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Joss Whedon (the guy behind Dr Horrible and Firefly, and recently Dollhouse) on Humanists as “True Believers”: This clip is relevant to the recent discussion as he talks about “faith” and points out that it isn’t the enemy. In fact, “faith” is important, faith is something we have to embrace he says in a wonderful [...]

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I wrote about Dan Dennet’s TED talk on memes before. Right now, I want to talk about a 25 second section out of it, between 5:00 and 5:25: I myself am a philosopher, and one of our occupational hazards is that people ask us what the meaning of life is. You have to have a [...]

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While taking a look at pages on quote mining, I came across a rather silly example of how the Bible could be quote mined. In Psalm 14 (NIV) the Bible says, “There is no God”. It does, really! Yea, quote mining can be absolutely ridiculous, not so? Refrain from quote mining. Quote mining is dishonest, [...]

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Much of the high rate of posts on this blog come from a place of wondering what direction to take. I probably contradicted myself often. This weekend, as I was doing a couple of thesis corrections before final publication (highly depressing to make minor corrections to something that seems majorly weak), and as I was [...]

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Here is another wonderful definition of what a “humanist” is. This definition is what Dale McGowan (Parenting Beyond Belief, The Meming of Life) told his six year old daughter, when she asked. It comes from a post on labels: “A humanist is somebody who thinks that people should all take care of each other, and [...]

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A Freethinking Maties General Assembly took place last night. There were nine new faces (more than half of those attending), and the direction the discussion took pleased me tremendously. Below I share some thoughts about the society, and mention some other groups, including Stellenbosch Humanists.

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After a nearly six hour session of listening and talking to creationists, I don’t know what to say. I have had ample warning about what it would be like, but did I really believe it? Yes, it was everything they said it would be. All the standard logical fallacies, all the standard tactics, reverse psychology, [...]

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I do hate labels, but they are necessary. Labels serve to classify things, and convey a lot of information in a word or two. As misleading as labels can be, they are necessary for good communication in a limited amount of time and space (for example, a tagline for a blog). Other than announcing I [...]

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