For since in nature the number of species is fixed and determined, since ‘God on the sixth day rested from all his labour’, that is,…
Published 19 Sep 2020
John Ray on species fixity and race
9 Comments
Category: Race and politics
Published 21 Sep 2019
Is racism Christian?
I was taught that racism developed out of Johannes Blumenbach’s Anthropological Treatises in the late eighteenth century, specifically his doctoral thesis On the Natural Variety…
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Published 6 Oct 2018
Good faith, bad faith and no faith in reasoning
We are hearing a lot of calls for there to be public debates with climate deniers, the alt-right (that is, modern fascists), creationists and antivaxxers, and this has led to people marking the so-called “paradox of tolerance” named by Karl Popper in his epochal 1945 Open Society and its Enemies:
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Published 18 Jan 2018
Religious exceptionalism is undemocratic
This is my submission to the government’s “review”. As usual, I get contrarian. Below the fold…
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Published 31 Aug 2017
Thoughts on racism
For many years, I have been very hesitant to speak about race. I’m white (a stupid social construction in itself), male and middle class. Every…
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Published 13 Jun 2017
Look over here – “terrorism”
The notion of terrorism is not well-defined.There are over 150 legal definitions in the US and more in international law. Here is the UN’s definition:…
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Published 9 Apr 2017
The Abstract and the Concrete, or, the Road to Fascism
I was thinking about the way in which the anti-abortionists justify their views. I have always said that “Pro-Life” is a misnomer. Instead of being…
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Published 19 Feb 2015
The place of religion in democratic secular countries
There is a religion which oppresses women, which is enthusiastically adopted by marginalised groups, which hates democracy and which has declared the modern world to…
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Published 16 Aug 2014
The Muslima problem in atheism
A while back, Richard Dawkins said some very silly things on PZ Myer’s blog Pharyngula [see this discussion at the time for details]. He wrote,…
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Published 3 Jun 2014
An unjust government
This one is about Australian politics. International readers may ignore it. There has been a lot of media and internet hype and fun had about…
