Why I am a Feminist – Marcella

For me, the roots of my feminism are intimately bound up with the roots of my atheism.
I was one of those kids who believed in ghosts, but only at night. During the day, they were an absurd idea. Invisible people? Yeah right. At night, though, I would cower under my duvet imagining I could see them. At the age of four, at Christian daycare, I was sitting on a swing next to a classmate who said, “Do you believe in god?”
He asked it in the same tone older children used when they said, “Do you believe in Santa?”
Suddenly, the correct answer occurred to me.
“No,” I said. “Do you?”
“Sometimes,” he said.
I knew exactly what he meant. During the day, god was an absurd concept, but at night, he cowered under his sheets not daring to move lest god should see him.
When I was eight, my teachers decided that I had committed too many crimes against handwriting and asked my parents to intervene. They bought rubber grips for my pencils that would force my fingers into the correct position. Then they brought out a Bible and some lined paper. Every night, I sat at the kitchen table and copied the words. The house we lived in at the time had dry-stone walls. They weren’t even plastered on the inside. There was a single window with a wooden frame and shutters on the wall over the table. A cast iron stove stood out from the far wall, a fire whistling from its belly.

I couldn’t help but read the stories as I copied them. They were terrifying. An invisible angel stopped a man in the dark, midway across a river. And the things that happened to women were even worse. A man raped his daughters and got them pregnant. God ordered a father to kill his daughter in the name of sacrifice. Another man offered to throw his daughter to an angry mob so that they would appease themselves by raping her. After a night of handwriting practice, I lay awake and listened for the sound of snoring from my parents’ room. When it came, I climbed out of bed and switched on the light. Then I read books about unicorns and fairies, anything to take my mind off the thought of invisible hands reaching for me in the dark.

For my birthday, I was given a sheet of glow-in-the-dark star stickers. I used a star chart to carefully recreate the constellations on my ceiling. For a while, I forgot about the invisible hands and the voice from the sky asking my dad to sacrifice me. I fell off to sleep thinking about what the stars would look like from the surface of the moon or from Mars. For a science project, I drew my own maps, each night walking up the hill with a flask of hot chocolate to draw constellations and note the phase of the moon. My dad found some books on mythology and explained the stories behind the constellations. For some reason, the myths were less terrifying, perhaps because nobody believed them anymore and they could be read for what they really were: stories.

One day I climbed the hill with my construction paper. The frosted branches of trees looked suspicious. There were new shadows thrown up by the moon that made it easy to imagine invisible people standing in the wood, watching me. I turned around and went home. In bed, my cowardice turned to regret. I looked up at the glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling and knew that invisible people couldn’t be real. Looking back on this moment from adulthood, I realise that I had to make a choice: Either the world was governed by invisible, unknowable forces or it was possible to systematically study the world. But even though I couldn’t have articulated that at the time, that was exactly the contradiction I had to resolve in my head.

Suddenly it occurred to me that I wasn’t afraid of god at all, but of the fact that other people believed in the idea. Outside, through the woods, the neighbours would all be in bed. Mankind landed on the moon twenty years ago. Yet these people went to church. They each kept a copy of the black book with its stories of human sacrifice. What would happen when one of these neighbours became convinced that a voice in the sky wanted him to kill his daughter? No child was safe. How did these people sleep at night if they believed invisible angles could wake them at any moment for a wrestling match?

Then the revelation came. I remembered the conversation on the swings as a four year- old. The fact that the boy felt the need to ask if I believed in god said it all. If gods and ghosts and Santa were real, nobody would ask me if I believed. Nobody had ever asked me if I believed in trees or rocks or even stars. Even the man in black in the church didn’t believe. I stood in front of him and he asked me if I accepted god and Jesus. My parents waited until I was older to have me Christened because they had the idea that I should remember the event. I was too afraid of the man in black to tell the truth, because even at four, I sensed that I was required to lie.

