A word about "Islamophobia"

If you're paranoid that the mild-mannered Muslim family down the street are secret terrorists, or that a Department of State aide with a foreign-sounding name is a deep-cover mole for the Muslim Brotherhood, then "islamophobe" might be an appropriate label to affix to you.

On the other hand, if you're genuinely worried about the spread of a culture that advocates lynching an 11-year-old girl because she had a burnt piece of paper in her bag that may or may not have been from a Qur'an, I'd say you're a rational human being who is rightfully afraid of a truly horrible thing.

"This girl is guilty. If the state overrides the court, then God will get a person to do the job," said Raheem. 

If that kind of thought is viewed as a positive thing in your religion, consider me militantly intolerant of your beliefs.

Put a gun to an atheist's head...

(Cross-posted to Skeptic Freethought)


My fellow Skeptic Freethought blogger Astrid drew attention to this heartwarming tweet this afternoon:

Sorry, kiddo. That's not God I'd be talking to. I'd be talking to the psychopath holding the gun. Though, hey, I'm pragmatic. I might say just about anything to get you to put the gun down.

If the only way you can get an atheist to pay lip service to your God is with a gun to their head, you might want to seriously reconsider the merits of your faith.

Mid-June Rehash: Dolphin/cephalopod copulation, divine search warrants, and criminalizing atheism!

I'm hopefully getting back in the swing of this blogging thing again.  This time I'm shooting for making mid-month rehashes of stories from around the internet a regular feature.  Let's do this.

Is that an octopus on your genitals, or are you just ha... wait, what?

So, in case any of you haven't seen it yet, this image started going viral yesterday:

Photo credit: Joan Gonzalvo

Best comment I've seen so far: "That's gotta suck."

(via Ed Yong)

Mid-month absurdity: Divine revelation is now probable cause?

Last year, a self-proclaimed psychic told the Sheriff's Office of Liberty County, Texas, that a local couple had 25 to 30 dismembered children buried on their property.  This prompted a raid on their home by deputies and put the couple in the media spotlight internationally (largely because the Sheriff's Office tipped off the media before executing the search warrant).

As it turns out, the couple weren't really serial killers and didn't even have one dismembered child buried in their yard, let alone 25 to 30 of them.  Now they're (rightfully) suing the Liberty County Sheriff's Office for defaming them and ransacking their home on the word of a charlatan.

The charlatan in question had this to say for herself:

“They up front asked me how I got the information, and I am a reverend. I am a prophet and I get my information from Jesus and the angels, and I told them that I had 32 angels with me and they were giving me the information and then it went from there,” she said.

Jesus and 32 angels told her about it? Must be legit.

(via Ken at Popehat)

Atheism gets you 2 1/2 years in prison in Indonesia

I hope by now that all of you who love freedom have heard of what's happening to Alexander Aan of Indonesia.  If not, go read up on it.

He's going to prison and will spend the next 2 and a half years locked up with dangerous criminals for asserting God's non-existence on an atheist group page on Facebook.  He also has to pay a fine of roughly $10,600 US.

Islamic extremists, however, seem to think that the sentence is too lenient; some of them feel that he's committed a capital crime.

“These atheists should be beheaded, that’s what they deserve,” wrote a man who identified himself as Putra Tama, a Muslim from neighboring Jambi province.

The Islamic Society Forum (FUI), an umbrella group for several hard-line groups, said that a five-year jail term for Aan would not suffice.

“He deserves the death penalty, even if he decides to repent. What he has done cannot be tolerated,” said Muhammad al-Khaththath, FUI’s secretary-general.

“It is important to prevent this group from spreading atheism in this country,” he added.

That doesn't bode well for him; how many Islamic extremists are going to be sharing a cell block with him?  It's morbid, but I wouldn't be surprised some righteous zealot sticks him with a shiv in the name of God.


At any rate, it isn't even legal to be an atheist in Indonesia.  You can choose from a laundry list of state-approved religions, but "none of the above" isn't an option.

Note to self: don't go to Indonesia.

If you're interested, the Atheist Alliance International is collecting donations for a legal fund to help Aan fight this ridiculous conviction.  If you want to contribute to that specific fund, make sure you tick the appropriate box before donating.

(via Friendly Atheist)

Atheism gets you jail time in the UK, too?

Indonesia doesn't exactly have the world's most permissive religious freedom laws, but surely nothing like that would happen in a bastion of liberty like a Western nation, right?

Yeah.  Wrong.

