Jacques
Staring into the abyss of special privileges
Take a vast chasm, a tightrope, pea-soup mists and swirling, vicious gusts of wind – then a person steps onto that rope, destination unseen. Such are the ingredients for the kind of ‘recipe for disaster’ if a country embarks on creating charter upon charter of special privileges for one or more interest groups – no [...]
Comment to the Press Freedom Commission on regulating the print media
The Press Freedom Commission “released a call for the SA public to voice its opinion about press freedom and the regulation of print media”. What follows is a submission made by the FSI Chairman (not a consensus statement by the FSI generally). To whom it may concern, SUBMISSION WITH REGARD TO PRESS FREEDOM AND [...]
Religion at South African universities
It appears that not only South African schools are willing to ignore the National Policy on Religion and Education (pdf). As previously observed, certain schools routinely violate the requirement that religious instruction needs to focus on religion in general – allowing for freedom of belief by not requiring that students are exposed to only one religion, [...]
UFOs meet ‘numerical science’ in a festival of nonsense
The Cape Times today reports that: SA’s first UFO event to be held South Africa will experience its first conference on unidentified flying obects (UFOs) in November. “Millions of people in SA have had their own personal experience with ETs and UFOs – but most have in the past been too nervous to raise the [...]
Stop Secrecy Week
Anyone in Cape Town and surrounding areas is encouraged to attend any of these events – but particularly the march on Saturday, in protest of the POI Bill. Students Against Secrecy, a coalition of student organizations have put together a week of action to raise awareness about and activism against the Protection of Information Bill. [...]
Atheists and the politics of productive engagement
Prominent spokespersons for divisive views can make their arguments in more or less divisive ways. And while we shouldn’t confuse whatever offence is caused by antagonistic expressions of a viewpoint with the legitimacy of that viewpoint, we also shouldn’t ignore the fact that persuasion becomes more difficult when your audience is pissed off. Read more at Synapses.
Sam Harris, ‘new atheism’ and alleged Islamophobia
André Gide remarked that “everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again”. So it is with the recent article by Mandy de Waal, who took Sam Harris (and the ‘new atheists’ in general) to task for ‘hate speech’, ‘bigotry’ and encouraging so-called Islamophobia. It’s [...]
Breivik, terror and Islamophibia
Of course it is unfortunate, and prejudiced, for many commentators to have assumed that Breivik was a Muslim – and for those who assumed this, the bias is clear in how they concocted quite torturous narratives to explain why a Muslim would target kids at a Labour Party camp. It made little sense that he [...]
On Elevatorgate: Dawkins, Watson and the need for balance
The origins of what has now become a bitter war between various elements in the secular community lie partly in a failure to understand context, or to apply the principle of charity. Some posts on Elevatorgate make it appear that Watson accuses all men of being rapists, and others that Dawkins is a misogynist – [...]
Bill of Responsibilities
Note: this is an edited version of a column for The Daily Maverick It has been a month since the department of education, LeadSA and the National Religious Leaders’ Forum launched their Bill of Responsibilities. Some criticisms of the bill were forthcoming from Ivo Vegter, Khadija Patel and myself (here, here and here). We had concerns [...]
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