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.
Saudi blogger and religious dissident Raif Badawi has been cruelly punished and toyed with by the Saudi legal system for about a year now, and things have taken a darker turn. According to Badawi’s wife, now living in Lebanon, the high court will try Badawi on the charge of apostasy. If convicted, Badawi could be executed. Read more
A few days ago, many of us marked the anniversary of the death of Carl Sagan. Since becoming part of the larger community of nonbelievers, I continue to be taken aback by how strongly so many of us continue to feel about that loss. I was more or less alone among my circle of friends at the time who even knew who he was, let alone grieved. Well, his life obviously meant a great deal to filmmaker Penny Lane as… Read more
There is no shortage of exasperation about the hypercommercialism of Christmas. Secular or devout Christian, it’s not news that the Dickensian ideal of enjoying time with one’s family with some drinking and music and feating upon a big goose is gone, replaced with an overwhelming and mind-numbing consumeristic orgy of overspending, overeating, and over-stressing. Or maybe that’s just me. But one aspect of the holiday season that gets less attention is just how Hanukkah managed to get lumped in with the whole mess. Read more
Are you celebrating Christmas today? Atheists’ experience of the holiday of course runs that gamut, with many going the Full Santa, complete with decorated trees and tinsel and candy canes and jolliness and all the rest, while others happily opt out of marking the day or the season in any way — and everything else in between. (My four-year-old boy got up this morning entirely disappointed that Santa was not in the living room waiting for him. Don’t worry, he came around.) At HuffPost Live, host Josh Zepps (who is also the new co-host of Point of Inquiry, my organization’s podcast) gathered some atheist thinkers and activists to discuss the topic of the way atheists celebrate (or not) Christmas. Read more
The Secular Coalition for America has announced the dates for its 2014 Lobby Day and Policy Conference this summer, June 12th-14th. Last year’s event featured actual in-person addresses by actual, real-life officeholders, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) and Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA), who for whatever reason were unafraid of getting atheist cooties. Read more
