The Heresy Club is a group blog of young heretical bloggers – Alex Gabriel, Siana Bangura, Rhys Morgan, Richard Nicholl and Hayley Stevens. You’re already familiar with Alex and Rhys if you’ve been reading B&W for awhile: they were starring daily back in January. I met both of them at QED, and Hayley as well. Check them out and if you like the blog, spread the word!

To be young and heretical in 2012 is to experience the intense realities of superstitious thought.

In our schools, we see science teachers treat Genesis with kid gloves. We see intereference in students’ private lives who blaspheme online. We see religious worship in British classrooms, and prayer creeping unconstitutionally back into American schools.

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

It seems odd that the Catholic Archdiocese of Melbourne publishes an article by an Anglican minister, but I guess it’s just the usual ecumenical - interfaith – he hates Them so we love him – any port in a storm deal. Catlicks and Prods join hands to fight the real enemy, Teh Atheists.

the sad atheists are those who do take the God question seriously. They know that the stakes are high and that without God it is notoriously difficult to make sense of the world or of human life or death or joy or pain or love-making or justice or even, at the philosophical end of the spectrum, of truth itself.

Do they? You sure about that?

I … Read the rest

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PZ is at this very moment in a church. Not a joke this time, he really is – he’s there to observe Chris Stedman in action. His tweets sound very…restless.

• You know what would be a crappy April fools joke? If I said I found Chris Stedman persuasive. So I won’t.
• It’s a very *nice* room, with very *nice* people. Jeez, but I detest “nice”.
• I learned that Stedman did good rewarding work in assisted living home. How NICE!
• Stedman: religion studies major. Seminarian. Pro-religion advocate. Atheist? Not one word for atheism today. Weird.

Not weird; typical.… Read the rest

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Oh damn, wouldn’t you know it, grumble grumble. Here I’ve been friends with Maryam for years but we hadn’t met, so three weeks ago we did at last meet, to our mutual joy, and what happens? She leaves FTB and her heretical ways to get in touch with her fun feminine side. She tells me she’s always loved fashion, and she’s going to go into the trendy decorative hijab line.

“I love beautiful fabrics and colours,” she told me on Skype, ”and what a great canvas you have in a burqa! Yards and yards of the stuff, to fill up with your own creative genius.”

Well yes. You know the sort of thing she means.

All very decorative and … Read the rest

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From the F Word -

The Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development (APWLD), Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID), International Women’s Health Coalition (IWHC), International Women’s Rights Action Watch Asia Pacific (IWRAW Asia Pacific) and Women Living Under Muslim Laws (WLUML) have released a joint statement on the failure of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) to adopt agreed conclusions at its 56th session earlier in March.  They draw particular attention to the role that arguments about protecting “traditional values” have played in preventing consensus on the human rights of women.

We say NO to any re-opening of negotiations on the already established international agreements on women’s human rights and

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Glory for Ken Livingstone: Iran’s Press TV reports

Ken Livingstone to make London a beacon of Islam

Ken Livingstone, Labour party’s candidate for mayor of London has promised to turn London into a “beacon” for the words of the Prophet Mohammad (peace be upon him) in a sermon at one of the British capital’s mosques.

Livingstone pledged to “educate the mass of Londoners” in Islam, saying:  “That will help to cement our city as a beacon that demonstrates the meaning of the words of the Prophet (PBUH).”

Livingstone described the Prophet (PBUH)’s words in his last sermon as “an agenda for all humanity.” He praised the Prophet’s last sermon, telling his audience: “I want to spend the next four years

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In a letter or pamphlet before the election:

God KNOWS who is a Muslim. And he KNOWS who is not. Instinctively, so do you. Let me point out to all the Muslim brothers and sisters what I stand for:

I, George Galloway, do not drink alcohol and never have. Ask yourself if you believe the other candidate in this election can say that truthfully.

How does Galloway KNOW that God KNOWS what Galloway says it knows? How does Galloway KNOW that there is such a thing as “God”?

Oh, he doesn’t, it’s just electioneering, I know. But I wanted to say anyway.

It appears that Cristina Odone wrote a piece blaming Merat’s killing spree on – wait for it … Read the rest

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A young woman of 19 in Mersin, Turkey, Hatice Ferat, ran away from home to live with her boyfriend. Her brother Mahsun did not approve.

