The Irish Times today published some short opinions by non-Catholics about Pope Francis. There are views from Church of Ireland, Presbyterian, Methodist, Jewish, Muslim and atheist backgrounds, as well as the former chief executive of the National Board for Safeguarding Children in the Catholic Church. This is my contribution, slightly edited in the published version. […]
In recent weeks, since I defended Richard Dawkins and the atheist movement from misrepresentations and smears in mainstream media articles, I have become the target of similar smears on various blogs. You can read details here. Now PZ Myers has crossed a new line by publicly alleging that I am defending rapists (that’s rapists, plural) […]
With the Irish Government finally announcing its intention to hold a referendum to remove the prohibition of blasphemy from the Irish Constitution, after five years of campaigning by Atheist Ireland, I debated the issue today on 4FM with host Niall Boylan, Christian callers and Imam Ibrahim Noonan. Part 1 – my debate with Christian callers […]
After five years of campaigning led by Atheist Ireland, the Irish Government has finally announced its intention to hold a referendum to remove the prohibition of blasphemy from the Irish Constitution. We don’t yet know if they will propose to simply delete it, or to replace it with a regressive clause about prohibition of religious […]
I will be taking part in two debates this week, one organised by the Literary and Debating Society at the National University of Ireland, Galway, and the other hosted by the Philosophical Society in University College Dublin. The Galway debate is ‘Is Islam a religion of Peace?’ and it starts at 7pm on Thursday 9 […]
This is video and text of my contributions to the annual OSCE human rights meeting in Warsaw, Poland, earlier this week. Contribution to Session on Discrimination The OSCE Guidelines for reviewing laws about freedom of religion or belief, stress the ‘or belief’ part of that phrase. That’s the part that protects us as atheists. In […]
Having recently defended Richard Dawkins and the atheist movement against misrepresentations and smears, I now find myself the target of similar misrepresentations and smears. Having seen at first hand how outrageously inaccurate their smears about me are, I now retrospectively doubt many things that certain people have said to me, or written about, in recent […]
Kevin Sheehan and I are on our way back from Warsaw, where we were representing Atheist Ireland at the annual OSCE human rights dimension meeting. It was a very productive three days. We formally highlighted Ireland’s breaches of human rights of atheists and minority faiths in education, politics, law and healthcare, including schools admission, discrimination […]
We’ve been working for most of this week on this submission to the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. It is part of a process by which civil society groups provide input to the Committee as it prepares to question Ireland next year on its obligations with regard to these rights. It’s […]
This is my second response to Ophelia Benson’s list of concerns about my original post about recent media misrepresentations of the atheist movement. I had written about PZ that: “In the last year or so, he has publicly accused Richard Dawkins of seeming to have developed a callous indifference to the sexual abuse of children…” […]