This is all we’ve got.

Really, that’s it for Christmas here. We didn’t put up a tree, we didn’t decorate, we didn’t get presents, and no way in hell are we going to church. We’ve got a few trees in the yard with snow on them.

It’s the one featuring Starfish Hitler.

All the echinoderms I’ve ever known have been quite pleasant and non-threatening, so that is going against type. Maybe it was written by a piece of kelp?

I aspire to be a good vegetarian — we simply don’t eat any meat at home, although we do consume some stuff like Impossible Burgers now and then, a plant-based meat alternative. I can believe that plant-based foodstuff have significantly lower environmental impact, but then I read this claim by the Good Food Institute, and my skeptical ganglion started sending alarms.

Plant-based meat has, on average, 89 percent less environmental impact than traditional meat across all impact categories. Furthermore, plant-based meat’s environmental impact is 91 percent lower than beef, 88 percent lower than pork, and 71 percent lower than chicken.

Overall, plant-based meat uses 79 percent less land, 95 percent less water, and produces 93 percent water pollution [I assume that’s an error…93% less maybe?]. Efficient, low-impact meat alternatives also produce 89 percent fewer greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and 89 percent less air pollution.

That’s lovely. Amazing. Let’s quit killing cows, pigs, and chickens and start murdering soybeans. I can believe it’s better for the environment…but that much better? I tried tracking down how they calculated those numbers, and couldn’t find a detailed methodology, or even a peer-reviewed paper — it’s mostly corporate in-house stuff.

Unfortunately, I also found this on Wikipedia.

In 2018, GFI participated in the startup accelerator Y Combinator, receiving funding and strategic support. Y Combinator lists “cellular agriculture and clean meat” as one of its funding priorities, stating that “the world will massively benefit from a more sustainable, cheaper and more healthy production of meat”.

GFI has ties with the effective altruism movement, having received endorsements and financial support from several effective altruism-affiliated organizations. For instance, Open Philanthropy awarded GFI with several major grants in support of its general operations and international expansion, totalling $6.5 million as of August 2021.

Sam Harris’ Waking Up Foundation recommends GFI as one of its top charities.

Yikes. Suddenly, they have even less credibility.

I’m still going to consume plant-based meat, but now I have no idea how beneficial the stuff is, and I don’t trust the techbros touting it.

I do have one nagging question, though: if it uses so few resources, relatively speaking, how come processed soy protein and GMO yeast are so much more expensive than slaughtered cow? So it’s a new technology and is still working up economies of scale, but does silicon valley love it so much because somebody is profiting heavily from it?

The Gaetz report is trickling out.

From the report: “The Committee determined there is substantial evidence that Representative Gaetz violated House Rules and other standards of conduct prohibiting prostitution, statutory rape, illicit drug use, impermissible gifts, special favors or privileges, and obstruction of Congress.”

More: “The record overwhelmingly suggests that Representative Gaetz had sex with multiple women at a 2017 Florida party, including the then-17-year-old, for which they were paid… Victim A recalled receiving $400 in cash from Representative Gaetz that evening, which she understood to be payment for sex. At the time, she had just completed her junior year of high school. Victim A said that she did not inform Representative Gaetz that she was under 18 at the time, nor did he ask her age.”

I can’t compete. I could talk about my experiments in spider sex, but all that’s happened is that the males have been attentive but cautious with the females, and all the black widow couples have settled down into a quiet domesticated co-existence. It’s not exciting at all! None of them are even taking drugs.

At least I can say that black widow spiders have a more conventional sense of morality than Matt Gaetz. Unless this portrait of Gaetz is accurate.

We all knew, way back in 2020, that the paper that launched the myth of hydroxychloroquine was total crap. In 2020!

The report was not a randomized clinical trial—one in which many people are followed to see how their health fares, not simply whether a virus is detectable. And Oz’s “100 percent” interpretation involves conspicuous omissions. According to the study itself, three other patients who received hydroxychloroquine were too sick to be tested for the virus by day six (they were intubated in the ICU). Another had a bad reaction to the drug and stopped taking it. Another was not tested because, by day six, he had died.

It was all about selective deletion of negative data to get a positive effect. Now, here in 2024, people are still saying exactly the same thing…well, not exactly, because they’ve also uncovered further problems in the study. Science says what everyone said all along!

The paper in the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents (IJAA), led by Philippe Gautret of the Hospital Institute of Marseille Mediterranean Infection (IHU), claimed that treatment with hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial drug, reduced virus levels in samples from COVID-19 patients, and that the drug was even more effective if used alongside the antibiotic azithromycin. Then–IHU Director Didier Raoult, the paper’s senior author, enthused about the promise of the drug on social media and TV, leading to a wave of hype, including from then–U.S. President Donald Trump.

But scientists immediately raised concerns about the paper, noting the sample size of only 36 patients and the unusually short peer-review time: The paper was submitted on 16 March 2020 and published 4 days later. On 24 March, scientific integrity consultant Elisabeth Bik noted on her blog that six patients who were treated with hydroxychloroquine had been dropped from the study—one of whom had died, and three of whom had transferred to intensive care—which potentially skewed the results in the drug’s favor. Larger, more rigorous trials carried out later in 2020 showed hydroxychloroquine did not benefit COVID-19 patients.

Critics of Raoult’s paper have pointed out more damning problems since. In an August 2023 letter published in Therapies, Bik and colleagues noted the cutoff for classifying a polymerase chain reaction test as positive was different in the treatment and control groups. The letter also raised questions about whether the study had received proper ethical approval, and noted an editorial conflict of interest: IJAA’s editor-in-chief at the time, Jean-Marc Rolain, was also one of the authors. (A statement saying he had not been involved in peer review was later added to the paper.) The letter called for the paper to be retracted.

A bad study with weak statistics and manipulated data that led to millions of people doping themselves with a medication that was worse than useless against COVID — and people are still taking it — but it was the simplistic, magic pill that they wanted. The doctors might have rejected it, but Joe Rogan and Dr Oz endorsed it.

There is good news. The paper has finally been retracted, well after it has already done harm.

The corresponding author, Didier Raoult, dissents. He disagrees with all the scientists all around the world who looked at his sloppy work four years ago and said that this should have been rejected from the get-go. This is not surprising: he looks like a terrible hack.

According to the notice, the three authors who raised concerns about the paper “no longer wish to see their names associated with the article.” Gautret and several other authors told the investigators they disagreed with the retraction, and the investigators did not receive a response from Raoult, the corresponding author. To date, 32 papers published by IHU authors have been retracted, 28 of them co-authored by Raoult, and 243 have expressions of concern.

