Someone that calls itself @ikonographer and describes itself as

atheist. provacateur. all around asshole. (get it? ‘all a round’ asshole). Hey, fuck you, I’ve seen square ones. not pretty.

Someone I don’t know, by the way; someone I’m not aware of ever having had any interaction with, tweeted me

@opheliabenson i always figured you didn’t have scruples. hard to do if you’re not really human. don’t bother. blocked bitch.

People are strange. Strange strange strange strange.

(I know. This is “drama.” Yes, no doubt, but it’s also political. Because it’s political, we have to talk about it. Drama or no drama.)

Raymond Tallis in the next issue of The New Humanist makes the case for assisted dying.

The case for a law to legalise the choice of physician-assisted dying for mentally competent people with terminal illness, who have expressed a settled wish to die, is very  easily stated. Unbearable suffering, prolonged by medical care, and inflicted on a dying patient against their will, is an unequivocal evil. What’s more, the right to have your choices supported by others, to  determine your own best interest, when you are of sound mind, is  sovereign. And this is accepted by a steady 80-plus per cent of the UK population in successive surveys. [Read more…]

Awwww department. Two gorilla brothers are re-united after the older one, silverback Kesho, had been taken away for stud duties. The Beeb has a slide show. Awww. Those faces they’re making – those are “play-faces.” The lips cover the teeth.

Awww.

H/t Bernard Hurley

Taslima’s very pissed off at Saudi Arabia, and rightly so. It’s planning to build women-only cities, Caroline Davies reports.

A women-only industrial city dedicated to female workers is to be constructed  in Saudi Arabia to provide a working environment that is in line with the kingdom’s strict customs.

The city, to be built in the Eastern Province city of Hofuf, is set to be the first of several planned for the Gulf kingdom. The aim is to allow more women to work and achieve greater financial independence, but to maintain the gender segregation, according to reports. [Read more…]

Helen Dale won the 2012 Law Society of Scotland Essay Award for a piece entitled ‘A Plea in Law for Equal Marriage’. The Journal of the Law Society of Scotland has published that piece.

Helen explains at Skepticlawyer why she wrote the piece. It’s because the arguments in play were crap.

I suspect that this is why the arguments both groups used (and continue to use, alas) were very, very bad.

Now, I agreed with the LGBT ‘side’; that’s why I wrote the essay I did. But their arguments were crap. And the Catholic Church’s were similarly awful. Sometimes it really is a case of ‘play to your strengths’, lads (even when the batsman in question, like Kevin Pietersen, wants to belt everything on the leg side). [Read more…]

Paul Fidalgo has a great contribution to Amy’s series. (That’s Amy Davis Roth, Surlyramics Amy. Just in case you’ve forgotten.)

There’s this movement, the skeptical/atheist movement. Why are we in it? Various reasons.

Some are moved by social justice and civil rights, some by a devotion to reality and truth, some who simply want a community of intelligent, creative folks, and of course there will be some who want a faction to join in order to combat a nefarious “other.”

Ah yes that nefarious other. I try to make the nefarious other be a thing rather than a set of people, but do I always succeed? Of course not. [Read more…]

The Heresy Club is great value, as you probably know.

Siana Bangura has a great post on “Black Atheism and why it’s something to talk about.”

For me, the biggest battle I face is dealing with the confusion and pity that my lack of belief often stirs in some. I remember an episode at school one lunchtime when I was surrounded by ‘The God Squad’ who chanted and prayed *AT* me with their Bibles and Rosary Beads. They said my ‘soul’ needed ‘saving’ and that I was on a one-way trip to hell and that lifelong bunsen burner if I didn’t ‘repent’. It was truly terrifying and also extremely laughable all at once. They simply didn’t understand me. I didn’t fit into their box, their little world, their narrow world view. They told me I was trying to be ‘white’. I was often called a ‘coconut’, or a ‘milkyway’ or an ‘Oreo’ if the mood was right. You know, black on the outside and white on the inside? I didn’t see it as bullying, and I don’t think it was. It was a terrifyingly real demonstration of the power of religion though. These girls quite often behaved in Un-Christian ways (although there was a wave of “Born Again” business just before we finished year eleven) and I didn’t quite understand why they felt they had the right to preach at me. But then again, the hypocrisy of religious people is something I have always known. The type of black community I was surrounded by was the type that accepts crooks, cons, thugs, woman beaters, drug dealers, absent fathers, womanizers and adulterers, but never gays and never non-believers. The latter did not exist.

She has a lot to say.

American Atheists is putting up two billboards for the presidential nominating conventions.

c

[Courtesy of American Atheists]

God the space alien in magic Mormon underwear. Jesus on toast.

Jacques Rousseau has a guest post at Martin Pribble’s blog in which he talks about atheists’ shared commitment to reason and desire to be guided by the evidence rather than superstition or dogma.

…it doesn’t seem much of a stretch to suggest that we should apply the same critical mindset to propositions beyond merely the god hypothesis.

So, when we speak of social justice, equality, freedom of speech and so forth, it’s reasonable to expect some similarity in approach, even if not in conclusions reached. To put it plainly, an approach in which we listen to the evidence, in other words to each other, without pre-judging what someone is going to say, what they believe, or what ideological faction they belong to. Their arguments are assessed on their merits, rather than via knowing which websites they frequently comment on. [Read more…]