To claim otherwise is blasphemy

Yulia Latinina, who hosts a political talk show on Ekho Moskvy radio, explains the religious views of many Orthodox Christians, whom she calls Homo Orthodoxus. They sound quite similar to fanatics in the US, Pakistan, Rome, northern Nigeria – you get the idea.

First, this belief holds that God does not forgive. A typical example: During a recent demonstration against Pussy Riot, an Orthodox activist screamed “God does not forgive, and to claim otherwise is blasphemy,” while  beating a female supporter of the punk group. [Read more…]

Atheism+ in the news

Hey, the Staggers blog is onto Atheism+.

Let me introduce you to Atheism+, the nascent movement that might be the most exciting thing to hit the world of unbelief since Richard Dawkins teamed up with Christopher Hitchens to tell the world that God was a Delusion and, worse than that, Not Great.

Less than a week old in its current form, Atheism+ is the brainchild of Jen McCreight, a Seattle-based biology postgrad and blogger at the secularist Freethought network. [Read more…]

Access to distant, remote associations

The cognitive psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman says there’s research that seems to indicate that social rejection fuels creativity.

I’ve always thought so. (Also that it works the other way too. Dreamy imaginative kids probably aren’t great at social skills, so they get social rejection, so they do even more fantasizing and pretending and nerding out. Loop loopy loop.)

By definition, creative solutions are unusual, involving the recombination of ideas. Unusual, divergent ideas and access to distant, remote associations are hallmarks of creative thinking. Perhaps those who like to distance themselves from others are more likely to also recruit associations from unusual places and think beyond conventional ideas. [Read more…]

A marked increase in outright misogyny and thuggery

Another great post in Amy’s series, this one from Phil Plait.

What the hell is going on in the online community?

If you’ve been reading or paying attention at all to any of the online cultures like skepticism or general geekery (scifi, gaming, convention-going, and so on), you’ll have seen astonishing and depressing displays of sexism. That’s been true for a long time. But recently some sort of sea change has occurred, and what we’re seeing now is a marked increase in outright misogyny and thuggery. [Read more…]

Knowing what people want for them

Richard Carvath, a “Conservative political activist” in the UK who hopes to be an MP, has written a rebarbative piece on Tony Nicklinson.

Tony Nicklinson shouldn’t have done it, you see. He was being a selfish baby doing it. Carvath knows, because he once fell off a mountain and spent weeks feeling like crap – and then got better. That’s totally comparable to Nicklinson’s life being locked in without the ability to talk and with no prospect of getting better.

Poor old Tony Nicklinson.  His wife wants to kill him, his family want to kill him, his barrister wants to kill him, the mainstream media want to kill him, the euthanasia lobby want to kill him and a vociferous mob of Twitter followers want to kill him. [Read more…]

She wrote it three times and deleted it twice

Laurie Penny, motivated by the Assange-Akin confluence of the past few days, has written a long, wrenching piece about being raped. It was a “nice guy” liked by everyone, including her; it was at a party, where she felt ill and went to sleep. She woke up to find him raping her (although she didn’t call it that at the time).

I asked him if he had used a condom. He told me that he ‘wasn’t into latex’, and asked if I was on the pill. I don’t remember thinking ‘I have just been raped’. After all, this guy wasn’t behaving in the manner I had learned to associate with rapists. Rapists are evil people. They’re not nice blokes who everybody respects who simply happen to think it’s ok to stick your dick in a teenager who’s sleeping in the same bed as you, without a condom. This guy seemed, if anything, confused as to why I was scrabbling for my things and bolting out the door. He even sent me an email a few days later, chiding me for being rude. [Read more…]

You learn something every day

Well here is something I did not know – that in 31 states in the US, rapists have parental rights.

Shauna Prewitt was raped and got pregnant (pipe down there in the back, Mr Akin), and had a daughter, and then found out something she did not know.

You could say she was conceived in rape; she was. But she is also so much more than her beginnings. I blissfully believed that after I finally had decided to give birth to and to raise my daughter, life would be all roses and endless days at the playground. I was wrong again.

It would not be long before I would learn firsthand that in the vast majority of states — 31 — men who father through rape are able to assert the same custody and visitation rights to their children that other fathers enjoy. When no law prohibits a rapist from exercising these rights, a woman may feel forced to bargain away her legal rights to a criminal trial in exchange for the rapist dropping the bid to have access to her child. [Read more…]

Mercy all around

It’s not just the Catholic church that is more concerned to protect its own sweet self than it is to prevent child sexual abuse or help the victims of child sexual abuse.

An evangelist Christian preacher from East Sussex urged a victim of sexual abuse not to report the man responsible to the police, the BBC has learned.

Ian Jackson told Lina Barnes he would not support her if she reported that Gospel Hall Brethren preacher Allan Cundick assaulted her at the age of 12. [Read more…]