, many people continue to subscribe to it.
Inca children were fattened-up before sacrifice
The Inca were imperialists too, and the treatment of such peasant children may have served to instil fear and facilitate social control over remote mountain areas.
Brian Whitaker on Joseph Massad on 'the Gay International'
Gay rights are part of the Orientalist project.
Bhutto Clan Leaves Trail of Corruption
The documents leave uncertain the degree of involvement of Benazir Bhutto but they trace the pervasive role of her husband.
Interview with Mukhtaran Mai
In their hearts these people were with us, but they were scared to show this.
Nebraska 1997: Multiculturalism meets child marriage
The use of cultural evidence risks a dangerous balkanization of the criminal law.
Joanne Payton on Sati
Across rural India, it’s easy to find people who revere sati as the ultimate demonstration of womanly honour, devotion and piety.
Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust marks FGM Zero Tolerance day
It is estimated that as many as 74,000 women in the UK have had FGM and that every year a further 7,000 are at risk.
The Religious Policeman on the 'Muslim Offense Level'
Reasons not to talk about stampedes where "several" poor Third-World Muslims died.
Natasha Walter on women in Afghanistan
"Every day women are sacrificed for their family or tribe," Nilab Mobarez tells me angrily.
God v Science
What is so good about having faith when you don't have evidence? What is the real advantage to that? Why is this something that we want to encourage?
Michelle Goldberg on the Dover trial
Emboldened by their growing political power, religious conservatives are once again storming the barricades of science education.
April 2002 HRW report on Gujarat riots
We Have No Orders To Save You.
AIDS Denial is Pseudoscience
The scientific evidence is overwhelming and has been published in peer-reviewed medical journals, the way science is supposed to be done.
Aids Denialists [pdf]
AIDS denial plays a corrosive role in the health policies of many countries, but nowhere has the damage been as extreme or as enduring as in South Africa.
Marieme Helie Lucas on the fundamentalist political agenda.
Fundamentalists want to impose a religious identity on all citizens, by virtue of their birth place rather than by choice, thus denying freedom of thought, freedom of religion, freedom of consciousness.
Akbar Ganji on the View from Tehran
Political change in Iran is necessary, but it must not be achieved by foreign intervention.
Rape in Congo
Countless women in DRC have been raped and mangled, then shunned.
Saudi women's rights activist Wajeha al-Huwaider banned
To mark international women's day 2004, International Pen Writers in Prison Committee focused on al-Huwaider.
'Whoever changes religion – kill him'
Sura 40 says that those who reject the scriptures will have iron collars and chains placed around their necks, be dragged into scalding water and burnt in the fire.
Marieme Hélie-Lucas challenges the 'coward Left'
Women in Algeria were slaughtered in the thousands by fundamentalist armed forces throughout the nineties, because they refused to be forcibly covered.
18 good ideas
Tahir Aslam Gora suggests an outline for the new Islam.
James Harkin on The Threat to Reason
Enlightenment 2.0 makes for a rather toothless, muddled kind of liberation.
Would Steve Gould have signed the 'Steves' list?
'There is no serious scientific doubt that evolution occurred or that natural selection is a major mechanism in its occurrence.'
Clever teenagers don't have sex
Sexual behavior may compete with the time and resources required for other goals.
Pigliucci on Fish on atheism
He has to reduce science to just another faith in order to salvage the “reasonableness” of religious belief.
Massimo Puglicci reads Stanley Fish on atheism
Another demonstration that atheism is simply not permissible.
Postmodernism and Fabrication of History
'Historians are always making up figures,' said Lyndall Ryan. Oh really?
Afghan women seek death by fire
Delegates from countries like Bangladesh, Iran, India and Sri Lanka - which have similar female suicide rates - discussed the problem at a conference in Afghanistan in November 2006.
Young Afghan women turn to suicide
Driven to desperation by forced marriages and abusive husbands, more and more are seeking release through self-immolation.
Spanish women's groups sue imam
His book gives advice on wife-beating. Not too hard, not on the tender bits; do it right.
Muslim-born woman detained for 'rehabilitation' from Hinduism
Islamic officials seized her 15-month-old daughter from her Hindu husband, Suresh Veerappan, last month and handed the child to Revathi's Muslim mother.
Injustice in Malaysia
Subjecting Hindu women to Sharia courts is not justice.
Murdered Journalists
Government and military officials are suspected of plotting, ordering, or carrying out more than a quarter of journalist murders over the past 15 years, CPJ’s analysis shows.
Woman in burqa horrified by woman in chador
Just look how she dresses, the bridge of her nose visible for all the world to see.'
National Conference of Catholic Bishops on infants with anencephaly
It is never permitted to terminate the gestation of an anencephalic child as the means of avoiding psychological or physical risks to the mother.
Cult Stud Suggests Put Down a Book Week
TV is popular culture, the working class likes it, so put down that book.
Peter Van Inwagen on Clifford's Sentence
Is It Wrong Everywhere, Always, and for Anyone to Believe Anything on Insufficient Evidence?
