Afghan atheist wins asylum 'on religious grounds'
Channel 4 News
Afghan atheist wins asylum 'on religious grounds'. Tweet. An Afghan citizen secures UK asylum on religious grounds because he is an atheist, in a case believed to be the first of its kind. Afghanistan atheist wins asylum on religious grounds (picture ...

Scotsman
Afghanistan atheist given religious asylum in UK
Scotsman
AN Afghan citizen has secured asylum in the UK over fears of religious persecution for his atheist beliefs, in a case believed to be the first of its kind. The case was submitted to the Home Office under the 1951 Refugee Convention on the basis that if ...

Britain grants asylum to Afghan atheist
UPI.com
"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," said Claire Splawn, a law student at the University of Kent who helped prepare the case. A ...

Atheist message circulating on city bus
The Sudbury Star
While the Sudbury CFI branch is new, the Sudbury Humanists Association – “a strong, but small association of humanists, atheists and free-thinkers” – existed for nine years, said Spencer Lucas, Sudbury CFI branch director. “I approached Justin several ...
Atheist organization starts Sudbury branchCBC.ca

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Metro
Atheist Afghan can remain in UK on religious grounds
Metro
An Afghan has been granted asylum in Britain on religious grounds – despite being an atheist. The man was told he could stay because if he returned to Afghanistan he could face persecution over his rejection of Islam. He feared he could be sentenced to ...

BBC News
Atheist Afghan granted religious asylum in UK
BBC News
An Afghan citizen has been granted asylum in the UK for religious reasons - because he is an atheist. The man fled to the UK from a conflict involving his family in Afghanistan in 2007, aged 16, and was allowed to stay in the UK until 2013. He was ...

Beyond the Human Eye

Express.co.uk
Atheist wins religious fight to stay in UK
Express.co.uk
He was brought up as a Muslim but after arriving in the UK, aged 16 in 2007, he turned to atheism, she said. Solicitor, Sheona York said: “We are absolutely delighted for our client. “We also want to welcome the prompt and positive response of the Home ...

A man and his wife are out on a movie date, and before the show starts, he talks to his 3-year-old daughter at home on his cell phone. And apparently he was doing some texting, too. Clearly, our big problem is our dependency on these ubiquitous little telecommunications devices…

Wait, no, that’s not it. The problem is that sitting nearby was Curtis Reeves, 71, a retired police officer, who resented the chatter before his movie came on, and Mr Reeves was carrying a goddamn fucking gun in the theater, and argued with the talkative father and eventually shot him dead and wounded his wife.

The Tampa police seriously “considered if this could be a ‘stand your ground’ case but decided the criteria did not apply.” Obviously not. The victim was white. But holy shitballs, they considered this? An armed asshole guns down a man over some noise during the movie previews and they contemplated letting him go?

Then, minutes after I read that, aghast, I get a little beep, and someone sent me this link.

Reddit is selling personalized guns with their logo.

Personal privacy is prized among Redditors, most of whom participate on the site anonymously. A fervent pro-gun constituency among them makes the market opportunity for gun dealers all the more attractive. The primary subreddit on the topic, /r/Guns, currently has more than 154,000 subscribers, and GunsForSale, created in March 2011, has doubled in size in the last year, with more than 7,200 subscribers. Gun dealers using the site indicate that they’ve enjoyed a spike in demand in the past year, after the Sandy Hook massacre ignited a national debate and pro-gun activists whipped up fears about a regulatory crackdown.

Yeah, that’s the big worry with a bunch of dead kids — someone might grow a spine and a brain somewhere and take steps to regulate guns. They needn’t have worried: this is America, we’re aspiring to mutual bloody annihilation among the citizenry.

And christ, reddit.

