In (only slightly) better news – the Southbank University Student Union has apologized to the Atheist Society for trying to make it shut up. That’s nice, but it would be much better news if Student Unions just stopped trying to make atheists shut up in the first place.

Following a meeting this morning with their Atheist Society and the AHS, South Bank University’s Student Union has issued a full apology on its website, stating “We have apologised to the Atheist Society for the actions taken and the distress that it has caused… We remind students that the appropriate response to opinions they may find offensive is to engage in healthy debate respecting the rights of others to hold

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Possibly Non-stamp Collector’s most brilliant and hilarious video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PK7P7uZFf5o… Read the rest

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Originally a comment on Humanity’s never-ending search for a synonym.

….to the point where they butcher their spelling of any word that has the letters “man,” or “men,”…

Goodneſs me! Wé ſhall not brook þeſe linguiſtic inſults! The purity of Engliſh ſpellyng ſhall not be ſullied!

SHUT DOWN THE TWITTERS, EVERYONE!

Mumble….godesdamned kyds þeſe dæġs with þeir ſpellyng…mumble…Chaucer…mumble

 … Read the rest

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Via Salil Tripathi, who shared it via PEN Delhi, Wendy Doniger’s statement on Penguin’s decision.

Statement from Wendy Doniger:

I was thrilled and moved by the great number of messages of support that I received, not merely from friends and colleagues but from people in India that I have never met, who had read and loved The Hindus, and by news and media people, all of whom expressed their outrage and sadness and their wish to help me in any way they could. I was, of course, angry and disappointed to see this happen, and I am deeply troubled by what it foretells for free speech in India in the present, and steadily worsening, political climate. And as

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

This again – Hindu nationalists going after the scholar of mythology Wendy Doniger. They’ve been doing it for years. I did an article/resource stash on Hinduists attacking scholarship and scholars such as Doniger more than ten years ago.

Ill-founded claims are the ones that get backed up with sticks, car antennas, guns, threats, petitions, calls for silencing, fatwas. There is a lot of that sort of thing around. The anger at the American scholar of mythology James Laine and his book about the Hindu king Shivaji is one example. A mob attacked and vandalized the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in January, destroying books and irreplaceable manuscripts. Scholars sat in tears among the wreckage afterward. In March the state of Maharashtra

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Heh heh. Seen on Facebook:

Avery Thompson Yeah. There’s no such thing as a “feminazi.” It’s a term coined by Rush Limbaugh to demonize feminists. So far, the only consistent (and I use that term lightly) definition I’ve seen of “feminazi” is “a feminist that I don’t like.”

Mark P Constable Ok, so what word should I use to describe an overly dominant woman that thinks anything with a penis should be placed under heel, to the point where they butcher their spelling of any word that has the letters “man,” or “men,” and think bras and tampons are on par with shackles?

Ed Brayton You should call them “unicorns,” since they also don’t exist except as a caricature

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Jessica Valenti says why it matters how we treat claims about sexual abuse.

I’ve never watched a Woody Allen movie. My parents refused to rent them after he began a “relationship” with Soon-Yi Previn and their explanation stuck with me through adulthood. I was around 13 years old at the time, and always looking to pick a fight—I asked why it mattered since Previn wasn’t his “real” daughter. My parents sat me down and talked about the responsibility adults have to children, and certain boundaries that parents and parental figures must respect.

It’s more than a little sickening how that got normalized over the past couple of decades. The guy married someone he’d been in a semi-paternal relation to, … Read the rest

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Rory Fenton, President of the National Federation of Atheist, Humanist and Secular Student Societies in the UK and Ireland, responds to the nonsense at Southbank University.

Students’ unions have a duty to protect the rights of their students, not their students’ beliefs. As President of the National Federation of Atheist, Humanist and Secular Student Societies, I’ve seen a 2013-14 academic year in which this principle has been too often forgotten. 

It’s as if there’s a nonsense pill that students have been taking.

South Bank’s Atheist Society are no stranger to hostility from their students’ union. When they were formed last year and affiliated to their union, they were accepted only on the condition that they didn’t criticise religion or

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

The Student Union at Southbank University has removed a poster removed from an AHS stall at (yes this again) a freshers’ fair, on the grounds of (yes this again) “religious offense.” The poster was of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

The SA displayed the well known image of the FSM on their pre-prepared stall the day before the freshers fair this week but when they returned to the stall the following day found that the posters had been removed. When they went to print some more to replace the missing posters they were stopped by union representatives who said that the posters had been deemed offensive and that it was the union that had removed them. The image parodied the Sistine

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Abhishek Phadnis reams the publishers and media outlets who refused to publish the Jesus and Mo cartoon that Maajid tweeted (and who talked as if they were occupying the moral high ground in the process, which made it all the more disgusting).

The media’s refusal to show the cartoon has elevated this ancient superstition into a masochistic national fetish, emboldening professional victims and censorious grievance-peddlers at the expense of inoffensive satirists. It has robbed the cartoonist of the presumption of innocence, by feeding insidiously into the notion among the uninitiated that the cartoon really must be beyond the pale if no outlet will show it. As Flemming Rose, the publisher of the Danish cartoons, lamented to Jytte Klausen, “once people 

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Heh heh heh

H/t Lisa Ridge… Read the rest

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Huh. I kind of vaguely though that “the atheist community” would be horrified by the DDOS attack on Saturday. Huh. I haven’t seen much of that. (But maybe I’ve missed it. That could be. I don’t see all the things.) I have seen some of the other thing – like for instance accusing us of blaming our “fellow atheists.”

Huh. No we haven’t. Not one person said “it was our fellow atheists who did this!”

But that’s ok, because the way to accuse people of something and not be held accountable for it is to preface your accusation with “I am hearing rumors that.” Then, for extra points, when someone points out that it’s a pack of lies, you say … Read the rest

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Sarah Moglia is doing a National Abortion Access Bowl-a-thon. (I like typing -a- things.) Her team is Coup de Twat. You can donate RIGHT HERE.

She says you don’t have to be as fancy as she is to support abortion access, so do it!… Read the rest

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Bill Cooke has an article about humanists helping pregnant teenage girls in Uganda at the CFI blog.

Since 2011 HALEA has been working with a group of girls in the local district it is based in. It began after a survey of its immediate neighborhood found 111 teenage mothers, nearly all out of school and unemployed. Religious superstitions are such in Uganda, that pregnant girls are often thrown out of the family home and suspended from school. Unemployed and homeless, they quickly become prey to unscrupulous relatives or to organised crime.

Faced with a daunting problem in their own back yard, HALEA supporters began by helping those girls willing to return to school. This often meant persuading the school authorities

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)