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 views or beliefs differing from their own.”

The AHS welcome this statement as a the start of a sensible approach to free speech for our members at South Bank. AHS President Rory Fenton said, “ Again and again our members are censored and then apologised to. Apologies are all very well but it would be better if these incidents never occurred. The appropriate response to being offended is to engage in debate, not censorship.”

Wouldn’t it be nice if all the Student Unions could finally get that straight?

(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

(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

(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 a publisher’s daughter, I particularly wince at the knowledge that the existing books (unless they are bought out quickly by people intrigued by all the brouhaha) will be pulped. But I do not blame Penguin Books, India. Other publishers have just quietly withdrawn other books without making the effort that Penguin made to save this book. Penguin, India, took this book on knowing that it would stir anger in the Hindutva ranks, and they defended it in the courts for four years, both as a civil and as a criminal suit.
They were finally defeated by the true villain of this piece—the Indian law that makes it a criminal rather than civil offense to publish a book that offends any Hindu, a law that jeopardizes the physical safety of any publisher, no matter how ludicrous the accusation brought against a book. An example at random, from the lawsuit in question:

That YOU NOTICEE has hurt the religious feelings of millions of Hindus by declaring that Ramayana is a fiction. “Placing the Ramayan in its historical contexts demonstrates that it is a work of fiction, created by human authors, who lived at various times……….” (P.662) This breaches section 295A of the Indian Penal Code (IPC).

Finally, I am glad that, in the age of the Internet, it is no longer possible to suppress a book. The Hindus is available on Kindle; and if legal means of publication fail, the Internet has other ways of keeping books in circulation. People in India will always be able to read books of all sorts, including some that may offend some Hindus.

(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 where the BORI is located sought the help of Interpol in arresting and extraditing James Laine. Other scholars of mythology such as Wendy Doniger and Paul Courtright are the object of threats and worse. ‘Vedic’ science and mathematics are introduced into the public school curriculum and history textbooks are altered without the consent of their authors, as the articles by Meera Nanda and Latha Menon for Butterflies and Wheels tell us. The war against research, inquiry, secularism, independent thought, scholarship and rationality goes on and indeed intensifies. It is a trend that needs watching.

Shikha Dalmia writes about the new instantiation:

The Indian blogosphere is up in arms today against Penguin’s decision to withdraw University of Chicago Divinity School Professor Wendy Doniger’s 2009 The Hindus: An Alternative History. The 700-page-plus tome offended Hindu nationalists, a scourge on humanity not quite as bad as the Ebola virus, who took exception to its description of the Shiv Lingam, a representation of God Shiva that Hindus worship, as a phallic symbol, among other things.

Folks at the Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti — the self-appointed guardians of Indian knowledge — filed a suit in 2011 demanding a ban. They charge that the book had “factual inaccuracies” and was written with “a Christian missionary’s zeal” to denigrate Hinduism and show it in a poor light.” Never mind that Doniger is not a Christian and is actually a great admirer of Hinduism, which she regards as a far more existentially profound faith than monotheistic religions. In fact, her aim in writing the book was to save Hinduism from misinterpretations of both hostile alien interlocutors and nativist Hindutva boosters.

…

But before the Indian courts could rule (and it is bad enough that they allow such suits to even go forward), Penguin not only agreed to pull the book from India but destroy all hard copies within six months.

Yet another outrage; yet another cowardly collapse.

(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 in your mind. It’s not actual feminists you’re fighting against, it’s that scary feminist in your head.

(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, no matter how much he says he didn’t interact with Mia’s children. She was on a tiny list of women who were simply off limits to him.

As I grew older—as I had teachers come on to me as a teen, as I experienced the way grown men get away with sexualizing girls—I understood the significance of what my parents told me. Today, as an adult, I know that when we make excuses for particular, powerful men who hurt women, we make the world more comfortable for all abusers. And that this cultural cognitive dissonance around sexual assault and abuse is building a safety net for perpetrators that we should all be ashamed of.

There’s another thing we do when we make excuses for particular, powerful men who hurt women, besides making things nicer for the powerful men. We also make the world less comfortable for women. We tell women – all women – that women just don’t matter as much as powerful men. We tell women that we’ll throw them overboard in order to hang on to the favors of the powerful men. Mr Big groped you? Well that’s sad for you, but shut up, because we want him to speak at our next event, and frankly we don’t give a fuck about you.

We know that abusers are manipulative, often charismatic, and that they hide their crimes well.

Well yes, and we also know that that’s why they’re powerful, that’s why they make good speakers for our events, that’s why they pull in the start-struck crowds, and that’s why we’re not going to hold them accountable. We like them and we don’t like you, their victims, so just shut up and go away, or we’ll trash you in every newspaper and blog in the land.