The Ethics of Belief
A shipowner was about to send to sea an emigrant-ship.
Religious Schools: the Case Against
Extracts from Humanist Philosophers’ Group pamphlet.
Debunking Edward Said
Ibn Warraq on a one-eyed view of the relationship between the Arab and Western worlds.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali on the Right to Offend
'Today, the open society is challenged by Islamism'
Confessions of a Lonely Atheist
Natalie Angier unimpressed by Bush's assumption that prayer is some sort of miracle Vicks Vapo Rub for the national charley horse.
Cambridge Mosque press release [on mosque site]
Cites sorrow and anger, demands apology for insult to honour of prophet.
Iran's bloggers in censorship protest
Hundreds of Iranian online journals have been protesting against media censorship by renaming their blogs after pro-reformist newspapers and websites that have been banned or shut down by the authorities.
The new Taliban codex
It is forbidden to work as a teacher under the current puppet regime. Teachers must recieve a warning; next time, a beating; next, death.
A Conversation with Akbar Ganji and Martha Nussbaum [audio]
Iran's most prominent political dissident talks to the philosopher.
Hearings into child abuse at Goldenbridge
Chills the blood.
Kenan Malik interprets the Dispatches Muslim Survey.
The survey shows that Muslims do not form a single homogenous community.
The Cardinal's concern for children.
Documents seen by the BBC suggest the archbishop ignored the advice of doctors and therapists who warned that Hill was likely to re-offend.
Feynman on the Challenger
Appendix F - a must read.
Norm Geras on Minimum Utopia
A world cured of its worst remediable deprivations and horrors is worth aiming for.
The 'Faith Community Liaison Group'
A ministerial working group in the Home Office charged with injecting religious ideas 'across Whitehall'.
Remember Hazlitt
Michael Foot, A C Grayling, Tom Paulin, Andrew Motion, Ian Mayes at ceremony to do that.
Newspaper articles on child abuse in Ireland
Paddy Doyle has a large collection saved.
A History of Neglect
Paddy Doyle's timeline of Irish Industrial Schools and failed attempts to reform them.
Carl Sagan on Pseudoscience
On NPR's Science Friday in 1996, the rising popularity of pseudoscience and the importance of critical thinking.
Joel Achenbach on Carl Sagan
We have needed Sagan ever since Copernicus removed us from the center of the universe.
John Stachel on recurrent hostility to Einstein
Relativity has been attacked in the name of US pragmatism, German idealism, English Hegelianism, French Bergsonianism (by fellow Jew Henri Bergson!), Soviet "diamat" (dialectical materialism) and Nazi "Deutsche Physik"
Chomsky and Foucault
Debate human nature.
George Scialabba on Jacoby, Bernstein and Multiculturalism
Books by a superb (albeit incorrigibly centrist) reporter and a radical social critic.
Religious police prevented schoolgirls from escaping fire
Saudi Arabia's religious police stopped schoolgirls from leaving a blazing building because they were not wearing correct Islamic dress; fifteen died.
Goldenbridge orphanage
She was regularly beaten, left to sleep in her own urine, had her teeth knocked out, was hospitalised after a beating when she tried to break out of the orphanage.
AI asks bloggers to support free speech
Human rights group also wants web log writers to highlight the plight of fellow bloggers jailed for what they wrote in their online journals.
Dabashi interview
Very nasty stuff
Emily Bourgeois helps children in Uganda
She houses, feeds, clothes and pays for the schooling of orphans in Uganda.
From Chattel to Freewomen
Dr Mohini Giri works to rescue Indian widows from living death.
Anthony Grayling and Keith Ward
God didn't do it, he wasn't there at the time, and besides he's sorry.
Constitution? What constitution?
Article 37 of Maryland's constitution provides that "no religious test ought ever to be required as a qualification for any office of profit or trust in this State, other than a declaration of belief in the existence of God"
Profile of Wangari Maathai
She rose to prominence fighting for those most easily marginalised in Africa - poor women.
Afghanistan: a Just Intervention
Chris Bertram asks why the British left reacted the way it did.
Richard Carrier: Why I am not a Christian
God is silent and inert, the evidence is inadequate, and the universe is not the one predicted.
M V Ramana on gay rights in South Asia
The strongly patriarchal nature of South Asian societies ensures even worse treatment for lesbians than for gay men.
Afsan Chowdhury on the shadow citizens
Being gay in Bangladesh isn’t easy.
Dawkins interview
On atheism and evidence for God
Seyran Ates on multiculturalism
I want to know, and many thousands of Muslim girls and women have a right to know, why understanding and infinite tolerance is practised with particular cultural traditions that are clearly oppressive of women.
Sheldrake's staring effect
The sequences used in Sheldrake's research are not properly randomized.
About that Chinese encyclopedia...
Foucault cited Borges, but some of his followers cite the encyclopedia as fact.
