Taslima has a great post on 19th century reactions to education for women in Bengal. She includes two satirical paintings, one of a woman beating a man with a broom, and the other of a man nursing a woman – at least that’s the caption Taslima has on it, though he’s portrayed just standing there with an implement I don’t recognize.

What a hateful world to live in. One, there’s the idea that men are supposed to beat women instead of the other way around, instead of the idea that nobody should beat anybody. And two there’s the deeply sad idea that a woman should nurse a man but not the other way around. Seriously? So if she’s … Read the rest

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Maryam did a blogathon today. All you need for an arrest is hurt religious sentiment is a good one (as are all the others). The first example she offers is a Bangladeshi writer.

A Bangladeshi court has issued an arrest warrant for the writer of a 2003 novel that allegedly contains insulting remarks against the Prophet Mohammed, a lawyer said Tuesday.

The court in Dhaka issued the order in response to a petition from a Muslim activist accusing author Salam Azad of hurting religious sentiment in his banned book “Bhanga Math” (“Broken Temple”).

“We told the court that the book contained slanderous remarks against the Prophet Mohammed and Islam. The judge accepted the petition and issued a warrant of

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Javier Krahe has been acquitted of “hurting religious feelings” in a movie he made nearly 40 years ago.… Read the rest

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Crommunist is doing the blogathan by taking pledges for learning songs and then posting a video of himself performing them. What a brilliant way of doing it!

Go cheer him on or donate all of your money or both.

 … Read the rest

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For our final item for this brief but exciting miniature blogathon – David Gibson at Religion News Service looks at the way bishops strain at imaginary gnats while gulping down very large smelly camels.

When the bishops gathered under intense public pressure in Dallas in June 2002, they seemed determined to take dramatic steps, and to a degree they did. Their Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People developed a “one-strike” policy to remove priests credibly accused of a single act of abuse, and jump-started efforts to have the Vatican streamline the process for defrocking abusive clerics…

Yet after all was said and done in Dallas, the bishops exempted themselves from any real sanctions. That self-absolution was considered

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Maureen Brian (whom I met at QED, much to my delight) makes an eloquent point on the government’s education plans. It’s so eloquent that it gets the 1:30 slot.

In an ideal world we would have the active encouragement of all a person’s natural languages throughout life, GCSE and A Level exams available in most of them and an end to the notion that passing an exam 20 years ago beats speaking the language every day to your Granny.

We will not be getting that ideal world under the current government whose aim seems to be to have people reciting infant school poetry before they sleep, unpaid and in fear of losing benefits, under the bridges of the nation.

Zing.… Read the rest

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Ron Lindsay points out in the Huffington Post that coming out as an atheist is significantly different from coming out as LGBT.

True. Nobody is saying that being straight is based on a lot of unexamined and untenable beliefs. Nobody is saying or hoping that straightitude will wither away. A good many atheists are saying that religion is based on mistaken beliefs and that it does harm as a result, and should either wither away or become very much less obtrusive and demanding and Special.

I don’t foresee a best-selling book entitled “The Straight Delusion” or “Heterosexuality Poisons Everything.” The LGBT community wants acceptance; they don’t want to persuade others to join their “team,” and even if they had that

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It’s not the thing you fling – it’s the fling itself.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJgt-HO0_kY

Donate to the SSA!… Read the rest

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Uh oh, it’s 11:50. That’s cutting it too fine.

The UK education secretary has decided to fuck up science education.

All children are to be taught a foreign language – which could include Mandarin, Latin or Greek – from the age of seven under reforms to the national curriculum being unveiled by the education secretary, Michael Gove.

In other reforms, children will be encouraged to learn science by studying nature, and schools will be expected to place less emphasis on teaching scientific method.

Less emphasis on teaching scientific method? What the hell? Why would they do that? They might as well say they’re going to place less emphasis on teaching children critical thinking and just stuff them with a … Read the rest

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This just in – today’s installment of Boko Haram attacks on churches in Nigeria. Body count for this week: 4 so far.

The violence Sunday in Jos and Biu, a city in hard-hit northeastern Borno state, comes as almost every weekend this year has seen churches targeted by a radical Islamist sect known as Boko Haram and other shadowy assailants exacerbating the country’s unease. While no group immediately claimed responsibility for Sunday’s dual attacks, they bore the hallmarks of the sect’s previous assaults, which continue unstopped despite a heavy military presence in the region.

You know this idea we were talking about, making the world a better place? This isn’t it.

Killing people isn’t it.

No group immediately claimed

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The final question from Brianne:

Any updates on Hamza Kashgari?

