Maryam did a blogathon today. All you need for an arrest is hurt religious sentiment is a good one (as are all the others). The first example she offers is a Bangladeshi writer.

A Bangladeshi court has issued an arrest warrant for the writer of a 2003 novel that allegedly contains insulting remarks against the Prophet Mohammed, a lawyer said Tuesday.

The court in Dhaka issued the order in response to a petition from a Muslim activist accusing author Salam Azad of hurting religious sentiment in his banned book “Bhanga Math” (“Broken Temple”).

“We told the court that the book contained slanderous remarks against the Prophet Mohammed and Islam. The judge accepted the petition and issued a warrant of arrest,” the petitioner’s lawyer Ekhlas Uddin told AFP.

I apologize for pointing out the obvious yet again, but sane legal systems do not have laws against “slander” of people who have been dead for centuries. I can say anything I want to about Socrates; so can you; so can anyone. Sane legal systems also do not have laws against “slander” of religions, even the local religion. Only insane legal systems have those.

The very idea is simply infantile. What next? Somebody slandered a building? A piece of fruit? Pluto? (planet or cartoon dog, I don’t care) The weather?

You saw it predicted here first.

 

 

Javier Krahe has been acquitted of “hurting religious feelings” in a movie he made nearly 40 years ago.

Crommunist is doing the blogathan by taking pledges for learning songs and then posting a video of himself performing them. What a brilliant way of doing it!

Go cheer him on or donate all of your money or both.

 

For our final item for this brief but exciting miniature blogathon – David Gibson at Religion News Service looks at the way bishops strain at imaginary gnats while gulping down very large smelly camels.

When the bishops gathered under intense public pressure in Dallas in June 2002, they seemed determined to take dramatic steps, and to a degree they did. Their Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People developed a “one-strike” policy to remove priests credibly accused of a single act of abuse, and jump-started efforts to have the Vatican streamline the process for defrocking abusive clerics…

Yet after all was said and done in Dallas, the bishops exempted themselves from any real sanctions. That self-absolution was considered outrageous at the time, and the passing years have not eased the anger.

“The Vatican also needs to do its job. It appears to have no problem investigating nuns and theologians, but investigating mismanagement by a bishop is not a priority,” the Rev. Thomas Reese, a well-known Jesuit commentator, told a symposium last month at Jesuit-run Santa Clara University to mark the 10th anniversary of the Dallas charter.

“Even when a bishop is indicted, no one has the sense to tell him to take a leave of absence until the case is over,” Reese said.

Quis custodiet, eh? Eh? It’s very like the bankers and hedge fund managers getting themselves put in charge of everything so that all the people who had nothing to do with all that gambling with other people’s money get to lose their jobs and houses and savings, while all the people who had everything to do with it continue to pocket millions every year, much of it via taxpayers. It’s very like that. We will fix all the things except the ones that have anything to do with us; those, of course, we will carefully bracket and put aside, because we want to be happy. Thank you for your understanding in this matter.

And so my part in the blogathon comes to an end and I get to rush outside for fresh air and rapid motion.

It is 1:58. This is post 13 of 13.

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Maureen Brian (whom I met at QED, much to my delight) makes an eloquent point on the government’s education plans. It’s so eloquent that it gets the 1:30 slot.

In an ideal world we would have the active encouragement of all a person’s natural languages throughout life, GCSE and A Level exams available in most of them and an end to the notion that passing an exam 20 years ago beats speaking the language every day to your Granny.

We will not be getting that ideal world under the current government whose aim seems to be to have people reciting infant school poetry before they sleep, unpaid and in fear of losing benefits, under the bridges of the nation.

Zing.

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Ron Lindsay points out in the Huffington Post that coming out as an atheist is significantly different from coming out as LGBT.

True. Nobody is saying that being straight is based on a lot of unexamined and untenable beliefs. Nobody is saying or hoping that straightitude will wither away. A good many atheists are saying that religion is based on mistaken beliefs and that it does harm as a result, and should either wither away or become very much less obtrusive and demanding and Special.

