Good. The discoveries about the Tuam mortality figures are making a stink in Ireland. Good.

There is growing pressure on the Government to hold a full historical inquiry into the deaths of almost 800 children in a mother and baby home in Tuam, Co Galway between the 1920s and the 1960s.

There were numerous calls from TDs, Senators and councillors yesterday for a full inquiry following the disclosure that many infants and children who died in the home run by the Bon Secours order were buried in an unmarked plot.

Minister for Children Charlie Flanagan said yesterday that he was giving “active consideration to the best means of addressing the harrowing details emerging regarding the burial arrangements for children who died many years ago in mother and baby homes”.

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Huh. The Global Secular Council’s contact person told me in her first replies (before the ones where she refused to tweet an apology)

I have instructed the Social Media team for future to take less liberties in this regard, and to run similar challenges by me before “tweeting” in defensiveness, rather than diplomacy.

I guess her standard isn’t exactly what mine is.

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Here’s me “bullying” or “internet trolling” the Global Secular Council.

Secular Council @SecularCouncil May 24

Sorry you missed this, @VitaBrevi. We responded many times to Ms. Ophelia. We are many women, & more joining soon. www.secularcouncil/team

Ophelia Benson @OpheliaBenson May 24

@SecularCouncil @VitaBrevi

Actually you didn’t. You typed words but they were consistently non-responsive. [Read more…]

The Global Secular Council is getting much much better at remembering that “Global” has to include people who aren’t from the US or the UK or even Sweden; much much better at following the news from other parts of the world and sharing voices from there.

Or, not.

 

Wow, the Global Secular Council and its parent the Secular Coalition for American sure is doing a great job of representing US secularists.

Secular Council @SecularCouncil June 2

Thanks, @RichSandersen, for understanding we had been trying to answer Ofie’s questions, but had not been heard!

“Ofie”

That’s what the harassers call me. Sometimes they vary it to Oafy, just like any 5-year-old.

And the Global Secular Council thinks it’s appropriate to follow their lead.

Sometimes I ask myself : Are Africans returning to a dark age? Are we moving towards or away from enlightenment, from civilisation? These questions have become necessary if one is to put into context the magical and superstitious beliefs that are ravaging the continent.

Recent reports from Burkina Faso and Nigeria (not just about Boko Haram and the missing girls) have caused me to wonder as to where this African continent is heading in this 21^st century. Africans, just like people in other regions of the world, entertain magical and mystical beliefs. They also hold spiritual and supernatural opinions. But the superstitious currents in Africa appear to be taking on a different dimension. I mean the situation is getting out of hand. African superstitions are so charged and threatening to the point that some may think that the people of this region are essentially a different sort of human being. But, of course, they are not. [Read more…]

Leo Igwe is doing a speaking tour in the Ohio-Indiana-Chicago-Michigan area in July. Don’t miss this if you are in that rectangle!

July 11-13: SSA conference in Columbus
July 14: CFI of Northeast Ohio
July 15: Freethought Dayton
July 16: Humanist Community of Central Ohio in Columbus
July 17: CFI Indiana in Indianapolis
July 18-20: FBB conference in Chicago
July 22: CFI Michigan/Society for Humanistic Judaism in Birmingham, MI
July 23: CFI MIchigan in Grand Rapids

A word of advice. If you’re attempting to write a panegyric in defense of someone who is useful to you but a blister on the heel of many other people – the first thing you want to pay attention to is verisimilitude. You want to make it believable. You see what I’m getting at? You don’t want to say “my friend is a saint, and for this saintliness he is roundly punished.”

You don’t want to say that because right away you’re going to get doubts and questions. “Huh?” people will say. “Why would that happen? Why would anyone punish your friend for saintliness?”

And then they’ll start to wonder if you’re just blowing smoke, and then you might as well have saved yourself the trouble.

You’re welcome.

Patricia Churchland responds crisply to Colin McGinn in the New York Review of Books. (Colin McGinn. You’d think he’d go quiet for awhile, wouldn’t you, to let people’s memories fade.)

Other scientific disciplines are also extremely important in understanding the nature of the mind: genetics, ethology, anthropology, and linguistics. Philosophy can play a role too, when the philosopher sees it is rewarding to get out of the armchair. Some philosophers, such as Chris Eliasmith, for example, have truly made progress in computationally modeling how the brain represents the world.

Nevertheless, there are nostalgic philosophers who whinge on about saving the purity of the discipline from philosophers like me and Chris Eliasmith and Owen Flanagan and Dan Dennett. What do the purists, like McGinn, object to? It is that their lovely a priori discipline, where they just talk to each other and maybe cobble together a thought experiment or two, is being sullied by…data. Their sterile construal of philosophy is not one that would be recognized by the great philosophers in the tradition, such as Aristotle or Hume or Kant.

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