A guest blogger wrote of Religious Freedom Day in yesterday’s Washington Post. I’ve taken the liberty of rewriting the opening paragraph to reflect reality.

The original:

Across the globe, religion and belief continue to matter deeply in the lives of people and their cultures. From worship to prayer, births to funerals, weddings to holy days, almsgiving to thanksgiving, religion is a central source of identity, meaning, and purpose for billions of human beings.

The reality:

Across the globe, religion and belief continue to worm themselves dangerously into the lives of people and their cultures. From self-abasement to talking to oneself instead of taking action, physically deforming male and female children without their consent to delusional thoughts of deceased loved ones being in a better place, from fighting to allow only a man and a woman to commit to a life together to strange ceremonies concocted by imaginative goatherds of old, giving huge sums of money to support the very system that seeks to control their lives to giving credit to superstition instead of science, religion is a central source of pain, suffering and misery for billions of human beings.

You’re welcome!

TSA accused of racial profiling. So?

http://m.cbsnews.com/storysynopsis.rbml?pageType=general&catid=57491583&feed_id=999&videofeed=999

As Sam Harris has argued it’s a waste of time to target the general population rather than those whose race and religion (Arabic and Islamic) are most correlated with violence. Our homeland security policies are another example of cultural relativism gone bad.

Washington Post Refers to Sex with a 12 year-old as “Marriage” Instead of Child Rape

In an article posted on July 9th, the Post discusses on the front page the phenomenon of the marriage of underage girls in Niger but never refers to the act as child rape. The article refers only obliquely to Islamic traditions as the source of the crazy notions at the base of this problem, but there it is for any willing to read and understand.

I frequently take note of the Post’s use of page A1 and the front page of the Metro section to fawn over religion, but this is a step beyond. Here they are giving a pass on one of the most heinous aspects of Islam, the acceptance of the concept that a young girl is mere currency between adult men.

The article opens talking about a 14 year-old who has just lost a baby during childbirth. Married at 12, she is quoted saying she’s going to try again to have a child as soon as she gets home.

The article frames the issue as one caused by food shortages in Niger. As is common whenever the Post deals with religion, they bury the lede.

Only after opening with mentions of the girl married at 12, the food crisis in Niger, and a quote from a UNICEF representative does the article get down to the root of the problem:

In a landlocked nation that has one of the world’s fastest-growing populations, the hunger crisis is the latest twist in Niger’s efforts to combat early marriages, a battle pitting modern values against centuries-old traditions. Niger’s government has enacted legislation outlawing unions before age 15; in some cases, parents have been arrested and imprisoned. Government social workers and international aid agencies have initiated efforts in remote villages to encourage girls to remain in school.

Yet early marriages remain widely accepted by families across large swaths of the country, fueled largely by high rates of poverty and illiteracy, ancient tribal codes and conservative religious views that wield more influence than government decrees in rural communities.

Let’s be clear. This refers to Islam and giving the practice a pass is cultural relativism of the worst, lowest, and most vile order. But this is standard practice for the Post and for Islam.

Quoting a hospital director as saying that the increase in girls giving birth is a survival tactic against the food crisis just doesn’t make sense. Introducing more humans into a food crisis is the exact opposite of the correct answer to the problem. And it’s a particularly bad idea where the underage mother also is malnourished.

Later on the author gets down to the nitty gritty. Describing the parts of the world most heavily Muslim, guess where child rape (marriage) is most prevalent?

Child marriage is a global phenomenon, but it is more prevalent in Africa and southern Asia. In many poor communities, girls are viewed as commodities, used as currency or to settle debts. To protect them in dire economic times, girls are sometimes married into more affluent families. Notions of morality and family honor also drive early marriages — girls are often married off to ensure their virginity. In some cases, men “reserve” especially young girls to marry them later as a way to unite families and communities.

Girls as commodities. Whether married off by fathers while still too young to have had sex and thus still virginal or promised by uncles as a way to settle a debt at an age way too young to understand the consequences is a human rights violation, not a niggling factor popping up as a consequence of a food crisis.

To be fair, the government has tried to stem the crisis by setting the age of 15 as the earliest age at which a girl can be married off, which the Islamists ignore, just taking the marriage underground. But, as in so many countries and with so many issues, Islam bows to no man but to the crazed edicts of Mohammed, a man who saw fit to marry a 6 year old and consummate that relationship when she was 9, and the writings of those who knew him or read his writings.

