Podcast for Inquiry S02E18: SciComm in the time of Covid, with Tara Moriarty

Dr. Tara Moriarty (@MoriartyLab) was happy being a research scientist, studying how Lyme disease bacteria travel to different parts of our body using the bloodstream. Then the COVID-19 pandemic struck, and she saw a vast need for disseminating accurate information to the public. So she founded COVID-19 Resources Canada and learned on the fly to become a science communicator. Dr. Moriarty describes the reaction from the scientific community and the public, and shares some surprising statistics about the current state of the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada.

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Podcast for Inquiry S02E17: How Minds Change with David McRaney

On this week's Podcast for Inquiry, I speak with David McRaney (@davidmcraney) about his book, “How Minds Change”. We explore how social context is critical when people form their opinions. People don’t change their minds in a vacuum, and David describes how network effects lead to social cascades, such as how widespread resistance to equal marriage flipped to widespread acceptance in an astonishingly short period. David quizzes me about the most recent movie I watched as a demonstration of how to get people to think differently. We discuss the role of truth in persuasion, and the utter failure of the “information deficit hypothesis”. You can learn more from David via his podcast You Are Not So Smart and on his website at davidmcraney.com. 

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Podcast for Inquiry S02E16: Catherine Dunphy on Humanist activism and the Kimberley project

Catherine is a humanist activist, and believes the two go hand in hand. Catherine talks about the inherent tension within the Catholic Social Justice Movement, and her own journey out of Catholicism. She describes the link between Christofascism and Incels (see her article in Free Inquiry). Catherine’s activism today is focused on The Kimberley Project, a Canadian charity dedicated to the prevention of violence against women. 

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Podcast for Inquiry S02E15: Escaping North Korea with Eunju Kim

How does one survive in an authoritarian regime, where you are sent away for education if the frame holding a picture of the Dear Leader gets dirty? When no one has enough to eat? Eunju Kim is the author of A Thousand Miles to Freedom, which describes her harrowing escape from North Korea to Seoul. She discusses how the Kim dynasty is worshiped in North Korea, much like a God. Eunju details how escaping from North Korea is much harder today than it was when she fled. Today Eunju works for Freedom Speakers International, helping North Korean refugees settle into their new lives in South Korea. 

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Podcast for Inquiry Diatribe #2: Catholic Health Care “Ethics”

In this second episode of Leslie’s Diatribes, I sound off on the Health Ethics Guide, a publication of the Catholic Health Alliance of Canada. Employees in Catholic health care facilities in eight provinces are told to sign this code of ethics every year, and many do so without reading it. Leslie highlights some salient aspects of its contents, and encourages those who object to what it demands to refrain from agreeing to it.

The opinions expressed in this episode are mine, and do not represent the Centre for Inquiry Canada or any other organization.

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Podcast for Inquiry S02E14: Homophobia in Catholic Schools with Tonya Callaghan

Why do publicly funded Catholic schools exist in Ontario, Saskatchewan, and Alberta? Does the government or the Church actually run them? I speak with Dr. Tonya Callaghan, author of Homophobia in the Hallways, about systemic homophobia in Canadian Catholic schools. We discuss the long struggle to establish Gay-Straight Alliances, the oddly selective enforcement of Catholic doctrine, and the contradiction at the heart of professing compassion for all at the same time as demanding lifetime celibacy from those with same sex attraction. 

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Podcast for Inquiry S02E13: Dana Korneisel on tetrapods and her book, “Dana Digs Dinosaurs”

What is a tetrapod? What is a homologue, and how does it differ from convergent evolution? Dana answers my many questions about animal development from embryo to adult, talks about her research on amphibians and axolotls, and how her book, “Dana Digs Dinosaurs”, was inspired by the excitement of a seven year old. 

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Sudbury Inmates on Suicide Watch Offered Only the Bible

Back in April, I spoke with Jenny Lamothe, a reporter for Sudbury.com, about a terrible policy at the Sudbury Jail: inmates on suicide watch can read nothing except the Christian Bible.

“There is no evidence that I have ever encountered that indicates that religious texts are effective in helping those who have suicidal ideation,” I told her. “As someone who is greatly in favour of evidence-based treatment, I would hope that our penal system would use those materials that have proven efficacy for those in dire need. So the policy of restricting access to religious materials makes no sense to me, because there is no evidence that it will achieve its stated goal.”

Ms. Lamothe also noted that Canada subsidizes "religious charities to the tune of $5 billion a year."

Read the full article on Sudbury.com. 

Secular news from May 2023

The following article appeared in the June 2023 edition of Critical Links, the monthly newsletter from the Centre for Inquiry Canada. 

A roundup of secular news from the past month:

• Canada’s Coat of Arms no longer features religious symbolism. The Canadian Royal Crown that sits atop the Canada Coat of Arms has been redesigned. The new Crown features Canadian imagery (maple leaves and a snowflake) instead of religious symbols (crosses and a fleur-de-lis). While the change has little practical impact on Canadians (personally, I couldn’t recall what Canada’s Coat of Arms looked like before reading about the redesign), it’s refreshing to see Canada slowly and steadily weaning itself off its erroneous self-conception as a Christian nation. 
• Iran hangs two convicted of blasphemy. It is for good reason that “theocracy” is generally considered to be a pejorative term. Countries where religious authorities run (or significantly influence) the government tend not to respect human rights (consider Iran, Afghanistan, and Russia, among others). In the midst of an uprising wherein Iranian women are publicly removing their hijabs in record numbers (despite severe repression from government authorities), Yousef Mehrad and Sadrollah Fazeli-Zare were executed for “burning the Quran” and “insulting the Prophet of Islam,” according to the country’s judiciary. Fortunately, because Canada repealed its blasphemy law in 2018, Iran can no longer point to Canada for moral cover. 
• Forced-birth organization makes short list for federal funding. The Canada Student Jobs program is in the news again. In 2017, controversy erupted because federal funds were being funneled to organizations that would force a woman to give birth against her will (they refer to themselves as “pro-life” groups). The government revised the rules, but in a way that religious groups claimed restricted their religious freedom. After another overhaul of eligibility criteria, Priests for Life has recently made the short list for federal funding. Priests for Life has not yet been awarded any money, but it will be interesting to watch the government attempt to balance women’s rights with religious freedom. 

Podcast for Inquiry S02E12: Justice-Centered Humanism with Roy Speckhardt

Roy Speckardt is the past executive director of the American Humanist Association. We speak about his latest book, Justice-Centered Humanism. Conversation topics include:

• Roy’s journey to Humanism
• How to get Humanists involved in activism
• How Humanism leads to Social Justice
• Environmentalism
• Sentientism (referencing PfI S02E06 with Jamie Woodhouse)
• Secularism

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