Last week a Malaysian court ruled that people who aren’t Muslims can’t call their god “Allah” because that name is just for Muslims.

The appeals court said the term Allah must be exclusive to Islam or it could cause public disorder.

People of all faiths use the word Allah in Malay to refer to their Gods.

Christians argue they have used the word, which entered Malay from Arabic, to refer to their God for centuries and that the ruling violates their rights.

No because they stole the word. From Arabic. It’s not theirs and they can’t have it.

Upholding the appeal on Monday, chief judge Mohamed Apandi Ali said: “The usage of the word Allah is not an integral part

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There’s this Evangelical church near Sacramento, Adventure Christian Church. Last weekend the church hosted a debate between David Marshall, a Christian author, blogger and founder/director of the Kuai Mu Institute for Christianity and World Cultures, and Phil Zuckerman, Professor of Sociology and Secular Studies, Pitzer College in Claremont, California, who reports how things went.

The question at hand: “What provides a better foundation for civil society, Christianity or Secular Humanism?” David Marshall took the Christian position, and I took the secular humanist position.

There was advance planning for months. They provided nice snacks.

I was repeatedly told — via e-mail, as well as in person — that not only would the debate be video’ed by their expert video team,

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A scorching comment from “Janis” on Erin Podolak’s post on not looking away from difficult embarrassing issues like sexual harassment.

It gratifies me beyond belief after leaving behind the career I’d wanted since I was 4 (and been more than qualified for) some two decades ago because the atmosphere was simply so poisonous I couldn’t get anything done, to see that this is finally being talked about.

It depresses me more than I can say that, twenty years later, it still needs to be said.

I am sick of the locker room.  I am sick of the “this is our space and you’ll play by our rules” attitude.  I’m sick of pathetic excuses being made for people who have

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Because things aren’t bad enough yet in Syria.

The World Health Organization says it believes polio has erupted in war-torn Syria, a dire development in the fight to eradicate the disease.

The Geneva-based agency says a cluster of more than 10 paralysis cases have been detected in Deir Al Zour province in eastern Syria, a contested area of the country.

The WHO’s senior official for polio eradication says initial tests indicate polio is the cause, and efforts to address what could be a crisis situation are being geared up.

Dr. Bruce Aylward says the potential exists for a large scale outbreak that will take some time to bring under control.

That’s because the collapse of health services during the

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Oh no, a girrrrrrrul wants to play a sport that’s supposed to be only for guys! This must be stopped, at least according to the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.

My name is Amanda. I’m a 16 year old Catholic school junior at Archbishop Ryan High School in Philadelphia. I love martial arts including wrestling, jiu jitsu, and muay thai. I want an equal opportunity to wrestle in school, but the Archdiocese of Philadelphia says no. I’m being discriminated against just because I’m a girl.

This November will be the inaugural season for our school’s wrestling team. Everyone’s excited, and I want to be part of it because I love the sport and hope to get a college scholarship for wrestling.

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More from Nigeria on Baba Omojola.

President Goodluck Jonathan has condoled with the government and people of Ondo State on the death of the highly respected pro-democracy activist and renowned economist, Dr. Baba Oluwide Omojola.

A press statement by the Special Adviser to the President on Media and Publicity, Dr Rueben Abati, said the President extends his sincere condolences to Dr. Omojola’s immediate and extended family, friends, associates and professional colleagues of the late nationalist, patriot and indefatigable advocate of good governance who dedicated his life to the pursuit of social justice and a better life for others.

The President noted that Baba Omojola remained  faithful to the cause of justice, equity and progress for all Nigerians till the

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One of the things we get accused of a lot – we feminists, we “social justice warriors,” we “#FTBullies” – is puritanism.

A new puritanism is on the march, and just as in the case of the old puritanism, its leaders are unconscionable bullies.

That’s a tweet from one of the regulars. It’s typical of the genre in its scare-mongering – note the sinister overtones of “on the march” coupled with puritanism, which is made explicit at the conclusion.

Does the accusation have much merit? Let’s try to figure it out.

What kind of purity is at issue? Political purity, or doctrinal purity, I take it. Feminism as opposed to anti-feminism, and so on for other identities. We’re accused of … Read the rest

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Ask Tequila UK.

The controversial Leeds club night which used a pro-rape video to promote its events was previously banned from a club in Newcastle, it has emerged.

Tequila UK has been slammed for using a video featuring a man who expressed his intentions to rape a female student.

