Well there goes the first run of essays and articles. Thank you to Emily Speed, Alex Shaw and Alex Charlton for submitting those pieces. There are more on the way, but don’t hesitate to submit anything you think should be up here to youngfreethought@googlemail.com . The age at which submissions are received has been changed from 16-21, to simply under 21. This is because I received an essay from a writer slightly younger than 16, and it occurred to me that, if the piece is rational and articulate, it doesn’t matter what the age of the writer is. Of course, we still are here to publish the works of young people, so the 21 year roof remains – sorry!
The original existence of a minimum age was a manifestation of one dreadful fallacy, first brought to my attention in Richard Dawkins’ heroic epic of evolutionary biology – The Ancestor's Tale. The fallacy in question is ‘Essentialism’. In the sense used here, it essentially (ha!) means placing objects, people and pretty much anything really, into nice little categories for our own convenience. For instance, one species does not instantaneously give birth to another. No Homo heidelbergensis suddenly gave birth to a Homo sapiens; the change was gradual, with each individual capable of breeding with the generation preceding and succeeding it. To use a modern example, the legal driving age here in the UK is 17. It would be nonsense to assert that a 16 year and 364 day old person would be any less capable of driving than someone who is exactly 17 years old. In the same way, a 15 or even 14 year old might well be capable of writing an article worthy of publication. In the driving example, such categories are needed for legal reasons, but on this site, no such barriers are necessary.
In other news, some of you may have noticed that our domain has changed. You can still find us at the blogspot address, but the snazzy new address is youngfreethought.com. The twitter site has been running well, thanks to tweets from The Freethinker, New Humanist, Richard Dawkins.net and the Out Campaign. If you use twitter and would like to follow us, the address is @yfthought. Don’t forget the facebook page either; it has a handy discussion section.
I hope that the young freethinkers whose work has been published have gained something from it, as well as other young, and older, people who read, or are yet to read, it. Let's keep this up!
P.S: It appears that the last essay, submitted by Alex Charlton, had the option to comment disabled. This was not intentional and is now fixed. Please read the article and feel free to comment.
2 comments:
May I also point out that for some reason it's not possible to paste into comments either. This discourages people from, e.g., referencing a URL. I did try to comment the other day but gave up because of it. You might want to have a look at that.
Can I ask what browser you're using? It works fine in Internet Explorer 7.
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