I imagined the neighbours all snug in their beds, sleeping soundly.
“They don’t really believe,” I thought. “None of them believe.”
The weight of fear was lifted from me and I dropped off to sleep. I didn’t have the vocabulary to know that I was a feminist or an atheist until much later. Ironically, I eventually learned about the term “atheist” from church. The reverend was raging against atheists and I thought, “Hey. He’s describing me. I must be an atheist.” Even though I didn’t have the terminology and hadn’t read any feminist or atheist academics yet, I look back on that night in my childhood as the point in which I became a feminist atheist.

Muslims are becoming jokers. They want Halal Meat, Halal Apple-pie. Now they want Halal Television.

Indonesian Muslim group wants halal television.

An Islamic council in Indonesia wants the country’s broadcasting commission to consider certifying TV programs as religiously acceptable.

But the country’s broadcasting commissioner has ruled out certifying TV programs based on whether they’re acceptable to Islam.

The term halal most commonly refers to foods that are permitted by Islam, but now the West Java branch of Indonesia’s Islamic Council is suggesting halal television too.

Indonesia’s Broadcast Law states that content should educate and entertain, but also implement religious values and the country’s culture.

So the Islamic Council is suggesting TV should be subject to a certification system, like foods, to show whether they’re religiously permitted, or halal.

The West Java Broadcast Commissioner, Nursyawal, says that’s not going to happen.

He says it’s up to Islamic Clerics to issue their own fatwa or religious law forbidding certain programs.

I never saw anything labeled as halal in my childhood. It is around 20 years ago I found that a word halal invaded the world. Muslims want everything halal or everything Islamic whatever they eat, or drink, or touch, or hear, or see, or smell. Muslims are now becoming more and more intolerant, ignorant and arrogant. The whole situation is so weird now that I do not need to know whether they are fundamentalists, they are Muslims or they believe in Islam–it has become a good enough reason to stay away from them.

Aren’t they becoming jokers too? Muslim women in Egypt have their Islamic TV. A bunch of faceless shameless women are placed there to humiliate human race. Now an Indonesian Muslim group demands for an halal or Islamic TV. It’s very simple. Their ancestors used swords to convert people to Islam. Today’s Muslims use hi tech media to convert people to Islam or just to brainwash millions of people everyday with misogynistic superstitions. Their aim is to occupy the world or make the world darul Islam or land of Islam. The aim has been the same, only the weapons are different.

‘Islamism kills generation’. Protest against Olympic Committee for allowing Islamism in Olympics.

We demand justice for women in Olympics. Feminists have been demanding justice for women. But it seems no one likes to listen to them. Why does everybody forget the Olympic principles?

• Universal fundamental ethical principles, such as: ‘Any form of discrimination [including gender discrimination] is incompatible with belonging to the Olympic Movement’ (Principle 5)

• A commitment to equality: ‘implementing the principle of equality of men and women’ (Chapter 1, Rule 2.7)

• Neutrality in sport: ‘No kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda is permitted on any Olympic sites, venues or other areas’ (Chapter 5, Rule 51.3)

Feminists demanded an end to gender-based discrimination and stereotypes. The International Olympic Committee did not protest against gender-based discrimination the way they protested against race-based discrimination. South Africa was banned from the Olympics for 21 years over its policy of apartheid. The International Olympic Committee violated the Olympic principles about gender equality by allowing countries that have anti-women-sharia laws to participate in the Olympics. It has also allowed athletes to wear veils, a symbol of oppression and to observe religious fasting that may higher the risk of dehydration during Olympic Games.

Femen, a Ukrainian feminist organization demands that the International Olympic Committee condemns violence against women in the Islamist states. Femen says that with the support of the International Olympic Committee Islamist governments actually use the participation of women in the Olympic Games to legitimize the killing and torturing of women.

Topless Femen activists Perform Anti-Islamist Olympic protest in London today. Five protesters are arrested.

How long will feminists from the West have to fight for women worldwide? Time has come for sane people living in the Muslim countries to move their butts and start an uncompromising movement against Islamic oppression.