'Living on Earth' visits Wangari Maathai
Green belts, trees, women, poverty, empowerment, corruption, resistance.
Jeffrey Nielsen's response to firing by BYU
I also strongly disagree with the implications of your statement that faithfulness and loyalty to the church and church leaders never permits expressions of disagreement, or questioning of our church leaders - especially in an academic setting.
Kenan Malik on free speech
The impact of censorship is in fact to undermine progressive movements within minority communities.
Nurse gang raped for doing her job
She refused to perform illegal abortions, so three men assaulted her
Stalking the wild taboo
The Seville Statement on Violence was written in the language of sociopolitical activism, not that of science.
Researcher denied funds for assuming evolution
Peer-review committee said he hadn't provided 'adequate justification for the assumption in the proposal that the theory of evolution, and not intelligent-design theory, was correct.'
Jesus and Mo on Righteous Blasphemy
Jesus is reading The Philosophers' Magazine.
Jesus and Mo on Mother Teresa
Not for fans of the saint
Fred Halliday on Blasphemy and Power
It is not possible to insult or defame someone who has been dead for 1,374 years.
The Forward March Of Women Halted?
A commitment to women's equality has eroded and strong opposition to this commitment has emerged.
Chris Mooney on Tom Bethell
There's plenty of science hijacking in The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science.
Hitchens on 'Mother Teresa'
Misdiagnoses, re-using unsterile needles, no pain medications...
Richard Norman on Richard Swinburne
If belief in God is a matter of ‘faith’ in contrast to reason, there’s nothing to distinguish it from mere wishful thinking.
What segregated education does
Entrenches the opinions of parents.
HRW on Women's Rights
Violence and discrimination against women are global social epidemics.
Milt Rosenberg interviews Frederick Crews [audio]
One of the greatest living skeptics talks about such follies as psychoanalysis, ID, and contemporary literary theory
A Mathematician Reads Social Text
Don't think someone as educated as Ross could fall into such a trap? Think again.
Carl Sagan on The Burden of Skepticism
What is called for is an exquisite balance between skeptical scrutiny and great openness to new ideas.
Hitchens on Hirsi Ali
She has case histories that will freeze your blood. These, however, are in some ways less depressing than the excuses made by qualified liberals for their continuation.
Witch-hunts in Orissa
When someone gets ill, women are punished.
Ramin Jahanbegloo on a philosophy of tolerance
Attentiveness towards others and openness towards truth is still not a matter of common sense in some religious and political cultures.
Ramin Jahanbegloo on the intellectual in the Middle East
Intellectual elites who gave up their intellectual habits and submitted to the strict rules of ideologies such as Marxism-Leninism or Islamism.
Reminding liberals how to get mad
Michael Bérubé on the Chomskian left and obfuscation
Philosophy: Who Needs It?
'It's a bug that has taken hold of me without asking my permission.'
Carlin Romano Reads Bruce Bawer
Enlightenment, we should equally remember, means replacing half-baked notions and myths with facts.
On the Robbers Cave Experiment
Derogation of the out-group was expressed in word and deed.
The Robbers Cave Experiment
A classic on intergroup conflict and cooperation
WAF Replies to Tariq Modood
Communities of interest are not born; they are made, and construct themselves, according to prevalent ideologies.
Necla Kelek
Her life was bound by prohibitions: no swimming, no sports, no playing outdoors and no German friends because they were infidels. She ran away the day her father threatened her with an ax.
Islamisation in Malaysia
Secularists, women's rights campaigners, minorities not pleased.
Law angers women's rights campaigners
New Islamic family law in Malaysia undermines women's rights.
The machismo of the riots
In 1968, women and men occupied the barricades.
British diplomats rescue women from forced marriages
Rehman has been thrashed by her father, threatened at gunpoint by her uncle and forced to marry a complete stranger
Horseplay in Harappa
Collection of articles on on the ways Hindutva propagandists distort ancient Indian history.
Outsider as enemy
K N Panikkar on the politics of rewriting history in India.
Crews Replies to Plantinga on ID
Creationists sense they're playing a losing game.
Robert Frost's 'Design'
'I found a dimpled spider, fat and white...'
Barbara Forrest on the Wedge at Work
How ID creationism is wedging its way into the cultural and academic mainstream.
Confessions of a Lonely Atheist
'Among the more irritating consequences of our flagrantly religious society is the special dispensation that mainstream religions receive.'
Tracy Morton and Kay Wilkinson v Vardy
Vardy schools accord equal importance to both creationism and theories of evolution.
Behe's Empty Box
Reviews and Criticisms of Michael Behe's book: Darwin's Black Box:
The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution
Behe and Intelligent Design
Irreducible complexity is a term invented by Behe. It is a myth: there is no irreducible complexity in living organisms.
Behe and Intelligent Design
Irreducible complexity is a term invented by Behe. It is a myth: there is no irreducible complexity in living organisms.
Nigerian State Segregates Travel
'You have no excuse to carry a woman who is neither your wife nor your mother on a motorcycle.'