Mahsun visited her in her new home and invited her out to take a walk along the beach. He then lured her in[to a] secluded area, slit her throat, stabbed her forty times, and disposed of the body in a river. When it was eventually found, her family refused to attend her funeral.
The investigation is ongoing – no trial has yet taken place. The funeral was held by 50 women, who took the opportunity to make it clear that such behavior would not be tolerated under their watch, shouting slogans that included “We

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Rock Beyond Belief is going on right now. Toooot!

Dan Fincke has a post saying that, and that Ed Brayton is the MC, and that he had a good time hanging out with Ed at the Reason Rally, and that Jessica Ahlquist rocked the Reason Rally, and that you can buy evil little thing T shirts which go into her scholarship fund…

…and that the evil little thing T shirts were my idea. Whoa, what?!

Oh yes, so they were. I’d actually forgotten that!

That’s too bad, because it means I didn’t think to introduce myself to Jessica that way in Orlando. “Hi, I’m the one who had the evil little thing T shirts idea.” If I remember … Read the rest

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Two things.

One, will someone please explain to me how Republicans keep getting away with playing the “anti-elitist” “I hate Harvard/Yale/people who speak French” card when they themselves went to Harvard or Yale and speak French?

How did Bush keep getting away with it? I’ve never understood that. Andover, Yale, Harvard Business School, grandfather a Senator, father the President, oil money up to the eyeballs, and he got away with pretending to be a Texas workin’ stiff just by drawling and being pig-ignorant.

Now apparently Romney’s getting away with it.

Mitt Romney likes to take jabs at President Barack Obama for representing the values of the Harvard faculty lounge. He should know.

Like the president, the former Massachusetts governor

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Rachel Maddow on Fresh Air the other day.

On why she came out in the Stanford student newspaper when she was 17

“I think because I was 17 and incredibly cocky and full of myself, and I thought that everything I had to do had to make a statement. I think I had a confrontational mindset. I think I was frustrated by the casual anti-gay stuff that I saw among college freshmen in the milieu that I was in. And my attitude toward that was not to try to bring people along gently, gently, and show people by my evident humanity their callousness. I just wanted to throw something up in peoples’ faces. I’m not sure that I would do

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Shannon Rupp went to a “Wellness show” in Vancouver.

The Wellness Show — or as I think of it, Current Trends in Snake Oil — attracts an audience of about 30,000 to see a disparate collection of businesses hoping to find new customers in the demographic that’s chasing wellness…

Office assistants act like barkers pulling in the punters, and on hearing I have no back problems one swears her boss can cure my allergies with a spinal adjustment. On hearing I have no health problems at all, another assures me chiropractic is about prevention. It’s like going to the gym, she says: it’s how you prevent illness!

Then there’s the guy selling “transnasal light therapy” – a new gizmo that

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Who won who won who won, you cry, on the edges of your chairs.

The Dalai Lama.

Say what? The Dalai Lama won a prize that’s given for doing something or other about science and religion? Where’s the science part?

NEW YORK — The Dalai Lama has been awarded one of the world’s leading religion prizes.

The Tibetan Buddhist spiritual leader is the winner of the 2012 Templeton Prize for his work on science and religion. The honor from the John Templeton Foundation, announced Thursday, comes with a $1.7 million award.

I didn’t know he’d done any work on science and religion.

The Dalai Lama is founder of the Mind & Life institute for research on science and Buddhism.

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The Women’s Studies Program at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, will offer a one-year postdoctoral fellowship in Islamic Feminist Studies in 2012-2013.

The Women’s Studies Program at Wheaton College is pleased to announce a one- year postdoctoral fellowship supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The fellow will pursue research and teach three courses in the Women’s Studies    Program during the appointment, including Transnational Feminisms, Introduction to Women’s Studies or Feminist Theory, and a course in his or her area of specialty. Women’s Studies is particularly interested in scholars of Islamic Feminism working on critical sexualities, but welcomes applications from all scholars in this field.

What I want to know is…what the hell is Islamic Feminism?… Read the rest

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Ramadan informs us that Mohamed Merah was neither religious nor political; he was just a confused angry guy flailing around.

He seems to have had very precise aim for someone who was just flailing.

Religion was not Mohamed Merah’s problem – nor was his politics. A French citizen frustrated at being unable to find his place, to give his life dignity and meaning in his own country, he would find two political causes through which he could articulate his distress: Afghanistan and Palestine. He attacked symbols like the army, and killed Jews, Christians and Muslims without distinction.

Wut? Religion was not his problem, nor was politics; it’s just that he found two political (or religious, or religious-political) causes and … Read the rest

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