Not of the type “He is free!” alas…but there is what appears to be an update on how he’s doing, from a relative, translated on the Free Hamza Kashgari Facebook page:

We visited Hamza, thank God, he’s in a good mental condition, and he says “hello” to everyone asking about him, he was extremely moved ‘weeping’ when he heard about the Balloon’s launching on his Birthday, may God unite us with him again.

Well “God” kind of got him into this mess, but never mind. However, that’s something, but it’s still Hamza-in-prison as opposed to Hamza in New Zealand living a free life.

Donate to the SSA!… Read the rest

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Brianne’s topics part 2.

What work/speech/writing of Christopher Hitchens do you find most inspiring? What do you most disagree with?

Most inspiring: the literary/historical/foreign correspondent writing, because of its sheer abundance, erudition, wit, and style. Pretty much all the speech I’ve ever seen, even when he was both hungover and jetlagged, as he was the first time I saw him on a book tour, when he was promoting No One Left to Lie To. It was the morning after the White House correspondents’ dinner, and he’d taken the red eye to Seattle – so he must have been as hungover and jetlagged as it’s possible to be without expiring. It did show, but it didn’t make him slow or … Read the rest

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It’s 9:47. I took some time to read things, and have a little coffee, so it’s 9:47. Yikes.

Brianne – awake much too soon after her 24 hour stint – provides topics.

How can we get Americans more interested in world politics? Do we need to get Americans more interested?  Does that kind of interest and knowledge set have to start being rolled out in the younger school years?

We certainly need to get Americans more interested – because the US does a lot of [helping/meddling] in the world, and citizens should have more knowledge in order to judge what is helping and what is meddling. Because there are international charities and NGOs, which Americans – like anyone else – … Read the rest

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EcksLibris (amusing nym!) replies to my request for topics to post about:

I would love to hear more about you, how you came to your beliefs/lack thereof, and how you became an activist (in the best possible sense of the word)!

I don’t generally like to talk directly about Me Me Me, but talking about how we come to our beliefs/lack thereof is another matter. It’s always interesting, at least to me.

I came to my lack of theist beliefs mostly by never really having theist beliefs in the first place, as well as I can remember. I was told things, as a child, but I think they must have always been hedged. I know they were sometimes, because I … Read the rest

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Ewan answered my request for suggestions by asking for reasons to support the SSA. Greta has a good selection of quotations on that.

JT Eberhard, a campus organizer and high school specialist with the Secular Student Alliance, gives us his personal account of what he does. He starts with Jessica Ahlquist on what the SSA did for her:

When JT Eberhard contacted me and gave me the support of the Secular Student Alliance I felt like I had friends again.  Over the course of two years the SSA provided me with support and JT closely monitored the actions of the school committee, always ready to come to my defense at any minute.  He expressed that he cared not only

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It’s 8:05 – no, 8:06. Get going.

An item on Twitter just now caused me to read the Wikipedia entry on the atheist’s wager, an alternative to Pascal’s of the same ilk.

You should live your life and try to make the world a better place for your being in it, whether or not you believe in god. If there is no god, you have lost nothing and will be remembered fondly by those you left behind. If there is a benevolent god, he will judge you on your merits and not just on whether or not you believed in him.

Not alternative enough, if you ask me. It’s still too focused on postmortem, as if we were going … Read the rest

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Here we go. The miniature blogathon begins.

Brianne did hers yesterday, except hers wasn’t miniature: she did the whole 24 hour thing. I encouraged her by reminding her that the second half was going to be much longer than the first. I’m kind that way.

You were supposed to suggest things for me to post about. Seriously: any suggestions? But then it’s Sunday, when nobody reads this. People read this exclusively during working hours, so that they’ll know for sure they’re not wasting their time.

Not to worry. It’s not as if the world is empty of things to talk about.

Donate to the SSA!… Read the rest

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Via Tarek Fatah, a Calgary conference has invited Bilal Philips as the top speaker; Philips has repeatedly said homosexuals should be executed. Get the name of the conference – The Power of Unity: Islam in a MultiCultural Canada. Some unity!

And there’s a slew of other craps, too.

Munir El-Kassem, a dentist from London, Ont., wrote a column back in 2001 that condemned the West as hypocritical and defended the Taliban regime for destroying the sixth-century Buddha statues in Bamiyan…

Shaykh Hatem Alhaj recently lost his job at the Mayo Clinic because he wrote papers in support of female circumcision. He later tried to clarify his position by saying he only supports nicking the clitoris, not cutting it right

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