Kenan Malik's Debate with Steve Fuller
If there are two cultures involved in the Sokal affair they are shoddy scholarship on the one side and an attempt at rational thought on the other.
So where are these powerful arguments?
Alister McGrath says Richard Dawkins is a crude religious propagandist
The Pope is also a head of state, and that's bad
The Vatican's fictive statehood allows it to promote its retrograde gender values in multilateral forums as well
Mediawatchwatch interviews Stephen Green of 'Christian Voice'
Other writings are unashamed myth, but not the Bible.
Natural History on 'Intelligent Design'
Articles by Forrest, Scott, Miller, Pennock, Behe, Dembski, more.
Scott McLemee does a close reading of 'Battlefield Earth'
Terl's responsibilities include blackmailing fellow Psychlo Forest Whitaker and laughing at his own jokes.
The great Kabbalah con
An organisation that charges £860 for dinner, 'healing' water and some books in Aramaic
Company recalls 'offensive' sandals
Laceys footwear, in London, made the decision after it received complaints from 'the Hindu community.'
Oregon's 'Cultural Competence' Plan
Many faculty members worried about insertion of undefined political notion ‘cultural competency’ into every aspect of administration, teaching and performance evaluation
Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen on Juliet Mitchell
There is something mysterious about the way psychoanalysis perpetually raises itself from its ashes.
How Fabrications Differ from a Lie
'Did Freud lie?' is the great question.
Frederick Crews on 'Intelligent Design'
Creationism sheds its Dogpatch image and takes a subtler approach.
Simon Blackburn interview
On truth, epistemology, global warming, philosophy of mind, quasi-realism, Hume
Silence over Afghan women's rights
Widows starve, refugees are beaten, rape victims are beaten
Evidence and persuasion
Robert Wilcocks on Jacques Bénesteau's Mensonges freudiens : Histoire d’une désinformation séculaire
Muslim Council of Britain unable to attend Holocaust Memorial day
Because it is too 'mixed with the politics of the day'
Human Rights Watch on the religious revival
Tensions between religious fundamentalism and human rights
Rushdie on 'joke' Islamic leaders
Says there is a “backsliding into bigotry” among Muslims both in Britain and around the world.
Polio outbreak in Indonesia
Officials believe the outbreak can be traced to Nigeria, where vaccinations were suspended in 2003 after radical clerics said they were a US plot
Manufactured Consensus?
If political considerations dictate what gets published, it's all over for science.
Amnesty International on 'honour' killings in Pakistan
Dr Tahira Shahid Khan says 'Women are considered the property of the males in their family irrespective of their class, ethnic or religious group. The owner of the property has the right to decide its fate. The concept of ownership has turned women into a commodity'
Women Against Fundamentalisms
WAF was launched in 1989 to challenge the rise of fundamentalism in all religions.
Ann Cryer: Forced marriages must end
Amanda Day talks to Labour MP Ann Cryer about her campaign to win justice for young Asian women.
Empty-headed vehemence of a discouraging kind
Greer's idealization of miserable women - which is to say, her denial of their misery - is worse than naive. It is cruel.
SF, Crypto-fascism and Romanticism
The bandit hero - the underdog rebel - so frequently becomes the political tyrant; and we are perpetually astonished!
Barbie looks better with no legs
Why does someone want both her legs off, 'fairly high' above the knee?
Costing an Arm and a Leg
Mental disorders come and go.
Piers Benn on Islamophobia-phobia
Many who fear the rise of Islamophobia veer away from critical analysis of Islamic claims and practices, perhaps for fear of what they might find.
Libraries
Some librarians now post NO SILENCE PLEASE signs as part of their marketing campaigns.
The hegemony of social constructionism
Mark Bauerlein on the institutional factors behind groupthink.
Noam Chomsky's 'Rationality/Science'
'these attributions scarcely rise to the level of a caricature of rational inquiry'
Visiting Preacher Killen
'If You Don't Believe in God, the Hellfire Awaits You.'
What is Munchausen's Syndrome by Proxy?
Highly controversial condition, which some doubt even exists.
About Patrick Henry College
Socialism is a violation of God's creation order.
An Unbeautiful Mind
It is pretty uplifting to be a scientist-theologian, happy with the universe, confident of the ways of the Lord.
Grade Inflation in US higher education
Americans just keep getting smarter and smarter
Cretino-Leftism
Classic Symptom of Epistemological Cretino-Leftism: Claiming that criticism, reason, rational inquiry and the pursuit of truth are “instruments of oppression”.
The real politics behind bad academic writing
The desire to "question common sense" is merely the self-congratulation of someone whose "sense" is different, but no less "common."
15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense
Scientific American provides useful tool
The Things We Forgot to Remember
OU/Radio 4 series on which bits of history we remember and which we don't
Eagleton on Spivak
Be as obscurantist as you can get away with, decently or indecently.
