Britain OKs Asylum For Atheist
Daily Beast
A 21-year-old Afghan atheist has been granted asylum by Britain over fears of religious persecution if he were forced to return home. It is believed to be the first time a lack of religion has been accepted in an asylum application under the United ...

The Guardian
Britain Grants Asylum to Atheist Afghan
TIME
An atheist from Afghanistan, fearing prosecution for “apostasy” back home, has secured asylum in Britain in a first-of-its-kind case, his lawyers said on Tuesday. The Guardian reports that the unnamed asylum seeker came to the UK in 2007 at the age of 16.
Afghan atheist granted UK asylumThe Guardian
Asylum given to an Afghan atheist... on grounds of religionDaily Mail
UK grants asylum to Afghan atheistAl Jazeera America
Telegraph.co.uk -ABC News -BBC News
all 65 news articles »

Business Insider
UK Grants Atheist Afghan Teen Religious Asylum
Business Insider
Britain has granted asylum to an atheist from Afghanistan due to fears he would be prosecuted back home, in what is believed to be the first case of its kind, his lawyers said Tuesday. The unnamed man was brought up a Muslim but after arriving in ...

This is unfortunate: a SF con scheduled for Chicago this March had to cancel after a disagreement with the hotel.

We regret to inform you that Chi-Fi 2014 will not be taking place at the Westin Chicago River North as planned. After several meetings with the staff of the Westin, we had concerns about the ability of their staff to create a welcoming and accepting atmosphere towards our attendees. A senior Westin employee referred to our staff, attendees, and guests as “freaks,” and hotel staff expressed their disapproval of our anti-harassment policy. As we want to put the safety and enjoyment of our guests and attendees first, we requested that the hotel make changes to ensure that our attendees and guests be treated with the same respect as any other Westin hotel guests. By mutual decision, we agreed to part ways with the hotel. We wish to make clear that these views were expressed by staff of the Westin Chicago River North and do not reflect the opinions of the Westin brand or Starwood Hotels. We are grateful to certain individuals working for Westin and Starwood who have been supportive throughout these discussions. Our organization does not condone any sort of retaliatory actions against either Westin or Starwood.

“Freaks”? And why would the hotel want to argue with a policy that discourages harassment?

Oh, well, I’m disappointed with the Westin Chicago River North — a very unprofessional place, apparently — but am impressed with the management of the con. They’re rescheduling for 2015, and it sounds like the kind of event that cares about its attendees, and I hope they are well-attended.

Of little faith: world's most dangerous places for atheists
Channel 4 News
Of little faith: world's most dangerous places for atheists. Tweet. As an Afghan citizen who is an atheist secures UK asylum for religious reasons, Channel 4 News looks at some of the countries where it is illegal to have no faith. Post by Channel 4 News.

and more »

The Guardian (blog)
The one theology book all atheists really should read
The Guardian (blog)
One reason that modern-day debates between atheists and religious believers are so bad-tempered, tedious and infuriating is that neither side invests much effort in figuring out what the other actually means when they use the word 'God'. This is an ...

Christian Post
Atheist Group Sues to Remove 2000 Pound Okla. Ten Commandments Display ...
Christian Post
A New Jersey-based atheist organization has filed a lawsuit calling for the removal of a 2,000 pound Ten Commandments display from the grounds of the Oklahoma state capitol in Oklahoma City. American Atheists filed the suit Monday in the U.S. District ...
Most of the 10 Commandments violate US Constitution, atheists say in ...Raw Story
Atheists file lawsuit against Ten Commandments monument in OKCKRMG

all 24 news articles »

Alex Gabriel has written an article about 10 Ways to Make Sure the Atheist Movement Is Not Just for the Wealthy. I mostly agree with it, but I’d add another point, and his #8 is, well, problematic.

8. Pay your speakers—well.

Speakers’ fees are commonplace in U.S. atheism. Britain lags far behind. It shows. Our speaking circuit is far whiter, wealthier and more dominated by academics and national groups’ staff. It’s far less accessible to bloggers, artists, filmmakers and people who aren’t stably employed. This happens when speaking isn’t recognised as work.

