Maryam responds to Warwick Student Union’s deceptive ass-covering statement yesterday.

Warwick Student Union (SU) has officially responded to the uproar surrounding their decision to refuse the Warwick Atheists, Secularists and Humanists’ Society (WASH) request to have me as a speaker in October.  They deceptively imply that the uproar over their denial is premature as a “final” decision has not been made.

And so the white wash begins.

We already know why that’s deceptive and a whitewash (aka ass-covering). The SU told ASH No, weeks ago. Just No, not No pro tem, not No until we reconsider, just No.

ASH appealed the decision.

The SU ignored the appeal.

ASH asked the SU to respond.

The SU did not respond.

ASH told … Read the rest

What is Abdullahi Ahmed An-Naim’s view of Sharia? A piece by Cem Say from 2006 explores the subject.

Islamic law, the Sharia, has a bad reputation – especially in the West, but also among many secular Muslims. It stands for the oppression of women, contempt for human rights, and backwardness. Abdullah An-Naim, Professor of Law at Emory University in Atlanta, USA and anything but a fundamentalist, understands the concept of Sharia quite differently. Sharia, he says, is positive and has a future.

According to An-Naim, the legal doctrines of the Sharia in their original form, which go back to the seventh century, are simply incompatible with the realities of life in the 21st century.

Yes. So then why hang … Read the rest

There’s one compensation in all the stupid treacherous bullshit about Charlie Hebdo, and that is the discovery of new best friends. Mihir S Sharma is my new best friend for this morning. He has thoughts on The vanity of good souls: I have already stated, in this column, my reasons for thinking that the highest […]

Well this is a novel way to crap on Charlie Hebdo – fully seeing what’s wrong with all the cries of “racist!” from people who have no French and no knowledge of French culture and no willingness to listen to people who do – and coldly deciding to crap on Charlie anyway, because bafflegab. It’s Joshua […]

Denise Balkissoon at the Globe and Mail talks to Mona Eltahawy. In Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution, she dismantles what she calls the “trifecta of oppression” working against Arab women: the state, the street and the home, which “work together for their own benefit by keeping girls and women […]

Amnesty International shares a letter from Samar Badawi to her husband Waleed Abu al-Khair. Samar Badawi is Raif Badawi’s sister. He taught me that a person is born free and that it is up to him or her to live in freedom or die trying to achieve it. Slavery has no place in his life except when it […]

Ken White also takes on Garry Trudeau, at Popehat. Last week cartoonist Garry Trudeau received the George Polk award for journalism. It’s an award named in memory of a journalist murdered while covering a war. Trudeau used the opportunity to say that while murdering journalists is sub-optimal, journalists need to rethink offending people: What free […]

CFI has a statement on the horrific murder of Washiqur Rahman. Barely a month following the brutal murder of our friend, freethought writer Avijit Roy in Bangladesh, and the near-killing of his wife Rafida Bonya Ahmed, atheist blogger Washiqur Rahman has been killed by a group of Islamic extremists in Dhaka. A young man at age 27, […]

Here’s another thing we can sign – a call to political action to Free Raif and Waleed. So far 12 MPs, 9 MSPs, and 4 members of the House of Lords have signed. Scores of prominent human rights activists, writers, lawyers and journalists have also signed as well as hundreds of others (see below). Please continue to […]

John Gray has a characteristic piece in the Guardian rehearsing the familiar old saws about how naïve and delusional atheists and liberals are, how it’s all just Christianity turned inside out, yadda yadda…but despite the staleness it’s not all wrong. The conviction that tyranny and persecution are aberrations in human affairs is at the heart […]

Priorities all wrong. Priorities fucked up. Priorities baaaaaaaad. No. Don’t do that. Instead denounce the torture of Raif Badawi. Denounce the mass murders by Boko Haram. Denounce the massacre in Paris. Denounce the murders of many thousands of Muslims by Islamist fanatics. Denounce cruelty and torture and oppression everywhere. Denounce crimes against the living.

Ok I’d seen a couple of mentions of imprisoned Saudi princesses and hadn’t followed up, but thanks to yazikus posting some extracts in comments I now have. I didn’t realize they were Abdullah’s daughters. His own god damn daughters, imprisoned in some dark rooms on his say-so. It’s a tale of horror. Sahar, Maha, Hala […]

The teenager who “insulted” Erdogan is out of jail pending trial. Oooh really? How can they be sure he won’t insult again? It’s terrifying and reckless to let such a violent insulter walk around freely when at any moment he might say something hostile about the president of Turkey omigod. Turkey’s penal code makes it […]

Turkish women talk back to Erdoğan. Sixty-five Turkish women‘s rights organizations took out a full page advertisement in a mass circulation daily newspaper Thursday condemning President Recep Tayyip Erdogan over his remarks this week that equality between men and women goes against “nature.” The advertisement in Hurriyet newspaper, one of the best-selling dailies in the country, […]

Oh look, PZ got to the Dawkins interview before I did. I didn’t see it until now, so it didn’t influence what I wrote. Funny, we said the exact same thing about Dawkins’s claimed “passionate feminism.” Richard Dawkins is a feminist like Christina Hoff Sommers, who he praises, is a feminist … that is not […]

Act one, Vlad Chituc wrote a post at Nonprophet Status yesterday saying how great Reza Aslan is and how wrong ex-Muslims are to have any quarrel with the things Reza Aslan says. The hashtag campaign #AnApostatesExperience initially drew my attention because it seemed like a welcome attempt to elevate the experience of ex-Muslims in conversations about Islam. Instead, […]

Libby Anne has another great post on the way the more anti-feminist of the atheist guys use Islamist misogyny and abuse of women as a pretext for belittling women’s issues closer to home. She starts with something Sam Harris said on that much-discussed Bill Maher program. Liberals have really failed on the topic of theocracy. […]

Another uh oh atheism has a dudebro problem article, this time from Amanda Marcotte. She points out that you would think atheism would be a natural for women, given the way religions view women. (Spoiler: as inferior, and not fully human.) She points out that feminism has had a long tradition of outspoken atheists and […]

Originally a comment by Tom Foss on Credit where it’s due.  Link to this comment This JG kerfuffle, is, though, inconsequential bullshit as far as I can see. The atheist and skeptical communities have made their names on calling out and arguing against bad arguments and strawmen. Why would we stop when those bad arguments […]

Paul Fidalgo explains why the Saudi representative had a triple meltdown at the UN Human Rights Council on June 23 (last Monday). Part of that has to do with what CFI is and what it’s been doing lately. The organization for which I work, the Center for Inquiry, sees as part of its core mission the …

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