ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 19

Who’s the Most Full of Bull?

The COVID-19 pandemic shows some signs of receding (depending on where on Earth you live, of course), but the infodemic of lies, pseudoscience, and misinformation continues unabated. There is no single person to blame, nor can the crisis be traced to one particular lie, but there are a small number of individuals who have done …

Serious about Butts

How can we, a science-advocacy organization named for the world’s most famous and eloquent evolutionary biologist, fail to include in its newsletter an article that begins like this?  “To peer into the soul of a sea cucumber, don’t look to its face; it doesn’t have one. Gently turn that blobby body around, and gaze deep …

Two Systems of Justice

For the past few weeks, the secular community has been bracing itself for the Supreme Court’s upcoming decision in the case of Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, in which a Catholic foster agency that receives public funding seeks the right to discriminate against LGBTQ parents. In analysis of the stakes of the case, Nicholas Ripley at …

That’s Not a Good Sign

Survey after survey shows a marked decline in religious belief among younger Americans. According to a recent survey by Arizona Christian University, fully 43 percent of Millenials “don’t know, care, or believe that God exists,” compared to 31 percent of Gen Xers, and 28 percent of Baby Boomers. This is progress! But then things get, …

God monitors your moves, even in the bathroom

Born and raised in the most suppressed and religiously fanatic Pashtun society of Pakistan. I’ve always questioned my religious beliefs that I acquired from my parents and society; however, I have paid a heavy price for this socially unacceptable stance in the form of social isolation. As a doctoral student in the UK, I became …

Will Someone Think of the Children?

This week saw a new milestone in the long journey out of the COVID-19 pandemic, as the FDA approved Pfizer’s vaccine for kids between the ages of twelve and fifteen. But for these young people to be protected from the virus, their parents have to actually let them get vaccinated. The Center for Inquiry believes …

Anti-Vaxxers Seek Freedom from Responsibility

Opponents of vaccines, fueled by pseudoscience and misinformation, have some funny ideas about what they’re fighting for. They claim that vaccine requirements infringe on their freedoms, forgetting that vaccines are the key to freeing us from a highly-infectious, life-threatening virus. They claim that businesses requiring proof of vaccination from their employees or customers is a …

A Good Turn for the Great Agnostic

Robert Green Ingersoll, the nineteenth-century orator known as “The Great Agnostic,” was perhaps the most significant “founding father” of American secularism and freethought, and CFI’s Council for Secular Humanism preserves and celebrates Ingersoll’s legacy with the Robert Green Ingersoll Birthplace Museum in Dresden, New York. Though, sadly, most Americans have probably never heard of him, …

The Hands That Help

From the Richard Dawkins Foundation Newsletter. Subscribe here. If you ask twenty humanists to define humanism, you’ll probably get twenty different definitions. There is no humanist Bible, no humanist catechism, not even a humanist’s rules of order (if only). But I don’t think it’s too much of a leap to say that a humanist is someone who …

VIDEO: CFI Kenya’s Humanist Orphans Center

Incredibly, there remain parts of the world where superstitions about witches and sorcery remain deeply embedded in the culture. Tragically, it is children who are often the victims of these beliefs. (See also Leo Igwe’s report on attacks on accused witches in Nigeria in the September/October 2020 issue of Skeptical Inquirer.) Some dedicated freethinkers from our own …