This creeps me out.

[Description: it’s a drawing or cartoon at the top of the Twitter account Four Horsemen of the Anti-Apocalypse, with Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and Hitchens striding in line, based on the familiar image of the Beatles striding across Abbey Road.]

Why is it so creepy?

The worship, the fandom, the adulation, the drastic limitation of horizons.… Read the rest

There’s a lot to be disgusted at in Richard Carrier’s inaccurate, patronizing, mental-illness-attributing post about me, but I’ll spare us all and just address one ridiculous assertion.

No one here called for her to depart. She chose to on her own. We all maintain many disagreements with each other at FreethoughBlogs, and criticize each other often, without this result. It appears Benson didn’t think colleagues should publicly criticize each other, particularly in ways she saw as paranoid for some reason. I hope at least she enjoys less stress in her new home.

That’s grotesque. This was not just “disagreement” and it was not just “criticism” – it was vehement moral condemnation and shunning, aided by much misrepresentation.

That is … Read the rest

Another piece of good news, to go with Malala’s spectacular exam results – India has renewed Taslima’s visa again. She was very worried about it.

They should make it long-term or permanent though.

Exiled Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasreen’s visa was extended by a year on Friday, a home ministry official said.

“Taslima Nasreen’s visa has been extended for one more year from the very date it was due to expire,” a ministry official said.

Exiled from Bangladesh in 1994 for “hurting religious sentiments” with her novel ‘Lajja’, Nasreen took refuge in Kolkata in 2004. Since then, she has been getting Indian visa on a continuous basis.

No, not continuous – she never knows it’s going to be renewed. It’s … Read the rest

Meanwhile Dawkins is still at it, generously calling people stupid on the basis of nothing in particular. I forget if I mentioned that he did that in the onstage interview he did at CFI’s conference in June. He referred to someone or some group as an idiot or idiots. I flinched, I scowled, I wished he would stop doing that. But he hasn’t.

Today it was a girl of 16 – one who did a colossally wrong and bad thing, but stupidity isn’t the only explanation for teenagers who do colossally wrong and bad things.

Richard Dawkins ‏@RichardDawkins 14 hours ago
If a girl as manifestly stupid as this gets good grades at school, is it time we examined

From the Telegraph:

A charity fun run that invited men to dress up as women is being investigated by police after a transgender charity claimed the dress code constituted a hate crime.

Officers were asked to look into the ‘Dames on the Run’ race – where men run dressed as women to raise funds for a children’s hospice – by a transsexual support group.

Chrysalis Transsexual Support Groups say the five kilometre run, organised by Derian House Children’s Hospice, in Chorley, Lancashire, is “dehumanising”.

Dehumanizing? It’s dehumanizing to wear clothes that are perceived as being for the “opposite” sex? So have I spent my entire life dehumanizing, because I hate skirts and never wear them?

Have we gone full … Read the rest

I signed this: IHEU Joint open letter to Prime Minister and President of Bangladesh.

To Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and President Abdul Hamid,

We, concerned members of the blogging and activist community of Bangladesh and internationally, along with representatives of human rights organisations and other civil society organisations and supporters, wish to protest in the strongest possible terms the institutional attack on Bangladeshi citizens who profess humanist, atheist or secularist views.

In the last two years, five bloggers (variously identifying as humanist, rationalist, atheist, and variously writing about science, humanist values, against Islamist extremism, or in favour of human rights and justice) have been murdered, hacked to death by assailants acting for fundamentalist militant groups (according to their own

So, this comment on Thinking as a value has been scratching at me all day, so I’m going to argue with it even though it will probably mean repeating things I’ve said about six times before.

Identifying as something in the gender and sexuality sense of the term is in reference to an innate gender identity and an innate sexuality that is immutable with regards to external force even if the experience of them can be internally fluid (see people who have fluid sexuality or are genderfluid).

I don’t believe in innate gender identity unless as a label for a way some people feel. I don’t believe in it as a universal description of how people relate to their own … Read the rest

Here’s an item from the Malala Fund –

I am Rita and I am from Adjokatsekope (Ada) in Ghana. My mother is a fishmonger and my father is a fisherman. We have five girls and two boys in my family. Only one other sister of mine has gone to school.

I study at the MGCubed program. Math is my favorite subject because I find it easy to understand through my new teachers on satellite! I also help my grandmother sell soap at her shop after school and on weekends. Because I have a better understanding of math from my lessons, I feel more comfortable when I am helping my grandmother at her shop.

She’s learning computer skills too.

After school

Now for some good news for a change – Malala rocked her GCSEs. 6A*s and 4As.

The 18-year-old, who now attends Edgbaston High School in Birmingham, did particularly well in the sciences, with top A* grades in biology, chemistry and physics – as well as in religious studies.

She also scored As in history, geography, English language and English literature.

English isn’t even her first language, yet she did all that.

Here’s an item from the Malala Fund on Twitter:

“Education doesn’t alienate you, it allows you to become a shining light for your community.”

Angeline Murimirwa

#WomanCrushWednesday

 … Read the rest

International Business Times reports:

Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transexual human rights are not guaranteed, nor will they be upheld in Malaysia.

