It’s B&W’s birthday again. Well actually it was a week ago, but other things were more urgent to post, and I’m always late anyway, so close enough.

Seven years old. Why, when B&W started, there were no proper roads between Missouri and Oregon, and credit default swaps were things that no nice girls would wear after nine in the evening. When B&W started Pepsi hadn’t been invented yet, and dogs still wore corsets, and families still gathered around the radio to listen to Jay Leno make fun of Jerry Seinfeld’s dinner jacket. When B&W started people still thought Cream of Wheat was food, and you could get a pound of assorted chocolates for a penny, and milk arrived at the … Read the rest

What nice people there are running Afghanistan.

Afghanistan’s upper house of Parliament has condemned the presidential pardon of a journalist sentenced to 20 years in prison for downloading an internet article about women’s rights and Islam…The upper house “expresses its strongest concerns and annoyance and considers this decision contrary to the Islamic values and the laws in place in the country”, said the statement signed by the speaker of the upper house on Monday. It called on Kambakhsh to serve his term, and said that those convicted of apostasy and hatred of Islam must be punished.

So the upper house of Afghanistan’s Parliament thinks apostasy and hatred of Islam in the form of downloading an internet article about women’s … Read the rest

Josh Rosenau talks about ‘ways of knowing’ and the non-empirical nature of the claims made by most religions.

It’s certainly true that the Jewish Bible can be read as making a number of empirical claims, for instance about the timing of human origins…But that’s not how Jews have understood the Bible for the last couple thousand years. Maimonides, writing well before any of the modern squabbles over evolution, explained:

“Ignorant and superficial readers take them [certain obscure passages] in a literal, not in a figurative sense. Even well informed persons are bewildered if they understand these passages in their literal signification, but they are entirely relieved of their perplexity when we explain the figure, or merely suggest that the terms

Albert Mohler the president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary is so obliging and has saved us so much trouble – at a stroke he has rid us of the obligation to keep answering the charge that “New” atheists are all wrong because they ignore sophisticated theology and are talking about a crude old version of God that nobody believes in anyway.

Mohler points out that the Wall Street Journal paired articles by Dawkins and Armstrong were not articles by an atheist and a theist but articles by two atheists.

Armstrong insists that Darwin really did God a favor by forcing us to give up our “primitive” belief in his actual existence — thus freeing us to affirm merely a

Life in Yemen.

A 12-year-old Yemeni girl, who was forced into marriage, died during a painful childbirth that also killed her baby, a children’s rights group said Monday. Fawziya Ammodi struggled for three days in labor, before dying of severe bleeding at a hospital on Friday, said the Seyaj Organization for the Protection of Children…Born into an impoverished family in Hodeidah, Fawziya was forced to drop out of school and married off to a 24-year-old man last year.

Well it was life for awhile and then it was premature death after three days of torture.

The Yemeni parliament tried in February to pass a law, setting the minimum marriage age at 17. But the measure has not reached the president

Life in Aceh.

Adulterers can be stoned to death and homosexuality is punishable by long prison terms under a new law passed in Indonesia’s devoutly Muslim Aceh province today…The law, which reinforces Aceh’s already strict Islamic laws, is to go into effect within 30 days. Its passage comes two weeks before a new assembly led by the moderate Aceh party is sworn in after a heavy defeat of conservative parties in local elections.

Ah – the conservatives have been voted out, so as a parting gesture, they pass a law saying that ‘adulterers’ can be buried up to the neck and slowly pelted with stones until they are dead – under ‘Islamic’ laws which notoriously have an impossible standard … Read the rest