John Richards, an elderly man living in Boston (a small town on the eastern coast of England), has a sign hanging in his window proclaiming religion as fairy tales for adults.

Recently, the local police informed him that he could be arrested for it if it offends anybody and he refuses to take it down.

Unlike in Indonesia, I highly doubt an arrest in this case would result in any kind of conviction.  I hope.

(also via Friendly Atheist)

Recommended Reading: The Merely Real

I may have linked to her old blog as recommended reading last year, but Chana Messinger has a new blog that she updates frequently, writing about all sorts of interesting topics like feminism, skepticism, and occasionally food.  Go check it out.

Horrific violence in the name of superstition

A couple of gruesome stories graced my Twitter feed this evening. It seems that violent religious extremists are starting off the year strong.

In Nigeria, Islamists are mercilessly gunning down Christians for praying to the wrong imaginary god:

"It was around 7:30 pm (1830 GMT)," Pastor John Jauro told AFP news agency of Thursday's attack in the city of Gombe.

"I was leading the congregation in prayers. Our eyes were closed when some gunmen stormed the church and opened fire on the congregation. Six people were killed in the attack and 10 others were wounded."

He said there was confusion as worshippers sought to flee at the Deeper Life Christian Ministry Church.

Local police spokesman Ahmed Muhammad confirmed the attack, but declined to say how many people the gunmen killed and wounded.

The attack comes after a purported spokesman for Islamist group Boko Haram on Sunday issued a three-day ultimatum for Christians living in Nigeria's mainly Muslim north to leave the region or they would be killed.

There was, however, no claim of responsibility for the attack.

(via Ophelia Benson)


Meanwhile in London, we have the ongoing murder trial of a woman and her partner, both Congolese immigrants, who tortured and drowned her teenage brother last Christmas because they believed he was a witch:

On Christmas Day 2010 the defendants, who both deny murder, allegedly forced the boy and his siblings into a bath, submerging him in water. Pathologist reports revealed he suffered 101 injuries, and died as a result of drowning and the injuries.

When Kristy was found by paramedics in the eighth-floor flat in Forest Gate, his head, face, back and arms were covered in deep cuts and bruises, and several of his teeth were missing.

Kristy and four siblings were sent by their parents, from their home in Paris, to see their sister and his partner on 16 December. A few days passed "pleasantly enough", then Bikubi said some of the children were possessed by spirits and were having an evil influence on a younger child in the house, it is claimed.

(via PZ Myers)


Belief in the supernatural isn't the root of all evil, but it certainly serves as an excuse for some.

Thoughts on the Norway attacks

And so it came to pass that the bombing and massacre in Norway were carried out by a homegrown, lone-wolf terrorist with anti-Muslim sentiment, contrary to conjecture about al-Qaʿida or other Islamist groups masterminding this horror.  I have to admit that Islamist terrorism was the first thing that popped into my head when I first heard that there was a bombing, but I wasn't so reckless as to make public declarations about it before I knew the details.  I would have hoped that professional journalists would hold themselves to an even higher standard than an ordinary citizen, but who am I kidding?

Left-wing commentators have been coming down hard with criticism toward anyone who incorrectly speculated that Islamic terrorists were behind the attack, solidifying their view that Christian extremists are just as bad. But is Anders Behring Breivik really a Christian extremist?  Anders Behring Breivik thinks so.

How sincere are his religious convictions?  From what I've gathered by skimming his manifesto, he was just an all-around deranged madman who admittedly hedged his bets on Pascal's wager before what he thought would be a suicide mission in the name of "cultural Christians" against the threat of multiculturalism.  Regardless of how much of a True Believer™ Breivik was, attempts to associate or dissociate him with Christianity are pointless; Jon Stewart did a great job pointing out how ridiculous it has become:

The Daily Show
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Right-wing pundits were quick to suggest that Breivik was right about the Islamic threat in Europe, though bombing government buildings and massacring children isn't a very effective way of fighting that threat.  If he believed that his country was under siege by Muslim invaders, why didn't he take the "fight" to his perceived enemy?  What did he think he was accomplishing by murdering all those people?

For what it's worth, I can somewhat understand the concern about multiculturalism - the "live and let live" attitude many Western governments have toward immigrants with no pressure to assimilate can lead to de facto segregated communities in which custom may supersede local law.  I've heard reports of troubling inicidents in majority Muslim communities in other countries such as the UK before, though I'm not sure how factual they are; similar reports coming from Dearborn, Michigan are mostly sourced from a Christian group with its own agenda.  Concern is one thing; paranoia is another.