28 garbage papers? I don’t know how many papers this guy has published, the only notable metric is his significant contributions to bad science.

The Edinburgh Magic Festival takes place soon, and I am staging a few events, including a talk on the magical history of Edinburgh, a magic workshop (joint with slight of hand expert Will Houstoun), and my ‘Invention of Magic’ show. For details, please click here. 

As part of the event, I have teamed up with Festival co-founder Svetlana McMahon and the amazing Young Carers charity to produce a fun optical illusion exhibition. Together, we created some mind-bending illusions, and then photographed the carers staging the images around the city. Each photograph features young carers doing what they do every day – making the seemingly impossible possible. 

If you are in Edinburgh, please pop into the Storytelling Center on the High Street, enjoy the free exhibition and watch our behind-the-scenes video. Here are a few of my favourite images….

 

Tomiwa Owolade is a Nigerian-born British journalist and critic. He is author of “This Is Not America” (Atlantic Books).

In the last Academic Freedom Index report, the UK came second-lowest compared with EU states. What is happening to free speech on campuses?

Many people have a great misunderstanding of what free speech actually looks like. They often are well meaning and imagine free speech to be a way of addressing inequality or of empowering certain marginalised communities.

One of the problems with universities and the way that the bureaucracy operates is that they often acquiesce to that sense of fear about offending marginalised communities. Protecting them is often used as a justification for endorsing certain types of censorship.

My problem with that is I think it could lead to a kind of blasphemy law, because what is considered hateful, bigoted or harmful to marginalised communities is not set in stone. It’s something that needs to be debated and contested, and the only way that we can debate these contentious issues is through an expansion of free speech rather than a diminution of it.

New legislation could see universities fined for failing to protect free speech. But the Labour government has delayed the legislation, and may repeal it. Should they?

It’s a very tricky issue because there is an irony there. If you try to make free speech mandatory you might also undermine academic freedom. I think there should be a greater degree of discretion among particular academic institutions in the way that they address these complicated issues. I do think in certain circumstances, if a person faces censorship, they should be able to appeal to an authority. But the most important thing is to advance the case for free speech at a more granular level, at a level of society itself.

Education is an important avenue here. We need to educate our young people that everyone should be entitled to freedom of expression, that it is one of the foundational freedoms in our society, that without it we will be unable to contest orthodoxies or discover new things. We would be unable to discover ourselves and the values that matter to us.

We need more institutions outside education that can spread those social norms as well – societies where people can come together from different walks of life, from different ideological or religious points of view, and listen to each other and be able to argue with each other.

In September, Marieha Hussain was found not guilty of a racially aggravated public disorder offence. She went to a Gaza demonstration holding a placard showing Suella Braverman and Rishi Sunak as “coconuts”. Do you agree with the verdict?

Yes. Even though I consider the statement she made to be a racist one (and many people have called me a “coconut”), I think criminalising that kind of expression is more disgraceful than the expression itself.

Why was the statement racist?

A term like “coconut” is a racial slur because it implies that the only motivation for a black person thinking or behaving in a certain way is that they are actually white and that they have betrayed their race. That concept relies on an essentialist understanding of what race is. We shouldn’t simply see somebody through their racial identity. As I argue in my recent book This is Not America, all too often conversations around race rely upon simplistic generalisations, without regard to any sense of nuance or context or specificity. If we want to genuinely address many of the inequalities in our society, we need to discard these simplifications and affirm our common humanity.

That book argues that Britain is importing racial discourse from the US. Could you give an example?

What really led me on the journey to the book was when I encountered many young British people, and some older ones as well, using the term “BIPOC” to describe ethnic minority people in the UK. It stands for black, indigenous and people of colour [and is commonly used to refer to ethnic minorities in the US]. In America, the acronym makes sense, because America hasn’t only discriminated against its black, Asian and Latino populations, but also its Native American population. But what is the word “indigenous” doing in a British context? It makes you sound more like a far-right agitator than a progressive activist. So I think that was the starkest illustration to me of the way a misguided approach of looking at race in the UK can come about by internalising the American way of thinking.

When we talk about diversity, we don’t talk about it with enough diversity. We’re not specific enough in what we mean by “ethnic minority people” in a particular country. To give you an example, black Caribbean pupils in British schools are three times more likely to be excluded than black African pupils. The groups that do worst are black Caribbean boys, Roma, traveller and gypsy communities, and white working class boys.

It’s a problem when we discard context in terms of class, geography, nationality, religion, and the ways that these contexts might shape inequality specifically in the UK. In particular, there’s an absence of any kind of concrete class analysis.

When it comes to activism, isn’t some generalisation unavoidable?

One criticism of my argument is that it’s all well and good to talk about the differences between black people in one country versus another, but both groups are still black, and shouldn’t there be scope for racial solidarity? To which my argument would be that the most effective form of solidarity is not based on race or any other aspect of identity, but on shared moral values and a shared way of analysing and trying to address inequality. That’s a more valuable form of anti-racism.

What do you make of Trump’s bizarre accusation that Kamala Harris isn’t “black”?

It was absurd because Kamala’s father is a black man from Jamaica. One interesting aspect is that had Kamala been elected president, she would have been the second black American whose ancestors were not enslaved [in the US] to do so, because Barack Obama’s father was an immigrant from Africa. The majority of black Americans are the descendants of enslaved Africans [in the US]. Any conversation around inequality within the black American community needs to acknowledge those differences too.

You call yourself a moral universalist. What do you make of the notion that the Enlightenment was a white European project?

I think moral values should be universally applied. My other intellectual influences include J. S. Mill, and I consider myself part of a tradition of humanist liberal thought.

A good example of the global impact of the Enlightenment is the Trinidadian Marxist writer and scholar C. L. R. James, who often emphasised the fact that he was greatly indebted to the Enlightenment, even though he grew up in the Caribbean. So I do think it’s a great mistake to argue that the Enlightenment is simply an extension of white supremacy, that it’s simply a kind of Eurocentrism. It’s a universal body of thought and has applications outside Europe.

As an anti-racist, you say you’re an optimist. Why?

One of the great misconceptions is that optimism is a kind of naivety. I don’t think so. I think pessimism is a powerfully paralytic force. It’s the easy option.

Optimism is the opposite of that. It says: These problems exist, let’s try and fix them.

This article is from New Humanist's winter 2024 issue. Subscribe now.

