There are demonstrations all over Ireland right now, to protest the horrible needless cruel death of Savita Halappanavar. Jen Keane (@zenbuffy) is there. People are estimating the one outside the Dail at 2 or 3 thousand, on only five hours notice.

A selection of tweets.

Ruairí McKenna‏@ruairimck

Just back from #actiononx protest at Dail. Hope politicians are listening. NEVER AGAIN #savita

TheJournal.ie‏@thejournal_ie

Organisers says over 2,000 people have attended a sit-down protest for #Savita outside Leinster House http://jrnl.to/SVUIQC

Ellen Newman‏@SmellenNewman

#Savita refused abortion due to doctor’s religious bias. The first thing we learn in med school: religion plays no part in medical decisions

Ciarán J. Martin‏

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There’s a protest outside the Dail right now. You can follow it on Twitter via #Savita. Michael Nugent is there. He wrote a blistering post on the subject before departing.

…while Savita was dying, the Catholic church was running an immoral propaganda campaign to mislead Irish people into believing that pregnant women will always get the medical care they need in Irish hospitals.

And Irish politicians were yet again refusing to legislate for abortion to save the life of a pregnant woman. They have now repeatedly refused to do this for twenty years, since the Irish courts established this right in the X case.

We have such a law in the US, at least in the case of hospitals that … Read the rest

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Nice work, Ireland. The Bishop of Phoenix, Thomas Olmsted, must be feeling very proud of you this morning. In Ireland, hospitals damn well do what the church tells them to do, and let women die rather than terminating a miscarrying pregnancy.

Savita Halappanavar died of septicaemia at University Hospital Galway a couple of weeks ago, because she had a miscarriage and the hospital refused to abort the dying fetus.

Her husband, Praveen Halappanavar, an engineer at Boston Scientific in Galway, says she asked several times over a three-day period that the pregnancy be terminated. He says that, having been told she was miscarrying, and after one day in severe pain, Ms Halappanavar asked for a medical termination.

This was refused,

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A new low. In Melbourne rabbis are threatening victims of child sex abuse in order to intimidate them out of reporting the abuse.

During a conversation with the victim the rabbi allegedly told him reporting the abuse now would do nothing but destroy the life of the alleged sexual perpetrator and his children.

“In cases like this, that are such a long time ago … the proper approach is to let him go,” he said.

Other shocking suggestions made by the rabbi included:

TELLING the victim he had invited the abuse because he wasn’t religious enough

SAYING children as young as five were abused because they were obsessed with sex, including with animals

ADMITTING he knew about allegations of abuse

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How does Scientology get away with it, exactly?

It charges money – a lot of money – for everything it does, but it calls itself a religion (one made up by a writer of pulp science fiction) and get a religious tax exemption.

How does it manage that? Why did the IRS say “Ok, you get your tax exemption, what the hell, why not”?

You know what “auditing” does? It restores your beingness.

Wut?

That’s what it says!

The goal of auditing is to restore beingness and ability. This is  accomplished by: (1) helping individuals rid themselves of any  spiritual disabilities; (2) increasing spiritual abilities.

Beingness. Does that have any connection to the ground of all being?

Through auditing one

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Oh, this is depressing. A 2010 article by Jeff Sharlet (I was browsing him for background on “The Family” and the Ugandan kill-the-gays bill) on how Hillary Clinton moved to the right on abortion at the behest of (gag, choke) “Mother” Teresa and “The Family” at the 1994 (gag, gag) “National Prayer Breakfast.”

HC was at the 58th annual nationalprayerbreakfast in 2010, and there she got nostalgic about the late Albanian nun.

In  her address,  Clinton sentimentally recalled meeting Mother Teresa at the 1994  National Prayer Breakfast. Mother Teresa had used her platform as guest  speaker to chastise the Clintons (standing right beside her, smiles  stretched to the breaking point) for their nominal support of abortion  rights. “Any country

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There’s a conversation (or a thread) at Christianity Today about the Ugandan anti-gay bill that its sponsors say will pass in time for Christmas, jingle jingle jingle. I just want to look at one comment because it’s such a pure example of how not to think about such things. It’s not at all surprising; don’t go expecting anything like that; it’s just that it’s usefully pure.

I do not advocate killing homosexuals. I think Uganda is on the wrong track here. But I also do not believe that we should glorify a behavior that God has clearly condemned. Sin is sin. Sin is rebellion against God. You cannot be a Christian and live a holy life unless you repent and

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Salman Hameed tells us more about that girls’ school in Lahore that was torched by an angry mob because a teacher accidentally photocopied the wrong page of the Koran for an exam. It’s heartbreaking.

He starts with Umair Asim and his passion for astronomy.

But what truly lights up Asim is his passion for public education. During the International Year of Astronomy (IYA) in 2009, Asim helped lead and organise numerous public observations in Lahore as well as in government schools in smaller cities and towns in Punjab. Wherever he went, he would bring his telescope with him. During IYA, it was a common sight to see Asim standing in front of an audience of 500, first explaining to them

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Via Tarek Fatah…

Life on the metro in Cairo.

Two niqab-wearing women assaulted and forcefully cut the hair of a Christian woman on the metro Sunday, the third such reported incident in two months, raising fears of a growing vigilante movement to punish Egyptian women for not wearing the veil in public.

The Egyptian Organization for Human Rights said in a statement that the assaulters called the Christian woman, who is 28 years old, an “infidel” and pushed her off the train, breaking her arm.

Well isn’t that pleasant. You’re on the train, minding your own business, and a couple of women in bags chop your hair off, call you an infidel, and break your arm in the … Read the rest

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The Vatican, shaken to its core by the shocking US elections in which three states voted for legalizing same-sex marriage and no states voted against it, has raced to reiterate its own stupid insistence on the obvious and the wrong.