Here's hoping that this atrocity is an isolated incident and not the start of a wider right-wing terror campaign.  The last thing any secular society needs right now is the additional threat of self-styled Crusaders attacking civilians.

Animal liberation extremists launch intimidation campaign against biomed students

Via OSU's "On Research" blog:

The campaign, spurred by an activist website called Negotiation Is Over, urged its followers to attack.

Students, the website said, are “infinitely more susceptible to negative and inflammatory publicity,” and  that “when education fails, smear campaigns can be highly effective.  Abusers [meaning science students involved in animal research] have forfeited all rights to privacy and peace of mind.”


Led by activist Camille Marino in Florida, this proposed attack on students seeking an education, and possibly a career, in the sciences was broadly seen as stepping over the line.  While activists have destroyed property, harassed scientists and businesses and proposed violence for years, targeting students in this way somehow seemed worse.

NiO is encouraging like-minded vigilantes to target students of biomedical sciences, what the site's author describes as "the soft underbelly" of the "animal abuse industry".  They've been passing out handbills on university campuses across the country enticing cash-strapped undergrads to spy on biomed students and help NiO assemble dossiers on these "soft targets", presumably to post this information on their blog for every ecoterrorist in the world to see.

NiO paints a sordid picture of scientists who experiment on animals; they're portrayed as sadistic Dr. Mengele cutouts, willfully foregoing other types of testing (examples?) in order to torture animals for profit (?).  Marino and her site's commenters talk about animal researchers like they're nonpersons, fair game for all manner of retaliation for their "crimes".

 

If you are willing to give that eyesore of a blog the time of day, you'll notice that many posts speak in the passive voice about the unfortunate things that befall animal researchers; they may receive threats, their families may be harassed, their homes may be vandalized, and so forth.  Their site logo, featuring a masked and hooded figure holding a lit match, is cleverly suggestive of arson.

In reality, they're implicitly advocating far worse than "smear campaigns", but the lawyer who runs the organization is very careful about her wording to avoid actually committing a crime herself.  Marino can disavow all responsibility for any nutcase who reads her site and then feels inspired to go burn down a grad student's home.

These people are using the same inflammatory rhetoric displayed by anti-abortion extremists about abortion doctors and by radical Islamists about blasphemers.  If I were a biomed student, I know I'd be taking Krav Maga classes and applying for a CCW license right about now.

I'd be happy to see experimentation on live animals come to an end when it's replaced by a better system.  Until then, I have no ethical objection to it if the research is saving human lives.

A stone at rest gathers no blood

Today is International Day Against Stoning, part of a campaign to raise awareness (and, in turn, condemnation) of the barbaric practice of battering people to death with rocks.  It's a striking anachronism to see it listed on Wikipedia's capital punishment article as a "current" death penalty method.

It turns my stomach to imagine myself half-buried in a pit, feeling the impacts shatter my bones and teeth and rupture blood vessels.  It's even more revolting to imagine myself in the mob surrounding the victim, my peers coercing me to pick up a stone and throw it at the shrouded, bleeding figure in the pit.

It's likely the oldest form of execution employed by our species, and though it predates Islam by eons its continued use today seems to be most prevalent in theocratic Islamic countries.  I hate to jump to conclusions about blaming religion for human evils that could exist independent of such beliefs, but there's really no way around it in this case: fundamentalist Islam is the most prominent force keeping stoning alive today.  The penalty of death by stoning is implemented not for only the most heinous crimes, but for mere violations of social norms.  Adultery, fornication, homosexuality, being a rape victim, and refusing to go along with an arranged marriage are all offenses punishable with death by stoning in some parts of the Islamic world.

What sickens me the most about this brutality is that I'm practically helpless to stop it.  What are we to do, invade every country in which stoning still occurs?  That won't fix it.  Such a conflict could go on forever.  Is it too much to hope for that our species could cast this horror aside once and for all?  Or is it only realistic to expect that it will endure in some communities on and on into the future?

For now, we can at least put strong diplomatic pressure on countries like Iran whose governments do have the power to curb the practice.  It's worked before, or at least is working so far for one case.  Apart from foolhardy armed intervention, it's all we can really do.

Using religion as a scapegoat for bigger problems

I have, and things wouldn't be any better.

A trope I've noticed among fellow "New" atheists, particularly of the blogging variety, is the blaming of society's evils on people taking orders from an imaginary being.  The sentiment is that if all people embraced a naturalistic worldview, then things like war, terrorism, pseudoscience, sexism, and homophobia would all but vanish from our civilization.  