From the Richard Dawkins Foundation Newsletter. Subscribe here. Hello! 2024 has been an eventful and uneven year, one marked by important steps forward and more than a few difficult setbacks. Progress, much like history, does not move in a straight line. No matter what the path, however, the intended destination remains (as Richard Dawkins himself says …

"Don’t punch down, we always say.” Ian Quaife leans in towards the camera, black and gold sunglasses on top of his shaven head. We’re chatting about the millennial-boomer
culture war, where the younger generation is pitted against “well-off” retirees. But 66-year-old Quaife, still working beyond state pension age, sees past this artificial divide. He lists the problems that affect both generations, such as the cost of living and sky-high rents. “Look at the common ground between older and younger people,” he says.

Quaife manages Bristol Older People’s Forum, a charity that challenges the “ageist narrative” by running workshops for other voluntary sector organisations. They also run a record club where older people share their favourite music – everything from 60s pop band Manfred Mann to electro-punks Sleaford Mods. One of the stereotypes they are trying to shift is the “grumpy-or-wise” dichotomy, where older people have to be one or the other. “Fit-or-failing” is another example. “Older people are [either] super-human, running marathons at 95,” Ian says, “or they’re stuck in a care home. There’s nothing in between.”

I ask him how we should treat older people, a cohort that can range from 55 to 100 years of age or more. “It’s about making sure they aren’t invisible,” he tells me. If you’re a graphic designer, make sure you’re representing older people, “but not wandering about hunched over walking sticks or looking forlornly out of windows.”

Beating age bias

“Ageism” – coined by gerontologist Robert N. Butler in 1969 to explain the discrimination suffered by older people – grows from a host of internalised stereotypes and biases. These came to the fore with renewed power during the Covid-19 pandemic, when the needs of young and healthy people were set against those of the old. A 2021 study, published in The Journal of Gerontology, compared media reports during the pandemic in the UK, US and Australia, and found that public ageism took similar forms, from name-calling (“coffin dodgers” or “grey shufflers”) to a “so-be-it” attitude that abandoned old people to the disease.

But ageism can take subtler forms. It can also spring from good intentions. We compliment those who look young for their age, as if this is always a good thing. Doors are held open. Shopping bags carried. Email accounts are set up for relatives, even if they never asked. “Just imagine it’s you in 30 years. People want a say in everything you do. In your money. In what you eat. In how you go from one place to another,” journalist Ann Peuteman tells me. She’s written three books in Dutch about old people, Grijsgedraaid (“worn out”), Verplant (“transplanted”, alluding to care homes) and her latest, Rebels: The Resistance of the Over-75s, published in 2022.

Rebels follows a group of people who resist the spirit-shrinking stereotypes placed on them by their families, the institutions they inhabit, and society. Like dapper 86-year-old artist Leo De Beul. He once commissioned the photos in the View-Master discs – those 3D photo viewers popular in the 70s and 80s – and now spends his time painting and organising exhibitions. “Creativity is the best – and perhaps only – buffer against growing old,” he says. Or 80-year-old Greta Vandeborne. After her beloved husband Romain died from motor neurone disease, Greta published Nine Years with ALS, helping her to “find a new path” and giving hope to others battling the same condition. Then there’s Guy Bottu, 85, who enjoys a regular glass of champagne and ignores all the well-meaning advice to take it easy. “That is life-threatening,” he says. “If you rest too much, you will eventually find yourself unable to get out of your armchair.”

Now a film version of Rebels, made with director Brecht Vanhoenacker, will be shown with English subtitles for the first time at the online Legacy Film Festival on Aging, which will take place in January 2025. The festival’s mission is to “inspire, educate, and entertain intergenerational audiences on issues of ageing”.

Caring and listening

Does Peuteman think our ageing society is becoming more aware of discrimination? “Things are changing,” she tells me, but she fears that change will be top-down rather than from the grassroots. In Belgium, for instance, she’s encountered many projects devoted to elderly care and age-friendly cities, but she’s never seen anyone over 70 on their boards. “We should really start asking older people, what do you want to get out of life?”

As the effervescent Maude Chardin said in Hal Ashby’s 1971 Harold and Maude (a film exploring the romance between the 79-year-old and a young man) “Oh my, how the world still dearly loves a cage.” When we combine a narrow outlook with what scholar Margaret Morganroth Gullette calls “decline ideology” – the widespread belief that will automatically deteriorate with age – we arrive at two questions. How can we escape ageist stereotypes? And what is the secret sauce the age rebels possess that might help us transform our own lives today?

Debates about ageing are, at root, debates about how best to live out our lives. We might see our life as a performance: a dance or drama that we play out over time. On the other hand, we might adopt an approach that philosopher Margaret Urban Walker calls “life as a career”: a self-directed journey towards success. Yet behind both these attitudes lies the presumption that life is lived by a lone individual. They ignore the years of nurturing by caregivers (primarily women), family, friends and significant others. When we bring care into our thinking, we move away from heroic autonomy towards ideas of mutuality and interdependence, with “care as the key to the comprehensive changes we need for any sustainable future”, as feminist Lynne Segal writes in Lean on Me: A Politics of Radical Care.

Older people are often being cared for, and they are often carers of each other and the younger generation. But good caring also requires the ability to listen, as Peuteman reminds us. “You get this idyllic image of the woman in a wheelchair, sitting in the sun with a dog by her legs. Then the expert comes and starts explaining what the lady in the wheelchair feels and wants,” she says. “But nine out of 10 times, the lady in the wheelchair is perfectly capable of explaining her problems herself.”

The recipe for the "secret sauce"

This is why, when it comes to ageing, an ethics of rebellion can be useful. Too much mildness and cooperation risks obscuring what is most unique and vital about us. In her book The Call of Character: Living a Life Worth Living, philosopher Mari Ruti writes, “it is quite possible that the more we pursue ‘balance,’ the more socially disengaged, the more bland and boring we become.” Moreover, what Ruti calls the “upside” of anxiety is precisely the awkward energy that pushes us towards more fulfilling projects.

That’s what I see in the age rebels. Not a renunciation of the anxiety and even despondency of old age, but a full embrace of ageing’s joys and sorrows in order to make new plans and connections – whether that’s organising art exhibitions, advocating for care home residents or continuing to work, and enjoy work, past retirement.

To embrace our own ageing, then, we first need to re-imagine it. So here’s my advice. Instead of a performance or a career, consider your remaining days as a body of water: an unfathomable sea, or a fast-moving river. Just as that water finds bays and coves to flow into, consider the path your life might take and the people you’ll want with you. Heed the rebel voice there too; sometimes soft, sometimes loud, but always where you left it – there in the shallows, or down in the deep. Then float and see where it leads; not forgetting, at least once in a while, to kick firmly against the tide.

