Muslim Riots Reach Europe

it’s weird times, when even christian german politicians like the minister for internal affairs, friedrich, from the conservative bavarian party CSU (christlich-soziale Union) are asking for are trying to cut down on the freedom of speech in order to make sure the infamous mohammed movie won’t be shown in Germany. obviously what his real intentions are, besides gutless fear of an angry muslim mob, is quite clear. he, as many of his conservative mates, is trying to bargain from this critical current situation by strengthening the ridiculous blasphemy laws that still exists one way or another in the country. to saveguard the feelings of deluded christian pensioners he is ready to sacrifice a fundamental democratic freedom…go figure how little some people have understood how important it is right now not to give in an inch, even if it costs blood. muslims have learned that they can overthrow dictatorships and can have elections, that’s step 1, now we have to make sure they understand that there are other freedoms a society has to learn in order to emulate western countries they both hate and long for.

wespeakfortheearth:

How Tribal Women Stop Witch Hunts

Indian village women, organized around a small, low-interest loan program, aren’t just making money, they are helping prevent the fatal witch hunts that can target their neighbors, according to researchers who worked in the tea plantations of Jalpaiguir, India.

Tribal women here form support groups when they receive the loans. These groups typically of about eight to 10 women have protected other women from these hunts, according to Soma Chaudhuri, a sociologist at the University of Michigan, who studied witch hunts in her native India for seven months.

Witch hunts are a long-standing practice here. The tribal plantation workers are poor and illiterate, and have a desperate need to make sense of rampant diseases in villages with no doctors or medical facilities, Chaudhuri said.

Continue..

(via divineirony)

I’ve just read this article from The Examiner:

British schools drop Holocaust from history lessons so as not to offend Muslims

it’s the same question over and over again. how can a country with a unique culture of freedom of speech and tolerance, namely the UK, end up being the one state in Europe that gives up the most freedoms for a completely misunderstood idea of political correctness? I’m all for PC where it does make sense. this obviously doesn’t and I wonder if the tories and labour party deliberately want to send their voters over to that dangerous moron Nick Griffin and the BNP national-socialists.

it shows once again how fragile and how subjectively constructed all our knowledge about history is. and it shows us the dangers of being gutless relativists for that very same reason, if you understand what I mean…

EDIT: it might be a hoax after all, at least I hope so, since this news item circulated the web for years, as this debunking website claims: http://www.snopes.com/politics/religion/holocaust.asp

however this website also says that at least 1 school actually did…in any way, this site is 4 years old, who knows what has changed since then, as indeed, even if the holocaust part (which is the most important) isn’t true, other sorts of tolerance towards the intolerant certainly are.

being aware is not useless, not to care about what’s going on in the world is the offense.

does the bigotry of religious people have no limits? read this article and watch this video about an almost unknown kind of adolescent sex slave trade that seems to be common among the wealthy and powerful in Afghanistan. it’s absurd that the same people who openly lynch gay people don’t mind under other circumstances. after all, if you’re richor powerful enough your libido will defeat your socalled morals big time.

‘Dancing Boys Of Afghanistan’: Bacha Bazi Documentary Exposes Horrific Sexual Abuse Of Young Afghan Boys

EDIT: apparently the preview video on the huffington website isn’t available anymore, however here you can (if you’re in the US at least, watch the full documentary, others will have to google their way to a copy or use a proxy):

PBS Frontline Documentary

Avaaz petition to free the 14 yr old pakistani christian girl accused of blasphemy...

it isn’t much in any way, but avaaz campaigns have been useful in the past, so why not sign it? I certainly did.

hahaha…sorry, this is just hilarious, there we go with what many atheists and agnostics already think. reading religious texts strongly encourages disbelief ;)

Has Religious Extremism (in Pakistan and elsewhere) gotten to the point of no return?

this is basically a follow-up on yesterdays story, and also a sign that there’s hope, since what’s to oppose is mainly Islam, not Muslims. here we have a moderate Muslim who understands the problems and the grotesque situation of Pakistan, where people have reached a point of fanaticism to wish death on 12 year old girls from religious minorities…there is some hope that those moderate people will be able to speak up and stop a process that’s dangerous to the world (don’t forget those fundamentalist could get hold of Pakistan’s nuclear weapon arsenal at some point. antitheism is the least of worries and not a step for Pakistan’s near future anyway. I’d be happy enough to help moderate people opposing the talibanisation of Pakistan.

