Unbelievable

Saudi Arabia is one screwed up, vile little backwater of a barbarous craphole. You have to read the case of Fawza Falih.

She has been condemned to death. By beheading.

She has been beaten to the point of hospitalization during her incarceration.

The authorities have a signed confession, which she has not had read to her.

She didn’t read what she signed, either, because she’s illiterate.

She and her representatives were not allowed to attend much of the trial.

And the crime for which she is to be executed? Witchcraft. She is accused of casting a spell that caused a man to become impotent, and threatening to cause people to be possessed by dogs.

Apparently, the spells must have worked all too well, since all the men of Saudi Arabia are now cowardly eunuchs with the souls of craven mongrels. At least, that’s the only explanation I can see for their uncivilized behavior.

It’s not just the Muslims

Down there in Weird Kansas, there was a minor incident that is symptomatic of an ugly way of thinking. A high school basketball team refused to allow a woman to referee.

The Kansas State High School Activities Association said referees reported that Michelle Campbell was preparing to officiate at St. Mary’s Academy near Topeka on Feb. 2 when a school official insisted that Campbell could not call the game.

The reason given, according to the referees: Campbell, as a woman, could not be put in a position of authority over boys because of the academy’s beliefs.

It’s also quite possible that her face was uncovered, that she had driven a car to the game, and that she may at some time in the past have actually played basketball in immodest clothing, against men…and she might even have won.

I’m sure that when all of the activities of this domineering Jezebel aspiring to be almost as good as a man are revealed, the upright young men of St Mary’s Academy will march over and burn her.

Oh, but here’s a hint for an organizations that want to exercise discriminatory policies. The local athletic organization is contemplating stripping St Mary’s membership over the issue, but they have to wait on one little thing.

Gary Musselman, the association’s executive director, said the organization will not make a decision until it confirms whether St. Mary’s Academy has a written policy of not allowing female referees to work boys’ basketball games.

Here that, administrators who want to implement racist or sexist policies? It’s OK as long as you don’t write them down.

Tit-for-tat

The Danish cartoonists vs. Muslims conflict is flaring up again, with the discovery of a conspiracy by Muslims to kill a cartoonist. There are many levels of irony here; it’s simply stupid to try and protest accusations that you are violent by committing acts of violence. I’ve also noticed an interesting pattern of escalation.

The aggrieved Muslims are saying, “Mock our god and we will kill you.” They have the goal of suppressing images they consider blasphemous.

The cartoonists are saying, “Threaten to kill us and we will mock your god.” Obviously, they’d like to stay alive, but their goal in this context is to see their work disseminated widely.

Now ask yourself, who is achieving their goals? Who is winning?

It looks to me like a few relatively obscure cartoonists are crushing the fundamentalist Muslim world. Those cartoons aren’t even that good, and they’re being published everywhere, even appearing on blogs.

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Now maybe I’m misinterpreting the fundie Muslim position here: maybe their goal is actually to make sure the world thinks their beliefs are dangerous and stupid, and also ineffectual; they’re flailing pointlessly to suppress a couple of scribblings that would have vanished into obscurity, and have managed to turn them into icons of Islamic insanity. They’re doing a good job if that’s so. They’ve convinced me, at any rate.

A compromise: maybe they could operate with their feet?

So…Muslims want special foot washing stations so they can tidy up in order to pray, but at the same time, Muslim doctors don’t want to have to wash their arms before they plunge them into my guts. “No practising Muslim woman — doctor, medical student, nurse or patient — should be forced to bare her arms below the elbow,” they say.

A belief system that prioritizes washing up before mumbling at an invisible man over sterile technique in surgery does not require accommodation. It needs to be the target of laughter and contempt.

Institutionalized misogyny

Saudi police arrested and strip-searched an American businesswoman for the crime of visiting a Starbucks with a male colleague.

“Some men came up to us with very long beards and white dresses. They asked ‘Why are you here together?’ I explained about the power being out in our office. They got very angry and told me what I was doing was a great sin,” she told the Times.

It could be worse. In Iraq, women who violate “Islamic teachings” are tortured and murdered. The “Islamic teachings” that are so important that violators must be tortured and beheaded involve wearing a headscarf.

You can imagine the reaction, then, when the Archbishop of Canterbury suggests that England ought to legally recognize Sharia law. It’s foolishness with well-meaning intent — let’s help the waves of Islamic immigrants acclimate — but it’s also a perfect example of why even moderate religions are dangerous. What he proposes is outrageous appeasement, an accommodation to a primitive religious tradition, when what ought to be said is that the uniform application of secular law is what a civilized society demands, not a patchwork of piecemeal laws which apply differently to different people, and especially not the corrupting insanity of irrational, hateful, vile nonsense like Islam.

