Michael Nugent has more about the release of Ben Baz, aka Abdel Aziz Mohamed Albaz, on his blog.

Ben Baz is a 28 year old Egyptian atheist, with a degree in commerce, who was working in Kuwait, and blogging about secularism and religion, when he was arrested over a year ago on charges of blasphemy. His friends highlighted his arrest, and said they suspected that a personal disagreement with his work sponsor, about work matters, may have been translated into a blasphemy accusation. This type of abuse of an already unjust law is common in Islamic countries.

This is a link to his blog, in Arabic, where he writes about the relationship of religion, the State and secularism.

An important subject to write about in Arabic. Also risky.

 

This guy? BenBaz Aziz?

Who is BenBaz?

Watch our video: http://youtu.be/2B_n7wo4Ji4

Abdul Aziz Mohamed El Baz, aka BenBaz, Egyptian, living & working in Kuwait, Born on 1985 in Kuwait. Aziz holds a Bachelor Degree in commerce Division of the English language and worked as an accountant until his arrest.

What happened to BenBaz?

BenBaz has been thrown in jail by the Kuwaiti Government since December 31, 2012. On February 7, 2012, he was sentenced by the same Kuwaiti Government for one year in jail plus forced labor, plus a fine, plus deportation from Kuwait. [Read more…]

An academic – an atheist – who teaches religion at a university is finding the job less rewarding than it used to be, because the students have come over all dogmatic.

When I first started teaching in my current institution, a decade or so ago, I was impressed by the diversity of students in lectures. Lots were believers of one sort or another, but many others would describe themselves as atheists and agnostics.

Whatever they thought about religion, they shared an intellectual curiosity and open-mindedness that made teaching the best part of my job: they enjoyed being challenged in their assumptions, and they loved exploring the ways religions have shaped and been shaped by cultural, social and political shifts. [Read more…]

Mary Beard has a long piece in the LRB about public speaking as definitional of manhood, and women’s exclusion from it as a result.

I want to start very near the beginning of the tradition of Western literature, and its first recorded example of a man telling a woman to ‘shut up’; telling her that her voice was not to be heard in public. [Read more…]

An incident in Kentucky.

A Kentucky pastor who co-starred in the TV showSnake Salvation has died of a snakebite.

Emergency personnel received a call Saturday night that someone at a church, Full Gospel Tabernacle in Jesus Name, had suffered a snakebite, Middlesboro Police Chief Jeff Sharpe said in a statement. He said an ambulance crew went to the church, but the Rev. Jamie Coots had left. The crew went to Coots’ home and found him suffering from a bite to the hand. [Read more…]

I got a mysterious piece of mail yesterday. It was exciting. A real letter in the real mail; an envelope with my name and address hand-written, in writing that I didn’t recognize, with a nearby return address that belongs to no one I know. It’s from a neighborhood a mile or two west of here, but farther away than that sounds because it’s a peninsula with a valley between the two, so it’s complicated to reach by car and totally forbidding on foot. Who oh who could be writing to me from Magnolia? Could it be a threat? Abuse? A rant? Or could it be a friendly surprise? [Read more…]

Dave Muscato has an interesting post about the reactions he’s seen from straight men to the news of Ellen Page coming out. (I had to think for a second to remember who Ellen Page is.) It’s not a sign that she’s more available, it’s a sign that she’s less available. So he goes on to wonder what’s up with that. Why are “I’m not interested” and “I’m gay” taken as a challenge while “I have a boyfriend” is more of a discouragement?

Well obviously one reason is that the boyfriend might be a puncher. But a slightly more complicated reason, I think, is that there’s a massive amount of cultural training that “I’m not interested” is the first part of a good story. [Read more…]

An interview with Rita Banerji of 50 Million Women Missing.

5.What was the motivating factor behind the 50 Million Missing Campaign?

I’d say: outrage. I’m an Indian woman, and my country tells me “We’ve eliminated your kind by the millions, like flies! You are not human. You are nothing!” 20% of women have been exterminated from the population. And people need to know – this is unprecedented in human history. It is not normal for any society! No other human group has been subject to this kind of systemic and targeted extermination. China is the other country that has female gendercide. But what makes India worse than China, is first the apathy of the Indian government. The Chinese government takes this far more seriously. And secondly, in China it is largely sex-selection. In India the violence is perpetuated in all kinds of ways, for girls and women of all ages: starvation, physical battering, rape, honor-killings, dowry murder, witch lynchings. If this was happening to a human group in India because of their religion or their ethnicity, we would have the media and all civil rights sections in India up in arms – like for Kashmir or for the Gujarat massacre. We’d have global human rights groups demanding international action. But are women not human? Why does our genocide not evoke the same response?

I wish I knew.

Seen at Secularism, Philosophy and Culture on Facebook –

Doesn’t Taslima look angelic?

Oh good god. I didn’t even know about this one until I saw a mention of it yesterday. It was more than two years ago, and it’s the same damn thing.

Oxford University Press is under growing pressure to explain its role in suppressing A.K. Ramanujan’s essay, “Three Hundred Ramayanas,” as the renowned indologist Sheldon Pollock and a number of other leading academics on Saturday joined the mounting outrage over its decision to stop publishing and selling the essay in India following protests from a right-wing group. [Read more…]