IHEU@IHEU
#AnantaBijoy and #AvijitRoy pictured together; they and 4 others all now killed by machete
Butterflies and Wheels
Gnu atheism, women's rights, internationalism, universalism, and gossip
IHEU@IHEU
#AnantaBijoy and #AvijitRoy pictured together; they and 4 others all now killed by machete
Taslima shared a poem that Ananta Bijoy Das wrote about her.
A painfully apposite extract –
Alexandria to Nalanda being rampaged and raped by them,
The “elders” are breathing in hatred and violence in their pens,
Blood of the innocent dripping off the shameless swords everywhere.If you violate their fatwa, their red eyes and edicts
You get beheaded in the east west north south wherever you are.
Human beings worship a loathsome god. They prostrate themselves to a foul, jealous, cruel demon who hates curiosity and learning and freedom of mind. Their god is a nightmare, a monster, the source of everything bad. Their god is evil and wicked and hateful. Their god murders people who want to free us from our chains. Their god carries a machete dripping with our blood and brains. Their god is our horrible red-eyed stinking enemy.
It’s one of those taunting rub-their-noses-in-it actions that Tories and Republicans love to do – Cameron appointed an anti-gay marriage MP to be minister for equalities. Hahaha get it? So funny. Hahaha those politically correct fools who think same-sex couples should be able to get married, we showed them, hahahaha.
Caroline Dinenage, the MP for Gosport, was appointed by Prime Minister David Cameron today as the Parliamentary under secretary of state at the Ministry of Justice and the minister for equalities at the Department for Education.
In 2013, she told a PinkNews reader that the “state has no right” to redefine its meaning of marriage and that “preventing same-sex couples from being allowed to marry takes nothing away from their relationship.”
Well, it takes marriage away. That’s not nothing. Not everyone wants marriage, but those who do, do. It’s not nothing.
In a letter to a PinkNews reader, Ms Dinenage wrote that the Church states that “marriage is in its nature a union of ‘one man and one woman’, and went on to say “the insitution [sic] of marriage is distinctive.”
Who cares what “the Church” says? She’s an MP, not a bishop.
At least I can say that without expecting machetes to the head.
Anne Widdecombe wrote a column in the Daily Express the other day. In part of it she said this:
Sofia Vergara of the US TV show Modern Family and Nick Loeb, her ex-fiancé, are locked in battle over his wish to use the embryos they created through IVF and hers to keep them frozen indefinitely.
Among those who have commented is women’s campaigner Kate Smurthwaite, who says: “If you have had a part in the creation of that embryo then you should have a say in its future but if the parties are not 100 per cent committed then maybe there is a better way.
“This guy can adopt, he can foster, he has got lots and lots of other options.”
I wonder what the lady would say if a man were to state that there were lots and lots of options to an abortion, declaring: “She can have it adopted, she can have it fostered”?
You can almost hear the squeals of outrage.
She wondered what Kate would say, so guess what, this is now, so Kate told her what Kate would say. [Read more…]
Oh good god, here’s another turn of the screw. The BBC reports the murder of Ananta Bijoy Das.
Ananta Bijoy Das was attacked by masked men with machetes in Sylhet, police say. He is said to have received death threats from Islamist extremists.
Mr Das wrote blogs for Mukto-Mona, a website once moderated by Avijit Roy, himself hacked to death in February.
Sweden has confirmed it turned down a visa request from Mr Das in April. [Read more…]
Bangladesh. Murder number 3 this year.
A secular blogger has been hacked to death in north-east Bangladesh, the third such deadly attack this year.
Police said Ananta Bijoy Das was murdered as he headed to work at a bank in the city of Sylhet, an attack that fellow writers said highlighted a culture of impunity.
Kamrul Hasan, commissioner of Sylhet police, said a group of about four masked attackers pounced on Das with machetes at about 8.30am on Tuesday on a busy street in Bangladesh’s fifth-largest city. [Read more…]
Same old – Catholic health systems buy up everything in sight and then refuse to prescribe birth control. Uh oh, you’re now screwed! Too bad. Have a nice life!
An OB/GYN who can’t prescribe birth control? It’s not some bad joke. It could be a reality if your doctor’s practice is purchased by a Catholic health system that then imposes the Ethical & Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services, a set of rules created by the U.S. Bishop’s Conference that prohibits doctors from doing everything from prescribing the Pill to performing sterilizations or abortions.
…Driven by health-care economics and incentives in the Affordable Care Act, health systems, which are a collection of hospitals and ancillary services, are acquiring physician practices at an unprecedented rate. The percentage of doctors who were employees of health systems increased from 20 percent to 26 percent between 2012 and 2013 alone; more than 40 percent of primary care doctors like OB/GYNs are now employed by health systems directly, and experts don’t see the trend slowing. [Read more…]
David Frum wrote a pretty good piece defending the right to blaspheme, but he got one part wrong.
In 1989, the AIDS activist group ACT UP disrupted services in St Patrick’s Cathedral, New York. One protester grabbed a consecrated communion wafer, broke it, and tossed it to the floor. He and some 100 others were arrested. A few of the protesters were sentenced to community service. None went to prison. Needless to say, none was burned at the stake.
From a Catholic perspective, defiling a consecrated communion wafer does violence to the body of God. It would be hard to imagine a more brutal affront to the most cherished beliefs of faithful Catholics.
Hmm. Is that really what it is? Do they think of it as like taking a machete to God’s arm? [Read more…]
Here’s a piece of jaw-dropping nastiness out of Egypt. A bunch of young prosecutors were fired because their parents hadn’t been to university.
Just months after they were appointed, 138 new prosecutors were removed from office in September 2013 following a ruling from the judiciary’s governing body that said only those born to parents with undergraduate degrees could join the state prosecution.
The Independent reports on a worrying trend.
The proliferation of “beautiful young vampires” in TV series and Hollywood films including True Blood and the Twilight movies is encouraging young people to dabble with occult forces, a leading authority on demonic possession has warned a Vatican-backed exorcism course.
What’s a leading authority on demonic possession? What’s there to be a leading authority about?
“There are those who try to turn people into vampires and make them drink other people’s blood, or encourage them to have special sexual relations to obtain special powers,” said Professor Giuseppe Ferrari at the meeting in Rome, which heard that the number of such possessions is rising globally.