I think that's a naive attitude.  Just as all of religion's positive effects (charity, volunteering, community, etc.) could easily come from secular sources, isn't the same true of the evils it has produced?  Is belief that you are acting at the behest of an almighty spirit necessary to torture dissenters? To enslave and/or rape those weaker than you? To ritualistically starve your children or deny them medical treatment? To crash airplanes into occupied buildings?

I suppose it depends on how broadly you define "religion"; should it include cults of personality? We've seen people do some awful things in the name of charismatic leaders, never applying a skeptical mind to their sovereign's claims.

Officially, most North Koreans are nontheistic, but is the Juche philosophy really so different from a religion apart from its answer to the "god" question?  The Dear Leader promotes an air of veritable divinity around himself even as his country's citizens starve, and he need not appeal to a higher power to keep it that way.

Religious obedience, or tribal loyalty?

Even religious fanatics like the Muslim extremists assaulting and killing non-Muslims in the Middle East are not too dissimilar from criminal gangs; it's tribalism in its most extreme form.  We see its benign cousin every time there's a major sporting event, though the disdain that one team's less sportsmanlike fans express toward the opposing team tends to subside after the game (the violent and destructive episodes of football hooliganism being a notable exception).  Belief that violence against the "other" makes some invisible being happy is unnecessary; it only requires pent-up anger, often brought on by socioeconomic factors, to be channeled as hatred toward another individual or group.

Now there's the matter of suicide terrorism.  The promise of an eternal paradise after death is certainly a useful tool for convincing people to sacrifice their lives, but is it the only way?  I think it's entirely possible for someone who accepts that death is followed only by the end of consciousness to willingly die for what they think is a good cause.

If you were utterly convinced that your people were at war with an entire civilization, a monolithically evil enemy whose every member was like a worker wasp supporting the nest you want to destroy, could you be persuaded to commit a kamikaze attack that would take out thousands of them?  Would you need to believe you would be rewarded for it in the afterlife, or would it be worth it solely to aid in the defense of your loved ones back home? It's really only necessary to unquestioningly hate those you perceive as enemies, to believe that every last one of them deserves to die, to carry out an attack like 9/11.  

A disease, or merely a symptom?

Christopher Hitchens claims that "religion poisons everything"; I can't help but wonder if it's analogous to potassium cyanide sprinkled atop the arsenic cocktail we'd be drinking anyway.

Perhaps a better analogy is that many atheists see religion as a disease when it may well be merely a symptom of other ills to which the human mind is inherently susceptible.  I'll dare to assume that most people are not skeptics, and even people who consider themselves skeptics are fighting an uphill battle against their own desire for certainty.  This gives the masses a tendency toward blind obedience of authority, whether that authority is a manufactured deity, an ideology, or an individual psychopath.

Even if religion vanished overnight, we'd still have no shortage of man-made problems. Hateful people create hateful gods in their own image, and those people would remain hateful even without their imaginary friends egging them on.

On the Drawing of Self-Proclaimed Prophets

Islam was founded in the early 7th century by a mortal man who we know today as Muhammad. The fact that his religion fundamentally shaped the history of Asia, Africa, and Europe, and that some 1.5 billion people alive today revere him as a prophet (whether through genuine faith or at the point of a sword), arguably makes him an important historical figure.


Unlike other historical figures (and indeed even other religious figures), there is an explicit prohibition against drawing a caricature or even a benign depiction of him in most of the Islamic world, and an implicit prohibition against it in much of the rest of the world.

The explicit prohibition in the Islamic world is due to theocratic rule and its criminal (sometimes capital) penalties for blasphemy.  The right to draw a picture of a particular man is the least of your worries when the separation of mosque and state is nonexistent.

The implicit prohibition in the rest of the world is due to two distinct fears: an altruistic fear of being seen as a bigot by cloying multiculturalists, and a practical fear of violent retaliation by fanatical Muslim hardliners.  We thus see Raptor Jesus become an amusing internet meme, boxing nun puppets on sale in the checkout aisles of stores, and corpulent Laughing Buddha statuettes serving as paperweights and lawn ornaments, yet any depiction whatsoever of an influential 7th century self-proclaimed prophet gets you lumped in with the likes of Terry Jones and simultaneously puts you in some extremist's crosshairs.

Why I stopped tiptoeing around religion

Out of the desire to be more open-minded and worldly during my college years, I conditioned myself to give the benefit of the doubt to Muslims, members of eastern religions, and neo-pagans while liberally criticizing Christians. Such was the norm among college students.