For more information on the Legacy Film Festival on Aging, visit https://legacyfilmfestivalonaging.org/.

This article is dedicated to the author’s late father Martin Walsh (1940-2024), an age rebel in his own way. It was published in New Humanist's winter 2024 issue. Subscribe now.

"If you knew the right people, you would know it’s very common,” wrote a man on Grindr, the LGBTQ dating app. He was one of many users of the app who claimed to have witnessed, or participated in, drug-fuelled parties within the Catholic Church. Not all felt able to meet in person, but digging further I found men willing to disclose their identities and share their stories in full.

What initially sparked my curiosity was the news of a priest testing positive for cocaine after crashing his car on the highway in central Italy in March 2024, while driving home from dinner. Police withdrew his driver’s licence, but did not press charges. It was not the first such case for the priest, nor for the Catholic Church. Cases involving Catholic priests using or dealing drugs have hit the headlines worldwide over time. In 2015, a priest was sentenced to five years for operating a meth-dealing ring in Connecticut. In 2016, in Northern Ireland, Friar Stephen Crossan was caught on camera snorting cocaine in a room filled with Nazi memorabilia. In February 2024, in Spain, a priest was arrested on suspicion of running a Viagra trafficking operation, and has been temporarily suspended by the Church.

But the biggest case in recent years took place in 2017, when the Vatican gendarmerie – in agreement with the Italian police – raided a drug-fuelled orgy involving high-level members of the clergy inside a Vatican palazzo. Luigi Capozzi, a priest and secretary to one of Pope Francis’s key advisers, was arrested and later suspended by the Vatican. Instead of being sent to jail, however, Capozzi was packed off to a Vatican-run “spiritual retreat”.

The Vatican, as a city state, has its own police and legislature. Italian law forms part of the Vatican legal system, but Italian police do not have jurisdiction on Vatican soil. The most important form of the law is the canon law of the Catholic Church, meaning the lines are blurred between acts considered a “crime” and those that are deemed a “sin” according to Catholic faith. There are only three jail cells in the Vatican. Misbehaving clergy are often sent to retreats, rather than into the Italian prison system. Meanwhile, these retreats, and the Vatican court system, are shrouded in mystery.

After the 2017 palazzo trial, the scandal was buried in silence. But such parties are rumoured to be commonplace in Rome and the newspapers carry a constant trickle of smaller stories involving drug-using clergy that rarely garner much attention. While Pope Francis has often repeated his opposition “to every type of drug use”, he has rarely publicly addressed the drug problem taking place within his own Church.

Some people are not troubled by this evidence of drug-taking. “Being clergy is a job, it’s not your private life,” said Leonardo (not his real name), who told me about attending drug-fuelled parties with clergy in Rome in the 1990s. “I believe that everybody has the freedom to do what he wants”.

But others point out that the Church has advocated for harsher laws on drug use in Italy, which is a problem if its own clergy are not always subject to these same penalties and sentences. Aside from the hypocrisy, it also points to the general lack of transparency around the criminal system in the Vatican.

Shaping and evading the law

Italian anti-drug legislation dates back to 1990, when a socialist government copied the US’s hardline approach. Three years later, the country decriminalised drug possession for personal use with a public referendum, but Catholic right-wing governments have found ways to harden penalties over the decades, often influenced by the Church. Possession of more than 1.6g of cocaine now counts as evidence of drug dealing. Prison sentences range from two to six years for soft drugs (like cannabis) and from eight to 20 years for hard drugs (like cocaine), alongside fines of thousands of euros. As a result, 34 per cent of inmates in Italy were serving time for drug dealing in 2023, compared to the European average of 18 per cent, according to the Ministry of Justice.

When two journalists, Emanuela Provera and Federico Tulli, tried to find out how many clergy were serving criminal sentences in Italy in 2018, they could find only six cases – and none involved drug offences. This is despite the number of stories hitting the headlines in recent years involving clergy in possession of drugs – cases that seem to have been dropped, or that have been dealt with within the walls of the Vatican, as Capozzi’s was. Meanwhile, the only Vatican trial for a drugs case dates back to 2007 and involved a lay employee found with 87g of cocaine. He received a €1000 fine and a four-month prison sentence, which was later suspended. Under Italian law, the man would have received harsher penalties.

Bishops often handle problematic priests informally and in secrecy to avoid scandals, sending them to Vatican-owned retreat houses. There, treatment for drug offences revolves around communal life, spiritual counselling and treatment by confessional psychologists (qualified professionals operating within the boundaries of the Catholic faith), without abiding by the official guidance of the Italian National Health Service.

Adele Orioli, responsible for legal battles at the UAAR, the Italian Union of Atheists and Rationalist Agnostics, believes this difference in treatment between lay people in Italy and clergy in the Vatican is unethical. “Why should wearing a cassock make someone more entitled to certain privileges, morally and juridically?” she asked.

Criminal activity can lead to clergy being expelled from the Church and tried in the Italian court system, but this typically only happens in the most severe cases. For example, in 2022, a prison chaplain in Sicily was arrested on suspicion of supplying drugs to an inmate. Rosario Buccheri was expelled from the Church and underwent a regular trial in Italy. In September, he was sentenced to five years and eight months of detention for drug dealing and illegal possession of firearms, though his lawyer said he will appeal.

But even when it comes to the Italian legal system, certain privileges apply to the clergy. According to the Concordat – the agreement between the Church and the Italian state – the police must notify a clergyman’s superior before initiating any criminal charges against him. On top of that, Church members are not obliged to report criminal offences to the police. Both of these special mechanisms help to enable the clergy to evade full justice under Italian law.

Palazzi parties and "priests in distress"

Many testimonies recount drug-fuelled parties in the beautiful palaces owned by the Church that are scattered around central Rome, outside the boundaries of the Vatican state. “The parties were held in houses [in Rome], often on Via della Conciliazione [which leads from St Peter’s Square out into the city of Rome],” Leonardo told me of his experiences in the 90s. “Nobody lived there. They were like prestigious palazzi, they had bedrooms but were almost empty. They had big parlours and frescos.” Leonardo, who was 19 at the time, said he was introduced to the circle by a friend who worked in the Vatican and attended three parties with priests and bishops. He stressed that he didn’t have sex and does not consider himself a victim of abuse. He smoked cannabis and believes others were using harder drugs, as well as engaging in sexual activities.

