The Thinking Housewife is mad at pope Francis

When people get tired of modern life and yearn for the languid bygone age of genteel manners where everyone knew their proper place and there wasn’t all this talk of ‘equality’ and ‘rights’ and so on that give so many people uppity ideas, many may tune in to Downton Abbey for a refreshing breeze of nostalgia. As for me, I go over to the website The Thinking Housewife where I can be assured that right thinking will prevail and old-fashioned values upheld. [Read more…]

Saudi Arabia condemns Twitter users to hell

In yet another sign of how the proliferation of social media is worrying authoritarian regimes because it allows people to communicate laterally easily and bypass official news channels, the head of the religious police in Saudi Arabia has warned Twitter users that they have pretty much forfeited any hope of a good afterlife. In addition, the country’s most senior cleric (who has the Monty Pythonesque title of ‘Grand Mufti’) has called Twitter users ‘fools’. [Read more…]

Observing Ramadan in the Arctic Circle

I just love it when religions create all these hoops for their followers to jump through and then, whenever one of those rules become inconvenient for whatever reason, struggle to find ways to break the rules while trying to maintain façade of coherence. Jews are clearly the winners in providing the most source of fun because their kosher and Sabbath rules are unbelievably complex while their Talmudic scholars are ingenious about finding loopholes for them, as was the case with telephones, ovens, elevators, and escalators. [Read more…]