Tauriq Moosa is contributing editor to Secular Humanist Bulletin, the newsletter for the Council for Secular Humanism. He is also a contributor to Skeptic magazine and Butterfliesandwheels.com. He has been published and translated for a number of European humanist organisations, including the Swedish Humanist Association and the Polish Rationalist Association. He has appeared on radio and local media. He obtained a B.Soc.Sci from the University of Cape Town. He is currently doing a Masters in Philosophy, specialising in Bioethics, at the Centre for Applied Ethics, Stellenbosch University. Email: tauriq.moosa@si.org.za
by Tauriq Moosa As per various stories emerging concerning censorship, I thought it a good time to consider one of the greatest documents defending free speech. In 1643, the English Parliament instituted the Licensing Order. This meant pre-publication censorship on all printed writings, including and aiming mostly at newspapers. This followed the abolishing, two years…
by Tauriq Moosa I had chosen not to write extensively about the late Christopher Hitchens, since his contributions to my life’s betterment is of no real interest to anyone save my future biographers. And in looking at Maniza Naqvi’s piece on Hitchens I am, in fact, still not focused on Hitchens but on a point…
by Tauriq Moosa This week in my Comic Creator Column, I’ll be interviewing and discussing funny book issues with JOEY ESPOSITO. Last week I held a brilliant interview (not because of me but because of her) with the amazing Alex de Campi. You can read that Comics Creator Column #01 here. If you have the…
by Tauriq Moosa This will be the first in, so far, a four-part series where I will be (reviewing the work of and) talking to comics creators. My aim is to provide an insight into the medium and the creative process, as well as exclusive interviews with some of the most talented people in the…
by Tauriq Moosa The gods of irony are smiling. I recently attributed the existence of the TV-show Jersey Shore as the closest thing to an insult I could fathom for myself, when comparing myself to Christians who regularly want things banned. Then, thanks to Jerry Coyne, I discovered my old friend – my seriously old…
by Tauriq Moosa Finding a new love is not always a good thing. Having started with writing prose fiction, I drifted away since I found fiction to be too self-indulgent. But, recently, due to events beyond my control, I found myself loving the comics medium. Indeed, I want to create these beautiful things. The problem…
by Tauriq Moosa How should we tackle things we believe are wrong and should be illegal, when it seems their very status of being ‘illegal’ gives rise to the problems we oppose. It’s not drugs per se that bothers us, but the violence and destruction that can arise. It’s not sex itself that’s a problem,…
by Tauriq Moosa Putting one word, one letter, after the other in order to make a coherent sentence is something most of us can do: you are currently doing it now, except you are forced to ride the tracks of comprehension as laid down by words I choose. There are some of us, stupidly, who…
by Tauriq Moosa I imagine that most of us are relieved to hear that Republican Michele Bachmann is going to become the first presidential candidate “to sign a pledge created by THE FAMiLY [sic] LEADER, an influential social-conservative group in Iowa.” Ms Bachmann, by signing the pledge, “vows” to “uphold the institution of marriage as…
by Tauriq Moosa In his treatise, On the Sublime and Beautiful, Edmund Burke wrote: “No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.” The extent to which this is true is beyond our concern, but there is little doubt fear often puts rationality in a cage, chains…
by Tauriq Moosa Hume’s Guillotine: “One cannot derive an “ought” from an “is”. This thesis, which comes from a famous passage in Hume's Treatise [says]: there is a class of statements of fact which is logically distinct from a class of statements of value. No set of statements of fact by themselves entails any statement…
by Tauriq Moosa Recently, Sir Martin Rees was awarded the most lucrative science-prize in the world, The Templeton Prize. Notice I said ‘lucrative’; not most respected or prestigious, though some indeed do think it is. This prize is awarded because it, according to its official website, “honors a living person who has made an exceptional…
by Tauriq Moosa What is it about topics like incest, bestiality, necrophilia and cannibalism that urges us to pick up pitchforks and torches? A more important question, however, is whether these topics automatically or necessarily should elicit outrage enough for us to target those who perform these acts. I think not. Considering the purely descriptive…
by Tauriq Moosa There is always the danger of dogmatism lurking within any collection of ideas. A collection of ideas tied together by a singular focus tends to be called an argument. However, it is often refreshing to have such bundles of ideas untethered and scattered after being cut by a sharper focus. It is,…
In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move. – The Restaurant at the End of the Universe A Short History of DNA Douglas Noel Adams was a best-selling British writer, born in 1952. (As you may have noticed, he…
‘Murder’ differs from ‘killing’ – and must differ for the words to have their moral impact – because killing is a neutral term. Surprising as it may seem, it is most helpful for discussions on killing if we recognise that the word itself is mostly and simply ‘the taking of organic life’. It is another…
In Philip Ball’s Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another, he articulates something rather profound: statistics destroys superstition. The idea, once expressed, is simple but does not stem its profundity. Incidents in small numbers sometimes become ‘miraculous’ only because they appear unique, within a context that fuels such thinking. Ball’s own example is Uri…
My previous article, ‘How Philosophy Killed My Children and Why it Should Kill Yours’, seemed to have generated some debate. Unfortunately, there was much heat but little light shed on taking the subject further from most commentators/critics. Yet, what little light was shed by critics is a welcome furthering of this important discussion. Considering I…
Parentage is a very important profession, but no test of fitness for it is ever imposed in the interest of the children. – George Bernard Shaw, Everybody’s Political What’s What? Philosophy, its oldest practitioners proclaimed, begins in wonder. Yet the wonder often directed at it appears with a furrowed brow and a patronising frown, a…
Review of Rhonda Byrne, The Power (London: Simon & Schuster, 2010) ISBN: 978-085-720-1706. 1. The Law of Attraction Rhonda Byrne, author of 2006 best-seller The Secret, has released its sequel. Entitled The Power, it claims further depth into the insights gleaned from The Secret. As she humbly states: ‘You don’t need to have read The…