No papers for you!

When parents go bad.

On Sep. 24, 2014, 18-year-old Alecia Faith Pennington left her family and childhood home with the help of her grandparents. Having been raised in a staunchly Christian, homeschooled family in Texas, she was ready to set off and pursue a new life.

You know, that needs a re-write.

On Sep. 24, 2014, 18-year-old Alecia Faith Pennington escaped her family and childhood prison with the help of her grandparents. Having been imprisoned in a fanatically Christian family in Texas that wouldn’t let her go to school, she was ready to escape and find a life.

[Read more…]

Isis efficiency

Just imagine the fun of being a Muslim in Raqqa. It’s a good deal more peppery than life in Chapel Hill, according to what the Independent says.

Residents of a city besieged by Isis have described living under strict bans on alcohol and cigarettes, with anyone caught smoking publicly flogged, handed huge fines and even reportedly executed.

I dislike smoking myself, but I don’t think people should be executed for it. [Read more…]

19 Muslims massacred in Peshawar

Meanwhile…let’s not lose sight of the bigger picture. The much much much bigger picture; the orders of magnitude bigger picture. Like this item from CNN today –

The Pakistan Taliban claimed responsibility for a Friday attack on a Shiite Muslim mosque in Peshawar in northwestern Pakistan — a suicide bombing and gunfire assault that a hospital representative said killed 19 people.

The Islamist militant group said the attack was orchestrated by a commander who was behind December’s massacre of 145 people, including 132 children, at a Peshawar school.

[Read more…]

Atheist but not also humanist

Michael DeDora has an excellent post on what Craig Hicks does or doesn’t have to do with vocal atheism and what vocal atheism has to do with being a decent human.

…as merely a position on whether god/s exist, atheism is no guarantor of moral behavior, and no guarantee should that be expected from it. Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and many others — apparently now including Craig Hicks — are atheists who have killed. A person’s atheism only tells you that they reject the idea of a god. It does not tell you about the rest of their character, which, as with all people, can include a very human but very misguided hatred. I guarantee some atheists will continue to do violence in the world so long as both atheists and the world exist. Why atheists continue to defend atheism at the expense of a broader moral and philosophical framework remains a mystery to me. This event should remind us that mere atheism is not enough — that for humans to find decency and sustain it, we must construct and nourish moral frameworks that engender complete respect for our fellow humans regardless of their beliefs on religion or gods. Hicks was an atheist, but he was apparently not also humanist. Humanism provides no shelter for such hatred and murder.

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She cannot fathom why it has taken so long

Sometimes movie stars put their celebrity to good use.

Europe’s first academic centre to combat the brutality faced by women in warzones has been opened in London by Angelina Jolie, who called for “the empowerment of women to be the highest priority for the finest minds, in the best academic institutions”.

Jolie, a special envoy for the UN high commissioner for refugees (UNHCR), has just returned from northern Iraq, where she met some of the millions of refugees forced to flee from their homes due to Islamic State (Isis) violence. She said students of the centre on women, peace and security at the London School of Economics (LSE) had the chance to change the world.

[Read more…]

Raif not flogged again

CBC News reports:

Raif Badawi, the Saudi blogger jailed for criticizing Islam, has had his weekly lashes delayed for a fifth time according to Amnesty International.

He was sentenced to 10 years in jail and 1,000 lashes, to be delivered in batches of 50 every week.

He was flogged for the first time on Jan. 9. However, the next five flogging sessions were postponed. At least two of the postponements were due to medical reasons.

Well – they’re going to look like complete ogres and complete fools as well if they go ahead with it after this. They’re in a hot spotlight, and that situation isn’t going to get any better for them.

Amnesty International is calling for Badawi’s sentence to be quashed and for him to be released immediately and unconditionally so he can join his family in Canada.

Damn right. And his lawyer, too, Waleed Abu Al-Khair.

Don’t stop until

Ensaf Haider has done a short video to thank people for working to free Raif. She asks us not to stop until he’s free and with them. Nope nope nope – not going to stop until then. On the ground, in Montreal – only then will I stop.

But then there is Waleed, and there are the others. Not stopping until they’re all free then.

The long-standing parking disputes

That Washington Post article that Glenn Greenwald linked to – it’s by Michelle Boorstein yesterday, on the (cough) tensions between atheism and Islam.

On Wednesday, the father of the two women said one of his daughters had mentioned Hicks’ before and felt he was anti-Muslim. A week ago, he said, she told her family she had  “a hateful neighbor.”

“Honest to God, she said, ‘He hates us for what we are and how we look,’” Dr. Mohammad Abu-Salha, who has a psychiatry practice near Chapel Hill, told The News Observer. [Read more…]