Covering expenses—say, for travel—is not enough. Good speakers put hours into talks. They’re writers, researchers, editors, lecturers, comedians, orators, things we pay people to be. They’re often discussing costly activism. (Jonny Scaramanga, whose blog about creationist exam papers went viral recently, spends huge sums getting hold of them.) Speaking for free means a real-terms loss even before expenses: the hours of work that go into it, as with graphic designers, could have gone into paying the rent. Academics, wealthy authors and the stably employed comprise most of our speakers because they can afford this loss. Others can’t. You need to cover it.

Given what U.S. speakers earn, the minimum wage and the skill involved, I recommend offering a $200 honorarium. You can’t afford that? Bollocks.

Humanist assemblies: you found 20 people to pay for your childcare. Now find 40 to put extra dough on the collection plate (better still, give it by monthly direct debit). Student groups: charge non-members that much on the door. Foundations like Todd Stiefel or Richard Dawkins will sponsor local groups. Secular authors will donate books to fundraising sales. Online atheists will donate to your page. For more ideas, see Darrel Ray’s advice.

If you can’t pay all your speakers yet, ask them to consider waiving the fee if they’re well off. Don’t allow negotiation. Higher and lower individual fees mean a race to the bottom where those who’ll work for least get booked the most. You’re trying to prevent that.

First of all, there’s a tell here that Alex doesn’t know much about the conference circuit: first he says to pay speakers well, and then he gets to specifics, and he says…$200. That line would get a laugh if he were Dr Evil.

You are asking a professional to take two or three days out of their schedule to grace your event, and you think $200 is fair compensation for that much of their time? Add another zero, and maybe $2000 would be more like it; a few hundred bucks is just plain insulting. Are you seriously going to call up Richard Dawkins and entice him to sign on by waving a few bills at him?

Even I am not anywhere near the mid-tier of conference draws, and I would find it weird to be offered a few bucks to show up. I do it because I care about this movement and want to see it grow, and also because I personally think my views are an important contribution — I lose money every time I go off to speak anywhere (I have to have my basic travel expenses covered so I don’t fiscally bleed to death, but all the little details I just pay out of pocket), but it’s worth it to see atheism growing.

I’m relatively well-off, though, with a stable job and a reasonable lower middle class salary; I would waive any honorarium because I don’t need it. I think it is fair to offer some general compensation to cover the miscellaneous expenses of those who aren’t quite as secure as I am, but I’m not too keen on expecting conferences, especially the home-grown free ones, to cover the expenses of a professional atheist lecturing class, even while recognizing that it’s necessary to expand our list of potential speakers.

You know what I would appreciate as an honorarium? Instead of paying me, tell me that X hundred dollars will be invested in scholarships to cover the cost of bringing in attendees who wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford the event. That’s what matters.

Or if you do want to help out the working people who are encouraging atheism in their spare time, look realistically at their mean income and estimate what they’d earn over your conference weekend if they stayed home and roofed houses or did company accounting or sold televisions at their local Best Buy, and offer them that. Someone like me would still waive the fee, but contributors who are otherwise trying to make ends meet would finally be able to use their talents well.

I said I would also add a #11 to his list of ten.

#11. Take advantage of local talent.

I see a lot of the same faces, drawn from the same big national and international pool of well-known atheists, and effective as they are at being a good draw for an event, it’s also important to grow the local talent pool. Sure, try to get one or three recognizable big names, but don’t make the conference revolve around them — they’ll be leaving the moment the conference ends…or as I’ve seen a few times, they’ll flit in just before their hour lecture, and then they’re off to the airport immediately after.

It’s the locals, or perhaps regional or state-wide people, who are going to hang around and make a difference, and who will be aware of the specific issues your attendees are dealing with. Make a commitment to have at least half your speakers be drawn from the same group as your attendees — and if you want to bring in more atheists from the black community or the poor or the working class, try to bring in speakers from that very same demographic.

