Glam rocker Marc Bolan might now be preparing for his 72nd birthday, if he had not been killed in a car crash on this day in 1977. His music with T. Rex permeated my last years of primary school, from Get It On and Jeepster, through to Children of the Revolution and 20th Century Boy.
It is great to see the positive public reaction to Gareth Thomas, former captain of the Welsh rugby team, announcing that he is living with HIV. While celebrities are of course ordinary people, their announcements can have a big impact on public perceptions of HIV and funding for HIV research.
Monty Python once recorded a song about the joys of visiting Finland. It has the underwhelming chorus of “Finland, Finland, Finland, The country where I quite want to be…” But Michael Palin’s lyrics have proven to be prophetic, as Finland is the happiest country in the world, according to the 2019 World Happiness Report.
David Quinn has published a blog post on the Iona Institute website titled Atheists can’t have their moral cake and eat it too. It is a response to my post titled How do atheists and Christians justify morality, which was a response to his earlier post titled The naïve morality of many atheists.
It’s just over two weeks until Dublin Vegfest, on the weekend of 28th and 29th September, in Griffith College on the South Circular Road. For me, the most important aspect of my veganism is animal rights, and that cause is always well represented at VegFest. I believe one of the greatest injustices in our world […]
On the morning of 9/11 my late wife Anne was working in Leinster House as a parliamentary personal assistant. She rang me to tell me to turn on the television. She had an intern from New York working with her. As the Twin Towers collapsed on global television, the intern was devastated, not knowing whether […]
Listen above to my discussion yesterday on the Niall Boylan Show, on Classic Hits FM, about whether religion should be taken out of schools. The discussion was in the context of the Islamic Foundation of Ireland applying to be patron of a new secondary school.
Listen above: As the Islamic Foundation of Ireland is seeking the patronage of a new post-primary school, I made the case for a system of secular schools that everybody can attend without religious discrimination, on Newstalk Radio’s breakfast show this morning.
Listen above to my discussion on BBC Radio Ulster’s Sunday Sequence, on Sunday 8 September, about the idea of “almost believers.” Unitarian Minister Reverend Chris Hudson coined the phrase to describe people who might be on the verge of attending church services.
Saturday 7th of September 2019 was the seventh anniversary of Atheist Ireland’s monthly information tables outside the GPO in Dublin. We hold them on the first Saturday of every month. We also hold information tables in Cork and Galway, and last month we had our first Teach Don’t Preach information table on secular education.