There’s something called the atheist two-step. Maybe so, but there is also a theist four-step.

1) There is a god. 2) It is good. 3) It wants us to be good in a particular way. 4) We have reliable knowledge of 1-3.

In a way 4) can be seen as the clincher – the least likely of all and the most dangerous of all. It’s 4) that produces these bastards dropping cement blocks on the faces of teenage girls and shooting women government ministers in the head and executing ‘apostates’ and ‘blasphemers.’ If only people could be content to believe 1-3 and realize that 4) is just out of the question, and deadly as well as presumptuous – the … Read the rest

The ‘community’ trope turns up yet again and confuses the issue yet again.

Cities and towns across the northern Indian state of Punjab are shut in response to a general strike called by the Sikh community…Sikhs are demanding an apology from the leader of a religious sect who appeared in an advert dressed like one of the Sikh religion’s most important figures. Sikh community leaders say it is an insult to their religion. Last week, thousands took to the streets. One man was shot dead in clashes that followed.

How can a general strike have been called by the Sikh community? What does that mean? What are we meant to understand by it? It’s annoying because it makes the report … Read the rest

So petty tyrannical spiteful controlling interfering clerics get their way and yet another woman is prevented from working, living her life, having ordinary grown-up interactions, having fun, expressing joy and exuberance. The world is made just a little safer for narrowness and deprivation and general nothingness.

Pakistan’s Minister of Tourism has handed in her resignation after coming under criticism from a hardline Islamist cleric for hugging her parachute instructor after completing a jump in France, an official said on Tuesday. Nilofar Bakhtiar, one of three women ministers in the Pakistani cabinet, made the parachute jump in March to raise money for victims of an earthquake that killed 73,000 people in Pakistan in October 2005. Shortly afterwards, Pakistani newspapers published a

Look –

The new Free Inquiry.… Read the rest

Twelve-year-old girls are treated like dirt, and so are eighty-five-year-old women.

India alone has almost 40 million widows. Traditionally Hinduism frowns on widows remarrying and many have their social and economic power eroded too…Vrindavan is a pilgrimage town now home to thousands of destitute widows. Ashtabala Mundo is one of thousands of widows who have been driven by poverty to the holy town. She was married off when she was still a baby and widowed when she was still a child. “We have to come and sing here morning, noon and night and for all that I only get is $10 a month,” she said. “By the time I’ve paid the rent, I can’t afford to buy cooking oil.

Young people are so spoiled these days. They just want to fritter away all their time in school when they could be sold into slavery I mean ‘marriage’ to pay off their fathers’ gambling debts. Why, when I was growing up, four year old girls were sold so their fathers could buy an ice cream cone, and they were thankful for the opportunity. Kids are so selfish now.

Shabana, a pretty Afghan teenager with a modern haircut, was 12 years old when she was forced to marry a man 38 years her senior to settle her father’s 600-dollar gambling debt. Two years later, she is unhappy and angry. She doesn’t like her husband, 52-year-old farmer Mohammad Asef. “He is

And another thing. If we think that we can justify the belief that our senses are a reliable guide to reality by appealing to our belief that God exists because a good God would not allow us systematically to be deceived – then what about the rest? If a good God would not allow us systematically to be deceived, why would a good God allow us to have such incomplete senses? Why would a good God not arrange for us to have exhaustive senses, that sense everything that can be sensed? Why are there senses that we don’t have? Why are the senses that we do have so limited? Why are there senses that animals have that we don’t have? … Read the rest