An unpleasant little story from India.

…a 12-year-old boy was allegedly chained by authorities of a local madrassa to prevent him from escaping from the school.

According to Medak town police, the boy has been studying in ‘Minhaj-ul-uloom’ religious school for the past three years and had earlier made several attempts to run away from the madrassa, as he was not a quick learner and had a stammering problem.

The police said that the madrassa management had chained the boy a few days ago to prevent him from escaping.

To prevent him from “escaping” – as if he were somehow legally obliged to be there.

“There is no compulsion in religion.” Oh really?

It’s interesting to see the Washington Post columnist Sally Quinn unabashedly announcing that theism is part of citizenship in the US.

This is a religious country. Part of claiming your citizenship is claiming a belief in God, even if you are not Christian. We’ve got the Creator in our Declaration of Independence. We’ve got “In God We Trust” on our coins. We’ve got “one nation under God” in our Pledge of Allegiance. And we say prayers in the Senate and the House of Representatives to God.

Excuse me. I am a citizen. I don’t have to claim anything (and neither does any other citizen), and I certainly don’t have to claim a belief in god. Nobody has to. Nor does anyone have to claim a disbelief in god.

Up until now, the idea of being American and believing in God were synonymous.

No, they were not.

It’s slightly shocking to see a political columnist betray such ignorance of political basics. A majority opinion is not at all the same thing as being any particular nationality. The claim is both absurd and bossy.

Fortunately there are many comments pointing out how wrong that column is, along with some predictable sexist dreck.

 

Have you read the Leiter and Weisberg review of Thomas Nagel’s book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False? It’s pretty entertaining.

First there’s theoretical reductionism: it’s all physics. Nobody thinks that, so it’s silly to bother with it. Second there’s naturalism: what there is is what there is. (That’s my version. Theirs is the proper one.) Lots think that, so what’s Nagel’s problem with it? Well he reads “widely in the literature that explains contemporary science to the nonspecialist” and he notices that science often contradicts common sense.

This style of argument does not, alas, have a promising history. [Read more…]

Adam Lee has an article in Salon about Divisiveness Among Teh Atheists and what a good thing it is. (No, he doesn’t say anything about “bitchy infighting” or the Judean People’s Front.)

The animating idea behind Atheism+ is that atheism isn’t a stopping point, but a beginning. We’re atheists not because we want to gather and engage in collective back-slapping, not because we want to chortle at the foolishness of benighted believers, but because we care about creating a world that’s more just, more peaceful, more enlightened, and we see organized religion as standing in the way of this goal. We consider politically engaged atheism an effective way to demolish this obstacle, to refute the beliefs that have so often throughout human history been used to excuse cruelty, inequality, ignorance, oppression and violence.

Is that bitchy of us? No, it isn’t. Joking aside, it isn’t. It’s what freethought has always been about. I bet nobody ever called G W Foote bitchy. [Read more…]

Well great. No need to worry about all the poor sad tragic parents in Germany frustrated in their desire to snip off the end of their infant boy’s penis. They can haz circumcision. Yay!

The Cologne court ruling in June outraged Germany’s Muslims and Jews, and triggered an anguished national debate, by stating that ritual circumcision of under-aged boys amounted to “bodily harm” and parents should wait for their son to make his own decision.

Omigod I know, right? Wait for their son to make his own decision! How crazy is that?! If they wait, he’ll decide no! And that won’t do, because. So obviously they absolutely have to do it when he’s too small and altricial to refuse. That’s absolutely the only fair thing! If you know it’s something a person with a mature-ish brain would refuse to do, you totally have to do it to them when they are infants. This is God’s wish. God could have just issued the infants without the foreskin, but that would be too easy. [Read more…]

An Egyptian women’s rights activist, Dalia Ziada, gave a talk at Tufts a couple of days ago and said what we already know: that the revolution is not an egalitarian revolution, and is taking away women’s rights as opposed to expanding them.

The pro-democracy figure warns that the heady optimism that infused Cairo’s Tahrir Square last year is being slowly replaced by fear that the very political forces that helped sweep long-serving Hosni Mubarak from power are remaking Egyptian society into a rigid, religiously intolerant, patriarchal system. [Read more…]

What one can expect when right-wing theocrats get power – arrests and prosecutions for “blasphemy” because of a Facebook page. Yes really – a Facebook page.

A man was arrested last week in Evia, Greece, on charges of posting “malicious blasphemy and religious insult on the known social networking site, Facebook” according to a press release by the Greek police.

The accused, whose identity has not been made public, had created and managed the Facebook page Elder Pastitsios the Pastafarian… [Read more…]

There’s a new Jesus and Mo book!

And it has a foreword by Richard Dawkins, which RD has posted at RDF. [Read more…]

I’ve seen some strange exclamations about the “hunting down” of Justin Vacula, from a couple of people not…what shall I call it…not paid-up members of the Slime Institute. Exclamations that “vengeance is haunting Salem” and it really really was “a witch hunt” and the hunters (or is it witches?) are “vicious, hateful ideologues.” [Read more…]

And on the same day, in another part of the forest…

…another busy representative of another university Student Union meddled with another Atheist, Humanist, and Secularist Society. Reading University this time, and RUSU and RAHS. This time not a Jesus and Mo toon on a Facebook page, but a pineapple named Mohammed. [Read more…]