From Maryam Namazie and Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain and One Law for All:
Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain and One Law for All are calling on everyone to join the Day of Agreement.

It’s quite easy to do.
On 10 October, upload the day’s logo as your avatar on social media, Tweet #dayofagreement or try it with your colleagues, family and friends.

You can also join our five minute flash-mob at 12 noon in central London. (Email for more details).

Just remember, you can’t disagree with anyone – your colleagues, spouse, lover(s), mates, neighbours, children, bosses, or even politicians…

You are not allowed to dissent, ‘offend’ or question.

And before anyone gets too excited, they have to remember that … Read the rest

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An unpleasant little story from India.

…a 12-year-old boy was allegedly chained by authorities of a local madrassa to prevent him from escaping from the school.

According to Medak town police, the boy has been studying in ‘Minhaj-ul-uloom’ religious school for the past three years and had earlier made several attempts to run away from the madrassa, as he was not a quick learner and had a stammering problem.

The police said that the madrassa management had chained the boy a few days ago to prevent him from escaping.

To prevent him from “escaping” – as if he were somehow legally obliged to be there.

“There is no compulsion in religion.” Oh really?… Read the rest

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It’s interesting to see the Washington Post columnist Sally Quinn unabashedly announcing that theism is part of citizenship in the US.

This is a religious country. Part of claiming your citizenship is claiming a belief in God, even if you are not Christian. We’ve got the Creator in our Declaration of Independence. We’ve got “In God We Trust” on our coins. We’ve got “one nation under God” in our Pledge of Allegiance. And we say prayers in the Senate and the House of Representatives to God.

Excuse me. I am a citizen. I don’t have to claim anything (and neither does any other citizen), and I certainly don’t have to claim a belief in god. Nobody has to. Nor does … Read the rest

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Have you read the Leiter and Weisberg review of Thomas Nagel’s book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False? It’s pretty entertaining.

First there’s theoretical reductionism: it’s all physics. Nobody thinks that, so it’s silly to bother with it. Second there’s naturalism: what there is is what there is. (That’s my version. Theirs is the proper one.) Lots think that, so what’s Nagel’s problem with it? Well he reads “widely in the literature that explains contemporary science to the nonspecialist” and he notices that science often contradicts common sense.

This style of argument does not, alas, have a promising history. After all, what could be more common-sensical, obvious or evident than

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Adam Lee has an article in Salon about Divisiveness Among Teh Atheists and what a good thing it is. (No, he doesn’t say anything about “bitchy infighting” or the Judean People’s Front.)

The animating idea behind Atheism+ is that atheism isn’t a stopping point, but a beginning. We’re atheists not because we want to gather and engage in collective back-slapping, not because we want to chortle at the foolishness of benighted believers, but because we care about creating a world that’s more just, more peaceful, more enlightened, and we see organized religion as standing in the way of this goal. We consider politically engaged atheism an effective way to demolish this obstacle, to refute the beliefs that have so often

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Well great. No need to worry about all the poor sad tragic parents in Germany frustrated in their desire to snip off the end of their infant boy’s penis. They can haz circumcision. Yay!

The Cologne court ruling in June outraged Germany’s Muslims and Jews, and triggered an anguished national debate, by stating that ritual circumcision of under-aged boys amounted to “bodily harm” and parents should wait for their son to make his own decision.

Omigod I know, right? Wait for their son to make his own decision! How crazy is that?! If they wait, he’ll decide no! And that won’t do, because. So obviously they absolutely have to do it when he’s too small and altricial to refuse. … Read the rest

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An Egyptian women’s rights activist, Dalia Ziada, gave a talk at Tufts a couple of days ago and said what we already know: that the revolution is not an egalitarian revolution, and is taking away women’s rights as opposed to expanding them.

The pro-democracy figure warns that the heady optimism that infused Cairo’s Tahrir Square last year is being slowly replaced by fear that the very political forces that helped sweep long-serving Hosni Mubarak from power are remaking Egyptian society into a rigid, religiously intolerant, patriarchal system.

“What’s happening now is the Muslim Brotherhood is coercing everything,” she said, referring to the once-banned conservative Islamic political group that now dominates Egypt’s parliament and the presidency. “What I fear is

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What one can expect when right-wing theocrats get power – arrests and prosecutions for “blasphemy” because of a Facebook page. Yes really – a Facebook page.

A man was arrested last week in Evia, Greece, on charges of posting “malicious blasphemy and religious insult on the known social networking site, Facebook” according to a press release by the Greek police.

The accused, whose identity has not been made public, had created and managed the Facebook page Elder Pastitsios the Pastafarian…

Paisios, who died in 1994, is well-known in Greece for his spiritual teachings. There have been dozens of books published about him and his prophecies, including such topics as the end of the world, the upbringing

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There’s a new Jesus and Mo book!

And it has a foreword by Richard Dawkins, which RD has posted at RDF.

…if I had to award the Palme d’Orfor the most original and wittiest of all (amid stiff competition from such gems as Brian Dalton’s Mr Deity and the songs of Roy Zimmerman) I would have to nominate an unassuming strip cartoon from my home country: Jesus and Mo.

Folie à Dieu is the latest in a marvellous series of collections of Jesus and Mo cartoons. Every intelligent observer of contemporary disputation will enjoy it. The central protagonists, Jesus and Mo themselves, are drawn with such disarming affection, it would be hard to take offence – even given the

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I’ve seen some strange exclamations about the “hunting down” of Justin Vacula, from a couple of people not…what shall I call it…not paid-up members of the Slime Institute. Exclamations that “vengeance is haunting Salem” and it really really was “a witch hunt” and the hunters (or is it witches?) are “vicious, hateful ideologues.”

But there’s a problem there, given the non-membership. The problem is that the people in question have never said a word about the much more sustained, much more vengeful, much more vicious, much more hateful, much more ideological “hunting down” of for instance Rebecca Watson. Or Surly Amy. Or (not to put too fine a point on it) me. Not a word. On the contrary, they have … Read the rest

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