Thursday, 23rd February (today!) – Murdoch University students – sign up with the Murdoch Atheist and Agnostics Student Society. Head down around 9.30am and be a part of Market Day!
In addition – tickets are limited for the 2012 Student Leadership Conference - which is on Friday, April 13, 2012, held before the Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne, Victoria. If you’re a student and planning to go, you must add this to your do-not-miss-event weekend.
In Australia, it’s the start of the University year. But is it simple to find or start a club for your atheist / secularist / skeptical / freethinking undergraduate self ? I’ve taken the challenge to find out what happens if you are a student who says “Perhaps there is no God…” Features interviews with Rhys Morgan and Lyz Liddell of the Secular Student Alliance.
This year, inspired by the lovely 40 Days of Treats, we have decided to use the annual protest to celebrate the right to safe, legal abortion and run our very own 40 day choice-a-thon. Every day we’ll be posting small, positive steps that we can all take to increase awareness of abortion rights and advocate for better access to reproductive health services.”
I am in such a snit at the moment. I could almost start devoting days at a time to action role-playing computer games as a result. Because (oh be still, my bruised ego!) – it appears I have been left out of the cabal of hipsterness, the club of coolness, the…
Actually, no. But I am counting my (non-Christian) blessings that I don’t have one more thing to delete from the in-box:
In case that isn’t too clear a picture – it’s Stella Young, who is a presenter at the Global Atheist Convention: a comedian, disability advocate and Editor of ABC’s Ramp Up, the online space for news, discussion and opinion about disability in Australia. She’s most puzzled about some unwanted correspondence.
Then, there’s a response by the equally awesome Shelley Segal, who has everyone raving about her music, particularly her newly-released “An Atheist Album”. She’s also been sent daft messages about her appearance at the convention.
[Oh, in passing - if you're thinking of attending the Dinner, you probably have only a few hours left to nab a ticket, so do so!]
What the? Well, they’ve both been bothered by some group calling themselves The Regal Standard.
Here’s one of (several out there) responses to it, primarily because it hit Reddit, Time Magazine, AdWeek and other media outlets. The Young Turks University in the USA say that ”They’re a lot more open-minded than America is… Yeah well, it’s a different culture.”
I’ve been enjoying an “Uncorrected Advance Reading Copy” of the upcoming U.S. edition of Mike McRae’s Tribal Science from Prometheus Books, which has once again put me in mind of something I think about often: the considerable bogusness of the conceit of “skeptics” versus “believers.” There is a social subculture that can be called “skepticism” and there is a niche of scholarly activity by the same name, but it’s a mistake to suppose that skeptics and believers are very different sorts of people.
The true landscape of skepticism and belief is so complex that I can’t resist summing it up with this wonderful T-shirt slogan from Ben Goldacre: “I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that.” Bulldozing the complexity of human striving for understanding into tribal “skeptic” and “believer ” piles distorts reality, and makes it harder to do the already difficult work of solving mysteries and promoting science literacy.
I remember the first time I learned about Type I and Type II errors, from another Michael – Michael Shermer. I hope that Americans will consider reading Tribal Science (available via Prometheus Books) with the same interest and enthusiasm I had when I first picked up a copy of Why We Believe Weird Things.
In 2010, Rhys Morgan made headlines across the UK for discovering a disturbing and hazardous “cure all” called Miracle Medical Solution, lent his name to a libel reform claim and investigated the claims of the Burzynski clinic. On Rhys’ blog, he wrote: “If you’re involved in the skeptical and/or atheist community, it’ll have been pretty hard to miss the University College London Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society storm in which they were asked by their union to remove this image from a promotional Facebook page for their weekly pub meet because someone had found it offensive and complained.” Since that time, Rhys has also become an advocate for speaking out about supporting student groups.
This presentation was given by Dr. Peter Boghossian of Portland State University on January 27, 2012. In this talk, sponsored by The Freethinkers of Portland State University and published by philosophynews.com, Dr. Boghossian argues that faith-based processes are unreliable and unlikely to lead one to the truth. Since our goal as knowers is to have more true beliefs than false ones, faith, as a process for getting to the truth, should be abandoned in favor of other, more reliable processes. The talk was followed by a question and answer session from the audience.
“OfFred was a normal everyday woman with a career, a name, a life like all women have come to expect and take for granted in this age. When the Religious Right came into power, they began to put into practice their insane beliefs which strip women of their identity, their rights, their body, their very name. Women are to be called Of (whatever asshat they belong to), instead of, say Beatrix. Reproduction is an issue because all the toxins in the environment have rendered many women infertile. But if you are fertile, woe to you, you get to be a baby factory against your will, get promised to some jerk you don’t love or even like because someone deemed him important enough to breed. Oh, come on!
While the genre of the book is open to debate (Valerie Martin in the introduction of the 2006 Everyman’s Library edition, suggests political satire, allegory, and even “reconstructed post-print novel”), I would argue that The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood can be seen to firmly fit within the genre of science fiction, often called “speculative fiction”. This is an attempt by writers using their imagination to project themselves into a possible future.
Corporations and zygotes are not conceptually related, but, nonetheless, the extension of personhood rights to corporations may pave the way for the extension of personhood rights to zygotes. The latter action would, of course, limit the autonomy and reproductive rights of real persons, namely women. - Protect Zygotes and Corporations; Piss on Women, CFI, by Ronald A. Lindsay.
Within science fiction, you can see different kinds of novels: technology based, space, novels that explore society on earth as it might be in the future, and so on. Some of the more famous examples of speculative fiction include Huxley’s Brave New World, or Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Sociologically speculative stories usually propose an argument about what are contemporary (not fictional) issues. The Handmaid’s Tale is one of these kinds of stories; it’s the author’s creation of an imagined society which grows out of our own, and represents potential events in the world as we know it.
Appearing of MSNBC with Andrea Mitchell today, Foster Friess, the main donor to the Super PAC backing Rick Santorum’s presidential bid, dismissed the controversy surrounding President Obama’s new birth control rule by suggesting that women should just keep their legs shut. - Santorum Sugar Daddy Foster Friess Gives ‘Gals’ Contraception Advice: Put An Aspirin Between Your Knees, Alex Seitz-Wald, Think Progress.org, Feb 16, 2012.
Her fault, her fault, her fault, we chant in unison. Who led them on? Aunt Helena beams, pleased with us.
She did. She did. She did. Why did God allow such a terrible thing to happen? Teach her a lesson. Teach her a lesson. Teach her a lesson.
- The Handmaid’s Tale, p. 82.
Geoffrey Robertson Q.C. is head of Doughty Street Chambers, the UK’s largest human rights practice, a Master of the Middle Temple, and serves as a ‘distinguished jurist member’ of the UN’s Justice Council. He was the first President of the the UN War Crimes Court in Sierra Leone, and has delivered ground-breaking judgements on the illegality of recruiting child soldiers and the invalidity of amnesties for crimes against humanity.
He has argued many landmark civil liberties cases and has acted against General Pinochet and Hastings Banda and for Salman Rushdie, Mike Tyson and Julian Assange. His recent book “The Case of The Pope” has been translated into many languages. He is author of “The Justice Game” (a memoir), The Tyrannicide Brief and “Crimes Against Humanity”. In 2011 he received The New York Bar Award Award for Distinction in International Law and Affairs.
Geoffrey Robertson Q.C will be giving the inaugural Christopher Hitchens Memorial Lecture at the 2012 Global Atheist Convention.
I now need to breathe into a paper bag to contain my excitement about seeing him present.
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February 23, 2012 at 2:07 am 
Kylie Sturgess 
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