Why I am a Feminist – Skeptifem

‘My feminism really began after reading The Beauty Myth, by Naomi Wolf. The book is far from revolutionary by my standards now, but when I read it my world was changed forever. This was years after I had been involved in skepticism, and years after becoming an atheist, just barely into my twenties. The difficult questions being raised by her work felt awfully familiar to me, she sounded just like my skeptic and atheist friends who were critical of ideas that were supposedly too sacred to question.

The book didn’t just make me think, it made me angry. I had spent years suffering for ideas I found out were totally fabricated, and designed specifically to make me feel horrible about myself so someone else could profit from it. I suffered for ideas that elevated the status of men at the expense of women. I compromised my health many times to lose weight, and there was virtually never a time that I gave up constant vigilance against gaining weight. It is a pitiable, tiring way to live, and I had done it for about 7 years at that point. I didn’t suffer as badly as other women I knew, many abused themselves for weight loss but also put up with humiliating (and sometimes painful) cosmetic procedures to rid themselves of hair, wrinkles, and other normal human features. When I was a teenager my mother got acid poured on her face to sear the wrinkles off of it. A surgeon, someone who pledges to do no harm to patients, did that to her for money. It echoed so perfectly what popular culture told me about appearance and beauty that it wasn’t even remarkable to me, it was normal for women to hate their bodies and faces. It was so normal that the violence inherent in all of it was invisible. Such a hatred for my body meant seeing me, all of me, as a thing instead of a person. Other women had chipped away at their sense of self exactly as I had.

I wasn’t transformed over night, but I did change a lot about myself pretty quickly. Eating like a normal person actually resolves many psychological problems caused by starvation, so I felt much better in general. I grieved for the years I had wasted hurting myself. I grieved for women who were still hurting themselves. I began to see that I had worth as a person. I was worth listening to and nourishing. I got help from a friend in college and enrolled in some classes, something I never thought I would do. Feminism helped me feel like a real person. I thought to myself, “men get to feel this way all the time, they don’t even have to fight for it. Every woman deserves to feel like they matter.” I wanted more people to know what I knew.

The more I thought about and researched the way women suffer for beauty, and the way men gain from that, I began to see some interesting parallels with religion and scams of all sorts. I became eager to discuss feminism with people in the skeptics groups I frequented. I felt as though I had discovered some new interesting intellectual territory, and was excited to see what other people thought. So many friends had used their intellects to impress me in the past with analysis of various issues. Surely, a great discussion would ensue.

I could not have been more wrong. I was met at every turn with dismissal and embarrassingly fallacious reasoning. What had happened to the intellectual honesty, the curiousness, of the people I knew? Why was no one outraged at the poor quality of arguments being used to dismiss my findings outright? I never expected everyone to agree with me, but I expected the level of discourse afforded to creationists and homeopaths. It became apparent that most of the people in my circle were… men. They didn’t want to think about the things I brought up, and they all helped each other avoid confronting problems with sexism. I became disillusioned with these groups, even though I still strongly supported the stated principles of all of the groups. I still believe in those things, and believe feminism is inherent in critical thought about problems affecting women and girls.

It got much more troubling to me once I began to research things like rape and sexual harassment. I realized that I had either been subject to sexual harassment, witnessed it against another woman, at every job I have ever worked at. This was true of virtually every woman I knew. The ones who spoke up usually got in trouble or were ignore. I realized that sexual abuse was a common experience for women as well. I knew from personal experience how little the judicial system cares if you decide to report being raped. I reported having been raped as a teenager. I gave the police contact information for other women who I knew who had been abused by the same guy, and they never even called them to collect statements. They did question me repeatedly and gave me a card to call someone for psychological help, as if I wanted to discuss what had happened even more. That was all that ever happened. People I told outside of the police had mixed reactions, a lot of men simply thought I was a liar or a whore, and it made dealing with the aftermath of sexual abuse much more difficult. I saw these attitudes mirrored all over society. Outside of feminism there was not much concern about these issues at all.

I got more involved with feminist groups, spaces that were much safer for women, and got introduced to feminism that dealt with more than the issues affecting economically privileged white women. I became interested in how racism and colonialism functioned. I am white and didn’t want to do to people of color what men had done to me. I wanted to listen instead. I made a point of finding people with experiences very different from my own, and trying to really understand their perspective. It was amazingly difficult but it helped me develop a lot of maturity, and to also see that social justice was a struggle for the majority of people in the world. I saw how we could all support each other. This is something I still try to do, something central to my feminism today.

