Tauriq Moosa is contributing editor to Secular Humanist Bulletin, the newsletter for the Council for Secular Humanism. He is also a contributor to Skeptic magazine and Butterfliesandwheels.com. He has been published and translated for a number of European humanist organisations, including the Swedish Humanist Association and the Polish Rationalist Association. He has appeared on radio and local media. He obtained a B.Soc.Sci from the University of Cape Town. He is currently doing a Masters in Philosophy, specialising in Bioethics, at the Centre for Applied Ethics, Stellenbosch University. Email: [email protected]
Why have so many stopped fighting for women’s rights? We fight for “human” rights and discuss them as if they were a natural element of being human; groups lobby and defend, almost diabolically and with much vitriol, the rights of “animals” (species that are not human). Yet women’s rights, that better half of our species,…
We imagine that there are areas of life beyond critical engagement. Stepping across boundaries of sanctity elicits outcries ‘in defence of custom’, as Tom Paine said. Drawing these lines, we imagine that no one would dare step across them to poke or prod with crude, manmade rationality at these things we view with sickly admiration.…
When a television network has a porn channel in the pipe-lines voices of outrage sound. When a television-series mocks a dead religious figure, knives are being sharpened and fingers are being shaken. Picketing outside abortion clinics, fighting against end-of-life alleviation, marching against free expression (do they never see the irony?) – we can usually count…
According to the ancient Greek poet Hesiod, women were created for the sole purpose of punishing men. The punishment of mankind in the form of womankind was kalon kakon, or a ‘beautiful evil’ – sent by the gods for a crime committed not by man but by the Titan Prometheus. Prometheus was presumptuous enough to…
“The message is not one of simple pessimism. We need to look hard and clearly at some of the monsters inside us. But this is part of the project of caging and taming them.” – JONATHAN GLOVER To many religious believers, one of the hardest aspects of maintaining their faith is steeped in mental gymnastics:…