Orioli of the UAAR says the stories of drug use amid the clergy that reach the Italian press are probably just the tip of the iceberg. She says when newsrooms report on cases they are often contacted by lawyers demanding the stories be taken down under the “right to be forgotten”. (According to European data protection regulations, an individual can have personal data deleted if it is no longer relevant to the community.) The UAAR often republishes news stories and also receives these requests. Moreover, Orioli claims that Italian police frequently fail to proceed with criminal cases where they involve the clergy, leaving them to the Church, which does not provide any data on the issue. As a result, it is impossible to gauge the real scale of the problem.

Nevertheless, efforts have been made to understand how deep it goes. Though focused on child abuse, Provera and Tulli’s 2018 book Giustizia Divina (“divine justice”) offers valuable insight into how the Church escapes secular justice. During their research, they discovered 17 Vatican-owned houses for treating clergy, set up in secluded villas, religious facilities and former convents across Italy.

The retreat houses were mostly aimed at “treating” priests who had “problems” with paedophilia, or were struggling with addictions to alcohol, gambling and porn. But they also found that these places provided drug-addiction programmes. Homosexuality was also on the list of “illnesses” to “treat”, as the Church does not differentiate between what it considers to be a sin and a crime.

However, data on these retreat houses is still scarce. Quoting Vatican sources, the book reported that “priests in distress” – that is, priests the Church found guilty of some sin or crime – made up at least 8–10 per cent of all consecrated persons. This is hard to verify, as retreat houses periodically destroy their files to safeguard the privacy of their patients. But the authors conclude that “priests in distress” are “not a marginal phenomenon in the Church.”

Pushing for harsher legislation

The Vatican today no longer enjoys the direct influence on Italian politics that it did in the past. But it continues to shape attitudes and ultimately the tenor of the political debate around drugs. Politicians often make reference to Catholic doctrine and ideological battles.

That is the case with several senior members of the current government, led by Giorga Meloni and her far-right Brothers of Italy party. Alfredo Mantovano, Meloni’s secretary who presides over the drugs committee, is a member of Alleanza Cattolica, a fundamentalist Catholic group. At the 2023 session of the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs in Vienna, he equated the liberalisation of soft drugs to giving permission to freely “kill yourself”.

Mantovano’s public position mirrors that of Pope Francis and the Catechism of the Church. In 2014, to oppose the legalisation of cannabis, the Pope argued that “drug addiction is evil, and with evil there can be no compromise”, a position reiterated this year. However, as Marco Perduca, a former senator and president of the Italian cannabis legalisation campaign, pointed out, Vatican-owned hospitals are allowed to use cannabis as pain medication. When it comes to its own affairs, the Church seems to have “a more pragmatic attitude”, he says.

Perduca is afraid that the current government will further toughen sentences for drug use in Italy. In 2022, before Meloni took power, an attempt at liberalising the rules around cannabis through a referendum failed as a conservative constitutional court dismissed it as inadmissible. Recently, the government passed a ban on products made with CBD – a relaxing, non-psychoactive component of cannabis, forms of which are legal in many other European countries. Hardline Catholics welcomed the move, including the influential Pope John XXIII Community, a Christian association and charity. The ban has since been suspended; meanwhile, the European Commission is considering its legality. We are yet to see whether it will be lifted.

Perduca believes Italy is marred by a “parochial mentality”, going backwards while other European countries like Germany are embracing a more liberal approach to drug use. “The Church has sown so much that […] you still have the slow release of the Catholic culture of the 50s,” he said.

Drug addiction as a "sin"

There is another worrying dimension to this picture. The Vatican does not only run retreat centres for its own clergy suffering from addiction. It also plays a considerable role in supporting lay people struggling with drug abuse problems. The majority of addiction treatment facilities in Italy are part of confessional communities and Vatican-owned hospitals. State facilities are chronically underfunded, receiving only €5 million this year.

The bulk of the public funding goes instead directly to Catholic projects through a system called otto per mille (“eight per thousand”). This is a tax that Italians can choose to allocate to the Church or the state, but many choose the former – and if no choice is specified, the funds go automatically to the Church. This year it was more than 70 per cent. The UAAR told me that this system yet again benefits the Church, but not necessarily those Italians receiving “treatment”.

“You cannot cure drug addiction with prayers,” Orioli said, pointing out that the confessional psychologists operating in these centres often follow unscientific methods. “These programmes escape public scrutiny on the kind of therapies employed and how they use public money,” she added. In 2023, the Vatican earned €1 billion from otto per mille. And starting this year, a decree by the Meloni government will redirect even more of this money to anti-drugs projects run by the Church.

The Church in crisis?

With little transparency, it is hard to understand the reasons behind what appears to be relatively widespread drug-taking in the Vatican. Some people believe it is just one symptom of more profound existential problems faced by the broader Catholic Church in the western world. A decades-long vocational crisis, with empty churches and a falling number of students training to be priests, has made life lonelier for the clergy.

Claudio (not his real name) told me he met with several priests and trainees after matching with them on dating apps, where they passed as laymen, between 2005 and 2010 in different Italian cities: Bari, Brescia, Milan – and also Lugano in Switzerland. He claimed some used MDMA and cocaine during sexual intercourse. “They seemed to be quite expert users,” Claudio said. They told him it was “like drinking wine”, a way of escaping reality, and reassured him that it did not affect their work; on the contrary, it helped them get through it. Nevertheless, Claudio sensed darkness. “There was always something very aggressive in their behaviour, some sort of desperate excess […] a stupor, an awful distress,” he said.

Hypocrisy and impunity are byproducts of this system. The Vatican, which did not respond to New Humanist’s request for comment, seems unwilling to face the legal consequences of the hard line on drugs it has helped to keep in place. It shields clergy from the harshness of Italian law, while refusing new approaches that might offer better handling of drug addiction.

After years of investigations into the abuses of the Church, Emanuela Provera now also believes that priests can develop addiction as a result of extreme psychological distress. “Their theological structure justifies this suffering,” she said. She also questioned whether clergy, perhaps unable to help themselves, are suited to supporting other addicts. She told me she sympathises with their pain, but now finds it too difficult to set foot in a church. “I would feel like an accomplice of an abusive system,” she said.

This article is from New Humanist's winter 2024 issue. Subscribe now.

It's been a big year, with transformative elections – for better or worse – in the US, UK and across Europe, not to mention the other events reshaping our society, from ongoing conflicts to scientific advances.

As ever, we've been working with some of the best journalists and experts from around the world to help unpick the forces at play, identify emerging trends and anticipate what comes next.