Eventually I wanted to write, something that was outside the realm of possibility to me just a few years before. I had come a long way from thinking I was not worth listening to. Since reading The Beauty Myth I’ve discovered some troubling things about Naomi Wolf’s beliefs, but I will always be grateful to her for writing that book. I will always be grateful to other brave women who write, like bell hooks and Andrea Dworkin, for helping to expand my understanding of the world we women live in. My life had improved so much because of individuals who had decided that it was important to spread a message of truth. They wrote despite the ridicule and insults, they wrote because it was too important to let other people stop them. I want to be that person for someone else out there.’

(Dear fellow feminists, Skeptifem has shared her story with us, why she is a feminist. You can share your stories with us too! -Taslima Nasreen)

Remembering Gore Vidal, a great humanist

“…homosexuality is a constant fact of the human condition and it is not a sickness, not a sin, not a crime . . . despite the best efforts of our puritan tribe to make it all three. Homosexuality is as natural as heterosexuality. Notice I use the word ‘natural,’ not normal.” –Gore Vidal, Esquire 1969

“The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchal—God is the Omnipotent Father—hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years in those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates.” –Gore Vidal on monotheism

Gore Vidal, a great humanist died yesterday.

I am remembering those days in 1995, when Gore Vidal, some other writers and I gave lectures at Oxford university. Our lectures were published in book form. Chris Miller, a fellow of All Souls College edited the book titled ‘The dissident word’.

THE Times Higher Education wrote about Gore Vidal in 1995 before the Oxford lecture series started.

Six leading writers will speak on the subject of the Dissident Word in the fourth series of Amnesty Lectures which starts next week at the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford.

Whatever Gore Vidal has to say in the course of his Amnesty lecture, there can be little doubt that it will be said wittily and well. His calculated wit has been criticised as an ingenious means of skating over thin ice – one reviewer said he had “perfected the art of going nowhere, while being deliciously funny en route”. But few deny the man who defined a narcissist as “anyone better looking than you” and who said he was all for bringing back the birch “but only between consenting adults” his standing as a master of the epigrammatic one-liner.

For half a century he has fulfilled the dual roles of iconoclast and scion of America’s ruling classes. Like his exact contemporary and political opposite William F. Buckley – also born in 1925 and the other half of a famous televised spat in which Buckley called him a queer and Vidal labelled Buckley a Nazi – he is a critic from within, a satirist with a deadly serious purpose, chipping away at the complacency of the milieu and the nation that produced him.

Politically well-connected -his grandfather Thomas Gore was a senator from Oklahoma while vice-president Gore and ex-president Carter are relatives – he has run for office himself, losing a New York congressional race in 1960 despite outpolling presidential candidate John Kennedy, and polling half a million votes in the California Democratic Primary of 1982.

But his immense self-confidence rests on achievement as well as birth, with a formidable canon of novels, essays, journalism and scripts built up in the half-century since his first novel Williwaw was published in his teens. Most of his twenties were spent in the shadow of censorship. His third novel, The City and the Pillar, outraged conventional opinion with its portrayal of a college sportsman driven by obsessive love for another male athlete.

He found refuge in pseudonymous crime novels and scriptwriting for MGM. “Censorship was very real in the 1950s and I had a bad time after the blackout. You don’t write a movie like Ben Hur if you’re having a good time.”

He is a ferocious critic of religion as a constraining force and was denounced as an anti-Christ by television evangelist and ex-presidential candidate Pat Robertson. Along with a disdain for religion goes a fear of the over-mighty state. He contends that the postwar United States has been a “National Security State” and calls for a reorganisation along the lines of the Swiss cantons to take power away from the centre. “The rulers of any system cannot maintain their power without the constant creation of prohibitions that then give the state the power to imprison – or otherwise intimidate – anyone who violates any of the state’s often new-minted crimes,” he says.