Scott McLemee on the Norton 'Theory' Anthology
All those mind-bendingly transgressive thinkers now formed a sort of tradition.
Michael Ruse reads Dawkins
Ruse sees Richard Dawkins as the atheist's Billy Graham
Intergalactic Jesus
Attempts to reconcile science and religion usually fail because religions make claims about the real world that don't stand up to scientific scrutiny.
Margaret Talbot on Carol Gilligan
Gilligan's teaching is in many ways reactionary, which also helps to account for its extraordinary success
The Guardian profiles E O Wilson
Ants, pheromones, genes, biodiversity, ecological footprints, consilience.
Simon Blackburn on Richard Rorty
Rorty has a gift for ducking and weaving and laying smoke
Hazlitt
His obscurity is a depressing lesson in contemporary cultural memory.
Einstein Wasn't Writing for Time
Einstein's theory of relativity did not spawn artistic modernism and moral relativism, Time magazine to the contrary notwithstanding.
Arguments from Incredulity and Gödel
'Basically, Godel’s theorems prove the Doctrine of Original Sin, the need for the sacrament of penance, and that there is a future eternity.'
A Conversation Between Rebecca Goldstein and Steven Pinker
Both are obsessed with realism and the pursuit of objective knowledge
Azam Kamguian on Islam and Education
The anti-secularist reaction has been bad for women and children.
Carl Zimmer Reviews The God Gene
Or rather, a gene for something labeled 'spirituality.'
Advertising Standards Authority rules out miracle cure ad
The ASA said Peniel Pentecostal Church had to offer proof at least comparable with that required of makers of washing powder
What is 'liberal orthodoxy'?
Graham Larkin answers questions from New York Sun
Index to Creationist Claims
Rebuttals and references from the scientific community to any and all of the various creationist claims.
Stalking the Wild Taboo
Anti-science is a revolt wherein second-rate scholarship is parlayed into tenured professorships and book contracts.
Can White Guys Eat Quiche and Jump?
Or as Tom Lehrer put it: Fight fiercely Harvard, fight fight fight: impress them with our prowess, do.
Julian Baggini considers online collaborations.
How human relationships are being pushed in new directions by virtual worlds.
Deborah Lipstadt on Holocaust Denial
Deborah Lipstadt discusses how misinformation and false claims are used to question the reality of the Nazis' attempt to exterminate Europe's Jews.
Ivan Kelly on concepts of modern astrology
Interconnectedness, paranormal information transmission, asymmetrical evidence acceptance, aperception of contradiction, and more.
Get an MA in astrology.
A new and exciting advance for the academic world.
Daughters of France, Daughters of Allah
Marie Brenner on forced marriage, violence, imprisonment of women.
Pragna Patel on the Impact of Fundamentalism
Women in particular have borne the brunt of the new found
Hindu militancy and intolerance.
Profile of Susan Sontag from 1992.
'I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up.'
Denis Donoghue Reviews Illness as Metaphor.
Impatient with nuances and discriminations that would impede the march of her argument.
Politeness on 'In Our Time'
The Spectator, coffee houses, no swords, drawing rooms, books, mixing, nobility and gentry, Boswell's dirty breeches, and much more.
A 'Museum Different'
The exhibit's commentary is limited to comments like 'Respect and sharing of your self is very important.'
An Unlikely Communion of Socialists and Islamists
'...they hide the atheism at the core of leftist politics in order to pursue a blatant get–rich–quick electoral scheme.'
BHL Too Fashionable, French Intellectuals Report
Authors motivated by impatience with relentless self-promotion and unquestioning adulation of French media.
As Miss World Turns
The war between religious fanaticism and secular modernity is fought over women's bodies.
Richard Wolin on Derrida
'Deconstruction was perceived, not unjustly, as part and parcel of an elitist, self-enclosed, mandarin academic idiom.'
Jane Kramer on French feminism.
Where did all the French feminists go?
Paul Gross Reviews Dawkins vs. Gould: Survival of the Fittest
Increasing involvement of philosophers with evolutionary biology testifies to the emergence of the discipline to the center of public interest in science.
No Need for Facts When You Have Faith
You can be certain and be wrong.
Jews in US Academia since World War II
Taken for granted now, but it hasn't always been.
The Catcher in the Rye is a crap book.
Execrable prose and jejune narcissism - not a good combination.
Tony Sewell and Lee Jasper on racism and school.
We need to challenge a youth culture that thinks to do well in school is 'to act white.'
Gangsta Rap Culture Not Such a Good Thing?
Education has been portrayed as 'white' - what use is it when strutting the streets?
Derek Freeman Replies
Ad hominem denigration doesn't make the case.
Derek Freeman or Margaret Mead?
One can be controversial and heretical and still be wrong.
Ni Putes ni Soumises
'We're girls, so we're less-than-nothings, Priscilla, 17, told Le Monde after her friend Sohane's death.
Irfan Khawaja takes issue with Daniel Pipes
Militant Islam and militant Christian fundamentalism are indeed related.
