by Heather Hastie | Apr 23, 2017 | Atheism, Middle East, USA
This video is from a debate on Egyptian TV on 27 January between an Egyptian Islamist imam Muhammad Hamouda and an Egyptian intellectual, Sharif Farouk. The TV host, whose name I cannot ascertain, is clearly on the side of the imam. Part of the debate is about atheism...
by Heather Hastie | May 14, 2015 | Atheism, Democracy, Freedom of Speech, Human Rights, Religion
On 21 April, Bangladesh’s The Daily Star published an opinion article entitled The extent of freedom of expression. It was written by senior law lecturer Mirza Farzana Iqbal Chowdhury of Daffodil International University, a private university in the Bangladeshi...
by Heather Hastie | Apr 29, 2015 | Atheism, Religion, USA
I see reports like this frequently in the US media, and they annoy me intensely. The latest is called Pro-Atheism Group Harasses University Over Bible Verse etched on it’s ‘Heavener Hall’. It’s in a publication called College Fix, which...
by Heather Hastie | Mar 31, 2015 | Atheism, Freedom of Speech, Religion
This morning I woke to the news via the Canadian Atheist website that only a month after the murder of Avijit Roy, yet another atheist blogger has been hacked to death in the streets of Bangladesh by Islamists. Washiqur Rahman (27), who was working as a trainee at Far...
by Heather Hastie | Mar 27, 2015 | Atheism, Freedom of Speech, Religion, Science & Nature
Yesterday (26 March) was Richard Dawkins’s 74th birthday. I’m a big fan of Dawkins – it was while watching one of his documentaries a few years ago that I realized that I was an atheist, and had been at least agnostic since I was a child. The God...