He is perhaps an ironic choice for a lecture series held on university premises. A scourge of current fashions in English departments, he has said: “It is quite evident that, in the English departments of the United States, not only do they not understand imagination, but to the extent that it comes their way they hate it. And they have eliminated literature altogether from the English departments and replaced it with literary theory.”

‘I regret to report that Gore Vidal has died. He was one of my favorite authors, and a notable atheist and humanist.’ —PZ Myers, biologist and blogger.

“The progressive and humanist values Gore Vidal repeatedly espoused moved the culture in a positive direction. He spent his life pointing out the places in society that needed the most attention without worrying who might be embarrassed or upset by his opinions.” –David Niose, president of the American Humanist Association.

”He’s been called an iconoclast, a provocateur, and a misanthrope, and of course Gore occasionally said things that gave humanists pause. But he was forever dedicated to the cause of enlightenment and exposed injustice and hypocrisy at every turn.” —Jennifer Bardi, editor of Humanist magazine.

Islam needs to be offended by millions. How many people will they arrest?

Egyptian teacher is arrested for offending Islam on Facebook.

Bishoy Kamel, a Coptic-Christian teacher from the Upper Egyptian Governorate of Sohag, was arrested on Monday for sharing cartoons on a Facebook page that allegedly defamed the Islamic faith and the Prophet Muhammad.

Mohamed Safwat, an Egyptian citizen who has pressed charges against Kamel, also claimed that the latter had insulted Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi and members of his own family.

Kamel, who has been detained for four days pending investigation, has admitted to managing the Facebook page in question. He claims, however, that he was not responsible for the content of the page, which, he said, had been hacked on Saturday.

In June of last year, Naguib Sawiris, Coptic billionaire and founder of the liberal Free Egyptians party, was severely criticized after posting a cartoon of Disney characters Mickey and Minnie Mouse dressed in Islamic garb.

Several Islamist lawyers subsequently lodged a complaint with Egypt’s attorney-general against Sawiris, whom they accused of offending Islam.

Thousands of men and women all over the world have been arrested, imprisoned, exiled, killed for criticizing Islam. Most people shut their mouth out of fear. Hamza Kashgari in Saudi Arabia who posted blasphemous messages on Twitter was arrested and deported. Indonesian atheist Alex Aan has been sentenced to two and a half years for saying ‘There is no god’ on Facebook. Muslim Brotherhood already started working for ethnic cleansing of non-Muslims and talibanization of Egypt.

No progress in society is possible if there is no freedom of expression. Islam, like all other religions, is not compatible with democracy, human rights and women’s rights. Millions of people should commit blasphemy against Islam for the sake of humanity. How many blasphemers will corrupt and repressive regimes arrest?

A big celebration of patriarchal tradition

Yes, it happens in the Indian subcontinent every year. It is a big patriarchal festival celebrated by Hindus. Men and women of all ages, of all classes and of all castes celebrate Raksha Bandhan or the bond of protection. On this auspicious day, sisters tie a silk thread called Rakhi on their brothers’ wrists and pray to God for their health and well-being. Brothers make a promise to protect their sisters from all harms and troubles.

There is no such festival where sisters promise to protect their brothers from all evil and brothers pray for their sisters’ health and well-being.

Middle class is rapidly expanding. Educated people are emerging. Technocrats are everywhere. Women are becoming more and more financially independent. But everybody will celebrate Raksha Bandhan day after tomorrow. It has been celebrated for centuries but no one says, it is not necessary to celebrate Raksha Bandhan when women are becoming educated and independent and they can very well take care of themselves. Instead of encouraging women to be strong and courageous, people celebrate Raksha Bandhan which is a symbol of women’s vulnerability. The message is, women are weak and vulnerable, so they need to be protected by men.

In reality, sisters are expected to give their inherited properties to their brothers. Many sisters are forced to stay with abusive husbands because brothers are not ready to take care of their sisters. Many sisters commit suicide for being helpless. Many widow-sisters are abandoned by their brothers and flocked to Vrindavan, a holy city where they have no other alternative but to live a miserable life and wait to die. And it is not uncommon that brothers kill sisters to save family honor. If brothers protected their sisters, India would not have become the 4th most dangerous place for women in the world.