Naomi Weisstein defends the beanie hat
We need to know what's out there so that we can change it.
Lee Smith on Tariq Ramadan
'Ramadan is a cold-blooded Islamist who believes that Islam is the cure for the malaise wrought by liberal values.'
Brian Appleyard's Understanding the Present reviewed.
'Scientists and their works are everywhere described in an arctic language of despair.'
Thomas Nagel on the Sleep of Reason
Eerily patient explanations from Sokal and Bricmont of why gibberish is gibberish.
Norman Geras on Minimum Utopia
The facts of widespread human privation and those of political oppression and atrocity are available to all who want them.
NAGPRA and the Demon-haunted World
NAGPRA proceeds from an antievolutionary perspective grounded in fundamentalist religious belief.
Norman Levitt on Kennewick Man.
NAGPRA is a well-intentioned piece of legislation that has grown into a monster of anti-scientific bias.
Rigoberta Menchu
'Whenever you're told that you shouldn't look into something, for some people, that is a very clear directive that you ought to keep looking.'
Multicultural Pseudoscience
Bernard Ortiz De Montellano on gibberish dressed up as education.
Out of Islam
'I don’t need a Hell to fear to be ethical, or a paradise to reward me for my good.'
Francis Crick on Atheism
'What could be more foolish than to base one's entire view of life on ideas that, however plausible at that time, now appear to be quite erroneous?'
The Impact of Religion on Children's Education
Azam Kamguian on what the anti-secularist backlash has done to education.
Barbara Forrest on The Wedge at Work
How Intelligent Design Creationism Is Wedging Its Way into the Cultural and Academic Mainstream
Vikram Chandra on the Cult of Authenticity
Don't essentialize Indianness, but you'd better get the Real India right.
Science According to the X-Files
'We are born of primordial slime, not at the hands of a benevolent and concerned supreme being who lovingly crafted us from clay.'
Holocaust Denial on Trial
Deniers distort history in order to promote antisemitism and white supremacy.
Raymond Tallis on Sokal & Bricmont.
'The protection built into Theory...is composed of layer on layer of ignorance.'
Paul Boghossian on the Sokal Hoax.
'To concede that no one ever believes something solely because it's true is not to deny that anything is objectively true.'
Polly Toynbee on Religious Hatred Laws
Confusing religion and race is a clever trap the religious have laid for a worried government rightly anxious about race.
Monolithic Thought Unfair to Astrology
'The Epistemological Situation of Astrology in Relation to the Ambivalent Fascination/Rejection of Postmodern Societies'
Separation of Mosque and State
'Among intellectuals and in the academic world, any attempt to blame Islam for women’s oppression is stamped as Orientalism.'
Eagleton on Fish
'A superficially historicist, materialist case - our beliefs and assumptions are embedded in our practical forms of life - leads not only to a kind of epistemological idealism, but to the deeply convenient doctrine that our way of life cannot be criticised as a whole.'
'Frontline' on Alternative Medicine
Alternative to what? Testing and evidence?
More Than 500 Arguments for the Existence of God
TELEOLOGICAL ARGUMENT
(1) Check out that tree. Isn't it pretty?
(2) Therefore, God exists.
Paul Kurtz on Belief
Why do people believe or disbelieve?
Webster Reviews Fisher and Greenberg
‘the findings were nicely congruent with the hypothesis’ - yes, they always are, that's the problem.
Kevin McDonald on Crews on Freud
'psychoanalysis, unlike a scientific theory but very much like certain religious or political movements, has essentially been immune from attacks leveled at it either from inside or outside the movement.'
Frederick Crews on Freud
'the claims of psychoanalytic theory are not interpretations but determinate propositions about how the mind regularly works'
A look at Kent Hovind's dissertation.
In fact Patriot University seems to have no standards.
Dawkins on Maynard Smith
'John does know more mathematics, more physics and more engineering than the average biologist. But he also knows more biology than the average biologist.'
Urvashi Butalia on 'honour' killing.
Women's groups demand that murderers be treated according to laws of the land and not be allowed to find shelter behind the curtain of 'culture'.
Melvin Konner takes on the opponents of sociobiology.
Biologists who had done no primary research in human sciences nevertheless issued anathemas on it.
A Designer Universe?
What a coincidence that we're here and not on that nasty Pluto.
Mary Lefkowitz on Distortions of History
He has his view and you have yours and they have theirs. So it goes.
Paul Gross on the Politicization of Science Education
Attempts to reshape science classes delegitimize science as an especially trustworthy form of knowledge and promote "other ways of knowing" instead.
Therapeutic Touch
The Skeptical Dictionary looks at energy medicine, the flow of chi or prana, auras, chakras...
Richard Dawkins considers Fashionable Nonsense
It's so uncool to think there is a real world.
Fifteen Answers to Creationist Nonsense
Some antievolutionists admit that they intend for intelligent-design theory to serve as a "wedge" for reopening science classrooms to discussions of God.
Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?
When cultures are organized around controlling and using women, is blanket respect for Other cultures such a good idea?
Historic Conference in Chicago
March 2000
Conference brought Armenian
and Turkish scholars together for the first time to discuss the 1915 genocide.
'Independent' Peer Review
The Bush administration wants scientists it can trust.
Dawkins on Darwin's Genetics
'Sexual selection really is a good candidate for explaining a great deal about the unique evolution of our species.'
Byatt Reviews Browne's Darwin Biography
'There has been a tendency among Marxist, or marxisant, critics of Darwin, and social Darwinism, to criticise, or ridicule, the theory as a simple product of the society in which it was developed.'
Scott McLemee on Orwell
Prose as a window-pane opens onto a reality that is solidly and visibly 'out there.'
Frank Lentricchia takes it all back.
'When I grew up and became a literary critic, I learned to keep silent about the reading experiences of liberation that I’d enjoyed since childhood.'
Whither Irony?
'In the clamorous and bloodstained souk of the world...people still go unrepentantly on looking out for good lives'
Washington, Jefferson and slavery.
Washington freed his slaves in his will, Jefferson did not. The reasons of each tell us much about American history.
Limitations of Political Reporting
Investors need to know the truth, but voters don't. Or not.
Democracy and its Global Roots
'Developments take place in a world linked by ideas rather than by race.'
Romila Thapar demolishes Sanskritic Indus Theory
'Indian history from the perspective of the Hindutva ideology reintroduces ideas that have long been discarded and are of little relevance to an understanding of the past.'
And 'Post-Contemporary' means...what, exactly?
If you number your paragraphs, will people mistake you for Adorno?
When Religion Steps on Science's Turf
Richard Dawkins on the cowardly flabbiness of the intellect that afflicts otherwise rational people confronted with long-established religions.
An ex-Muslim woman speaks out - and has to flee for her life.
Most government-funded Islamic clubs 'are run by deeply conservative men and perpetuate the segregation of women.'
Human Rights and Asian Values
Dissent is part of all cultures, Asian decidedly included.
Report on Resistentialism
Betrousered, two-eyed philosopher Ventre considers a world in which Things are Against Us.
Why Lit-crits want economists to sound more like lit-crits.
Paul Krugman draws an interesting parallel with Stephen Jay Gould.
Katha Pollitt on Multiculturalism and Women.
'A Russian, an Italian, could not justify beating his wife to death by referring to the customs of dear old Moscow or Calabria'
Stanley Fish Defends Postmodernism
Terrorists, freedom fighters, fundamentalists, postcolonialism, the Enlightenment - all contested, as usual.
Grade Inflation
When students are consumers, they want what they pay for.
What we need is a robust universalism.
'There is nothing sacrosanct about any culture or religion's rituals. Cultures are neither monolithic, unchanging, nor without internal critique and resistance...'
Deep, unconscious anti-science bias.
Scientists are humorless nerds, and crop circles and crystals are more fun.
Literature and theory duke it out.
If Lentricchia and Said have joined, the revenge of the emeriti may not be so regressive after all.
The Yanomamo Controversy
A scandal in anthropology is complicated by politics, emotion, prestige - the usual sort of thing.
Science, Scientism, and Anti-Science in the Age of Preposterism
'We are in danger of losing our grip on the concepts of truth, evidence, objectivity, disinterested inquiry.'
Susan Haack on Vulgar Rortyism
It's important to distinguish between necessary, useful technicality, and jargon or pseudo-mathematics substituting for genuine rigor.
Professionalization in the Humanities
What if you want to talk about an authentic self instead of an 'authentic self'?
McCarthyism's Indian Rebirth
The new chauvinism receives official sanction from government and academic institutions.
Frank Furedi on Paranoid Parents
The world is a jungle, barely one child in a hundred escapes being murdered! Or so you would think.
So Sylvia Plath was a Poet?
'Death and marriage may have fed and fuelled her writing, but - posthumously at least - they cramp her style.'
Hitchens on Contrarianism
'Among his many weapons are a forensic curiosity, a vast learning, a savage wit, a commanding intellect, an international perspective and a moral authority that is built on something sturdier than cheap moralising.'
A Moral Argument for Atheism
Slaughter of innocents, human sacrifice, eternal torture - it's all there.
Durkheim on Religion
The way to 'reject the insipid relativism of the tabula rasa without denying or ignoring the freedom and variability of individual human beings and their cultures.'
Memory and trauma
Sally Satel looks at the way we construct narratives about our symptoms.
Curtis White on The Middle Mind
Book reviews in glossy magazines, worshipful interviewers on public radio and tv, 'annoying' as the ultimate condemnation...
The Baghdad blogger.
What life was really like in Saddam's Iraq and what it's like now.
Livid Quietism on the Right
'The anti-intellectuals are finally on the side of power at its most unforgiving and voracious.'
'Without a theory, you can't meet the people.'