I don’t foresee a best-selling book entitled “The Straight Delusion” or “Heterosexuality Poisons Everything.” The LGBT community wants acceptance; they don’t want to persuade others to join their “team,” and even if they had that objective, they would strive for it in vain.

By contrast, the amount of literature that has been produced in the last decade criticizing religious belief is extensive and continues to grow. Moreover, these critiques of religion seem to have had some effect.

So the fact that we don’t have two heads or spikes isn’t enough to make us acceptable, and we might as well get used to it. In fact it’s what we want. (“We” as usual are gnus, or outspoken argumentative atheists.) We want to chip away at social deference to religion, and we can’t combine that with claims to be jes’ plain folks like everybody else.

12:49. I can spend a luxurious 11 minutes eating lunch.

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It’s not the thing you fling – it’s the fling itself.

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Uh oh, it’s 11:50. That’s cutting it too fine.

The UK education secretary has decided to fuck up science education.

All children are to be taught a foreign language – which could include Mandarin, Latin or Greek – from the age of seven under reforms to the national curriculum being unveiled by the education secretary, Michael Gove.

In other reforms, children will be encouraged to learn science by studying nature, and schools will be expected to place less emphasis on teaching scientific method.

Less emphasis on teaching scientific method? What the hell? Why would they do that? They might as well say they’re going to place less emphasis on teaching children critical thinking and just stuff them with a Box o’ Facts.

The science curriculum is expected to emphasise using the natural habitat around schools – learning biology by studying the growth and development of trees, for example.

There will be less of a focus on doing experiments. Instead, children will be taught to observe their surroundings and learn how scientists have classified the natural world.

Seriously? Seriously? Forget experiments, just look at stuff and learn some lists?

That sounds like me at my teenage worst. “Uhhh, I like to look at stuff, that’s good enough.”

One of the first few comments captures it nicely.

Learning foreign languages from age 7 using songs and poetry and learning about science by spending time outside observing nature – that’s not news, my step-son did that at school 15 years ago. But then he did go to a Steiner school…

Precisely.

Whew – 11:58.

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This just in – today’s installment of Boko Haram attacks on churches in Nigeria. Body count for this week: 4 so far.

The violence Sunday in Jos and Biu, a city in hard-hit northeastern Borno state, comes as almost every weekend this year has seen churches targeted by a radical Islamist sect known as Boko Haram and other shadowy assailants exacerbating the country’s unease. While no group immediately claimed responsibility for Sunday’s dual attacks, they bore the hallmarks of the sect’s previous assaults, which continue unstopped despite a heavy military presence in the region.

You know this idea we were talking about, making the world a better place? This isn’t it.

Killing people isn’t it.

No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attacks. Nigeria faces a growing wave of sectarian violence carried out by Boko Haram, whose name means “Western education is sacrilege” in Hausa. Boko Haram has been blamed for killing more than 560 people this year alone, according to an Associated Press count. The sect’s targets have included churches, police stations and other security buildings, often attacked by suicide car bombers across northern Nigeria.

That isn’t it. Boko Haram are not making the world a better place. The idea that any kind of genuine education is “sacrilege” or blasphemous or haram or Forbidden will not make the world a better place. (Genuine education does not include memorization of the Koran to the exclusion of everything else. That goes double when the memorization is in a language that the memorizer does not understand.) The spread of genuine education to all people will make the world a better place.

Just yesterday I published an article by Leo Igwe on Boko Haram and religious minorities in Northern Nigeria, in which he talks about some of the ways Boko Haram’s attacks will not make the world a better place.

Attacks on religious minorities could spark reprisal killings as has often been the case in the past, particularly in Southern Nigeria where Muslims are in the minority. In this way Nigeria is edging towards religious cleansing. Boko Haram attacks could provoke the cleansing of Christians in the Muslim majority states and of Muslims in the Christian majority communities. Already there are reports of Christians leaving Muslim majority communities for fear of being attacked and killed by militants.

That’s not a better world. People moving away from the places where they live because they are afraid of being killed or made destitute in religious cleansings – that’s not a better world. Boko Haram are doing it wrong.

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