These heinous acts will continue as long as Islam and other religions continue without sufficiently loud, persistent challenge. The Washington Post is, as a publicly held company, unfortunately a part of the problem, afraid to call child rape by its ugly, true name, leaving a false impression of the problem on those who choose not to take time to understand what is really happening.

330 schoolgirls & teachers poisoned in 1 month in Afghanistan. #Islam keeps giving & giving. Or is that taking & taking lives & liberties from women. As described in Jonathan Turley’s article, Islamic men work to close schools that dare teach girls and women and, failing that, work to disfigure or kill them. 

Interesting then, the comparison with the US religious right and the zeal to inculcate youth with the poison of fairy tales and un-humanistic dogma. While the US right isn’t throwing acid on or outright killing girls, they do share the common goal of steering learning to insular private schools, many feeding off the public teat, where their crazed teachings can be passed on without the challenge of rational thought.

The US religious right is only better than the Taliban by a matter of degree, the goal is the same.

I’m having trouble with this article in Religious Dispatches, by Austin Dacey, representative to the United Nations for the International Humanist and Ethical Union and author of “The Future of Blasphemy: Speaking of the Sacred in an Age of Human Rights.”

In it he uses the plight of one Alexander Aan, imprisoned in Indonesia for the crime of “inciting hatred or enmity of a religious group, and under the country’s blasphemy provision, Article 156a, which criminalizes “hostility, hatred or contempt” and “disgracing” of a religion. Article 156a also prohibits attempts to persuade others to leave their religion and embrace atheism.”

A reminder, Indonesia’s Constitution stipulates that every person believe in a supreme being. Can you imagine being atheist and visiting Indonesia and what would happen should you have a couple of beers and get into a conversation in the wrong bar? Say goodbye to the return portion of your air fare!

For me the cognitive dissonance comes from statements like:

“In the West…The public debate is about how to balance freedom of speech with respect for religious belief.”

Dacey contrasts his view of the Western framing of the issue with that of predominantly Muslim Indonesia this way:

“Here the value at stake is not just freedom of speech, but freedom of conscience. The real contest is not between atheists and believers, but between those who affirm the equality of all persons of conscience and those who deny it.”

Wrong, wrong, wrong. On both the West and Indonesia. There is no need to respect religious beliefs! To paraphrase someone, perhaps Hitchens, those with ridiculous ideas should be treated as such. Freedom of conscience is a veiled way of giving the religious the right to slap back at any perceived insult.

Then he puts atheism and religion on the same moral level:

“From a moral perspective, there is an important symmetry between the attitude of the believer who reserves special reverence for a deity, saint, or prophet, and the attitude of the secularist who asserts that every person is equally holy.”

He’s treating atheists and atheism as just equal to a religion, just another dogma lookin’ for respect. Nothing could be further from the truth. Atheism leads to humanism, though I admit one can get there from other vectors, but religion is full of the exact opposite of humanism.

Anywhere religion holds sway over a majority of the citizenry, and especially where religion is baked in to the government is a bad, dangerous place to be, for this is where only those with the facts on their side are persecuted. Respect for religion is the worst answer to the problems of the world and for the ability of every person to think for themselves and express their ideas.

I’m having trouble with this article in Religious Dispatches, by Austin Dacey, representative to the United Nations for the International Humanist and Ethical Union and author of “The Future of Blasphemy: Speaking of the Sacred in an Age of Human Rights.”

In it he uses the plight of one Alexander Aan, imprisoned in Indonesia for the crime of “inciting hatred or enmity of a religious group, and under the country’s blasphemy provision, Article 156a, which criminalizes “hostility, hatred or contempt” and “disgracing” of a religion. Article 156a also prohibits attempts to persuade others to leave their religion and embrace atheism.”

A reminder, Indonesia’s Constitution stipulates that every person believe in a supreme being. Can you imagine being atheist and visiting Indonesia and what would happen should you have a couple of beers and get into a conversation in the wrong bar? Say goodbye to the return portion of your air fare!

For me the cognitive dissonance comes from statements like:

“In the West…The public debate is about how to balance freedom of speech with respect for religious belief.”

Dacey contrasts his view of the Western framing of the issue with that of predominantly Muslim Indonesia this way:

“Here the value at stake is not just freedom of speech, but freedom of conscience. The real contest is not between atheists and believers, but between those who affirm the equality of all persons of conscience and those who deny it.”

Wrong, wrong, wrong. On both the West and Indonesia. There is no need to respect religious beliefs! To paraphrase someone, perhaps Hitchens, those with ridiculous ideas should be treated as such. Freedom of conscienceis a veiled way of giving the religious the right to slap back at any perceived insult.