Miller wonders why 'unavailing Latinate neologisms' convince so many people that something profound is being said.
Or Academic Pooh and Postmodern Instincts
Literary criticism, cultural studies; love letter and satire.
The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes
Consider Will Crooks, Labour MP. 'Growing up in extreme poverty...Crooks spent 2d. on a secondhand Iliad, and was dazzled...'
Carol Tavris Wonders Where the Evidence Is
'But the gender-genre books that are based largely on clinical intuition and popular psychology typically lack a basic skepticism toward received wisdom and the willingness to wrestle with an idea to see who wins.'
Research psychology or psychotherapy.
'...many of the widely accepted claims promulgated by therapists are based on subjective clinical opinions and have been resoundingly disproved by empirical research conducted by psychological scientists.'
Dwight Macdonald
'...all but a fraction of his own writing molders unattended in America's used bookstores. Like the New York Intellectuals with whom he was associated...he is referenced more often than read, a sad fate for a critic who wrote so much, so well and with such wit and insight.'
The Great Convergence
Beware of neo-Deistic pseudoreligion.
The margins are getting so crowded!
Centrality is so uncool that the margins are as full of people as Bangkok or the Aran Islands.
Ethnomathematics
'Mathematics is absolutely integrated with Western civilization, which conquered and dominated the entire world.'
Anthropologists sharpen their knives
'Anthropologists are trained to appreciate cultural differences, but they can't stand it within their own profession.'
Steven Weinberg on the Sokal Hoax
No, linear doesn't mean what pomos think it means.
Thomas Kuhn Examined
The shift from logic to history, and the perennial appeal of irrationalist programs.
Samantha Power on genocide and failures to prevent it.
Why did it take the US Senate forty years to ratify the UN Genocide Convention?
Norman Levitt on Kennewick Man
What is a government department doing endorsing the idea that traditions and myths count as evidence?
Massimo Pigliucci on Science and Religion
Do scientists 'keep the faith' and if so is that a good thing? Is religion a good source of morality?
Martin Gardner looks at a Center for nonsense studies.
Dowsing, homeopathy, Tarot cards and their relevance to mental health professions, and, of course, alien abductions.
Science, Scientism, and Anti-Science in the Age of Preposterism
What is the difference between genuine inquiry and the sham and fake variety?
Lies, Self-Deception and Magical Thinking
Psychoanalysis was never, despite Freud's 'positivist rhetoric,' a science; it was a 'purely speculative enterprise,' argues Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen.
Richard Dawkins' review of Not in Our Genes
In their 'paranoiac and demonological theology of science' Lewontin, Kamin and Rose fire both barrels with equal monotony and imprecision: 'determinism' and 'reductionism'. But the gallant little fire brigade has perpetrated a fatuous little book.
You Mean Movie Characters Aren't Real People?
No it's not just an accident that the character who gets Tom Hanks killed in Saving Private Ryan is both an intellectual and a coward. Spielberg is making a point, a bad point, and we need to pay attention.
'Why should science be any different?'
'We no longer defer to bishops or politicians; scientists are simply facing the same fate.' Yes but bishops are one thing and scientists are another. We can demand that scientists produce evidence, but what evidence can a bishop offer?
Jihad versus McWorld
In the 1992 article that he expanded into an excellent book, Barber examines the ways Identity and Shopping are dividing the world between them.
Tom Frank on 'Market Populism'
Extreme diets and extreme investing, diversity all around, along with a consensus as ironclad as any in the '50s.
Bias, as in Confirmation Bias
Being on the side of the rich and powerful ought to make it hard to play victim, but the right in the US manages it by seeing 'liberal' bias in the media even when it's...not there.
A Duty to Annoy
Is feminism about being a fragile flower needing protection and consolation at every hint of conflict? Or is it about being a cactus and fighting back. Wendy Kaminer disavows florality.
Please, No More Glamorama
James Wood on the grim outlook for social realism and 'hysterical realism', which may allow a space for the aesthetic and the contemplative again.
Meera Nanda on the Case for Indian Enlightenment
Meera Nanda had good reasons to fight against patriarchal, upper-caste Hindu traditions that would have suppressed all she valued. Science was not 'elitist' or Western but a way of life and a philosophy for social action.
Richard Dawkins Karate-chops Fashionable Nonsense
Dawkins on fun and games.
Not What You Think but How You Think
'He was very easily irritated by anything bogus, anything facile or hypocritical.'
Paul Boghossian on the Sokal Hoax
'How, given the recent and sorry history of ideologically motivated conceptions of knowledge -- Lysenkoism in Stalin's Soviet Union, for example, or Nazi critiques of `Jewish science' -- could it again have become acceptable to behave in this way?'
Yale as a Place Where Language Goes to Die
Helena Echlin on the misery of being a PhD candidate in English and American literature at Yale. She has to stifle her urge to write 'eh?' in the margins, discovers that obfuscation is de rigeur, and that people who talk nonsense are now looked upon not as sloppy thinkers, but as sages.
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