Perhaps the Archbishop was concerned that if he didn’t support the Islamic version of irrational insanity, people might notice that the Anglican church is also a bastion of irrational insanity. Let’s hope that instead this will help open people’s eyes and get them to wonder, “why the hell do we even pay attention to old fools whose only claim to authority is their position in an antiquated ecclesiastical hierarchy?” Go away, archbishops and imams — you harm our culture.

Loyal Rue vs. (?) PZ Myers

At some time, a recording of our ‘debate’ will be available online, so I won’t try to do a play by play now. I will say that I found this one pretty much impossible to prepare for — there was no way this debate could be shoe-horned into a good vs. evil or smartness vs. ignorance conflict, making it a much more complicated discussion, rather than a television wrestling storyline. We’d had a few conversations in email and there were several points of disagreement, and in fact Dr Rue showed those points in a slide, but you know, he had good reasons for all the stuff he got wrong. I read his book, Everybody’s Story: Wising Up to the Epic of Evolution(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), which is actually very good: he doesn’t advocate the abandonment of religion, but rather the evolution and transformation of religion to incorporate the best of modern science in its cosmology, rather than the best of Babylonian science from the first millennium B.C. We have our differences, but I couldn’t help but feel that I’d be quite content if all the reactionary religious nuts would convert to Rue’s religion, even if they did fall shy of the perfect ideal of atheism.

So we had a discussion rather than a debate, a discussion that revolved around some of our differences, but our intent was more mutual enlightenment than mutual evisceration. We got good probing questions from the audience, too, so I think a lot of us had our thinking caps on. I had a good time. I had two dark ales afterwards to celebrate a pleasant evening.

Some of you loyal readers were there, feel free to chime in with your impressions in the comments. Maybe it looked completely different from the bleacher seats…?

P.S. Greg Laden was there, and he made some really good points about how morality isn’t a product of religion at all in most cultures. We should have dragged him up on the stage to give his perspective, but maybe he’ll expand on that on his blog.

Let us pray

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Just the title of this book is good for a laugh: The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Prayer. They’ve certainly got their target audience pegged.

As an added bonus, the reviews are amusing.

Have reviewed a number of books on prayer and they usually get too complicated and bogged down.

“Close your eyes and pretend” is too complicated? Are there rules and regulations and rituals that must be performed for this prayer thing that are baroque and beyond my understanding, or is this reviewer the kind of person who finds swallowing to be an act of will that requires concentration and practice?

I just recently returned to my Christain roots and the Complete Idiot’s Guide to Prayer helped answer a question that many of us are afraid to ask; “How do you pray?” I’ve seen it done hundreds of times but it’s all so mysterious. This book explains a variety of options to mix it so that prayer doesn’t become a chore.

I’ve seen it done, too, and no, it isn’t mysterious. People just talk to themselves, silently or aloud. It isn’t hard. It also doesn’t work. But it’s that last line that I found weird.

These people supposedly believe they have a direct, personal relationship with the Supreme Omnipotent Overlord of the Universe, and not only that, but he loves them and is deeply interested in the tawdry minutia of their personal lives. Yet they can consider having a conversation with such a being a “chore”? If such a being existed, and if I were able to talk with him, ask questions, and get answers, I’d be online with the big guy all the time and asking all kinds of questions. He’d be better than Google!

Of course, if he were a colossal tyrannical jerk who refused to answer any of my questions, then I’d consider it a chore. I’d also stop calling him up.

But then, I’m an atheist, and I’m smarter than they are — the Bible says so.

Our congress takes care of the IMPORTANT stuff

We’re in a war, we’re looking at a looming mortgage crisis, and I can tell you that our educational system is getting flushed down the tubes, and what does our brave congress do? Why, it decides to make the words “In God We Trust” bigger on our coins.

Responding to complaints from the Religious Right, Congress has passed legislation mandating that the phrase “In God We Trust” be moved from the edge to the back or front of the new presidential dollar coins.

President George W. Bush signed the measure into law Dec. 26. It was tucked into a $555 billion domestic spending bill after having been pushed by U.S. Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.). Brownback and other Religious Right conservatives have been complaining about the new coins since the series started last year.

Oh, yeah. That’s a solution. Maybe God will like us better if put his name in bigger print on our money.

They’re all demented fuckwits.