“In western countries there is a widespread tendency to modify the classic vision of marriage between a man and woman, or rather to try to give it up, erasing its specific and privileged legal recognition compared to other forms of union,” said Father Federico Lombardi.

“It is a question of admitting that a husband and a wife are publicly recognized as such, and that children who come into the world can know, and say they have, a father and a

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Are any of you good at Wikipedia stuff? I ask because Leo Igwe’s entry could do with expansion. I would do it but I’ve never taken the time to learn the many baroque rules there, so I’d be sure to do something terribly wrong.

Leo was appointed a research fellow at JREF a few days ago. That’s very good – the more support Leo gets, the better!

I just published his tribute to Paul Kurtz at ur-B&W.… Read the rest

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Late yesterday afternoon my time people in Australia were calling for a royal commission to look into the Catholic church’s coverup of child rape by priests. This morning my time I learn that Gillard has already announced such a commission – though not confined to the Catholic church.

Hmm. Why not confined to the Catholic church? Well because the Catholic church doesn’t want it to be confined to the Catholic church.

Opposition Leader Tony Abbott said earlier today he’d support a “wide-ranging” commission that didn’t focus solely on the Catholic Church.

“Any investigation should not be limited to the examination of any one institution,” Mr Abbott, a high-profile Catholic, said in a statement.

“It must include all organisations, government and

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Detective Chief Inspector Peter Fox explains what the abuse was really like.

A sample from the transcript:

TONY JONES: As we’ve heard, the scale of this abuse in Newcastle-Maitland Diocese over many years is truly shocking. It’s astonishing in fact. 400 victims, 14 clergy charged (inaudible), six Catholic teachers convicted, three priests currently on trial. How does this much evil get concentrated in one small area?

PETER FOX: I don’t think it takes a detective chief inspector to work that out, Tony. Alarm bells were ringing there for me many, many years ago, so much so that I actually detailed a number of reports to hierarchy within the Police Department to launch fuller investigations.

It was quite evident that

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Zach Alexander has a very thoughtful review, or review-essay, on Chris Stedman’s book. He admires much of it, but also dissents strongly from part of the argument.

The most obvious problem is that even as Chris extolls the virtues of religious pluralism, he delivers an anti-pluralist message to his fellow atheists. Not content to merely do his own work, inviting like-minded people to join him, he expects the entire herd of cats to conform to his particular temperament and interests. Rather than increasing the breadth of the movement with his unique voice, he wishes to narrow it.

Second, even as he preaches respect, he casts aspersions on the so-called New Atheism, calling it “toxic, misdirected, and wasteful” (14). This

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So after Obama was re-elected the other day, naturally lots of people took to Twitter to call him a nigger. I mean what else do you do when you’re pissed off? Nothing, right? Because there is nothing else. There’s only whatever epithet fits the crime.

Ricky Catanzaro plays football for Xaverian High School, a private Catholic prep school in Brooklyn, NY. Students who play sports there must sign an athlete’s contract that stipulates a promise “to be a worthy representative of my teammates and coaches, abiding by school and community expectations.”

The day after the election he tweeted, “No nigger should lead this country!!! #Romney” His Twitter timeline (since removed) revealed that “nigger” is a word he regularly

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Stories. I was thinking about stories, earlier. Stories, narrative, interpretation, explanation; and science, evidence, testing. I forget what started the train of thought, but it was about the way stories give us explanations of why people do things that are peculiarly satisfying, and that science can be irritating when it tells us a story is wrong.

The thing about stories is that they give us permission to make unquestionable claims about what people think, and what their motivations are. We can’t do that in real life, you know. If we’re sharing a bit of gossip about Eleanora or Archibald, we don’t tell it the way a storyteller does. We narrate facts or reports, what we’ve seen or what others say … Read the rest

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Deborah Hyde is at Skepticon.

On Sunday morning, I will be talking to a crowd of American atheists about belief in werewolves in post-Reformation Europe. My subject is usually consumed enthusiastically by atheists, because they find vampires and witches no sillier than angels and, in any case, studying these things leads to insights into what makes us human.

As a story, the idea of the werewolf is really very good. So are the ideas of vampires and witches. The trouble is just that stories bleed into what we take to be real, and in the case of things like witches that can have terrible results.

If the tweets are any guide, James Croft killed it at Skepticon earlier … Read the rest

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It makes my head hurt. Bringing more women into leadership roles so that they can force women into more submissive roles. No not Sarah Palin, no not Michelle Bachmann – the women in the Muslim Brotherhood.

The rise of the Muslim Brotherhood to power in Egypt has brought with it a new  group of female politicians who say they are determined to bring more women into  leadership roles — and at the same time want to consecrate a deeply conservative Islamic vision for women in Egypt.

But if they are determined to bring more women into  leadership roles then why do they want to consecrate a deeply conservative  Islamic vision for women?

Really, people, those two things do not … Read the rest

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It’s Malala day today. It’s global.

People around the world are expected to hold vigils and demonstrations honoring Malala and calling for the 32 million girls worldwide who are denied education to be allowed to go to school.

Pakistani prime minister Raja Pervez Ashraf saluted Malala’s courage and urged his countrymen to stand against the extremist mindset that led to her attack.

That’s sweet. But…when I say “global” I mean partly global. I don’t mean Malala’s own hometown, for instance. It’s not Malala day in Mingora, not openly.

But in Mingora, the threat of further Taliban reprisals casts a fearful shadow, and students at Malala’s Khushal Public School were forced to honor her in private.

“We held a special

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