Secular matters

Wafa Bahri represents the Center for Inquiry at the Human Rights Council in Geneva . And she manages the Translations Project , an initiative by the Richard Dawkins Foundation to make scientific and humanist works by him and other authors available to readers as free downloads in languages, in which they have previously not been published, namely Arabic, Urdu, Farsi, and Indonesian. We talked abou...

Gynaecologist Joachim Volz is a chief physician in a hospital in Lippstadt, a town with a population just under 70 thousand, situated in Nord-Rhine-Westphalia, halfway between Cologne and Hanover. He took his employer to court because he was ordered to no longer offer abortions, a service he had been able to provide to his patients since 2012, when he had started working in the clinic. The reason:...

Andreas Gradert was the driving force behind the newly founded Humanistische Akademie Österreich . We talked about Austria's secular and humanist scene, the role the Humanist Academy is to play in Austria's education system, what Austrians believe in, why the concordat with the Vatican needs to be adapted – and why Vienna is lacking a Karl Popper museum. Links: Humanistischer Verband Österreich (H...

Andrew and I talked about how the international humanist scene has evolved in the last decade, especially by humanist organisations from the Global South joining the umbrella organisation Humanists International . We also discussed cultural differences between humanist and secular organisations from different countries and why some tend to lobby for a strict separation of the state and religious o...

Khadija writes for The Freethinker , the Daily Mail and co-hosts the A Further Inquiry Podcast . She's on Facebook , and X , Topics discussed in the podcast: BBC report on the successful appeal by Hamit Coskun against a "religiously aggravated public order offence" because he had burnt a copy of the quran outside the Turkish consulate in London to protest against the islamisation of his country of...

Marte talks about H , the 100 page magazine the publishing house of the Norwegian Humanist Association issues three times a year, and her role as an editor. And she speaks about the non-fiction-books she has published. The award-winning article BRYLLUPSNATTA (wedding night) about «Zahra», who rushes off to Paris to have her hymen surgically restored as her future husband must not know that she is...

Taha Siddiqui worked as a journalist in his home country Pakistan until the army tried to kidnap him. He is now living in exile in France. There he published his life story as a graphic novel together with the French artist Hubert Maury. I translated "Dissident Club" into German for the Alibri publishing house. In the podcast we talk about the book, Taha's upbringing in Pakistan and Saudia Arabia,...