The Ada Initiative did an interview with Rebecca; she says a number of amusing and/or insightful things. (No not “inciteful” – that’s not a word. Insightful.)

On why she stipulates a minimum of 35% women speakers as a condition of speaking.

I’ve also seen that the more women who speak on stage, the more women show up in the audience. People feel more at home when they see people like them in prominent positions. Because the conferences I attend are usually heavily male-dominated, having a minimum of 1/3 female speakers is another easy way that conference organizers can show they place a high value on diversity. 35% is actually ridiculously low considering women are 51% of the population, but then, I’ve always been pretty easy-going. Despite the rumors. Next year I may up it to 40% and add a “non-white” percentage for fun.

And the year after that, total world domination.

She was asked what her dream speaking engagement would be.

I like speaking in pubs, because everyone is relaxed and there’s beer. So I suppose my dream speaking engagement would be on a panel with Hillary Clinton, Lucy Lawless, and Amy Poehler, in a pub full of sloths, and also we’re on a spaceship.

A pub full of sloths does sound ideal.

 

Repeating things 50,000 times has to rank high. It could always be worse though. It could be repeating things 100,000 times. Or 500,000 times. Or a million.

It’s a real thing in Turkey though.

A teacher in Istanbul has allegedly ordered his students to say God’s name 50,000 times and “prove it” for homework.

The teacher of a Religious Culture and Moral Knowledge class at Sancaktar Hayrettin Primary School in Istanbul’s Fatih district set fifth grade students the task of repeating “salawat,” meaning “peace be upon him” in Arabic, a phrase often used after the name of the prophet of Islam. The task was to be completed as homework during Islam’s holy week.

And “prove” it? How the hell would you do that?

Students told reporters that the most difficult part of the homework was “proving” that they had completed it. Some parents bought “a salawat-counting machine” called Zikirmatik, which is sold for 2 Turkish Liras (around 1 euro). Zikirmatik is a counter for people who have difficulties counting beads.

One parent said he had gathered his whole family and tried to reach the 50,000 prayers. “I calculated that every salawat lasted three seconds. This means is would take around 40 hours to reach the limit,” he said.

Some students found another solution by marking their notebooks once for each salawat.

Hello? That doesn’t “prove” anything except that you hit click 50 thousand times or that you made a mark 50 thousand times (which would be bad and stupid and tedious enough).

We know what the idea is though. Drill. Self-hypnosis. Self-conditioning. Believers use prettier language for it, naturally, but that’s what it is.

Avicenna has a horrific post about rape in India.

His conclusion:

The anger is rising again in India. It doesn’t matter what laws you make. In order to stop rape you need to change the culture of India and empower women. You need to teach men to not rape women, not blame everything else. The real fault here lies in the rapist and a culture of harassment, denigration of women and rape. The protests will keep happening and they SHOULD. Society cannot afford complacency on this.

There are no excuses here. Culture Must Change. You aren’t going to protect girls by keeping them away from boys. You are going to protect them by teaching boys and girls responsible behaviour and how to treat each other properly. Teach boys to respect women and not rape them. Teach girls and boys that No Means No, not No Means Try Harder. These young kids think like that because they have no adult role models to sit them down and tell them that. What they have instead are movies which are made by people who themselves think “No means Try Harder” and who have never had to date either. It’s like taking sex advice from the Pope.

But if people are taught that No Means No then no one will ever have sex again ever ever ever.

CNN keeps telling us it feels like a decisive moment, it feels like the end of the story. We don’t care what CNN thinks it feels like. Just tell us what you know.

I want him not to be killed. I want to know why.

I once lived in Boston, for a short time.

“We are getting the feeling that this is it.” Oh shut up.

I also once lived in a house with an old boat of the landlord’s in the yard.

They don’t want him to deploy the suicide vest. Well clearly he doesn’t want to deploy it either.