Atheist Asylum * Marriage Ban * Playoff Sermon: Tuesday's Religion News ...
Religion News Service
... decision you've made. It's the finality of it. Atheist Asylum. Britain has granted asylum to a Muslim-raised Afghan man who came to Britain as a teenager and lost his faith. He argued that as an atheist, he might face death if he had to return to ...

and more »

The Guardian
Atheist Parents Catholic Child
Patheos (blog)
Deacon Kandra links to this article from London's Guardian newspaper (London papers are the best) which is a frank article by an atheist father whose daughter has chosen to be baptized. Our little girl, however, has made a life-defining decision by ...
My wife and I are atheists, but our daughter wants to be baptised CatholicThe Guardian

all 3 news articles »

Atheist Afghan receives asylum in the UK – for fear of religious persecution
New Statesman
The Home Office has granted asylum to a man in fear of his life because he no longer believes in God and wishes to live his life without publicly practising Islam. How many others are there who will need protection because of their lack of religious faith?

DAWN.com
Britain grants asylum to Afghan atheist
DAWN.com
LONDON: Britain has granted asylum to an atheist from Afghanistan due to fears he would be prosecuted back home, in what is believed to be the first case of its kind, his lawyers said Tuesday. The unnamed man was brought up a Muslim but after arriving ...

Oh, yeah, we’re always hearing about sperm whales and how they just chow down on the grandest cephalopods in the sea, but we never hear enough about how squid eat vertebrates. The answer is: horribly, slowly, agonizingly.

Am I a traitor to my phylum that I was cheering for the squid?

The newspaper of record reflected the disease last night. They had an article about the man killed over texting during the previews at a movie that included this ridiculous paragraph.

The killing underscored the increased debate about when to use smartphones in public. In October, the singer Madonna was spotted texting during the Lincoln Center premiere of “12 Years a Slave.” That led Tim League, chief executive of Alama Drafthouse, a Texas-based chain of boutique cinemas, to post on Twitter that she was banned from watching movies at his theater.

No, it did not underscore that debate. It underscored the debate over whether we should continue to allow armed assholes to wander the streets freely. You know, that real issue that no one in America, including the New York Times, wants to deal with, because the proponents of armed assholery like to kill you if you disagree with them.

(By the way, if you go read that article now, you’ll discover that it has been cleansed of that astonishingly stupid paragraph.)

It’s about time the US had a rational discussion about gun control, though. It’s way past due, and the weird aversion to changing the way we manage guns has to be overcome. So here are my suggestions for a start.

• Repeal the second amendment. All right, we don’t actually have a mechanism to strip that sucker out of there, but we can override it with a new amendment. Face it, the second amendment stinks: it’s an 18th century relic, it’s ambiguously worded (it’s about militias, people), and somehow stupid Americans have it fixed in their brains that the Constitution is sacred magic — all they have to do is shout, “Second amendment!” and we’re supposed to dissolve into accommodating bits of gelatin before them. We can criticize and revise the Constitution, you know; if you revere the Founding Fathers, you should at least still recognize that they thought an informed citizenry was important. You’re supposed to think, not just follow rules.

• Regulate gun ownership. Regulate the heck out of it. I live in a state where all liquor sales, even of wine and beer, have to be made through state-licensed stores — but I can order a freaking AR-15 through reddit. This is absurd. End all the loopholes, including the gun show provisions. All gun sales must be made through strictly licensed dealers, with extensive background checks, and all gun sales must be made in person with photo ID and a permanent record made. Make gun ownership public: anyone and everyone can look up who owns guns and where the guns are.

  If you are a responsible gun owner who needs the tool for hunting deer, this should be no burden at all on you. I’m very suspicious of people who insist that their possession of a deadly weapon must be secret and untraceable, and that they must be allowed to buy it from the skeevy guy operating out of a trailer.

• You have no right to carry a gun in any public place. No more concealed carry permits. No more “stand your ground” laws. Only authorized agents of the law should be carrying weapons in public, and even there, not all of them should be armed, and those who are, should be clearly and obviously armed. You’re packing heat in a movie theater? Fuck, WHY??.

