There’s a new Point of Inquiry episode! This time, Jim Underdown talks to Massimo Polidoro and Kenny Biddle, “two of the top investigators in the skeptic movement.”
In our latest Secular Rescue story of success, we have Dhaka Tribune columnist and Mokta-Muna contributor Nur E Emroz Alam, aka, “Tonoy”:
He lamented the “overwhelming exaltation of ignorance” in Bangladesh that has led to an “arrogant form of Islam” spreading across the landscape “like a chronic disease.” He and other secularist writers are therefore burdened with a harrowing task: stopping the spread of ignorance while coping with the terrifying reality of violence and retaliation from extremists.
Indiana’s Washington Times Herald covers the debate in the state legislature over one of those Project Blitz bills to ram Christian supremacist crap into public schools. One of the folks who testified was our own Reba Boyd Wooden, head of CFI Indiana:
Reba Boyd Wooden, executive director of the Center for Inquiry Indiana, a non-profit committed to advancing secular values, said each of her children went through a district that offered release time for religious education. She allowed them to decide if they wanted the instruction.
While her son chose to attend, her daughter did not, opting to complete her homework instead. But overall, Boyd Wooden said, including release time for optional religious instruction disrupted already limited class time for all students and their teachers.
“We are talking about having enough time to teach the essentials in schools, and we’re taking time out of that,” Boyd Wooden said.
CFI has a new official representative to the United Nations, our UN Advocate, Andreas Kyriacou. And he’s Swiss!
Research at Texas Tech University shows what you might already have guessed: Flat-Earthers become Flat-Earthers through YouTube.
Jason Horowitz at the New York Times reports that folks should temper their expectations for reform in the Catholic Church in regard to the sexual abuse crisis:
The New York Times interviewed bishops and priests on four continents, and their views varied widely on the urgency, extent and very existence of sexual abuse of children and minors among priests — a problem that by now has been painstakingly documented in many parts of the globe.
So there are Catholic Church sex-abuse-truthers? Oy.
Nicholas Kristof reflects on the sexual abuse crisis among Southern Baptist clergy:
The problem is not just wayward pastors and priests. Rather it is structural, an inequality and masculine conception of God that empowers rapists.
Sarah Kaiser updates us on the many goings-on at CFI’s Western New York branch, you know, the one at CFI’s global fortress super-headquarters.
At Malaysia’s New Straits Times, Ahmad Badri Abdullah writes with concern about the state of the antivax movement in his country:
Conflicting messages on alternative medicine such as homoeopathy and naturopathy have also challenged the public trust. This trust deficit in vaccination needs to be carefully dealt with, otherwise, the growing anti-vaccine trend could dampen the growth of even the nascent halal vaccine market in the country. This is due to the fact that the movement does not merely suspect the halal status of the vaccines but involves a total rejection of vaccination as a valid healthcare option.
In a letter to the Baltimore Sun on the theologically based reasons for opposing physician-assisted suicide, one Henry Farkas writes:
It is unconstitutional to make suicide illegal just because God says that suicide is a sin. We have lots of sins that are perfectly legal. Just to name two mortal sins, masturbation and adultery are just as sinful as suicide, but they are not against the law. Good thing, too, because if they were against the law, the jails would be even more overcrowded, and the world outside of the jails would be nearly empty.
Quote of the Day
Transhumanist activist and frequent political candidate Zoltan Istvan writes in the UK’s Church and State that when it comes to indoctrinating kids in religion, there oughta be a law:
Like some other atheists and transhumanists, I join in calling for regulation that restricts religious indoctrination of children until they reach, let’s say, 16 years of age. Once a kid hits their mid-teens, let them have at it—if religion is something that interests them. 16-year-olds are enthusiastic, curious, and able to rationally start exploring their world, with or without the guidance of parents. But before that, they are too impressionable to repeatedly be subjected to ideas that are faith-based, unproven, and historically wrought with danger. Forcing religion onto minors is essentially a form of child abuse, which scars their ability to reason and also limits their ability to consider the world in an unbiased manner. A reasonable society should not have to indoctrinate its children; its children should discover and choose religious paths for themselves when they become adults, if they are to choose one at all.
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Linking to a story or webpage does not imply endorsement by Paul or CFI. Not every use of quotation marks is ironic or sarcastic, but it often is.