Maryam is annoyed by channel 4’s “provocative” call to prayer during Ramadan.

What about all the Muslims (and ex-Muslims) who can’t stand to hear the call to prayers? or who don’t fast during Ramadan? There is a movement of eating during Ramadan as a way of challenging laws that make it an offence to eat in public. Here’s one example of people being arrested for “inciting public eating during Ramadan” but of course none of these will be shown on Channel 4.

Rather than being provocative, Channel 4 is feeding into the narrative that all Muslims are religious and conservative and fast during Ramadan. Something Islamists insist upon thereby justifying their attacks on those who refuse to fast or transgress their vile norms.

It’s also not really “provocative” to support an institution that already has massive, unaccountable, fundamentally authoritarian power. Religions don’t need help; it’s the victims of religion who need help.

The guy who made death threats on Facebook has been jailed.

A British man who threatened to kill 200 people in the US, in posts he made under a false name on Facebook, has been jailed for more than two years.

Reece Elliott, 24, of Foss Way, South Shields, made the threat in February on online memorial pages for two Tennessee girls killed in car accidents.

About 3,000 pupils in Warren County missed school the next day as a result.

Elliott, who pleaded guilty at Newcastle Crown Court in April, was jailed for two years and four months. [Read more…]

Religion News Service reports that African religious leaders are very annoyed at Obama for telling them not to shit on gay people. Well yes that makes sense – how dare Obama tell good god-fearing clerics not to shit on people? Shitting on people is a god-given right of clerics.

In a news conference in Senegal during his three-nation tour, just as the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a federal ban on same-sex marriage, Obama said African nations must grant equal protection to all people regardless of their sexual orientation.

“My basic view is that regardless of race, regardless of religion, regardless of gender, regardless of sexual orientation, when it comes to how the law treats you, how the state treats you … people should be treated equally,” Obama said. “And that’s a principle that I think applies universally.” [Read more…]

The new pope is helping some previous ones get to be saints.

Showing more of his sprightly personality and his priorities, Pope Francis sped two of his predecessors toward sainthood on Friday: John Paul II, who guided the Roman Catholic Church during the end of the cold war, and John XXIII, who assembled the liberalizing Second Vatican Council in the 1960s.

In approving the sainthood of John XXIII even without a second miracle attributable to the pontiff, Francis took the rare step of bypassing the Vatican bureaucracy.

Ok but so how does all this work? Are there rules, or is it just whatever the pope feels like? And if popes can speed other popes, why mess around, why not just make it that all popes are saints? [Read more…]

A pregnant child in Santiago Puerto Montt, Chile.

A young girl in Puerto Montt is 14-weeks-pregnant after being raped by her mother’s boyfriend. She is not able to have an abortion as the procedure is illegal in Chile in all cases. The man has confessed to sexually abusing the child.

She’s 11.

The mother spoke in defense of her boyfriend, who was arraigned in court in the southern city of Osorno.

“She wasn’t violated and he would not have used force,” she said, adding that the relationship between them was consensual.

Ah, that’s nice. The child is 11 years old – and her mother says she had “consensual” sex with her mother’s boyfriend? That is some loving mother.

This case has brought new, fierce criticism of Chile’s current abortion laws, which as of 1989, outlaw all cases without exception. Politicians have spoken out on the issue via social media.

You mean girls of 11 shouldn’t be forced to bear children? That can’t be right.

A nasty fella.

Last week American Atheists unveiled an atheist monument in Starke, Florida.

Kent Eric Hovind jumped up onto the monument to nag everyone about god.

I think that’s rude and belligerent.

There’s this website called The Irish Catholic, where you can read a guy called John Waters explaining how horrible women are. He starts with a little thought experiment by someone else.

‘What is the difference, in human rights terms, between a situation in which a distraught male goes in to his doctor and says that his partner is making him suicidal and that he fears that unless he/she (the doctor) arranges to have the partner killed he will kill himself, and a situation in which a distraught female goes to her doctor and says that her unborn child is making her suicidal and that she fears that unless he/she (the doctor) arranges to have the child killed she will kill herself?” [Read more…]

It turns out there’s this movie star who is a feminist. Uh oh! Right? Men are people too you know. Human rights. Don’t talk to me about women’s rights; human rights.

Who is this twisted radical person who is a feminist? Ellen Page, of the irritating Juno in which our quirky brave intelligent heroine age 16 decides to have the baby and give it to some nice people instead of having a nasty filthy ol’ abortion, because girls of 16 have nothing better to do than bear children.

Apparently she didn’t realize it was an anti-abortion movie until this reporter pointed it out to her, which seems odd for a feminist. [Read more…]

Greetings to the new Council of Ex-Muslims in France.

On Saturday, members of the Council of Ex-Muslims in France met to launch their group publicly and discuss their mission: to promote liberty and equality for all people, regardless of their faith. Their Facebook page explains:

“We are a group of atheists and non-believers who have, because of this fact, been threatened or faced restrictions in our personal life. Many of us have been arrested for blasphemy.”

Maryam was there today for the launch, with Waleed Al-Husseini and Caroline Fourest among others. [Read more…]