The celebration of patriarchy is the celebration of men’s superiority and women’s inferiority. The festival is getting bigger and more glamorous every year. It is alarming.

What a wonderful world!

I asked 28 people (4 film actors, 4 doctors, 4 engineers, 4 journalists, 4 businessmen 4 politicians, 4 ordinary nobodies in the Indian subcontinent) to express their opinions after watching this video. 3 people said, ‘Wow, I like to go scuba diving.’ 5 said, ‘We did not know much about under water lives, it’s amazing!’ 12 said, ‘Awesome’. 19 said, ‘My faith in god has now increased’. 22 said, ‘It shows the glory of God’.

I sighed and said, ‘We sane godless people are the minority’.

I laughed at them. It worked.

It is difficult to help deconvert a religious adult to atheism; however, many people have become atheists after reading my books. In some of my books, I simply quoted the anti-science, anti-women, anti-humanity, anti-compassion, anti-equality and anti-freedom verses and sayings of the Quran and the Hadith. Most people have no idea what the holy books really say. They just believe that whatever is written therein is all good. Since I started pointing out the ‘holy’ words that clearly advocate for cruelty, barbarity, inequality and injustice, many believers were shocked and started thinking – which is certainly not a norm that ordinary people follow; ultimately, they became atheists. One can never be sure how many days or months or years an adult person may need to become an atheist. Some take a few days, some need decades. It depends on their level of intelligence and understanding. I believe that many adults may remain religious even after reading piles of books on secular philosophy.

In contrast, as I have noticed, it is much easier to introduce innocent children to atheism, before – or even after – they get brainwashed with religion. I have no child. I have met cows, goats, ducks, dogs, cats, rats, birds, bees, and so forth; none of them believe in god. It is us humans that suffer from a god delusion.

I experienced how quickly my nephews and nieces got enlightened. I spent only a few days to encourage them to be atheists. When they were around 5, and started believing in someone sitting in the sky and watching everyone, I asked them, “Do you really believe fairy tales or fictions are facts? Do you really believe that a thing called god is sitting there, who is called most kind and most merciful but he will burn you in hell for eternity only if you do not pray to him or say that he is great? If he is all-knowing, then why did not he know simple Bengali? Why do you need to pray in Arabic? You know about angel Israfil? Why has Israfil been sitting for millions of years, holding a trumpet to his mouth? Why does Allah make him do that? I mean, He knows when the day of judgment is going to arrive, doesn’t He? Surely He could ask Israfil to pick up his trumpet and blow it when the time comes? Poor Israfil is having to stay put, not moving an inch. Did anyone see god? Why doesn’t god show up? Why should you believe something without any proof? Ask something now from god. Will he give you what you asked for? No. People created different gods in different countries in different times. People were definitely ignorant. You know what? No clever people believe in god. Most scientists, writers, artists, intellectuals, philosophers are atheists. You may say that some people you know are clever but believe in god. But you should not forget that they may be clever for somethings but not for everything. People who believe in god say that only humans will go to heaven. Okay, tell me why horses and dogs, or butterflies and birds would not go to heaven? The truth is, there is no heaven anywhere. Don’t get afraid of hell, there is no hell either.” They listened to me carefully. I was very patient. They asked me many questions. I answered all of their questions, even many of their not-so-bright ones.

Next day I bought them some children’s books about evolution and the universe. And read them out to them, aloud. We spent a whole weekend reading and discussing.

After a week, I took them to a natural history museum and spent all day there.

After a few weeks I caught them praying. A bearded man had been appointed to teach the kids how to read the Quran and how to pray to god. They were asked to wear skullcaps and veils. Observing them I started laughing. I laughed all evening. Then I said, “How could you do that? You look so stupid.” They looked ashamed of themselves. It worked. They rebelled against the bearded teacher. They already learned how the universe evolved and where they came from. They became atheists before they were 12-year-olds.

They all are now adults, leading wonderful lives without god.

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