The New York Times religion reporter Mark Oppenheimer did a big piece yesterday on ex-Muslims at Women in Secularism 3. 

Anyone leaving a close-knit belief-based community risks parental disappointment, rejection by friends and relatives, and charges of self-loathing. The process can be especially difficult and isolating for women who have grown up Muslim, who are sometimes accused of trying to assimilate into a Western culture that despises them.

“It was incredibly painful,” Heina Dadabhoy, 26, said during a discussion called “Women Leaving Religion,” which also featured three former Christians and one formerly observant Jew, the novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. “My entire life, my identity, was being a good Muslim woman.”

That was a great panel – it was a … Read the rest

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Still working hard to build ties with the secular community…or something…

Matt Penfold @mattpenfold_uk 1h

@secularcouncil Of the 7 “issues” on your website only one is not about the US. Does only the US matter ? And do you know what global means?

Secular Council @SecularCouncil

We think we know what global means, @mattpenfold_UK: Our resource breadth. You’re right, though; our home base and starting focus is the US.

Ophelia Benson @OpheliaBenson

Your what? What does “resource breadth” mean? A Global Council is one that acts globally.

Secular Council @SecularCouncil

@mattpenfold_UK And we will, my dear @OpheliaBenson, we will! The Tweeters can’t stop us.

So much for the beloved “secular community” eh – if we … Read the rest

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Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti is back, after almost ten years.

The last time I was at the Birmingham Rep, I was advised by West Midlands police to leave the building. Protests against my play Behzti (Dishonour) were becoming increasingly heated and I was told I was in danger. I arrived home in London, and hours later a police officer called to inform me of a threat to abduct and murder me. I laughed in disbelief. He didn’t laugh; he told me to get out of my flat.

The next day, after a huge demonstration outside the theatre, the Rep pulled the play. I was devastated. As the author I felt strongly that I had placed myself in the

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I was going to move on today, so as not to be a big mean ol’ bully to the Global Secular Council, but then I read yet another of its Twitter responses to me and found that moving on would not be possible.

It was alternating between rebuking me for judging them “by the color of their skin” and saying they are working hard on diversity. Well that’s unclear. What do they mean by “working hard on diversity” if it has nothing to do with “the color of their skin”? “Diversity” is simply a (very stale by now) buzzword used for the purpose of avoiding the mention of race (aka “skin color”) or sex or national origin etc etc. … Read the rest

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PZ takes a look at the Global Secular Council Debut and compares how that’s being run to how he and Ed thought about Freethought Blogs when they were setting it up.

Will they be effective? I looked at their Issues page, and it’s rather high-mindedly vague. For instance, one issue isInternational Human Rights. I’m glad they’re for ‘em, but after a scant 3 paragraphs that consist of platitudes, they present their summary:

POLICY RECOMMENDATION: The U.S. government should apply political pressure whenever possible to countries violating their international human rights obligations.

So, the Global Secular Council’s advice is that the US should do something about it?

I had to stop and laugh for about 3 minutes. I’m so … Read the rest

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Originally a comment on To I, to she, to he, to they

So, quite aside from anything else here (and FTR, I completely agree with you about this org): I’m sick of ‘ideological’ being a dirty word. Having a coherent, connected set of principles that inform how you think is not a bad thing. Having words and concepts and ways of understanding based on them that frame your politics at large is a good thing.

What’s clearer to me by the day (and one of the reasons my blog’s called Godlessness in Theory) is that the limp, illiterate brand of skepticism proffered by many of the GSC’s people, which prides itself on being ‘rational’ and ‘evidence-based’ at the loss … Read the rest

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This is the music Lauren played 3 minutes before each talk or panel was scheduled to start, as a signal to everyone to come in and sit down and be quiet.

Schoolhouse Rock: Women’s Suffrage Movement

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFOieRHRzh8… Read the rest

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They’re adding stuff, the Top of Their Field geniuses at The Global Secular Council. We get to watch them add stuff.

They’ve added a page for something called The Bella & Stella Foundation, which has a link at the bottom of the Team page. It’s some sweet whimsy-whamsy so that we’ll know they don’t take themselves too seriously. (Right, because a few US/UK white guys declaring themselves a Global Council has no trace of taking themselves too seriously.)

These two furry heathens do not suffer fools lightly, as they are both staunch proponents of the separation of church and state. When lounging in direct sunlight, they have a propensity for summoning the unwitting to their soft stomachs. A

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Also…

Here’s how the left margin of their Twitter account looks.

Oh really? My and our resource center for international policy? Really?

What makes it that? Who says it’s that? How can it possibly be that?