before I start I have to issue a warning: DO NOT watch this video if you’re not sure you can stand it, because I barely could. it’s monstrously graphic depicting the whole process of decapitating an apostate…

so…how do atheists, particularly antitheists, perceive the news about outrageous crimes committed in the name of religion flocking in from all over the world each day?

it has become more and more difficult not to be almost overinformed thanks to facebook, blogs we follow, various trusted websites of choice. yet, being an atheist, or even better, an antitheist, is worth almost nothing if it isn’t accompanied by some sort of humanism. this means that an atheist who supports things that have been time and again proven to be harmful to societies by science, such as weak gun laws, the death penalty and so on, is still some sort of an ignorant bigot who abuses one part of science, mostly natural sciences, to disprove god, while selectively ignoring the less straight forward social sciences that show us a lot about how societies can work.

what I’m going on about is the issue of not uncritically mixing up the harms by religion as a structure and institution of power with actions of religious individuals who have had almost no say in their indoctrination. it’s important to blame religion and the leading clerics and politicians (not that this difference is valid in islamism) pushing fundamentalism forward, abusing the gullible nature of religiously indoctrinated humans who didn’t enjoy any sort of independent education, not to speak about being taught critical thinking and doubtfulness in all sorts of dogmatic preachings. but it’s also fair to note that you shouldn’t shoot the individual messenger, but react to the message and act according to the threat it poses to your liberty.

recently I’ve read about and watched videos about a lot of almost unbearable crimes in the name of religion. where do we, as antitheist humanists, draw the line of who we hold responsible? the video opening this post makes me feel like I don’t find the right answers, it’s incredibly violent and has been sent viral around the internet simply because it’s “producers” wants to spread fear.

but there’s more…there’s always more religiously motivated crimes. only yesterday all over the international media we could see reports about a group of taliban murdering, partly beheading 15 men and 2 women simply because they were listening to music and dancing. social interaction and a hint of cheerfulness between men and women is considered enough of a breach of the merciless shariah laws to actually murder everyone involved. read this BBC article if you haven’t read about it so far.

then there’s a 12 to 14 year old christian girl in Pakistan, probably with down syndrome, who thousands of angry local muslims want to see executed for blasphemy (fortunately it seems the officials don’t intend to do anything of the like, but still they keep her and her family in custody, maybe only until the lynching mob calms down, but who knows how they react towards public pressure…it still shows how fundamentalism is growing in a way that the local governments, no matter how secular or religiously minded, don’t have answers to the push for absolute power islamists are working on in many regions of the globe). but mind you, although many “moderate” muslim clerics don’t really want to execute a child with down syndrome, you only have to look back a couple of weeks to see what happens in Pakistan, when the mob actually gets hold of you. a man accused of blasphemy has been burnt to death after the mob raided the police station where he couldn’t find safety: read this if you don’t know the case.

in other places like Mali, where an islamist group of rebels and terrorists now dominate the north of the country after a coup d’etat, shariah corporal punishments are already being applied. while the afghan and pakistani taliban murder because they see sin in all music but qur’an-chants, in Mali you can see the same process of criminalization of music and entertainment in an early stage. it’s heartbreaking: read this article about how the music has died in northern Mali

you get my point, which is about a basic dilemma all humanist atheists have to face. to what extend is the individual responsible for atrocities, where is the line we have to draw because group dynamics are taking over until the individual gets lost in the power and ecstasy of the lynching mob? social sciences show us that there are no direct answers to this problem. and since there are no such answers there are no direct solutions, just indirect ones. those are the same old suspects education, welfare, human rights, lowering the gap between rich and poor…let’s face it, those never get old because they just work. let’s try to be angry instead of hateful and promote those humanist values.

proud-atheist:

Meet the Members of the Congressional Science Committee Who Don’t Get Science

http://proud-atheist.tumblr.com

a reblog for a change, since there’s really not much else to add…

…besides asking oneself, even not being an american, how I can know more about the founding fathers’ views on the separation of state and religion, as well as about the inventive scientific minds of some of them, than those manipulative, populist, religious retards…how about leaving science committees up to people who actually have a brain? even the more intelligent rep’s, and although it seems incredible, there are a few intelligent conservatives out there, who one can respect for their intellect, although despising their ideological conclusions, should understand that by harming the science committee with their party’s nominees they are harming the intellectual potential of the  whole secularized western world.

anyway, it’s not up to me to vote in the US, I can only give an outsider’s perspective. I often find that there’s massive differences between the US and Europe in terms of how ideological certain debates can be.