Behold four scary criminals:
Asif Mohiuddin, Subrata Adhikari Shuvo, Moshiur Rahman Biplob and Rasel Parvez
Yesterday, four Bangladeshi atheist bloggers were indicted for posting derogatory material about Islam and the Prophet Muhammad online. The bloggers, who were first arrested in April, will now face up to 14 years imprisonment and hefty fines. They are the first people to be tried under the country’s new Information Technology Act, which bans the publication of online material that “causes hurt to religious beliefs.”
Wait until they get a load of me. Don’t they realize there is a whole wide world out here that says mean things about Mo?
Takes the whole childish fit about so-and-so said something mean to a whole new level…
Yep, fuck Mo. Mo was a goddamn pedophile. Whose pedophilia is sanctioned by the scripture of the Koran. And no, I haven’t and I won’t read the entire Koran, because the fact that its most revered prophet was a fucking pedophile tells me all I need to know about it.
One of those four scary criminals isn’t like the other three. There’s four names in the caption so one of them must be using an invisibility cloak.
Better not accept any invitations to speak in Dhaka, PZ. Fourteen years is a long time to spend in a government hotel.
Don’t they realize there is a whole wide world out here that says mean things about Mo?
Yes, they do, and they’ll be coming for you as soon as they can find (or make up) a legal pretext to do so.
14 years?!
Fucking hell. Can their omnipotent ghost not get off his own arse to defend his favourite earthly messenger?
I see three unhappy looking guys & two cops in the photo.
I also see injustice, ignorance, unreason, …
Islam is pathetic, disgusting, & a disgrace to human civilization.
Oh yeah, & the cops look like they don’t want to be there.
“Cause hurt to religious beliefs”, where does it end? By definition, the existence of a lot of religions cause hurt to religious beliefs of other religions. For example, the Koran clearly states that Jesus was never crucified, attacking a core belief of Christianity. There are bazillions other examples.
I also remember an argument where a muslim said that calling Islam a belief system WAS an attack to his religion, because a belief implies that it is not necessarily 100% true fact.
Isn’t this a provision that Muslim dominated countries have been pushing the UN to adopt?
@Dick the Damned
“
IslamReligion is pathetic, disgusting, & a disgrace to human civilization.”FTFY.
You would have thought that Allah the Merciful would have punished them in His own good time, but for some reason he needs earthly zealots to interpret and carry out his wishes. Is He getting old or something?
One would have also thought that since Islam is clearly correct, then it wouldn’t need laws to prove it – can’t it stand up to scrutiny by itself?
Two cops (DB stands for Detective Branch) and three guys arrested in April: the photo dates back to when they were first arrested. /google
Which makes the caption incorrect, of course.
I’m always morbidly amused by the way Christians take opportunities like this to point out how kind and loving Christianity is because it’s not enforcing fear tactics like teh eeeeeevil moozlems.
The Christians in more secular states conveniently forget to add all that vaunted lack of oppression is not for want of desire to hold such power over people’s lives. History is replete with evidence that the only reason Christianity held sway in much of vaunted Christendom was because there were crippling fines, tortures, public humiliations, imprisonments and death sentences awaiting those that might want to question the belief system held by the lawgivers and their literal brethren they put into positions of liturgical authority.
The yearning sighs for present Nigeria and Russia’s rebooting of state ‘morality’ into unashamed Christian tyranny that can freely pursue the blasphemous existence of homosexuals tell me all I need to know of what would happen to the ‘loving Christians’ if they didn’t have secularizing laws being enforced upon them in countries where they are the noise to signal majority.
Based on this image (via The Daily Star) it looks like the three men pictured above are Subrata Adhikari Shuvo, Mashiur Rahman Biplob and Russel Parvez. Asif Mohiuddin was also arrested he is not featured in this photo.
Mashiur Rahman Biplob is at right in black polo; Russel Parvez is in the center in black shirt with red spider logo; Subrata Adhikari Shuvo is at left in the white T shirt with tricolor logo. I can’t find search results for the officers on the left and the right but they are wearing the insignia of the Dhaka Metropolitan Police.
The sentence “hurts” their religion so much more than the disbelief of these men.
Not to worry…this is where Canada’s new Office of Religion Freedom will step in …right? I mean Stephen Harper’s government and his trusty Minister of Foreign Affairs John Baird will go to Dakka and spring these guys. A little dust-up and religious freedom is secured once again…oh did you say atheists?
I want to say it’s unfair to call them nerds, but they do look exactly like the cast of some nerd comedy.
You know what? I’m going with that. To spare my faith in humanity I’m going to pretend these guys are going on some wacky adventure to lose their virginity instead of rotting in prison for over a decade because they insulted somebody’s imaginary friend.
Right… Well, since so many people claim that “Atheism is a religion too!!!” perhaps we can try the following:
Imprisoning people for what they say online hurts my religious beliefs!
Can we go lock up that judge now?