Educational innit.… Read the rest

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So in Germany people are cross with the bishop of Limburg, who treated himself to a very pricey new place to live at the expense of none other than Jesus’s own Catholic church.

he €31-million bill for Franz-Tebartz Van-Elst’s residence, including €15,000 on a bath tub and €350,000 on built-in-wardrobes, has put the finances of the Catholic Church, much of which comes from taxpayers and state subsidies, into the spotlight.

Carsten Frerk, an outspoken critic of the Catholic Church in Germany, estimated its wealth at around €430 billion with about €140 billion of that in capital, the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper reported.

You’re starting to talk about real money there.

The opaqueness of the church’s finances was no surprise to Frerk.

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Sound familiar?

Via Alice Bell on Twitter, by Jim Hines.

By Jim C. Hines @jimchines… Read the rest

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There’s this tv add I’ve seen a few times, and if I’ve seen it a few times that means it’s been aired like a million times.

See a problem here?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANhmS6QLd5Q

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A giant of the Nigerian left and a beloved friend of Yemisi’s died suddenly today. From Sahara Reporters:

A renowned pro-democracy activist and prominent economist, Baba Omojola, has died in Akure, the capital of Ondo State.

Mr. Omojola, who earned a PhD, died a few hours after submitting a presentation to the National Dialogue Committee in Ondo State early today.

Baba, as he was famously known, was a prominent figure during Nigeria’s pro-democracy struggles of the late and early 1990s.

Mr. Omojola was one of five activists known as “Kuje Five” who were arrested and clamped into military detention after Nigerian students engaged in massive protests to force out the Ibrahim Babangida dictatorship in 1992.

… Read the rest

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Daisy Coleman is the teenage girl at the center of the Maryville rape storm, and she wants to tell the world what really happened.

She was 14. She had her best friend Paige, who was 13, over for the night to hang out and watch scary movies – and drink alcohol, against her mother’s known wishes and rules. She was texting with an older boy her brother had warned her about. Update: That looks censorious, and that’s not what I meant. I meant to summarize so as not to paste in the whole article, and to give all the relevant facts. I needed to include both the drinking alcohol and the fact that it wasn’t with parental approval.

It

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My contribution to Thinking Towards Humanity: themes from Norman Geras, Manchester University Press, 2012.

What is it like to be a blogger?

Hume famously observed that it is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of his finger. He wasn’t expressing a whimsically inflated sense of his own importance, but pointing out that logic doesn’t determine how we weigh the world versus our finger. We have to love the world in order to be able to weigh it properly. Looking it up in a table of weights and measures won’t do the job – we could see the arithmetic and still shrug and say yes but it’s my finger, the world … Read the rest

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Norm Geras 1943-2013… Read the rest

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Laura Helmuth wrote about it in Slate yesterday.

I take back every bad thing I have ever said about Twitter. It’s fast, responsive, and efficient, and it’s the medium of record when gossip breaks. Like pretty much every other science journalist in the world, I’ve been glued to Twitter for the past several days. It all started when a biologist named Danielle Lee, who writes a blog called the Urban Scientist, tweeted that some minor-league editor had called her an “urban whore.”* Really, that is what he called her. To show support for her, people started renaming their own blogs with the word whore using a #WhoreItUp hashtag. The insult was infuriating and the response

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Press Release October 18, 2013

Following recent events, Bora Zivkovic has offered his resignation from Scientific American, and Scientific American has decided to accept that resignation.

The Scientific American Blog Network is a vibrant group of voices who challenge, educate and widen the discussion about science and science communication, and Bora played an important part in that. The bloggers who write on the Scientific American Blog Network are important to us, as is the science online community. We will be in regular contact with members of the Scientific American Blog Network over the coming days. Learning from recent events, we are also looking at how we support our bloggers in future.

Scientific American has an anti-harassment policy. We offer live … Read the rest

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Acharya S has had her Facebook account shut down, apparently because she posted a photo of “virginity testing” of little girls in Nigeria. She needs our help pushing Facebook to reinstate her account.

My Facebook account has been permanently disabled because – I’m guessing here – I shared a photo of little African girls suffering a “virginity test.” After I contacted Facebook, I received the following form response, in which, naturally, FB doesn’t give the specific reason:

Hi,
Your account has been disabled because you violated the Facebook Terms.
Unfortunately, we won’t be able to reactivate your account or respond to your email directly.
For more information about our policies, please read the Facebook Community Standards: https://www.facebook.com/communitystandards/

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)