Creationist Zoos and ‘Quality’ Badges

A brief story published in the Weston, Worle and Somerset Mercury seems to be provoking a fair degree of head-scratching on Twitter at the moment for what I hope should be fairly obvious reasons: Zoo’s education award NOAH’S Ark Zoo Farm has achieved recognition for the education programme […]

Jesus & Mo and Channel 4 News

So, without wishing to waste time recapping events that are probably already familiar to most of my regular readers, the ongoing shitstorm of the wonderful Jesus and Mo cartoon strip started with this tweet by Maajid Nawaz: To me, it matters that you can see that for yourself. […]

And all I said to my wife was: “That piece of halibut was good enough for Jehovah”

By now I’m sure you’re aware of the fact that Maajid Nawaz, a Lib Dem PPC in Hampstead and Kilburn, stands accused of committing the thoroughly heinous crime of causing religiously aggravated butthurt in the first degree, the suggested punishment for which appears to be political career death […]

Dear Rationalist Association… fix your petition, please! UPDATED

Update #2 – 15:20pm, 8 June 2012 The Rationalist Association have now updated their petition to reflect the information in this post and the discussion we had this morning, so the comments below are now moot other than serving as a record of the RA’s willingness to respond […]

Skeptic faces threat of 3 year sentence for exposing weeping statue scam

India prides itself on being the world’s largest secular democracy but when you scratch the surface of that claim just a little that claim starts to look rather shaky as Indian skeptic and rationalist Sanal Edamarku recently discovered after he investigated a ‘weeping statue’ at the Catholic Basillica […]

ECHR, Same-sex Marriages and The Daily Telegraph

It’s been widely observed that, since it was taken over by Barclay Brothers, The Daily Telegraph has noticeably shifted downmarket and has come to resemble a broadsheet version of the Daily Mail. What perhaps a little less obvious is that The Telegraph’s religious outlook has shifted at the […]

Christina Odone’s Persecution Complex

What’s the difference between a blogger and newspaper columnist? The answer, more often than not, is that a blogger actually takes the time to investigate a story before committing their thoughts to teh Interwebs, unlike newspaper columnists, many of whom seem to think that the fact that they […]

Fail of the House of Lusher

Over at the Richard Dawkins Foundation, the great man himself has posted a fascinating and, to say the least, illuminating account of a telephone conversation with a reporter from the Telegraph which speaks volumes for the rather desperate state into which the newspaper has fallen in recent times. […]

Two Peas in a Totalitarian Pod

I must admit that I’m somewhat surprised to see some people making a meal the sight of Sayeeda Warsi cosying up to the Pope and buying wholesale into the Catholic Church’s absurd rhetorical attacks on so-called ‘militant secularism’. Warsi is, of course a Muslim, and its this – […]

O.Q. – Original Quacksters*

I think its time for Andrew Brown to move on from The Guardian to a publisher like Elsevier where his regular opinion column can be given a more appropriate title. Something along the lines of ‘The Journal of Not Even Wrong’ would do very nicely, if only because […]