I’d like to say that all differing religious beliefs would hurt my religious beliefs as well, however, locking up the whole world population hurts my religious beliefs too, and so saying so would mean I have to be locked up besides them.
My friend Mohamed once told me after we had a longer conversation about Islam, Atheism and Humanism “I see where your coming from, but please do yourself a favor and don’t talk like that in a Muslim country!”
Then I suggested that would probably be one of the biggest problems with Islam, it leaves no space for others in the public arena. He agreed to that notion, but I don’t think he considers that as a problem.
*sigh*
Yep.
I’ve long wondered this about omnipotent omniscient gods…
LOL.
Isn’t John Baird, (Canada’s Minister of Foreign Affairs), on record as saying that freedom of religion doesn’t mean freedom from religion? Yes! He said, “We know that freedom of religion does not mean freedom from religion”. The context, in a speech last year, doesn’t make clear exactly what he meant, but it seems to me that it probably can be taken at face value.
So don’t expect an intervention by Canada’s Office of Religious Freedom.
Meanwhile, under
Meanwhile, underage girls are still being married off to lecherous old farts because that’s all fine and dandy with their beliefs.
From the second article:
Well, clearly they’re limited in their work because they must use their resources and time to go after dangerous criminals like the above mentioned bloggers.
*SPITS*
@ David Marjanović, 23
Did you ever notice that the more powerful the alledged god is, the more they need to let humans do their dirty work? (as well as their “miracles”, btw)
Why … it’s almost as if those gods are completely unable to have any direct physical impact on this world at all…
They dared to oppose the state sanctioned mind control network. Not locking them up leads to civil disobedience, you know. Can’t have that in a nation of piecework loving bosses.
“causes hurt to religious beliefs.”
I guess I know what that means, but… what the hell does it mean?
It’s not that it causes offense to religious believers (an adsurd enough law), but that it… causes hurt? To beliefs? So it… challenges beliefs?
If it didn’t ruin people’s lives and instill fear and automatic, reflexive compliance, I’d say it’s laughable.
How deliberate was the passage of this clause of the Internet Technology legislation? Was it slipped in by religious conservatives amongst useful, technical details or is it central to some official purpose? I suspect the latter–extending anti-blasphemy-against-Islam laws to the realm of electronic publishing.
Just as Christians in the U.S. fail to realize that freedom to proselytize includes religions other than Christianity, so Muslims in some other country fail to realize that their anti-blasphemy laws, if written in general terms, would prevent them from bashing other religions if there was any will to prosecute. Hence their support for things like a “religious respect” resolution by the U.N. I wish there were a group that could bring suit or lay charges or ask for charges against those who denigrate minority religions.
This meme of Atheism as religion should be pursued. Bill Riley keeps hurting my religious beliefs. Can’t we spray him with unholy wáter or something? Incommunicate him?
If the law states Any religious beliefs then it’s time for my idea of “the Church of the Unknowable God” to set up in Bangladesh. My church has only one tenet: that God is unknowable and anyone who claims to know anything about God blasphemes against my religion and offends my religion and hurts my feelings – so if there’s a law against that then every person who practices any other religion has broken that law. (This includes referring to God in the 3rd person with a gendered pronoun too, Ouch! That hurts my religious sensibilities and my feelings).
[disclaimer: I am an atheist and the above is a joke, not serious].
There’s a good chance that Mo wasn’t a pedophile and that the whole “it’s ok to marry a kid” stuff was added by dishonest and cowardly clerics trying to mollify the middle-age upper-class they were supposed to moralize by telling them that they didn’t need to renounce to their arranged marriage customs to be “Good Muslims“…
Which means that instead of one dirty secret about its founder, there’s a whole set of skeletons to hide in the form of countless clerics who cowardly excused corrupt nobilities’ customs and habits instead of challenging them.
Nevertheless, one shouldn’t run in circle shouting pedophile dead guy! pedophile dead guy! pedophile dead guy! as if doing so sufficed to give oneself the moral and intellectual high ground
***
There’s quite a few follower of the Baha’i faith who may find your jokes not so funny: you see, they tried the whole “Church of the Unknowable God” shebang, and were predictably the object of state sanctionned violence and persecutions everywhere some higher up saw it as a threat to his privilege.
@ laurentweppe, 33
Actually, when the subject is alledged morality that is taken so seriously that people are willing to base their laws on this alledged morality … yes, not being a pedophile* or not blindly following the words of a known** pedophile does give one the moral high ground.
——
* I’m using the term pedophile in the meaning it is best known, i.e. a person who actually has or tries to have sex with children. Marrying a 6-years old and “consumating the marriage” when they are 9 years old falls under that definition.
** Even if Mo didn’t really marry a child, Islamic lore accepts it be true so for all intents and purposes, Mo is known to have abused a child.
I suppose I should stop telling that charming story about the cool atheist I met in Abu Dhabi, a gracious and generous man with a fairly high-profile job and the grandson of a famous imam, for fear that someone might trace it back to him and get him in trouble. :(
Thread won.