Category Archives: religion

The terrible tale of Tuam

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Continuing my usual practice of being late to press has the advantage of letting more details of a story emerge, being very late means that other people still cover the fuller picture before I do but I can cope. A little while back a tale of terrible cruelty from Ireland’s past emerged involving as always the Catholic church and cruelty to children. Stories about bad things the Catholic church is alleged to have done in the past, much like accusations against aging celebrities, causes even usually calm heads to discard their usual rigor and leap upon the most sensationalist headlines … Continue reading →

Halal and labeling

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There’s been quite a bit of talk about halal meat being served by popular fast food chains of late. Quite a few people have tried to frame this as a racist attack on Muslims (conflating as ever a religion with a race, or are Saudi Muslims, Pakistani Muslims and all other Muslims all the same race?). Other people have taken the view that it really doesn’t matter as long as the welfare of the animals are the same, and apparently some of the food vendors do tell you that they use halal meat if you go to their website and … Continue reading →

High priests of the endarkenment

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The barbarians are it seems at the very gates of the ivory towers, and I apologise for such an over used metaphor. The popular on line science magazine “Popular Science” is drawing up the door bridge and closing down comments. Now their gaff their rules, they can do whatever they like, they could have moderated comments, rated them all sorts of things, but they chose to turn off comments and let people discuss things on their forums which does serve the purpose of restricting those that comment to only the genuinely interested so fair enough. Their reasoning is that: “Comments … Continue reading →