As we all reflect on the year that's been, here are the stories from 2024 you shouldn't miss:

1. Catholics for Trump by Mary Jo McConahay

In the run-up to Trump's re-election, we exposed how US Catholic bishops were working with evangelicals to re-install their candidate in the White House – and usher in a new era of Christian nationalism

2. Maybe Gen X are the heroes after all? by Shaparak Khorsandi

It's hard to pick, but this was one of our favourite "Shapchat" columns from a brilliant thinker and comedian, in passionate defence of the middle-aged

3. The new age of the cyborg? by Moheb Costandi

The neuroscientist Moheb Costandi cuts through the noise on brain-computer interfaces. They are already changing lives, but now we need to think hard about the ethics

4. Richard Dawkins on our immortal genes

We talk to the renowned evolutionary biologist about how we can read the history of life on Earth through modern genes

5. The Indians fighting back against religious hate by Kunal Purohit

The Indian election delivered a blow to Narendra Modi's Hindu nationalists – but will it stem the tide of religious violence?

6. Great thinkers and their clutter by Samira Ahmed

What the objects collected by Higgs, Freud and Einstein can tell us about their inner thoughts

7. Inside England’s ultra-disciplined schools by Cherry Casey

As UK schools struggle with behaviour problems, a new breed boast of high grades and obedient students – but at what cost?

8. "We are in a fight to save life on Earth": Nicola Cutcher interviews Chris Packham

The campaigner and TV presenter has been attacked as an “eco-zealot”, but his drive is only getting stronger

9. A dangerous calculation by Peter Ward

Effective altruism has suffered a blow, but the extreme ideas surrounding it have infiltrated some of our most powerful organisations

19. Zombie forensics by Amit Katwala

Lie detector tests are unscientific and unjust. What’s behind their growing use by UK police forces?

11. The Queen of country on her personal philosophy: Graeme Green interviews Dolly Parton

Dolly Parton talks to us about her new rock album, her remarkable career and her liberal approach to faith

12. Why science needs metaphor by Tasneem Zehra Husain

A theoretical physicist, who is also a novelist, writes beautifully on why metaphors are key to unlocking the secrets of the universe

13. What can moral philosophy tell us about Israel-Palestine? An interview with Jonathan Glover

We talk to philosopher Jonathan Glover about the moral questions at the heart of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

14. Divided Israel by Alona Ferber

As the Gaza war deepens, divides within the Israeli Jewish population threaten to split the state

15. Viruses could kill you, but they could also save your life by Richard Pallardy

We are only just beginning to understand the enormous significance of the human virome

16. The Vatican has a drug problem, and it matters to us all by Gabriele Di Donfrancesco

As the Church pushes for harsher drug laws in Italy, a series of cases suggest that the priesthood is hiding a problem of its own

17. Why are so many books so boring now? by John Merrick

Publishers are selling more books than ever – but they’re all the same. Here's why

18. The introverts are winning by Marie Le Conte

Technology is enabling us to retreat from the outside world. But we should resist the urge – for ourselves and for each other

19. Crisis of compassion by Pavan Amara

Following the Birth Trauma Inquiry, how do we tackle the toxic culture in the NHS?

20. Brazil's new gold rush by Eléonore Hughes

Lithium mining is bringing jobs for some in Brazil – and devastation for others. Is there a better way?

Give the gift of journalism this Christmas! We hope you've enjoyed reading New Humanist in 2024. If you'd like to spread the joy, we're offering gift subscriptions for just £19.99 – the perfect present for curious minds! Sign up now using code XMAS24.

Multitudes: How Crowds Made the Modern World (Verso) by Dan Hancox

When you picture a crowd, you may think of a jostling, unruly mass. It’s an image often painted by politicians, news outlets and the police, who warn us of the dangers of mass panic, crime and violence. It’s a compelling vision, but it isn’t the whole picture. What if crowds are not the enemy of society that they sometimes seem? That is the argument presented by journalist Dan Hancox in his thought-provoking new book.

According to Hancox, our modern conception of crowds was shaped in the late 19th century by French proto-fascist Gustave Le Bon. The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind was hugely influential, lauded by everyone from Sigmund Freud to Mussolini and even playing a part in shaping the Nazi propaganda machine. Crowds make us feel inferior, writes Le Bon. They replace personal accountability with anonymity, human morality with animalistic desires. A strong leader is needed in order to channel these destructive potentials away from anarchy and chaos – from the “mob rule” of democracy and socialism towards the maintenance of order and hierarchy.

As crowds grew larger and more frequent due to rising populations and urbanisation, the Le Bonian way of framing the crowd survived to become part of our cultural narrative. It is essentially a supercharged version of a scepticism that goes back at least as far as Plato, who saw the easily corruptible crowd as an obstacle to the noble intentions of democracy. In reality, Hancox argues, we must distinguish between two kinds of crowds: the top-down organised crowd where people identify with a charismatic leader, such as a Nazi rally or the Trumpists who attacked the US Capitol in 2021, and the more egalitarian self-organised crowd that revolves around horizontal solidarity and shared identity, such as the carnival in Cádiz, Spain, or London’s Notting Hill. The former type of crowd is anti-social; the latter is rooted in humanistic principles.

But whatever the type of crowd, Hancox argues, they form because people choose to join in, and not, as Le Bon led us to believe, because they are coerced into doing so. We know this from our own behaviour, when we have ourselves joined a crowd situation. As Hancox asks, pointedly: “How can it be ... that crowd madness is only ever an affliction ascribed to other people?”

As an experienced journalist, Hancox has reviewed many concerts and reported on numerous protests. In his personal life he has enjoyed the thrill of dancing in mosh pits “thrashing around like a loon”, and the not-so-thrilling experience of being contained by police on an overcrowded Westminster Bridge with fellow peaceful protesters. Yet, it was not until a decade later when the pandemic turned football stadiums and vast nightclubs into vacant shells that he began investigating crowd dynamics.

He discovered that a new, more empirically based science of crowds has emerged in recent decades that has turned conventional wisdom on its head. The science suggests that crowds are far less prone to violence than we thought, and through their shared identity crowd members usually show a remarkable consideration for each other’s wellbeing.

When things go wrong, crowd expert Professor Keith Still tells us, it is usually because of bad planning. “People don’t die because they’re panicking, they panic because they are dying,” he explains. So rather than contain crowds by fencing them off and resorting to collective punishment, some authorities are now working to support their ability to self-organise.

At the same time change is slow and the ghost of Le Bon looms large. The press is quick to point fingers at the crowd when trouble breaks out, while organisers fear reprisals and throw the reality under the rug, as happened famously with the Hillsborough disaster in 1989. The crowd crush that killed 97 at a football stadium in Sheffield was initially blamed on hooliganism before the main causes were found to be failures of planning and errors made by the police.

