Hindu extremists get mad over a film

Hindu extremists in India are threatening violence if a new Bollywood film Padmavaat is released that they allege depicts a romance between queen Padmaavati and a 14th century Muslim ruler Alauddin Khilji. They have not seen the film and the filmmakers say the film does not show this and have offered an advance screening to allay their fears. But hell hath no fury like an enraged religious extremist and now that they have got worked up, they are not going to calm down easily.
[Read more…]

Apologies without accountability are meaningless

If you have hung around much at all with Christian evangelicals like I have done in the past, you will have noticed that they love redemption stories. The sentiment of “I once was lost and now am found”, as expressed in the hymn Amazing Grace is a surefire winner with that crowd, to the extent that they will even exaggerate the extent of their past sins in order to make their salvation sound even more dramatic. I know because I have heard the testimonies of people I knew well.
[Read more…]

Christian group seeks to roll back transgender prisoner rights

Aviva Stahl writes that a Christian advocacy group known as Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) is seeking to roll back protections that had been put in place in prisons that had enabled transpeople to petition to use bathrooms corresponding to their gender identity.

For Lagan and the other trans women locked up at Carswell, the new policies were a lifeline. They were allowed to escape the pervasive risks they faced in male custody, including sexual and physical assault from prisoners and guards; they frequently ended up in solitary confinement, either as punishment or, perversely, for “protection.”

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, more than one third of transgender people held in prisons and jails experience sexual violence, the highest reported of any demographic group studied; the new policies were meant to ease this burden.

Today, however, a Christian legal advocacy group with a growing national profile, called Alliance Defending Freedom, is working to undo the regulations and policies that helped Langan move to Carswell. Now she is at risk of being sent back into the male prison population.
[Read more…]

Only a crazy system could allow this to happen

Most people have heard about David and Louise Anna Turpin who kept their 13 children aged 2 to 29 like prisoners under the most appalling conditions, where they were shackled and starved. These children were not sent to school but kept at home pretty much all the time. It was only after one 17-year old child escaped through a window and called the authorities that the abuse was discovered although it had been going on for years. She was so emaciated that police thought she was just 10 years old.
[Read more…]

Scaring young people with stories of the Rapture

That excellent radio program This American Life devoted its entire hour this week to a single story. It is about how parents hired a private basketball coach AJ for their son Cody who was in third grade and that over time, the boy formed a close bond with the coach who then, over a period of years and unbeknownst to the parents, proceeded to indoctrinate the boy with elaborate stories about the Bible and the Rapture and how there was an evil supercomputer somewhere in Belgium that was going to take over the world and how the Illuminati were planning to implant everyone with RFID chips as a way of controlling them. These chips are the prophesied ‘mark of the beast’ that any Rapturite will tell you identifies those who worship the anti-Christ.

It is pretty engrossing and also disturbing for any parent. At the end, Cody says that he cannot believe now that he believed all the crazy stuff that AJ told him, a common experience for those who eventually escape from the indoctrinating influence.

Young Earth creationist argumentative strategy

I came across this interesting blog post by someone named Jaybird (whose gender is not specified and I will refer to as a ‘he’) who had been a young-Earth creationist. He was taught that it was vitally important to defend the idea of a young Earth because that was based on a biblical chronology and if that was taken as metaphorical, then that would open the floodgates for thinking that everything, even the resurrection of Jesus, as metaphorical, and that would be the end of everything. He describes the rhetorical tricks that he was taught to enable people like him to defend that position and get the better of their more-scientifically-minded critics.
[Read more…]

Sex abuse report released in Australia

The royal commission in Australia charged by the government with investigating how institutions (religious, federal and state governments) have responded to child sex abuse allegations has, after five years issued a 17-volume report containing 400 recommendations, of which 189 are new. Such commissions usually issue fairly mild recommendations but these were quite sweeping. Naturally, the report looked at the Catholic church, one of the worst perpetrators of child sexual abuse, and suggested two major changes: ending celibacy for priests and requiring priests to report to the authorities anyone who in confessions to priests said that they had abused children.
[Read more…]

Lead us not into theological controversies

Those of us who are lapsed Christians, however long ago it was that we fell from grace and chose the express lanes to hell, will likely remember the Lord’s Prayer even if we have forgotten everything else in the liturgies. We said it so often that it was deeply embedded in our brains long after we stopped paying any attention to what the words actually mean. So it is a big deal when none other than the pope suggests changing a line in the prayer because it puts their god in a bad light.
[Read more…]