A 15 year old girl has been murdered in Pakistan.

By having acid poured on her face.

By her parents.

The girl’s parents, Mohammad Zafar and his wife Zaheen, recounted the Oct. 29 incident from jail. The father said the girl had turned to look at a boy who drove by on a motorcycle, and he told her it was wrong.

“She said ‘I didn’t do it on purpose. I won’t look again.’ By then I had already thrown the acid. It was her destiny to die this way,” the girl’s mother told the British broadcaster.

There is no crime so great that I could imagine doing something so horrific to any of my kids. I can’t even imagine committing such a violent act on a stranger. And to do it for so trivial and natural an offense…

It’s true. Religion compels people to commit abominable and terrifying acts normally well out of bounds of the behavior of well adjusted, normal people.

And no, it wasn’t destiny. It was the work of two awful people who didn’t deserve their daughter.

(This is part of a list of bad arguments I heard at the Texas Freethought Convention.)

Richard Dawkins gave a short speech on the Texas capitol steps, and for the most part, it was right on the money (or should I say, the Rmoney). He pointed out the bugfuck lunacy of Mormonism, and the patent charlatanry of its con-artist founder, Joseph Smith, as well as criticizing the media for failing to follow up on how nuts Romney’s religion is.

And he’s right! But some of his conclusions were, I think, a strategic error and simply wrong.

He came right out and said that he thought Mormonism was worse than the older, more established religions. That was the gist of his defense, actually: that Catholicism and Anglicanism and the various other protestant faiths were older, therefore less wacky…and that Mormonism’s clear mimicry of Elizabethan English, for instance, is a clear indicator that it was all fake. I don’t think that’s a good argument; I’d argue that Christianity could have been just as obviously bogus to a contemporary during its formation because they’d be as aware of its cultural context as we are of Mormonism’s origins; We benefit from sufficient proximity that the anachronisms leap out at us. But also, I think familiarity breeds complacency. Sure, Mormonism is nuts, but Catholicism is equally so. If you want deranged beliefs, I would merely cite the dogma of original sin — the pernicious doctrine that all people are born intrinsically evil, giving us a rich heritage of guilt and shame — as just as wicked and disturbing as anything Mormonism has come up with, and it’s far more pervasive, too.

Dawkins’ suggestion that the media should more thoroughly grill Romney on the details of Mormon belief has a germ of utility to it, but I don’t think he quite appreciates the depths to which the American electorate and the political process has sunk.

If you’re going to ask Romney if he believes Native Americans are descendants of the lost tribe of Israel, or whether Mormon underwear really stops bullets, or if Joseph Smith actually translated golden plates by staring at stones in a hat, you’re also going to have to ask Obama if he believes every line of the Nicene Creed. And when you start doing that, we atheists will be sitting smug and cocky laughing at both of them professing their faith, but the majority of the electorate will be seeing their religious identity challenged — and they won’t like it, not one bit.

Dawkins did mention Kennedy’s resolution of his Catholic problem, but I don’t think he really got it. Of course Kennedy’s views were shaped by his Catholicism, as Romney’s are by his Mormonism. But what Kennedy did was the only reasonable secular solution, since we can’t wipe our cultural influences out of our brains: he stated that he would not bring the papacy into the Oval Office, and would not entangle the institution of Catholicism with his duties as president. And that’s as much as we can ask of someone.

It is a question I’d like to see Romney smacked with, though. The Mormon church is a meddling church — witness their active interference in gay rights in states outside Utah, for instance. I’d like to see a clear statement from Romney that that scary office building just outside Temple Square in Salt Lake City will not be pulling the strings on a Romney presidency, and that he’ll be making political appointments on the basis of competence rather than religious cronyism (something Mormons are notorious for). Is he willing to stand up for the separation of church and state? Then I won’t make a big deal about his stupid beliefs.

And this goes for everyone. When the first atheist president is sworn in, I want evidence that he won’t simply be a puppet of the wizened, necrotic husk of David Silverman, Atheist Pope of 2060.

Look at this long line of people in Australia.

They’re queued up to gaze in wonder at the 500-year-old mummified right forearm of some Catholic saint. I’ve got a few things I’d want to ask them.

“What the hell is wrong with you people?”

“Do you really think fragments of corpses have magic powers?”

“Are you aware that many people find Catholics extremely creepy? Do you have any hypotheses about why that would be so?”

“Is it true that later tonight you’ll be burrowing in the local cemetery to feast on the decaying flesh of the dead?”

In case you haven’t heard of him (good for you!), he was an academic who promoted racism.

In 2002, Rushton became president of the Pioneer Fund, which has for decades funded dubious studies linking race to characteristics like criminality, sexuality and intelligence. Pioneer has long promoted eugenics, or the “science” of creating “better” humans through selective breeding. Set up in 1937 and headed by Nazi sympathizers, the group strove to “improve the character of the American people” through eugenics and procreation by people of white colonial stock. Pioneer has financed a number of leading race scientists, lavishing large sums each year on those who work to “prove” inherent racial differences that the vast majority of scientists regard as nonsense.

He has died of cancer on Tuesday. That’s a rough way to go, and I’m sorry for that — but I regret even more that he wasted most of his life poisoning the discourse with evil racist nonsense.

Check out the website! Sign the petitions! Read Maggie Koerth-Baker’s summary! Exploration Day is the cool idea to rename Columbus Day, to strip out the ugly historical implications — we celebrate the genocide of the first inhabitants of the American continents? — and build up new and positive associations. I’m all for it. Now we just need to get people with some clout behind it.

It’s going to get interesting this weekend: we will have Brownian, Louis, Jen McCreight, and Rebecca Watson on a Google+ hangout on Sunday, 5pm Central time, to talk about the limitations of the current skepticism and atheism movements, and how Third Wave Atheism/Atheism+/Sniny New Atheism should and can extend our reach.

A lot of people have been writing me asking to join in, but notice that Google+ has a ten person limit to hangouts, and I’ve already booked five of us. I’ll be sending out invitations to the primary guests first, and I’m going to let them talk for a while before maybe sending out a broader wave of invitations for the limited spaces left. I may also ask the late-comers to limit themselves to a short comment or question and then step out to let others in.

You will be able to watch and listen live on Google+ and youtube, and I’ll keep my eye on the comments for good questions to pass along to our panel. I’m afraid this one might get swamped with people clamoring to join in; don’t be offended if you’re not allowed in, I will try to pay attention to comments during the discussion!

Gay marriage is a useful marker. It’s an issue that’s rather orthogonal to atheism, but we can still use it as a parameter to help us identify our allies (it is not, of course, a perfect or even entirely sufficient marker, but it’s still kind of cool to see how it splits the country into the the America I want to live in and the America I hope to see in the dustbin of history). Here’s a poll on legalizing gay marriage that breaks respondents down into various categories.

The proponents of Bad America: the Tea Party and religious-values Republicans.

The vanguard of Good America: Urban liberals and the agnostic left.

Maybe I should flip my metrics around. The real marker for regressive, bad ol’ Americans is their conflation of God and country.