I’m going to piss off some people with this, but…
I think the reaction to what happened at Newtown is a little bit out of proportion. Wait, I can explain. I don’t mean it wasn’t absolutely horrible. But the reaction seems to imply that it’s terribly out of the ordinary, and the fact is…it’s not nearly as out of the ordinary as it should be except in the fact that it was 20 children in one go.
The US has a shamefully high rate of violence against children. [Read more…]
Cristina Odone is worried. What’s she worried about? She’s worried that Ireland is planning to change its abortion law – to legalize abortion when it’s necessary to save the woman’s life – on the basis of a mistake about what happened to Savita Halappanavar. Oh noes!
I’m a Catholic but I believe abortion has to be legal. Yes, it is a sin; and yes, there are women who use it as contraception. But the risk of having a long roll call of tragic deaths like Savita’s is too cruel to contemplate. Like divorce, abortion should be available, but reserved as a last-resort nuclear option – and when the mother’s life is in danger is precisely such a scenario.
The Irish U-turn over Savita’s death worries me, though. Is this the right result based on the wrong premise? [Read more…]
First, do no harm.
First, don’t be evil.
It’s strange how easily a lot of people lose sight of that basic thought, or never entertain it in the first place.
What would be high on a list of harms not to do? Killing people who are working to prevent polio in a country where 35 children have been infected with polio this year, when nearly all other countries in the world are polio-free. [Read more…]
The Islamists in Northern Mali are getting more unpleasant.
On a sweltering afternoon, Islamist police officers dragged Fatima Al Hassan out of her house in the fabled city of Timbuktu. They beat her up, shoved her into a white pickup truck and drove her to their headquarters. She was locked up in a jail as she awaited her sentence: 100 lashes with an electrical cord.
“Why are you doing this?” she recalled asking.
Hassan was being punished for giving water to a male visitor. [Read more…]
The pope has his message of peace for the new year all written and typed up and translated and posted online. The pope is way ahead of the game! The pope can kick back and watch some football.
Well it won’t have been very difficult. It doesn’t break any new ground. Somebody could have put it together by cutting and pasting from previous messages of peace for the new year.
It’s not very rich in what you might call self-awareness or self-knowledge.
In addition to the varied forms of terrorism and international crime, peace is also endangered by those forms of fundamentalism and fanaticism which distort the true nature of religion, which is called to foster fellowship and reconciliation among people. [Read more…]
I re-read some of Michael Shermer’s Why People Believe Weird Things this morning, to refresh my memory. I’ve read that and Why We Believe and the odd article here and there. I’ve never liked his writing much. It’s not bad, but it’s a little loose and lazy. Characterless. Journalistic.
I was interested to see that chapter 7 is titled Epidemics of Accusations: Medieval and Modern Witch Crazes. The modern ones are the panics about “Satanic” abuse in the 1980s and about “recovered memory” in the 90s. [Read more…]
An Egyptian blogger wrote about Waleed Al Husseini more than two years ago, when he was arrested by the Palestinian authorities.
Palestinian blogger Waleed Al Husseini has been detained by the Palestinian authorities for creating a Facebook page named “Allah”! it was reported and shut down and Waleed created this page, that page, and that page, that is already hacked, to fight those who keep censoring his thoughts.
Waleed Khalid Hasayen is a 26 year old blogger who was arrested in the West Bank city of Qalqilya by the Palestinian authorities on the grounds of religious contempt and promoting atheism. On his blog “Nour Al Akl” or The enlightened Mind, he refuted all religious arguments – specially Islam – and he wrote long detailed posts on the fallacy of religions.
Now he’s out of jail, and at a distance from the people who arrested him, but his situation is precarious. I’m hoping we (the community) can help him.
It’s not just mouthy atheist feminist women. It’s not just mouthy atheist feminist me. It’s not just mouthy feminist gamers, or programmers, or columnists. It’s everywhere.
Like theology, for instance, I see via Marlowe Filippov. JTB at rudetruth:
I’ve been following with some interest, given my previous interaction with the blog on the limerick thing, the conversation on Theoblogy in response to Tony’s question, “where are the women.” [Read more…]
Meet Waleed Alhusseini.
I ran a blog in Arabic called Nour Alakl. I was also active on Facebook, running a satirical page under the pseudonym of Allah. In October 2010 I was arrested in the street near an internet cafe. I had believed that I had a right to the freedom of speech and to the freedom of belief. [Read more…]