It took me years to realize the irrationality and hypocrisy of this air of immunity my mind had placed around non-Christian religions. After all, you can disparage a religion as a whole without condoning discrimination or violence against its adherents; why should certain religions get a free pass while others are legitimate targets for condemnation? Furthermore, why should any religion at all be exempt from the same scrutiny we afford political and economic ideologies?

Muslims selectively interpret Quranic verses to suit their own attitudes, and the moderate Muslims liberally use No True Scotsman to distance themselves from extremists and terrorists. Even Hindus are just as prone to irrationality as their Abrahamic counterparts, forming lynch mobs to attack and kill Muslims and Christians in India, and starting an international clamor over an Australian swimsuit bearing the image of one of their deities. Do the particulars of theology make a difference in human behavior, or are reactions like these inherent in our nature?
I cringe at the credulity I once gave neo-pagans and their "choose your own reality" worldview, which like other religions is at best a delusional fantasy and at worst a deliberate deception of others.

We've all seen the actions of officially atheistic China in its crackdowns on Christians as well as its brutal campaign against Tibetan Buddhists, the same heavy-handed tactics one would expect from an oppressive theocracy. To me, this seems like evidence that even the absence of religious belief doesn't strip away this aspect of human nature; we will regardless cling irrationally to ideologies and turn against anyone who challenges them.

I think it makes sense to file all permutations of religion under the same category as other in the annals of human irrationality. It doesn't matter that some faiths have yielded beautiful artwork and music and contributed greatly to many modern cultures. All claims are subject to test by the cold, hard facts of reality, and we are right to dismiss any that fail that test regardless of emotional value to the claim maker.

bin Laden is dead... So what?

Thanks to social media, the news of Osama bin Laden's death has spread around the world, even before the major news outlets have had a chance to get the President in front of a microphone.

Well, they win this particular match, anyway.
(Image credit)

I do feel some faint satisfaction that the world's most wanted terrorist finally got what's coming to him, but he seems like more of an afterthought now.  Al-Qaida isn't some monolithic organization that will crumble without the Dark Lord's leadership.  The seeds of Islamist terrorism have been planted in dozens of nations, and those groups will continue to be a threat regardless of how many hydra heads we cut off.


The Taliban has once again begun its spring offensive in Afghanistan, kicking off with a 12 year old suicide bomber in a marketplace.  Lone wolf terrorists still spring up everywhere, a unique threat distinct from the terrorist cells that have splintered off from Al-Qaida.  They've lost a figurehead but possibly gained a martyr.  Time will tell whether this development demoralizes or emboldens them.


Side note: Obama, thanks for reaching out to all Americans in remembrance of 9/11 regardless of "which god we pray to" and implicitly showing that nonbelievers are still outsiders in the eyes of most of the nation.

Thoughts on the Taliban

While I may get ticked off by some American Christians bent on legislating their sense of morality, subsidizing their churches with my tax dollars, and forcing their creation myths into public schools' science curriculum, I admit I don't really feel personally threatened by them.  Even the antics of anti-gay funeral protestors and Quran burners and the occasional doomsday cult militias are, compared to other forms of extremism, a minor annoyance.  I know I'm fortunate to live in a country where I can at least find secular ground to stand on and feel like there's a small place for nonbelievers among the religious majority, even if some members of that majority seem to hate my guts for not being one of them.


And with that, I'll say I'm glad I don't live in Afghanistan.  The past year has shown some disturbing news involving the Taliban, in which crowds of townsfolk were goaded into violence by Taliban activists.  Even those who didn't directly participate in the killings looked on as spectators - out of fear? schadenfreude?  a mix of both? - as perceived enemies of their culture and of Islam were set upon and brutalized by the mob.  We saw it again with the recent murders of UN aid workers by Taliban-instigated rioters claiming retribution for Pastor Jones' Quran burning party.


The Taliban is a uniquely frightening concept to me.  Unlike the top-down oppressive theocracies like Saudi Arabia and Iran, the Taliban promotes vigilantism in the enforcement of its religious code.  As a heretic living with such a group present, your worst fear isn't the religious secret police - it's your neighbors, your friends, even your own family members, who may all one day surround you with stones in hand, believing it's their moral duty to spill your blood.


Reading news stories about this kind of oppression puts things in perspective.  There are still legal battles and hearts-and-minds campaigns that need to be fought and won on the home front against our homegrown religious fundamentalists, but they pale in magnitude compared to the life-and-death struggles people face under true religious tyranny.