There’s not a trace of internationalism in their lineup. Not a whiff. There’s not one person who’s not pale, when internationally and globally, a lot more people are not pale than are pale. This joke of a “Global” council looks as if some twenty or thirty conceited Yanks and Brits have gotten together to reinvent the East India Company. I suppose Shermer wants to play the John Stuart Mill part, since Mill used to take his trousers off every day when he got to … Read the rest

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Oh I see the “Global” Secular Council (populated exclusively by Anglophones from the US and the UK plus one Swedish guy) has a Twitter account. I just replied to its “We’re live!” tweet by asking what makes them “Global”. I don’t suppose they’ll reply but I would really like to know.

But also interesting is that in that tweet they included the original of the front page masthead photo that we’ve been talking about. It’s different, and different in an interesting way.

See there? On the opposite end from the Shermer-Rogers end, there’s Bill Nye – but apparently they like the Shermer grab so much that they feel it’s worth the price of not showing Bill Nye on the masthead. … Read the rest

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Lots of people are talking about Laura Hudson’s article in Wired on how to curb online abuse. I liked this bit in particular:

Really, freedom of speech is beside the point. Facebook and Twitter want to be the locus of communities, but they seem to blanch at the notion that such communities would want to enforce norms—which, of course, are defined by shared values rather than by the outer limits of the law. Social networks could take a strong and meaningful stand against harassment simply by applying the same sort of standards in their online spaces that we already apply in our public and professional lives. That’s not a radical step; indeed, it’s literally a normal one. Wishing rape

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Right Wing Watch tells us how the American Center for Law and Justice – which was founded by Pat Robertson to be the opposite of the ACLU – likes religious freedom in the dear US but not so much outside that cozy god-loving gun-toting country.

Both the European Center for Law and Justice (ECLJ) and the Slavic Center for Law and Justice (SCLJ) affiliates voiced support for Russia’s 2013 gag order on gay-rights advocacy. In addition, following the 2012 Pussy Riot protest, the SCLJ called for a law criminalizing religious blasphemy. One of its leading attorneys then helped draft one proposed version of the law. 

Religious freedom for me but not for thee.

Shortly after the feminist punk band

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Author of Jesus and Mo explains why it’s a good idea to support J and M via Patreon.

Early in 2014, Jesus & Mo began to cost more money than it made. It has never made much money, as that was never the intention – but the sudden increase in the number and intensity of attacks on the website meant that, without financial help, Jesus & Mo would no longer be a viable enterprise. I love making the comic, but I am not willing to pay $250 plus per month just for the privilege of showing it to the world!

The high cost of hosting is largely down to the advanced Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection which is

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The Catholic church’s rules on abortion, mandated by US bishops via the ERD (Ethical and Religious Directives) are so twisted and vile that even people who are reporting on them can get them wrong.

This from an article on the church takeover of healthcare institutions in Washington state:

Sheila Reynertson, advocacy coordinator at MergerWatch, which tracks hospital mergers, called the rapid expansion of Catholic-sponsored or -affiliated health care systems in our state an anomaly. A MergerWatch/ACLU study found that in 2011, one in nine acute-care hospital beds across the country had a Catholic affiliation. At the same time in Washington state, 28 percent of acute-care hospital beds were Catholic. That study is based on the most recent information released

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This is something I was unaware of. There are some things it’s good to be unaware of. I became aware of this example because of a random headline that made me curious. The thing I was unaware of is “coyote ugly.” Urban dictionary explains:

1. coyote ugly A situation encountered after a night of consuming alcohol whereby a person, usually male, wakes the next morning in a strange bed with a sexual partner from the previous evening who is completely physically undesirable (see ugly, nasty, two bagger) and sleeping on the man’s arm. The hapless male would rather gnaw off his own arm than wake the woman and have to face the ills of his intoxicated choices the previous

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I see Nicholas Wade has a new book out. I reviewed a book of his, The Faith Instinct, for Free Inquiry in 2010; I disliked it quite a lot. It was full of windy speculation about the putative evolutionary advantages of religion, which I had zero confidence in because he’s a journalist rather than a biologist and also because his speculation was so speculative. Also his claim didn’t even make much sense – the idea was that religion is good for group cohesion, so people who do religion have an advantage so they win all the wars. Huh. Really? What about the way group cohesion can lead to fights with those outside the group? Maybe they’d all have been … Read the rest

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The more I look at that picture, the more I’m just…amazed and repulsed.

This isn’t at a party, or even a banquet or a reception. It’s for a group photo of Very Important People in the Global Secular Conference; it’s for the home page, the front page, of this Important new organization. Six adults and one frat boy. Yeesh.… Read the rest

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