Prime Minister Najib Razak said at an international Islamic moderation seminar 2015 in Bangi, Selangor that his administration will do its best to uphold human rights but only within the confines of Islam.

This is in line with the Islamic teaching of balance and moderation (wasatiyyah), he said, adding that Muslim Malaysia cannot defend the more “extreme aspect of human rights”, citing lesbian, gay, bisexual and transexual rights for example.

Of course. That’s the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam. You can have human rights but only so far as they comply with sharia. I wrote … Read the rest

Aron and Lilandra are leaving Freethought Blogs.

Aron explains that it’s not an acrimonious divorce.

We had considered moving the blog a couple years ago, but I didn’t want to do it then because that’s when FtB was under attack.  I thought it would look like we were bowing, or cowering to criticism of anyone who blogs at FtB.  I also stayed because I could use myself as an example against the absurdly stupid stereotypes people tried to pin on this group back then.  I often pointed out that, if everyone on this network is required to work in lock-step with a hive mind, as so many outsiders have alleged, then why am I still tolerated whenever I publicly

Larry Wilmore was on Fresh Air yesterday. He used to be the “senior black correspondent” for the Daily Show and now he does The Nightly Show (and Jon Stewart is gone, tragically).

I recommend listening to it, but there’s also a transcript. In one bit they played a clip of Wilmore on his show talking about the Confederate flag.

GROSS: …This is about the Confederate flag and the controversy about whether it should have been, you know, this was before it was officially taken down in Charleston, S.C. so there was still the controversy about whether it should be taken down.

WILMORE: Right.

GROSS: So here’s your take on that. It’s kind of like an editorial that you were

One of the most peculiar accusations against me in Stephanie Zvan’s long, clotted, incoherent, pointlessly cryptic list of accusations (pointlessly because she said at the very end that she was talking about me so why all the “they” and “them” in the list of accusations?) was this one –

When you see them repeatedly deride feminine-identified clothing, grooming, and verbal expressions?

The question behind all the “when you” accusations was “what’s a blogger to do” – so apparently she thinks she ought to “do” something about my putative attitude to feminine-identified clothing, grooming, and verbal expressions. Why? Why would she have a duty to “do” something about that? What business is it of hers? Who asked her? Why would she … Read the rest

Frank Gardner at the BBC takes a look at the role of women in Islamic State.

IS has big plans for Muslim women who migrate to their territory to play a key role in building the so-called caliphate.

“They want women to join them,” says Dr Katherine Brown, an expert in Islamic Studies at King’s College London.

“They see women as the corner stones of the new state and they want citizens.

“What is really interesting is that people talk of IS as being a death cult, but that is the opposite of what they are trying to create… they want to create a new state… and they very much want women to join that as part of this

Oh, Josh Duggar. You’re really not what you’ve been pretending all this time at all, are you. Nope.

In 2013, conservative reality TV star Josh Duggar—of TLC’s 19 Kids and Counting fame—was named the executive director of the Family Research Council, a conservative lobbying group in D.C. which seeks “to champion marriage and family as the foundation of civilization, the seedbed of virtue, and the wellspring of society.” During that time, he also maintained a paid account on Ashley Madison, a web site created for the express purpose of cheating on your spouse.

Well Josh Duggar thinks of marriage and family as including the daddy’s other playmates. It’s traditional.

Someone using a credit card belonging to a Joshua J.

That post in which Derrick Jensen responded to Oregon State’s no-platforming of a talk of his –

The issue was apparently that he has said cis women shouldn’t have to share “sleeping and bathing” space with males and by “males” he seems to mean trans women.

I’m a founding member of an organization called Deep Green Resistance. Given that gold standard studies show that 25 percent of all women in this culture are raped within their lifetimes, and another 19 percent fend off rape attempts, and given that many members of this organization have themselves been sexually assaulted, and given that the overwhelming majority of sexual assaults are committed by males, the women of this organization decided that when we

You read about one no-platforming and learn of another, so you read about that one and learn of another, so –

– it may be that the loop goes on forever.

I was reading Derrick Jensen’s response to his no-platforming, and found a generalized reference to another:

I’m not alone. All over the world women and their male allies routinely get blacklisted and much worse over this issue. An entire conference in the UK had to be canceled after death and rape threats against the owners of the venue–who were bystanders in this: they merely owned the venue–because one of the presenters believes that women should be allowed to have their own spaces.

So I tried Google, and found … Read the rest

The Guardian has more information on the murder of Khaled al-Asaad in Palmyra – it has the why of it. The god-loving murderers killed him because he refused to tell them where the antiquities are buried.

Asaad had been held for over a month before being murdered. Chris Doyle, director of the Council for Arab-British Understanding, said he had learned from a Syrian source that the archaeologist had been interrogated by Isis about the location of treasures from Palmyra and had been executed when he refused to cooperate.

Hell and damn. What a brave man – a lion of Syria. What a brave, hideous sacrifice.

Palmyra-based activists circulated an unverified, gruesome image on social media of Asaad’s beheaded body, tied