• End the “gun collector” excuse. I don’t believe the pretense that you’re merely building a historical archive, that you’re simply gathering Americana of note. Collect bottles or hubcaps, instead. If you must insist that you’re creating a museum, OK…then you won’t object if every weapon in your collection is thoroughly and irreversibly modified to be non-functional: firing pins removed, solid plugs placed in the barrel, mechanisms locked in place with a nice glop of super-glue. If you have religious reasaons that they must be functional, go collect old hand grenades and undetonated bombs. You’ll expunge yourself from the population soon enough.

  We have no problem recognizing that if you have a bale of marijuana in your garage you’re in the business of dealing, not just recreationally consuming, drugs. If you’re accumulating an arsenal of deadly weapons, this isn’t for your personal enjoyment any more, you’re up to nefarious purposes.

• No more “self defense” excuse. The only people we need to defend ourselves from are the jerks who carry guns. And guns are a lousy instrument for self-defense — they’re indiscriminate and irreversible, they tend to punch holes in objects and people that we didn’t intend to punch holes in, and there are no take-backs after you punch a hole in someone by mistake.

  You want to defend yourself? Take a martial arts course. Too unathletic to do that, like me? Support your local police and have a phone by your bedside.

• Change the culture. You may think you’re a macho stud when you swagger down the street with a pistol at your hip, but the rest of us think you’re a pathetic asshole who is not just stupid, but a real danger to others. The rest of us have to get that message across to the NRA membership.

  There are very few legitimate uses for guns by general citizens — hunting, target shooting — and none of those require assault rifles, secrecy, or huge stockpiles of guns and ammo. If you actually have a practical use for the gun as a tool, I can respect that and have no problem with it, just like people who have a use for a tractor. But you know, it’s a tool with a specific purpose, and the nitwits who want to extend that purpose to being a constant presence in our lives are overcompensating losers.

Now, cue the stupid people declaring their love of guns in the comments, and accusing me of being a commie. I’ll prime your anger by telling you right off the bat that if you love guns, you are a sick, pathetic, twisted dingbat, and I won’t care about your arguments.

An "Atheist Church" Schism
Religion Dispatches
I've started my bloggingheads.tv new year right, with a fascinating discussion with journalist Katie Engelhart about her piece on the recent schism in Sunday Assembly, or "atheist megachurch." In the split, a New York branch of the group lambasted the ...

The Guardian
My wife and I are atheists, but our daughter wants to be baptised Catholic
The Guardian
I was, however, inclined to agree when my wife, who's a pretty vehement atheist, said that she could cope with just about any life decision our children may make – apart from them wanting to join the military or the clergy. So what happened when our ...
Atheist Parents Catholic ChildPatheos (blog)

all 3 news articles »

UK Grants Afghan Atheist Asylum
RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty
An Afghan citizen has been granted asylum in Britain on religious grounds because he is an atheist. Lawyers for the man, who has not been identified, said on January 14 that he came to Britain in 2007, aged 16, and gradually lost his Muslim faith.

Daily Mail
Asylum given to an Afghan atheist... on grounds of religion
Daily Mail
She said: 'We argued that an atheist should be entitled to protection from persecution on the grounds of their belief in the same way as a religious person is protected.' In February 2006, an Afghan national, Abdul Rahman was arrested and threatened ...
Afghan atheist granted UK asylumThe Guardian
UK grants asylum to Afghan atheistAl Jazeera America
​Afghan atheist granted UK asylum on religious groundsRT
BBC News -Telegraph.co.uk -ABC News
all 63 news articles »

The Times (subscription)
Britain grants landmark asylum to Afghan atheist
The Times (subscription)
Britain grants landmark asylum to Afghan atheist. Every aspect of daily life in Afghanistan is permeated by Islam, so living discreetly would be virtually impossible, the spokeswoman said. AFP/Getty Images. Print ...

RT
​Afghan atheist granted UK asylum on religious grounds
RT
An Afghan man has apparently become the first atheist to secure religious asylum in the UK. The Home Office let him stay in the country as he could face the death sentence because of his views on religion, report British media. The 23-year-old, who ...