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Rushdie’s victory
image credit: elena ternovaja. image used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. ‘What you have made will long endure.’ This is how Salman Rushdie signed off one of...
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The Marketplace of Ideas will always exist. The only choice we have is how to...
The concept of the ‘Marketplace of Ideas’ is widely considered to be a liberal one. It is, indeed, liberals who have argued for the free exchange of ideas as a positive good. However, in a more...
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Rap versus theocracy: Toomaj Salehi and the fight for a free Iran
Toomaj salehi. image: Hosseinronaghi. CC BY-SA 4.0. Although elaborate hate speech laws can make it extremely difficult, we have the right to freedom of expression in Britain. Generally speaking,...
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Donald Trump, political violence, and the future of America
image: Evan Vucci. details and non-free use rationale per wikimedia commons. Donald Trump was nearly killed a couple of days ago, and the consequences of this failed assassination attempt will...
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An upcoming secularist conference on the safeguarding of liberal values in a...
Stephen Evans highlights the myriad threats to secular liberalism and sets out what’s needed to preserve it ahead of the National Secular Society’s upcoming conference on protecting liberal values, at...
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The Galileo of Pakistan? Interview with Professor Sher Ali
professor sher ali. photo by ehtesham hassan. Introduction In October 2023, a rather bizarre piece of news from Pakistan made the national and international news: a professor was forced by the clerics...
View ArticleEscaping Ideology with Jonathan Church: Freethinker editor Daniel James Sharp...
Freethinker editor Daniel James Sharp recently spoke to Jonathan Church, host of Merion West’s ‘Escaping Ideology’ podcast (and Freethinker contributor), about the magazine and its history, freethought...
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Image of the week: first edition of ‘The Satanic Verses’
first edition of The Satanic verses, in honour of international blasphemy day. Read more here.A little late to the party, perhaps, but to celebrate International Blasphemy Day (30 September), I thought...
View ArticleMy punk rock cancellation
As both a participant and observer, I’ve seen the underground punk scene increasingly succumb to identity politics and cancel culture at the expense of free thought and expression. But when you find...
View ArticleWhat’s Happened to Free Speech? Musings of a Troubled Freethinker
This is almost certainly the first and last time the words of George Galloway will be repeated in this magazine, but freethought and free speech are surely ‘two cheeks of the same arse’. Chapman Cohen...
View ArticleThe return of non-crime hate incidents: tyranny back on the march
According to a recent article published in The Times, children as young as nine have been investigated by police for non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs). A freedom of information request revealed that a...
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Kant vs Tahir Ali: why desecration should not be outlawed
As readers of the Freethinker are likely aware, MP Tahir Ali recently advocated in Parliament for legislation prohibiting ‘the desecration of religious texts and the prophets of the Abrahamic...
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Year in review: 2024
Both the world at large and the Freethinker itself have been through some pretty big changes this past year. We’ll get to the world soon, but the Freethinker saw a change of editor in April when I took...
View ArticleCharlie Hebdo: An open letter to the free world from a freethinker
The phrase ‘Je suis Charlie’ (‘I am Charlie’) came to symbolise support for free speech and the free press, as well as to show solidarity with the victims of Islamist terrorism, in the wake of the...
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The Freethinker: Some History and Themes (With a Dundonian Addendum)
Editor’s IntroductionOn 10 February 2025, I spoke to the Dundee Humanist Group about some of the history and themes of the Freethinker. Especially for the event, I looked through our historical archive...
View ArticleIs Democracy Overrated? The Vacuity of Curtis Yarvin and His ‘Dark Elves’
In his seminal work, the renowned 20th-century economist John Maynard Keynes wrote: ‘Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few...
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