Kimberly Winston recounts the moving story of ‘Samya’, a young woman aged 20 in the US, who left her parents and her five siblings and fears that if her true identity were revealed, she might be killed by her family. Her crimes? “She rejected a marriage arranged by her father, who came to the U.S. from the Middle East when Samya was an infant. And perhaps more serious to her parents: She has become an atheist.” [Read more…]
The process of selecting the new pope is about to begin. The cardinals began today to go through the preliminaries before deciding when to begin the conclave that actually elects the pope. I came across an article by David Gibson that provides some information on the process as well as interesting historical trivia. [Read more…]
Whenever the political class, the major players in the business world (especially the financial sector), and their media lackeys, all of whom are collectively known as The Villagers, enthusiastically agree on something, concerned people should sit up and take notice because it signals that a big swindle is about to be perpetrated on the general public. The clue that such a thing is in the works in when the phrase ‘everyone knows’ is bandied around about a major policy proposal with absolutely no evidence to back it up. [Read more…]
The International Humanist and Ethical Union, which describes itself as the world union of humanist organizations, issued in December 2012 Freedom of Thought 2012: A Global Report on Discrimination Against Humanists, Atheists and the Non-religious, its first report on worldwide discrimination against the non-religious. [Read more…]
I wrote earlier about how the Obama administration will not deny that it has the right to summarily kill US citizens without trial even if they are in the US, and the deafening silence that has accompanied this outrageous claim. It is remarkable the extent to which so-called ‘liberal Democrats’ have sold their soul when it comes to the subversion by the current administration of the things that they used to say they held dear, such as the rule of law and upholding the constitution, not to mention notions of fundamental human rights, all of which they used to condemn the Bush administration’s reign of lawlessness. [Read more…]
I have not seen the film Life of Pi and am probably not going to. I read Yann Martel’s book some years ago and what I liked most about it were the opening chapters of the boy Pi simultaneously following the religions of Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam, unbeknownst to his parents or to the clerics of the three religions, each of whom thought he was a devout follower of only their faith. Once the boy started on his ill-fated journey across the ocean, I lost interest while the film seems to have that as its main focus. [Read more…]
There has been a lot of chatter in the media recently about the upcoming oral arguments before the US Supreme Court on March 26 and 27 on two cases involving same-sex marriage. Hollingsworth v. Perry concerns California’s Proposition 8 that banned same-sex marriage but was later overturned by the courts. The second is United States v. Windsor that challenges the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). While these cases are undoubtedly important and interesting, their long-term effects are not as significant. The reason is that same-sex marriage is coming and the only question is whether it comes soon or sooner and the court cannot stop it. [Read more…]
Christopher Hitchens angered a lot of people with his expose of Mother Theresa in his 1995 book The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, and he was dismissed by her fans as an angry atheist who wanted to tear down anyone who was held up as exemplifying what was good about religion. [Read more…]
Indefinite detention, torture and testimony obtained from torture, spying on attorney-client conversations, solitary confinement for months and years, no habeas corpus, military tribunals that suspend normal rules of due process, all these are now part of the brave new world that we live in as a result of the war on terror. Ah, for the days of the Cold War when the US used such charges to bludgeon the Soviet bloc nations as part of the propaganda blitz to show the world how evil they were and how superior the US system of justice was. [Read more…]