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.
I’ll begin with the lede: There is a critical petition launched by the Center for Inquiry on behalf of Alexander Aan, the jailed Indonesian atheist (I promise this won’t be the only thing I write about here, but this is very important). We want the White House to speak out on his behalf, but I describe this as critical because in order to guarantee a response from the Obama administration, we need to muster 25,000 signatures by August 16th, 2012…. Read more
Indonesian atheist Alexander Aan, jailed for stating his atheism, has heard us. Last week, I wrote about the significance of Alexander’s plight, making the case for putting serious energy toward his struggle both for the sake of atheism-writ-large and for Alexander himself. It moves me to no end to know that he knows we’re rooting for him. Michael Nugent posts at his blog that Alexander has written a letter from prison to his supporters. The English is somewhat broken, but… Read more
Many of the bigger secular and civil rights organizations have been making noise about the case of Alexander Aan, the 30-something civil servant of West Sumatra, Indonesia, who was beaten by an angry mob and then arrested and convicted… all for stating his atheism on Facebook. At the Center for Inquiry (where I work), Aan’s situation has been perhaps our primary focus as an organization since the Student Leadership Conference last month, most recently with a protest held this past… Read more
The problem of the public funding of religious schools — let alone those explicitly promoting Creationism — seems so self-evident to even the most lightly secular of us, that it can be shocking to see how those on the other side view the entire issue. We’ve heard time and time again the arguments for vouchers from a free market standpoint, and that’s all well and good and we can talk about that, but one would think that our opinion leaders… Read more
Over at the Center for Inquiry, we’re trying to get a little more attention for a very troubling development in North Dakota, and I’m hoping against hope that the Friendly Atheist readership in the Roughrider State is huge. For the sake of my sanity, I will presume this to be the case. Listen: There is a ballot measure to be voted on on June 12th being pimped as a “religious liberty” amendment to the state’s constitution, not terribly unlike the… Read more
