Aah, The Daily Mash is brilliant. I’m sure it;s written by the same writers as Viz…: RELIGION is still being…
Category Religion and Society
The term fundamentalism is bandied about with wild abandon, but what does it really mean? We have an intuitive sense of what it means, perhaps. When I use the term, I have in my mind ideas of hardliner, fanatical beliefs, adhered to by uncompromising believers in a dogmatic insistence that a particular (holy) text and/or ideology is correct.
Pope Francis has been quoted as saying that reliable data indicates that “about 2%” of clergy in the Catholic Church are paedophiles.
The Pope said that abuse of children was like “leprosy” infecting the Church, according to the Italian La Repubblica newspaper.
The failure to tackle female genital mutilation (FGM) is a “national scandal” with as many as 170,000 victims in the UK, MPs have said.
Failures by ministers, police and other agencies have led to the “preventable mutilation of thousands of girls”, the Home Affairs Committee said.
The National Governors’ Association calls for the abolition of the 70-year-old rule that requires schools to hold a Christian assembly every day, saying it is “meaningless”
I was involved in a little discussion over at Advocatus Atheist the some time ago with regard to whether a secular and skeptical approach can spell the end of religion. I found this to be interesting. Even if the evidence (does it not already) overwhelmingly ruled in favour of the disbelief in a personal god, would religion still tenuously hang on to the threads of desperate hope or ritualistic comforts that humanity seems to endure?
Genius, as ever, though sad, enraging and just unfair.
I came across a Catholic poster on facebook recently who posted an article celebrating the present Pope in combatting the Mafia. The Pope was brave in doing so, so it was claimed on this thread.
This story is doing the news rounds. Another shocking example of how religion fucks everything up. Modern atheism prefer to argue vociferously about what happened in lift at skeptical conferences:
A 25-year-old woman was stoned to death and killed by her family outside a high court in the Pakistani city of Lahore, for marrying the man she fell in love with, according to police and a lawyer. Police said about 20 members of the family started attacking Farzana Parveen, and her husband Mohammad Iqbal, with sticks and bricks as they waited for the high court to open on Tuesday afternoon.
This has been an ongoing saga which is nothing short of depressing. As the Guardian reports:
Amnesty International joins condemnation of death penalty for Sudanese doctor found guilty of ‘apostasy’ for marrying Christian
President Omar al-Bashir, an Islamist who seized power in a 1989 coup in Sudan
President Omar al-Bashir, an Islamist who seized power in a 1989 coup. The imposition of sharia law was one cause of Sudan’s civil war. Photo: Abd Raouf/AP
A Sudanese doctor who married a Christian man and who was convicted earlier this week on charges of apostasy was sentenced to death on Thursday, judicial officials said.
The new book that I have co-edited with Tristan Vick called Beyond an Absence of Faith: Stories About the Loss of Faith and the Discovery of Self has been really favourably reviewed by those who have read it, and hopefully some of those reviews will filter trough the internet.
Plenty of brain-sapping journals clutter the desks of Westminster, offering the patient reader an intellectual transfusion of information, analysis, insight and yes, just occasionally, complete guff.
But until the last few weeks I had never read the Church Times.
This, from the Telegraph: Headmaster sacked from Catholic school over marriage split A top Catholic school retracted its job…
Some of you may have heard news reports like this one from Yahoo News about a church being ‘knocked down by the Communists’. This is how they report it:
Gregg Caruso, an author on free will, is now editor-in-chief of a nascent open source journal which is well worth perusing: Science, Religion & Culture.
It’s aims are as follows:
This article is taken from the excellent podcast Reasonable Doubts which itself borrows from source material and commentary from Tom Rees’ superb…
Being a Christian, or any non-Muslim, in Pakistan is hard. Blasphemy laws restrict any kind of free speech and freethought. Here, the BBC reports on yet another case of backwards thinking. It makes me so sad.
Timberlake, VA – Sports, sneakers, and short hair; it’s what makes eight year old Sunnie Kahle unique. It’s also what had her removed from Timberlake Christian School. Her grandparents pulled the plug on her time there after they said she was no longer welcome.
The family received a letter telling them that if their eight year old granddaughter didn’t follow the school’s “biblical standards,” that she’d be refused enrollment next year. She’s out and in public school now.
For Hitchens and co, religion does little good and secularism hardly any evil. Never mind that tyrants devoid of religion such as Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Mao and Pol Pot perpetrated the worst atrocities in history. As H. Allen Orr, professor of biology at the University of Rochester, observed, the 20th century was an experiment in secularism that produced secular evil, responsible for the unprecedented murder of more than 100 million. (Abramovich, 2009)
Media group opts for self-censorship on terrorism after Taliban admits murder of three employees for critical reports on militants
When it was launched four years ago, the Express Tribune set out to become the house newspaper of liberal-minded Pakistanis.