Paul is communications director for the Center for Inquiry, as well as an actor and musician. His blog is iMortal, and he tweets as @paulfidalgo, and the blog tweets as @iMortal_blog.
The opinions expressed on this blog are personal to Paul and do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Inquiry.
Serving as almost a direct contradiction to the video I posted yesterday on the Catholic explanation of Hell, today I came upon this 2006 interview with Bishop Shelby Spong, an Episcopalian who is extremely liberal theologically, saying that, in fact, Hell is made up. [Click the headline for more…] Read more
The battle over prayer in schools and other public institutions is not exclusive to the United States. In Nashik, India, English teacher Sanjay Salve is in a struggle with his school to be allowed to refrain from prayers, where he has been denied traditional pay grade increases because of his “defiance” — visibly not taking part in prayer sessions, which began on the school playground. Reports the Hindu Times: As students began their prayers and pledge, I remained standing as… Read more
There’s little doubt that human beings seem to like the idea of messiahs, deus ex machinas that will save us in our darkest hours. Obviously, even we seculars find something appealing about it, or else we’d be rolling our eyes, or else outright rejecting, stories that are messiah-tastic, such as Harry Potter, Dune (Paul Atreides), and even Lord of the Rings (Frodo and Aragorn are both “foretold”). At The American Scholar, William Deresiewicz sees a pining for messiahs throughout more than our fiction, but in our very response to word events and technology. He cites our collective awe over the Web, and its liberating potential, as well as “politics,” in the sense of either elected leaders (Obama in ’08) or revolutions (the Arab Spring and Occupy) who will magically “change everything.” And he thinks he spots where this inclination has gotten us into serious, serious trouble: Climate change. [Click the headline for more…] Read more
Since February of last year, Dr. Robert Price has been hosting his solo podcast The Human Bible for CFI. It’s a show in which Bob brings his encyclopedic knowledge and his trademark humor to demystifying the many layers of myth and conjecture about the Bible. The bad news is that it’s coming to an end (at least as a CFI podcast, though Bob does his own thing as well). Funding and listenership were, of course, among the big culprits. And I admit, I had kind of lost track of it myself. You see I have to consume a great deal of skepto-atheist media in my work, usually very quickly, so even things that CFI produces, things I really love such as Point of Inquiry and the magazines Free Inquiry and Skeptical Inquirer, can pile up. [Click headline for more…] Read more
Sam Harris has apparently grown weary of what he considers ill-informed attacks on his book The Moral Landscape and its central thesis, that science can be used to definitively determine whether something is “right” or “wrong” morally. So weary, in fact, he’s willing to shell out his own cash and endure a public humiliation if he’s taken down. [Click headline for more…] Read more