Aside from a discussion of how and when crowds might “go wrong”, Multitudes is also a celebration of the positive capacity of crowds to liberate. Hancox shows how crowds, on the whole, enable us as individuals to express ourselves more fully, and at times with more political impact. “We join crowds because located there, in the midst of all that commotion and movement, is something fundamental about what it is to be human,” he writes. “We are swept along on an emotional tide, fired up and inspired by our fellow travellers. Our individual failings are submerged: we become greater than the sum of our meagre parts. We join crowds with tentative enthusiasm and leave them beaming with joy, or roaring about the need for change – yelling for one more tune, or one more push for revolution.” It is precisely this liberating capacity, he argues, that makes the establishment cling to the draconian and scientifically debunked Le Bonian view of crowds. Hostility to “the mob” is usually hostility to democracy, dressed up as a phony concern for propriety and order.

However, there is a fine line between the liberating experience of losing ourselves in the crowd and the danger of being swept up in the moment and letting other people influence our behaviour, or think on our behalf. Hancox applauds the outpouring of mass popular resistance that characterised the Black Lives Matter protests, which were largely organised by social movements, and decries the 6 January insurrection that was instigated from the very top of American political life, with then president Donald Trump encouraging supporters to march on the Capitol. Certainly, self-organised crowds coming out on the streets against racism are at the opposite end of the spectrum to the insurrectionist crowds that threatened to bring American democracy to a halt. But the distinction doesn’t always function so neatly.

While Multitudes was published in late October, it was written before the riots that erupted in England, following a mass stabbing in Southport on 29 July. Self-described “protesters” came out onto the streets, setting fire to mosques and hotels holding asylum seekers, and committing other racist attacks. Over a thousand people were arrested. In videos of the gatherings, they appear to be egging each other on, cheering and filming the violence. Such scenes, some people might say, show the dangers of crowds – the potential for groupthink, irrationality and violence that lurks at their heart. It can be assumed that Hancox would place these summer riots in the anti-social camp, although the level of organisation by far-right groups, and the extent of premeditated violence, is still being untangled.

Whether his distinction always holds, Hancox’s mission seems worthwhile. In the spirit of democracy and in light of the agony of social distancing that inspired him to write the book, we must take on the broader challenge of restoring the reputation of the crowd and its egalitarian potential. Multitudes helps us to better reflect on crowds in a nuanced manner, weighing up pros and cons, with an emphasis on the good that crowds can bring as a vital source of self-empowerment, liberation and joy.

This article is from New Humanist's winter 2024 issue. Subscribe now.

I recently received a lovely email from a pal of mine, Ian Franklin. We met when I investigated alleged ghostly phenomena at Hampton Court Palace, and so I thought that it would be a good time to re-visit the work.

As a kid, I was fascinated by ghosts and hauntings. In the 1990s, I obtained a PhD in the psychology of the paranormal from Edinburgh University and then started my own research unit at the University of Hertfordshire. One day, I received a curious letter from Hampton Court Palace.

This historic Palace has been home to many British monarchs and is now a popular tourist attraction. It also has a reputation for being haunted, with many people experiencing unusual phenomena in an area now known as ‘The Haunted Gallery’. The letter invited me to carry out an investigation (the first at a Royal Palace).

I put together a team of researchers (Caroline Watt, Paul Stevens, Emma Greening and Ciarán O’Keeffe) for a five-day investigation. It proved to be lots of fun. For instance, before we started, the Palace staged a press conference to announce my study. During a break, I stepped outside to get some fresh air and some teenagers drove past. Weirdly, one of them threw an egg at me and it smashed on my shirt, leaving a large stain.  I returned to the press conference, said that the stain was actually ghostly ectoplasm and that this is going to be a tough investigation. 

At the time, Ian Franklin was working as a palace warder. He was kind enough to go through the historic records and figure out where people had reported unusual phenomena in the Haunted Gallery.   

Each day, I asked visitors to walk through the Gallery and write down any unusual experienced (e.g., suddenly feeling cold or sensing a presence). They were also given a floorplan of the area and asked to indicate the location of their experience. About 600 people participated. Interestingly, the experiences from those who believed in ghosts tended to take place in areas that Ian had identified from historic reports. Before the study, we had asked everyone to rate their previous knowledge about strange happenings in the Haunted Gallery, and we could see that that wasn’t a factor.

So, what was going on? We discovered that some of the experiences were caused by natural phenomena (e.g., subtle draughts), and speculated that others might be due to areas looking dark and scary. But who knows, maybe there actually are ghosts at the Palace! Importantly, the work showed that it was possible to carry out a rational and open-minded investigation into an alleged haunting, and it paved the way for my later ghost work (more about that in another blog post). Alas, little did I know that there would soon be lots of people (including those on TV) carrying out somewhat less scientific investigations into alleged ghostly phenomena!

Anyway, it was wonderful working with Ian, and the journal article about the study is here, and it also described in Paranormality. 

This week we will take a detailed look at an optical illusion that I created to shrink people.

There are a few ways of making someone look small. One approach involves making everything else big! Here is a great example of that from a Trick Eye exhibition in Japan. The picture is huge and the glass is painted on the back walls (I pressed my hands against the ground beforehand, so that they looked like they were being pushed against the glass).

Another approach involves forced perspective (making a far-away object appear much closer to the camera) – a technique used in the famous Beuchet Chair illusion….

It’s wonderful but is still a big build. I wanted to create something that was far more portable, and had the idea of moving the chair very close to the camera. Here is how this new illusion looks and works.

All of the details and templates were published in the journal iPerception and I was especially happy with the article because that’s my mum in the photos! I have used the idea lots over the years, ….

….including in this quirky video……

Next week I will reveal a brand new optical illusion! Oh, and if you are in Edinburgh, I will be giving a talk on the 28^th December at MagicFest about the strange intertwined lives of three master magicians from the city. One was the most famous illusionist in the world, another perfected a trick that revolutionised magic, and the third was frequently asked to appear in the Edinburgh Sheriff Court. Do come along, fun will be had. Details here.

This thread has been created for thoughtful, rational discussion on subjects for which there are not currently any dedicated threads. Please note that our Comment Policy applies as usual. There is a link to this at the foot of the page. DISCLAIMER: All comments posted throughout this website are the personal views of users and …

Welcome to another Thursday post celebrating curious mind stuff. This week, we enter the world of illusion! 

