I’ve been challenged on my post decrying the recent Supreme Court decision to criminalise intact dilatation and evacuation (iD&E), so here’s more argumentation about how I came to my conclusion. For those who enjoy reading 73-page legal documents, the complete summation can be found here.
The finding can be condemned on two grounds. It ignored [...]

On Wednesday, the US Supreme Court overturned a generation of legal precedent and the opinion of working gynaecologists to pass a law that makes a certain kind of abortion illegal. Apart from the obvious arguments and counter-arguments, I would just like to point out two interesting quotes from this excellent Washington Post report.
Quote the First:
Mr. [...]

His Holiness, Pope John XX
St Kopernik Cathedral, Albertus Magnus Square, Frombork
Easter Sunday 2007
My dear Brothers and Sisters,
Christus resurrexit! Christ is risen.
Welcome to all who have made the journey to Frombork to share with us this wonderful day. We come from all the continents of Earth. From Australia, the two Americas, from Africa and Asia, [...]

Tribalism in action

Nothing illustrates the tribalism of religion better than the upswelling of anger directed at Richard Dawkins in response to The God Delusion. Now let’s get one thing straight from the start: I disagree with Dawkins in his broadside on religion. While I agree with many of his individual arguments, the whole he has [...]

For those who are unfamiliar with the Australian comedy scene, Flacco defies description. I’m not even going to try. Suffice to say that he is the brainchild of Paul Livingstone, and he takes comedy beyond the crazed thoughts of Stephen Wright, well beyond the Pythonesque, and into the downright weird and paralogical. But every now [...]

Houzan Mahmoud is a feminist from Kurdistan Iraq now living in London. She has campaigned against the oppression of women that would follow the imposition of Sharia law, and has accordingly received a death threat from the jihadist group Ansar al-Islam. “With the permission of Great God, we will kill you either in Iraq or [...]

The rise of activist atheism: an explanation
Around the web and the media, a lot of opinionists have noted with varying degrees of alarm the rise of activist atheism. Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion is a huge international bestseller. A number of books sympathetic to Dawkins have also found success: Sam Harris’s Letter to a Christian [...]

Stephen Law has written a thought-provoking article about the problems with the “faith schools” initiatives in the UK while carefully distinguishing his criticism from religious schools in general. He argues that “all schools, religious or not, should be liberal, in the sense that they should encourage young people to think critically and for themselves about [...]

At Spiked Online, Frank Furedi wants to defend humanism against its greatest enemy…”secular misanthropes.”
In this year we have seen attacks on the church-state divide across the entire Western world. The US has banned embryonic stem cell research. In the UK there’s been a trend towards legitimising fringe religions by allowing them to run “faith schools” [...]

(Via Panda’s Thumb) The Lutheran has an interview with Judge Jones, the conservative Republican and devout Lutheran who ruled against intelligent design in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School Board this year. There is little new in the interview, but it does provide some nice succinct quotes.
On whether he should have ruled on the validity of [...]