(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 hold debates with religious groups, which is as absurd as telling the Socialist Society to steer clear of critiquing capitalism. Despite hopes that a new academic year would bring a more reasonable union committee, the group has faced constant opposition. Since the start of their first term, they have seen their posters torn down and stamped on the day they are put up, including posters simply showing Brian Griffin, Family Guy‘s atheist talking dog. I attended a meeting last term at which their union accused them of picking on Christians for a poster stating, “We may not be able to turn water into wine but we do like wine, join us in the bar next Thursday”.

Hmm. Was Southbank University a bible college until a couple of weeks ago? That might explain it.

The ultimate irony of these attacks on free speech is that they so often only give a louder voice to their targets. The LSE Union’s attempt at censoring students’ t-shirts lead to those same students being invited onto the BBC’s Big Questions, wearing those same t-shirts. South Bank’s Atheist Society’s pasta posters are now on blogs right across the country.

Oh yes, thank you for the reminder!

Noodly appendage to you too.

(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 Chapel painting of God poking Adam. The initial justification was that the posters show Adam’s genitals but when Cloe Ansari, Southbank Atheists President, offered to censor them, they then said the problem was religious offence, because the image was based on religious art. The next day their stall had been replaced with that of another society.

What the hell is wrong with students in the UK?

AHS President Rory Fenton said, “This is beyond parody and it is not the first time one of our groups have had similar problems with Southbank University, who were last year told not to criticise religion. We are very concerned by the tendency to censor our member societies for fear of offending religious sensitivities by overly zealous union representatives. Universities need again to be reminded to recognise our members’ right to free speech: the same rights that also ensure freedom of expression for religious students, adherents to the Flying Spaghetti Monster included. Universities must recognise that their duty is to their students, not their students’ beliefs”

Southbank University Atheist Society President Cloe Ansari said, “I felt harassed and intimidated – it was not aimed at protecting other students from harm, but rather an attempt to sideline and restrict our rights; perhaps perceived as the easier option rather than standing up to the (much bigger than us) “religious societies”. Rather than included, we have been made to feel as an unwelcome minority of secularists”.

It’s grotesque.

(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 see them, they see that they are not as bad as their reputation would indicate”.

Those of us who have followed the news media’s refusal to show any illustration of Mohammed over the past decade will recall being fobbed off with soothing explanations that the climate is unsuitable, the editorial justification not strong enoughor the content too crude, to publish the images in question. Nine years after the Danish cartoons affair, the Goldilocks moment of this piece is upon us – an utterly innocuous depiction of Mohammed is at the heart of a major news story, at a time when the right to depict it is in question and a nascent school of Islamic thought is defying crude reactionary opposition in urging the media to show the cartoon. If they won’t show it now, they never will.

The Islamist propensity for violent offendedness is the national equivalent of a child’s tantrum in the cereal aisle, not an insuperable law of physics for which every allowance must always be made. It can, and must, be fixed, and if the media won’t support those undertaking this thankless task, the least it can do is admit it’s scared, and stop getting in the way.

Beautifully said.

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

Heh heh heh

H/t Lisa Ridge

(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 you were rebuking the people spreading the rumors.

So I have heard there has been DDOS attack against several social justice Atheist websites. Also I am hearing rumors that they are blaming other atheists for these attacks. It blows my mind that the first people you would point your finger at would be your fellow atheists when there are hordes of religious people out there who would like nothing more than to either convert you or ruin you. Well done kids.

Yeah, that’s someone rebuking people for spreading rumors that we are blaming other atheists for these attacks. Suuuuuuuuuure it is.

I still like some atheists. But “the community”? No. Too many assholes like that in it.

(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!

(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 of their legal obligations. And usually, it also meant HALEA taking on the ongoing school expenses on the girls’ behalf. 26 of them returned to their studies. Another 21 were given some basic computer skills and nine undertook other vocational training.

But they’re running out of money, and cutting back on what they do.

In Uganda it costs about US$440 to keep a teenager in vocational training for a year. Overall HALEA has helped 57 girls, but this year the programme is only able to support the ten girls still at school. —  CFI is concerned about this cutback, and will be happy to take donations on HALEA’s behalf for this program, or you can donate directly to the HALEA website.

Bill and Melinda – just down the hill from me – please note.

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

Deeply stupid man explains that women can’t do things like talk and give lectures in public because come on, guys, keep it real. Imagine a woman giving you a lecture. Imagine it! Are you going to listen to what she’s saying? Please! You’re not going to look at her as if she’s a wall unless you’re a wall. Amirite?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjKREDi7JG8

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