I often wonder why there are so few women mixing it up on atheist sites or running atheist and related sites themselves. Are they all too busy working the double shift, or what?

I thought of one possible reason today, and that is that (to my ever-renewed surprise) lots of men still think it’s hip and funny to be sexist. Then if a woman says it’s not, a lot of them think it’s hip and funny to be sexist some more by way of reply. Then the woman decides she doesn’t want any more of this crap, so she stops visiting the site in question – and it becomes even more of a boys’ club than it already was.

That’s … Read the rest

And of course now that the news is out, clerics are talking disgusting nonsense about Kambaksh and what he did.

Maulavi Hanif Shah Hosseini, a prominent mullah, declared: “Kambaksh committed a crime against the Koran and the people who conspired so that he escaped the law have also committed a crime. All the decisions to help this man who disrespected Islam are coming from the foreigners…We are going to call for a gathering of the ulama to decide what to do…[A]ny trouble will be the fault of people who helped Kambaksh.”

A crime against the Koran – that’s an interesting notion of a possible crime, right there. It presumably means something like ‘disagreeing with some tenet of Islam as … Read the rest

Well at least Sayed Pervez Kambaksh is free and safely out of Afghanistan. It’s too bad the women of Afghanistan have to stay behind, but it’s good that Kambaksh is out, all the same.

Mr Kambaksh was moved from his cell in Kabul’s main prison a fortnight ago and kept at a secure location for a few days before being flown out of the country. Prior to his departure, he spoke of how his relief was mixed with deep regret at knowing he was unlikely to see his family or country again…Hardline Islamists, including a number of political figures close to the government of President Karzai, have repeatedly called for Mr Kambaksh’s execution and were fiercely critical when an appeal