From Dave Muscato of American Atheists:

As part of a joint effort amongst national groups, and in partnership with Boston Atheists and the Humanist Community at Harvard, we want to educate public officials about the diversity of their communities in times of tragedy and atheists’ desire and need to be included.

Atheists are hurting from this news as much as anyone else, and part of the grieving process for atheists affected includes things such as representation at the official memorial service and in the community response. When memorial services include exclusively religious language, and especially when public officials use terms such as “godless” as a slur to describe these attacks, atheists who are affected are excluded and shut out from the community.

We are asking you to assist us by writing a short paragraph that includes the following three things:

1) Who you are and whom you represent or speak on behalf of (e.g. Matt Dillahunty is President of Atheist Community of Austin)

2) Why you’re hurt by the exclusion from the memorial and/or use of “godless” as a pejorative

3) What’s you would like to see happen as a solution

Greg Epstein from the Humanist Community at Harvard is meeting with public officials to discuss this issue and would like to pass on responses from our community’s leaders. We also encourage you to solicit responses from members of your communities (if you run a blog, your readers; if you have a TV show, your viewers, etc) that he can include as well.

Please send your responses to me by early next week so we can make sure he gets them in time.

IMPORTANT: Please send your responses to BostonResponse@gmail.com and encourage your fans/listeners to do the same. Please DO NOT send your responses to dmuscato@atheists.org. Thank you.

—————————

So, get those responses written and send them to BostonResponse@gmail.com. Let’s do this.

Jerome Taylor of the Independent seems to be remarkably under-informed on the subject he reports on.

They are often described as “The Unholy Trinity” – a trio of ferociously bright and pugilistic academics who use science to decimate what they believe to be the world’s greatest folly: religion.

But now Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris are on the receiving end of stinging criticism from fellow liberal non-believers who say their particular brand of atheism has swung from being a scientifically rigorous attack on all religions to a populist and crude hatred of Islam.

The weirdnesses of modern life, you know? Texting. Cupcakes. Wheely bags. Granite counter tops.

One such weirdness is the recurrence of photographs of young men on their way to kill and maim a lot of random people.

There are some of Timothy McVeigh, I think – renting the truck was it? Getting gas? Or maybe there aren’t.

But there certainly are of some of the 9/11 young men. There are of the July 2005 London bombers. And now there are of the Tsarnaev brothers.

Walking along the street, dapper and casual, with their pressure cookers packed full of shrapnel in the backpacks they carry.

So we can see them. We can see how people look in the process of killing some random people and maiming a lot more. They don’t look like anything. They look normal. They fit right in. They’re as banal as the rest of us.

Ottawa

On April 25, an international coalition of atheist and humanist organizations led by the Center for Inquiry, the International Humanist and Ethical Union, and American Atheists will protest the arrest and persecution of atheist bloggers in Bangladesh with demonstrations scheduled in London, New York, Washington, Ottawa and Calgary.

Bangladesh has recently been at the centre of a human rights crisis as authorities have detained several prominent bloggers for “hurting religious sentiments” and have arrested two more young people for making “derogatory remarks” about Islam on Facebook. Tens of thousands of protestors, led by the Islamist group Islami Andolan Bangladesh, have rallied in Dhaka, the country’s capital, to demand more arrests.

Centre for Inquiry is leading protests in Canada and has made appeals to the newly founded Office of Religious Freedom to urge the government to issue a public statement condemning the arrests and reaffirming its commitment to freedom of expression.

Protest events are confirmed for the following Canadian cities on April 25, 2013:

Ottawa: High Commission for Bangladesh

Constitution Square Centre

340 Albert St, K1R 7Y6 @ 4:30 pm ET

Calgary: Consulate of Bangladesh

633 6th Avenue South West T2P 2Y6 @ 4:30 pm MT

 

For media inquiries:

Michael Payton, National Director, CFI Canada, Email: mpayton@cficanada.ca

Phone: (647) 244-5483 (647) 244-5483

Up-to-date information on protest events can be found at http://bit.ly/defenddissent.