Pakistan is bracing for its full supreme court to issue its final verdict in the case of the blasphemy charges brought against the woman known Aasia Bibi after a three judge panel ruled that the charges against her had not been proven and that she should be released. The right-wing Tehreek-e-Labbaik (TLP) party has been leading the protests. Meanwhile, Bibi’s lawyer has had to flee the country out of fear of being killed.
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I came across an astonishing but little reported item about the most recent mass murder that took place in California last week. Apparently the killer Ian Long actually made a Facebook post around the time he carried out the rampage where he mocked the predictable reaction that people would have after the killing.
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The laws in Pakistan against blasphemy are an absolute disgrace. They are so expansive and ambiguous that people can use them against their enemies by alleging blasphemy and making their lives intolerable. It seems like charges can be brought easily and religious mobs easily incited who then in turn intimidate authorities into take action against the accused. Hence the decision last week by the Pakistani Supreme Court to overturn the blasphemy conviction of the woman known as Asia Bibi is a welcome development.
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I have referred several times to the weird book of Revelation in the Bible, particularly how it has become the go-to source for the Rapture-lovers. I just learned that my colleague Tim Beal in the Department of Religious Studies at Case Western Reserve University has published a new book titled The Book of Revelation: A Biography that dishes the dirt on this last book in the Bible that has produced such a lot of head scratching and been the source of so many weird fantasies.
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Not that we should be surprised since religious zealots exist in every country and in every religion. In New Zealand, they are upset by the fact that the new speaker of the parliament has dropped references to Jesus in the prayers that open each session of parliament.
Since taking over the role in November last year, Labour’s Trevor Mallard has dropped any reference to Jesus in the prayer which opens the start of every session.
Mallard said he wanted to make the prayer more inclusive for all parliamentarians and the tweak was a “compromise”.
A reference to “almighty god” remains, but it is not a specific reference to a Christian god.
On Tuesday around 1,000 people protested on the steps of parliament house in Wellington, arguing that New Zealand was a Christian nation and Mallard had no authority to axe Jesus’s name.
The protesters want Jesus’s name reinstated, and held signs reading “Dishonourable Judas Mallard”.
“He needs a good kick in his pants, and he needs to actually be removed because this is a Christian nation,” protester Rieki Teutscher told Radio NZ. “We don’t share his atheism.”
The good news is that Ireland has voted to remove the crime of blasphemy from its constitution, with young people leading the way.
Until recently, Ireland was deeply conservative, dominated by the Catholic church, but the country has legalised gay marriage and abortion in popular votes, and is now led by an openly gay taoiseach.
Reflecting the speed of changes in Ireland, the strongest support for ending the ban came from younger voters, exit polls suggested. Four in five voters under 35 backed the change, according to the Irish Times, while over-65s only approved it by a narrow margin, with 52% in favour and 48% against.
The government had already laid out legislation to remove the offence of blasphemy from the constitution and all relevant laws, should the referendum be passed.
It has been over 150 years since anyone was prosecuted for blasphemy in Ireland, but the country had passed a blasphemy law in 2009.
This has been a hell of a week for politically motivated violence in the US. The mail bombs sent to prominent people perceived as opponents of Donald Trump by a fanatical Trump supporter are just one indicator of how toxic the political climate has become. Today we have the horrendous killings at a synagogue in Pittsburgh where reports say that eleven people have died and six others wounded. That synagogue is in a neighborhood that is very familiar to me from my days as a graduate student in that city, because it is adjacent to where both the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University are and many students and professors (including my thesis advisor) live there.
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I just got an offer of a complimentary copy of a book if I would be willing to review it. I get these offers from time to time but what was unusual this time was in the choice of me as a potential reviewer. The book is about the Rapture, the supposed end of the world that some Christians believe is imminent and will signal the beginning of a massive, long, and bloody fight between the forces of Jesus and the forces of Satan as represented on Earth in human form by the Anti-Christ, whom some think is Barack Obama.
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It appears that blasphemy is currently an offense in Ireland, even though the last known prosecution was in 1855 and the last conviction was in 1703 when a Unitarian pastor was fined £1,000 and sentenced to one year’s imprisonment for publishing a book that argued that Jesus was not equal with God the Father.
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That atheists can be virtuous is so obvious that it is not something that needs to be stated. But we know that it was not always thought so, especially in early modern times. And even now, we often hear the specious argument being advanced that since god is the source of moral values, an atheist cannot be expected to have any. I won’t even bother to respond to that silly argument. But I came across this interesting article by Michael Hickson, a professor of philosophy, who describes the evolution of attitudes towards atheists.
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