Calling all Māori Atheists

Mark Honeychurch - 19 August 2024

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I was going to attend a talk given by Sara Rahmani to the NZ Humanists in Wellington. At the talk she summarised her findings from a set of interviews she’s conducted with Māori who have been happy to talk with her about their spiritual journeys with her. Although most of these journeys have been from belief to non-belief, taking a variety of different paths to get there, she has also interviewed a few people who still hold religious or spiritual beliefs.

The information Sara has learned so far is fascinating, but she’s not finished yet. If you are Māori and would like to talk with Sara about your beliefs (or lack of them), she would love to hear from you. You can email her at sara.rahmani@vuw.ac.nz, and read more about the project here. If you want more information, there are some videos online where she talks about her research, such as this one:

In this week’s newsletter, Brian Paavo has found himself at a loose end in Honolulu and decided to pop in and say hello to the local Scientologists. I’ve looked at some over-hyped AI mobile devices, and come away from the experience very much underwhelmed. Bronwyn was side-tracked this week when I asked her about the Spiritualist Church of New Zealand Act 1924, and has dropped her original article idea to deliver a great job of drawing a thread through several layers of Spiritualist-related nonsense. And finally we have a chapter from a free booklet John Maindonald has written called “What Do the Data Say? – Traps to Avoid”, about how data and statistics can be misleading.

John is a Wellington based skeptic who has had a long and varied career working in academia, mostly around mathematics and statistics. We’re hoping to have a review of his new book, “A Practical Guide to Data Analysis Using R”, for the newsletter soon, as it has some interesting lessons for skeptics - as well as a lot of very technical information about using the R programming language for performing data analysis. In the meantime, I’ll be choosing a few of the more skeptically relevant chapters from his booklet to include in this newsletter.