I have created many optical illusions over the years, and I am fortunate enough to be friends with some of the smartest and most inventive folks in the field. Olivier Redon is certainly one of those people. Working with his daughter Chloe, Olivier creates new illusions and wonderful twists to existing ideas. A generous soul, his pieces are as playful as they are fooling.

Here is his Oh La La Box, which won the Best Illusion of the Year in 2021. Simple but brilliant….. 

A man after my own heart, most of Olivier’s creations are built from cardboard and paper, and show how to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary. In another instance, the dynamic duo have joined books and boxes together in impossible ways….

Our paths first crossed when I created a version of the Beuchet Chair, only to discover that Olivier had had pretty much the same idea several years ago (mine involves an addition of a fake cloth to help with the illusion of continuity)!  
Olivier has also used the same idea to make objects shrink and grow in desktop version. Genius. Olivier is based in San Francisco and creates for the fun of making something new and the joy of sharing it with younger minds. Who knows, perhaps there will be a museum dedicated to his work. 

I asked Olivier three key questions about his work…

How do you find your creative ideas? 
Very interesting question. At first, I paid attention to what was around me. But then, over time, I noticed that there were no big changes in the world of optical illusions, and so I decided to do something about it and create something new myself. Now I have more than 50 optical illusions that fill 3 rooms in my house!

Who are your heroes of the world of optical illusions?
Jerry Andrus, because he invented so much, yet had no computer or printer! He just worked with metal, cardboard, or wood. I found Jerry Andrus via the internet in 2022, but I didn’t know him before that because I wanted to create my illusions without knowing about what already existed.

Should all the classrooms in the world have optical illusions? 
Of course! It is so much fun to play with your brain and especially for adults, children, teachers and students.     

You can find out about Olivier’s great work here and read more about it in this article.

What do you think? Leave a comment and let us know.

From the Richard Dawkins Foundation Newsletter. Subscribe here. Hello! It is Thanksgiving week here in the U.S., and I could not be more grateful to be part of such an active and wonderful global community of people dedicated to advocating on behalf of science and secular policy. The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science is …

Another Thursday, another dose of curious stuff. Here is a strange tale combining magic, a trip to Paris, and some remarkable photographs.

In the early 1890s, French scientist Alfred Binet teamed up with several magicians (including sleight of hand expert Edouard-Joseph Raynaly) and photographer Georges Demeny to discover how magic fooled the mind. Demeny had helped to create an early type of film camera and was using it to analyse fast movements by reducing them to a series of rapidly taken still photographs. His clockwork camera could move 24 frames past a lens at the rate of one every tenth of a second. Publishing the results in an 1894 article, Binet describes how the images removed the magician’s patter and speed of movement, and so exposed the illusions. The photographs were not reproduced in Binet’s article, but it did contain a curious note explaining that they were ‘stored in laboratory records.’

I came across Binet’s article when I was writing my PhD on magic. A few years later, I decided to search for the missing images. I first contacted an expert on early film, Professor Marta Braun (Toronto Metropolitan University).  Marta wasn’t aware of the images, but suggested that I reach out to an archivist at the French National Library named Laurent Mannoni. After several weeks of discussions and searching, Laurent discovered 3 sets of Binet’s images in the archive. I headed to Paris!

Once in the archive, Laurent led me into a darkened room filled with amazing objects, including Demeny’s camera, apparatus from the famous French magician Robert-Houdin and the 3 sets of images! These images were breath-taking and involved Raynaly springing cards between his hands (11 images), changing one playing card into another (11 images) and making a ball vanish (24 images). Laurent kindly allowed me to make digital copies of the photographs. On the train back to the UK, a thought occurred to me. If I were to present each set of images in rapid succession, I could recreate Raynaly’s performance from over a century ago! So that’s what I did and here is one of the films.

The film shows Raynaly dropping the ball from one hand to another, passing back into his upper hand and then the ball vanishing. Don’t blink or you will miss it! Historians often cite 1896 footage of British magician David Devant as the earliest film of a conjurer, but Demeny’s film predates Devant’s footage by at least two years. I have shown the Raynaly film at many conferences and conventions, and he always receives a much-deserved round of applause!

So, there you have it. A magical detective story borne of curiosity and luck, that ended up uncovering the world’s earliest film of a magician.  What do you think? It’s easy to imagine none of this happening. What if the article hadn’t stuck in my mind. Or Maria hadn’t been as helpful? Or Laurent hadn’t been as generous? But I am glad that it did.

Further reading:

Binet, A. (1894). Psychology of prestidigitation. Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution (pp.555–571). Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.

Lachapelle S. (2008). From the stage to the laboratory: magicians, psychologists, and the science of illusion. Journal of the history of the behavioral sciences, 44(4), 319–334. https://doi.org/10.1002/jhbs.20327

Thomas, C., & Didierjean, A. (2016). Scientific Study of Magic: Binet’s Pioneering Approach Based on Observations and Chronophotography. The American journal of psychology, 129, 313–326. https://doi.org/10.5406/amerjpsyc.129.3.0313

All images except Binet, copyright Richard Wiseman

This thread has been created for thoughtful, rational discussion on subjects for which there are not currently any dedicated threads. Please note that our Comment Policy applies as usual. There is a link to this at the foot of the page. DISCLAIMER: All comments posted throughout this website are the personal views of users and …

From the Richard Dawkins Foundation Newsletter. Subscribe here. Hello! While Election Day proper is not until next week, millions of Americans have already voted. Elections are always important, but this year feels particularly significant. The choice this year is not just about individual candidates or policy agendas; as Public Religion Research Institute President Robert Jones said …

check, 1, 2…is this thing on? hi everyone! it’s been a while.

Someone contacted me hoping to find young atheists who might be interested in being part of a new series. I’m not particularly interested in having my mug on TV, but I would love to have some great personalities represent atheism on the show, so I offered to repost his email on my blog: My name […]

All throughout my youth, I dreamed of becoming a writer. I wrote all the time, about everything. I watched TV shows and ranted along with the curmudgeons on Television Without Pity about what each show did wrong, convincing myself that I could do a better job. I flew to America with a dream in my […]

A friend linked me to this. I was a sobbing mess within the first minute. I sometimes wonder why I feel such a strong kinship to the LGBT community, and I think it’s because I’ve been through the same thing that many of them have. So I watched this video and I cried, because, as […]

UPDATE #1: I got my domain back! Many thanks to Kurtis for the pleasant surprise: So I stumbled upon your blog, really liked what I saw, read that you had drama with the domain name owner, bought it, and forwarded it here. It should work again in a matter of seconds. I am an atheist […]