Then he puts atheism and religion on the same moral level:

“From a moral perspective, there is an important symmetry between the attitude of the believer who reserves special reverence for a deity, saint, or prophet, and the attitude of the secularist who asserts that every person is equally holy.”

He’s treating atheists and atheism as just equal to a religion, just another dogma lookin’ for respect. Nothing could be further from the truth. Atheism leads to humanism, though I admit one can get there from other vectors, but religion is full of the exact opposite of humanism.

Anywhere religion holds sway over a majority of the citizenry, and especially where religion is baked in to the government is a bad, dangerous place to be, for this is where only those with the facts on their side are persecuted. Respect for religion is the worst answer to the problems of the world and for the ability of every person to think for themselves and express their ideas.

I’m first on the wagon to keep #sharia from being used here in the US and everywhere. But it seems to me to be a tricky strategy to go exclusively after sharia. 

When I think of sharia I think of it in terms of not just the worst options like beheadings, stonings, honor killings and loss of limb but the more insidious things like all the subjection of women to second class status. 

But what this all boils down to is that, by participation in the religion, voluntarily or less than voluntarily, a person subjects themselves to this secondary law, to which, in some countries, like the UK, civil courts defer. The “voluntary” nature of religion is a subject until itself as many are participants of a religion due strictly to the “inherited” nature of having been indoctrinated into the cult from the earliest days of childhood by the very parents whose job it is to prepare your mind for the big world.

Here in the US (and presumably elsewhere) a couple married in the eyes of civil and Jewish religious law and who want to divorce have to be granted divorce by both bodies if either party wants to be granted a new marriage under Jewish law. 

To me it seems that the most practical thing is to abolish ALL religious law in the US. It’s silly to have, or even condone, a secondary unelected, potentially coercively adopted, “legal” system for religions. Count me in the camp for abolition of ALL religious “law” in the U.S. at least. 

Today’s WashPost A1 headline is “The Two Faces of Freedom.” It’s about the state of Islam since Arab Spring and like the cultural relativist rag that it is, it buries the lede. The very last sentences of the article quote one of the persons interviewed for the article:

“Every Muslim will reach our phase and be like us,” he says. “Our duty is to convert others, and if they don’t let us express ourselves, we will have to fight.”

Tunisia prior to Arab Spring was like Egypt in that Islam was suppressed in favor of a secular state. The downside of that arrangement was that it was effected by a dictator. 

Now, with the freedom to speak out and to practice Islam to its foul fullest you get in Tunisia what you hear wherever Islam, and especially where the strict version known as Salafism is practiced:

“We must adopt Sharia law,” making sharia the law of the land. If the state “tries to silence us, will use any means - violence too.”

While the recent announcement that Tunisia’s constitution would not be based on Islamic principles was good to hear, with Islam, a religion that is forsworn to obliterate all other religions, you can never be too sure.

http://www.france24.com/en/20120414-zahra-lari-ice-princess-hijab →

Isn’t this a charming story of a muslim ice skater? Is it fair to call children who are raised religious and still practice it as blinded by Stockholm Syndrome? “We are in a cult that insists you not go out with your head uncovered and really, your father thinks you’re a whore going out there and showing off in front of all those men.”

Religion is anti-humanist and anti-woman, among many other negative attributes.

Atheists have something in common with the extreme right wing, though we come at it from diametrically opposed starting points. 

Today we are presented with the curious case of Pam Geller, who came out in support of Rush Limbaugh in his battle to survive the fallout from his attacks on Sandra Fluke.

Geller’s no friend of liberalism or much of a humanist and she’d surely fight back if someone called her an atheist. But she does have the curious trait of spending significant effort in pointing out the folly of Islam. 

We both want that Islam should be pushed out of the sphere of influence. The right points out many of the same things atheists do, primarily the great danger posed by radical Islamists. (As with any religion, anytime we refer to a radical we are referring to someone who follows most closely the word of whatever “holy” text guiding their particular cult. Sobering when you think about it.)

Atheists point out that and go that additional step of asking the “where’s the beef” questions - where’s the proof of your god and why the fuck is yours, of the thousands of claimed gods, the one true god?”

I admit it’s uncomfortable to share this tent with a group that daily spouts such massive quantities of venom, especially as it’s generally in the name of radicalism inspired by their own religion, but I will take help from anybody that will get out the message that Islam is anything but a religion of peace.