2015 was bookended by the Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan massacres in Paris. Meanwhile, Islamic States violated human rights through blasphemy laws, lack of due process, persecution, floggings and executions, and ISIS tried to bring us back centuries to an even more barbaric implementation of Sharia law. Ireland was at the forefront of both secular progress and resistance to secular progress. […]
Update: University of Warwick Students Union has now approved Maryam to speak at this event and has apologised to her. Universities should be prepared to host events at which speakers cause offence to people who do not share their beliefs, as long as such events do not break the laws of the land or incite […]
Dear Ashley, Thank you for your open letter. I understand your feelings after waiting a week without a response from me to your last post. I’ve now been waiting three months without a response from the manager of your blog network, Ed Brayton, to an email about the network’s oversight mechanisms. You are correct that […]
Richard Carrier has just published some of the most vacuous and insulting of the recent smears against Atheist Ireland, Hemant Mehta and me. And so I have to again reschedule other activities, including finishing my response to the more considered posts by Ashley Miller, MA Melby and Secular Woman, in order to ensure that Richard’s […]
MA Melby has published a post satirising Atheist Ireland’s dissociation from PZ Myers by inventing an Institute of her own and dissociating that from comments on my blog. The second half of MA’s post is quite reasonable, and I will address it as part of my response to Ashley Miller’s recent post, and to another […]
A Twitter user today accused Atheist Ireland of being neoconservative, which is entertaining because we have also been criticised for being reliably leftist. Actually, our policies are based on respecting and promoting human rights, then building an ethical secular society on that foundation. Here are the two Twitter conversations. The ‘reliably leftist’ argument was made […]
The Secular Policy Institute has responded to Atheist Ireland’s public dissociation from the harmful and hateful rhetoric of the atheist blogger PZ Myers. The Institute says that the secular movement should stop rewarding those who cause discord, and it asks why are “shock jock” bloggers invited to lecture at major secular conferences? It says that […]
Please sign this One Law For All petition, asking the Bangladeshi Government to prosecute the Islamists who killed Avijit Roy and to protect freethinkers. Like Mukto-muna, we are united in our grief and remain undefeated We are outraged by the senseless and brutal hacking to death of well known scientist, atheist and writer Avijit Roy […]
Today Sarah Jones of Patheos called me a “far right hack” on Facebook. I’ve asked her to clarify what she is basing that opinion on. [Update: Sarah has clarified that she meant that my stance on Muslims and Islam is identical to what she would get on Fox News in the US.] Yet on Saturday, […]
There has been some speculation that Craig Hicks’ atrocious murder of three neighbours in Chapel Hill was related to him being an atheist and his neighbours being Muslims. This speculation seems to be based largely on the content of his Facebook page. It is important that justice is brought about for the victims of these terrible […]