The Global Secular Council is getting much much better at remembering that “Global” has to include people who aren’t from the US or the UK or even Sweden; much much better at following the news from other parts of the world and sharing voices from there.
Or, not.
Wow, the Global Secular Council and its parent the Secular Coalition for American sure is doing a great job of representing US secularists.
Secular Council @SecularCouncil June 2
Thanks, @RichSandersen, for understanding we had been trying to answer Ofie’s questions, but had not been heard!
“Ofie”
That’s what the harassers call me. Sometimes they vary it to Oafy, just like any 5-year-old.
And the Global Secular Council thinks it’s appropriate to follow their lead.
Sometimes I ask myself : Are Africans returning to a dark age? Are we moving towards or away from enlightenment, from civilisation? These questions have become necessary if one is to put into context the magical and superstitious beliefs that are ravaging the continent.
Recent reports from Burkina Faso and Nigeria (not just about Boko Haram and the missing girls) have caused me to wonder as to where this African continent is heading in this 21st century. Africans, just like people in other regions of the world, entertain magical and mystical beliefs. They also hold spiritual and supernatural opinions. But the superstitious currents in Africa appear to be taking on a different dimension. I mean the situation is getting out of hand. African superstitions are so charged and threatening to the point that some may think that the people of this region are essentially a different sort of human being. But, of course, they are not. [Read more…]
Leo Igwe is doing a speaking tour in the Ohio-Indiana-Chicago-Michigan area in July. Don’t miss this if you are in that rectangle!
July 11-13: SSA conference in Columbus
July 14: CFI of Northeast Ohio
July 15: Freethought Dayton
July 16: Humanist Community of Central Ohio in Columbus
July 17: CFI Indiana in Indianapolis
July 18-20: FBB conference in Chicago
July 22: CFI Michigan/Society for Humanistic Judaism in Birmingham, MI
July 23: CFI MIchigan in Grand Rapids
A word of advice. If you’re attempting to write a panegyric in defense of someone who is useful to you but a blister on the heel of many other people – the first thing you want to pay attention to is verisimilitude. You want to make it believable. You see what I’m getting at? You don’t want to say “my friend is a saint, and for this saintliness he is roundly punished.”
You don’t want to say that because right away you’re going to get doubts and questions. “Huh?” people will say. “Why would that happen? Why would anyone punish your friend for saintliness?”
And then they’ll start to wonder if you’re just blowing smoke, and then you might as well have saved yourself the trouble.
You’re welcome.
Patricia Churchland responds crisply to Colin McGinn in the New York Review of Books. (Colin McGinn. You’d think he’d go quiet for awhile, wouldn’t you, to let people’s memories fade.)
Other scientific disciplines are also extremely important in understanding the nature of the mind: genetics, ethology, anthropology, and linguistics. Philosophy can play a role too, when the philosopher sees it is rewarding to get out of the armchair. Some philosophers, such as Chris Eliasmith, for example, have truly made progress in computationally modeling how the brain represents the world.
Nevertheless, there are nostalgic philosophers who whinge on about saving the purity of the discipline from philosophers like me and Chris Eliasmith and Owen Flanagan and Dan Dennett. What do the purists, like McGinn, object to? It is that their lovely a priori discipline, where they just talk to each other and maybe cobble together a thought experiment or two, is being sullied by…data. Their sterile construal of philosophy is not one that would be recognized by the great philosophers in the tradition, such as Aristotle or Hume or Kant.
But, we are told, it wasn’t the church, or it wasn’t the church alone, or the church was just following orders adhering to the norm, or it was poverty and wars and the drink, or no one else wanted these children and it was very kind of the church to take them in, or you’re just a pack of bigoted secularists so you are. An avowedly Catholic blog runs through them all, one after the other.
The story of the home run by the Catholic sisters of the Bon Secours has hit the UK press after a resulting Irish media storm.
It has predictably whipped up anti-Catholic outrage and sentiment amongst the small clique of Irish secularists who seem to inhabit Twitter, lurking to pounce on anyone who dares to say anything less than condemnatory about the Catholic Church in Ireland.
Originally a comment on To hell with making sense, eh?
Ah yes, Wimmin’s Lib. Burning bras. Damn uppity women jumping in front of the king’s horse. Patronising sitcoms. Patronising sketch shows. Bluff, honest CEOs explaining why they can’t possibly pay women the same as men because babies, menstruation, hormones and they’d only spend it on fashion and hair anyway.
I spend half my time being genuinely shocked on remembering that we live in the 21st century and the other half being even more surprised that we obviously still live in the fucking 70s.
I grew up in those exact fucking 70s in the UK. The very concept of feminism was widely and blandly treated as a joke. Why, feminists didn’t even shave their armpits! They wanted non-sexist language! They frowned upon rape! Ridiculous, I know, but we men indulged their little fancies. We gave them a weekly pittance so they could indulge their fascination with gossip by visiting their non-threatening friends on the way back from doing the shopping. And all we asked in return was our dinner on the table and couldn’t you just put a nice frock on once in a while despite working, looking after the children and looking after me as if I myself were a child? We as a nation rolled our eyes at their silly attempts to be like men and smugly congratulated ourselves for indulging feminism by mocking it on a societal level. We sure as shit spent more time creating media that portrayed feminism as infantile than we did actually, you know, listening to complaints, raising our consciousness or adjusting society so it was fair.
And here we are four decades later and though many things have changed for the better, the prevailing attitude seems to be exactly the same. It reminds me of those experiments – also done in the 70s (and earlier) – where people wore special glasses that split their vision in half. The subjects had difficulty commanding their limbs to do various things.
There’s an idea some people have that their brains are split in half because they feel they have to accept what they know is true (women are people) while simultaneously pining for the days when it was acceptable, even desirable in society, to treat them like they weren’t.
I think those people blame women for their brains being split in half. Their brains aren’t split in half, though. Get over that cognitive hump – men – and everything is better. Dawkins made two good points right at the start of The God Delusion: the concepts of Raising Consciousness and I Didn’t Know I Could. It’s an astonishing shame that he doesn’t apply either of those excellent concepts to himself.
Sorry, I’m ranting again but LATSOT MAD, pink trousers ripped, and I hope you’ll excuse it. My work is about making tools people can use to level playing fields and it’s so frustrating that I can hardly tell the attitudes of today from those of forty years ago.
Gwyneth Paltrow thinks water thinks you are thinking about it, and that it can tell when you are thinking mean things about it versus thinking nice things about it.
Gwyneth Paltrow loves nothing more than imparting life advice to her followers, and while that advice has dabbled in the pseudoscience before, it’s rarely been as totally off the rails as the May 29th edition of her newsletter goop. Paltrow begins:
I am fascinated by the growing science behind the energy of consciousness and its effects on matter. I have long had Dr. Emoto’s coffee table book on how negativity changes the structure of water, how the molecules behave differently depending on the words or music being expressed around it.
