Month: June 2014

Did Luis Suarez’s Biting Break His Fast?: A World Cup / Ramadan Update

Eli Heina, , , , , , 3 Comments

It’s a World Cup Ramadan, the first one since the 1980s. It’s like a White Christmas? Kind of? Except Ramadan is more like Lent than Christmas.

Never mind.

Today marks the third day of Ramadan, the Islamic month of fasting. This weekend, concerns over the Muslim World Cup players made their way across the internets. I happened across posts of the Vox and Mashable links and observed much speculation and questioning regarding the rules of fasting during Ramadan, as well as talk of exemptions to fasting.

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Did Luis Suarez’s Biting Break His Fast?: A World Cup / Ramadan Update
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Bad Chart Thursday: Exposing Dov Charney & Terry Richardson

Eli Heina, , , , , , , , 4 Comments

I had never thought much of Terry Richardson or Dov Charney, but all the information I’d heard about “them”, until very recently, somehow ended up in the same mental box, as it were. I instinctively thought they were the same person until the so-called “News Media”‘s propaganda machine told me that one is a photographer and one is the head of American Apparel. I remained a believer in this false enlightenment until my eyes were recently re-opened. When I read an article on The Toast by Mallory Ortberg that compared the “two” “men”‘s looks, and saw in the comments that I was not the only person who recognized “them” for the same person that “they” are, I knew I had hit upon a troubling truth. Before I reveal it, let me present the facts.

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Bad Chart Thursday: Exposing Dov Charney & Terry Richardson

Fellow Atheists: Quit Bragging About Our Prison Underrepresentation

Eli Heina, , , , , , 13 Comments

Dan Arel’s piece on atheists and the prison population has been making the rounds, along with the seemingly inevitable assertion that the statistics prove that atheists are no less (and perhaps) more moral than theists.

I understand the impulse. Truly, I do. But that doesn’t make it any less problematic.

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Fellow Atheists: Quit Bragging About Our Prison Underrepresentation

#TwitterTheocracy: How Anti-Blasphemy Laws Are Tools of Oppression

Eli Heina, , , , , , 5 Comments

Recently, the case of Meriam Ibrahim made international headlines. The story was that she, a pregnant Christian woman married to a Christian, was being accused of apostasy and sentenced to death for it. Some but not all of the articles about it mentioned the most troubling fact about the case: she is not even a apostate in that she was a Muslim and then defected from Islam. Instead, her absentee father was a Muslim and, by Sudanese law, this automatically makes her a Muslim, despite being raised a Christian by her Christian mother.

A case of a born and raised Christian being accused of apostasy from Islam and sentenced to death for it shows that anti-apostasy laws are a brutal tool that can be used to enforce tyranny on anyone, whether they are an apostate, a theist of another religion, or a non-apostate atheist.

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#TwitterTheocracy: How Anti-Blasphemy Laws Are Tools of Oppression

5 Things I Learned After My Partner Was Sexually Battered at an Atheist Conference

Eli Heina, , , , , 5 Comments

When you’re ethically non-monogamous, you end up engaging in a lot of meta relationship conversations. When you’re polyamorous and dating someone you met because you were both speakers at the same secular event, you end up discussing the potential effects of your relationship, likely and unlikely alike, on your respective careers. This is especially true when one of you has strong feminist values and works for the advancement of secular causes and the other is a loudmouthed, keyboards-a-blazin’ firebrand-in-waiting.

What I didn’t think to discuss was what actually ended up happening.

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5 Things I Learned After My Partner Was Sexually Battered at an Atheist Conference