The Guardian
Afghan atheist granted UK asylum
The Guardian
An Afghan man is believed to have become the first atheist to be granted asylum in the UK on the basis of his views on religion. The 23-year-old, who has not been identified, feared that if forcibly returned to his homeland he would face persecution ...
Britain OKs Asylum For AtheistDaily Beast
Atheist Afghan man granted asylum in UK to protect him from 'religious ...Telegraph.co.uk
Atheist Afghan granted religious asylum in UKBBC News
The Independent -Daily Mail -RT
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Telegraph.co.uk
Atheist Afghan man granted asylum in UK to protect him from 'religious ...
Telegraph.co.uk
A young Afghan man who became an atheist after coming to Britain has been granted asylum on the grounds that the threat to his life for having no faith would amount to “religious” persecution. In what is thought to be the first case of its kind in the ...

Did your absentee father make you an atheist?
Religion News Service
(RNS) A once-popular book that links atheism with shoddy fathering is getting a second life with a new publisher, thanks, in part, to the rise of nonbelief in the United States. “Faith of the Fatherless: The Psychology of Atheism” by Catholic ...

Of New Atheists and Noble Lies
New York Times (blog)
I began last week by responding to Jerry Coyne's broadside against my Christmas column, so I suppose it's fitting to begin this one by responding to Noah Millman's lament that I need to “argue with better atheists,” instead of “weak combatants” like Coyne.

eBay Removes Woman's Ad Auctioning 'Take an Atheist Leader to Church ...
Christian Post
After posting herself as an "auction item" on eBay for a chance to attend a Christian church, Eve Brannon of South Carolina-based Upstate Atheists said her ad was removed multiple times by the company without explanation, deterring the purpose of her ...

Prague spring: Catholic churches sprout up in Europe's “most atheist country”
Patheos (blog)
Some 50 new Catholic churches have been built in the Czech Republic since the 1989 collapse of the communist regime, mainly in Moravian regions with a higher share of believers, and another ten are being planned or under construction, daily Lidové ...

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The Independent
Afghan atheist to get asylum in Britain on religious grounds
The Independent
Although he was brought up a Muslim, since living in the UK he has gradually turned away from it and is now an atheist. The young man – who does not want to be identified for fear of being rejected by the Afghan community in Britain – fled to the UK ...

Atheist organization starts Sudbury branch
CBC.ca
The National Organization for Atheists is opening a Sudbury branch. Local branch leader, Spencer Lucas, said there are many atheists in this area who would like to be part of an organization, but added many don't know a group like this exists. The ...
Atheist message circulating on city busThe Sudbury Star

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The appalling privilege and bad taste of the well-off rears its ugly head again. Bill Keller, former executive editor of the New York Times, took the time to pen an op-ed to shame cancer victims who speak too militantly of their disease. In particular, he singles out Lisa Bonchek Adams, a cancer patient who blogs and tweets and writes poetry about her disease and treatment, as somehow…unseemly. He contrasts her public battle with the resignation of his father-in-law.

In October 2012 I wrote about my father-in-law’s death from cancer in a British hospital. There, more routinely than in the United States, patients are offered the option of being unplugged from everything except pain killers and allowed to slip peacefully from life. His death seemed to me a humane and honorable alternative to the frantic medical trench warfare that often makes an expensive misery of death in America.

I can respect that choice; everyone should have the freedom to die with dignity. But where Keller becomes an obnoxious ass is in his implication that a calm death is an ideal for everyone, and that there is something enviable about going gently, and then he dares to question whether Adams’ campaign has been a public service. Guess what, Bill Keller? You don’t get to question how a cancer patient gets to live. I appreciate what Adams writes, and what Jay Lake writes, and what every person who wrestles with this terrible disease chooses to say or not say. It is their choice.

Keller knows he’s treading on shaky ground here, since his wife apparently wrote something similar for the Guardian (I can’t read it because the Guardian yanked it) asking, What are the ethics of tweeting a terminal illness?. I’d rather ask, what are the ethics of telling someone with a terminal illness that it is unethical to talk about it? So for backup he asked Steven Goodman of Stanford Medical School for an opinion.

“I’m the last person to second-guess what she did,” Goodman told me, after perusing Adams’s blog. “I’m sure it has brought meaning, a deserved sense of accomplishment. But it shouldn’t be unduly praised. Equal praise is due to those who accept an inevitable fate with grace and courage.”

Oh, so the problem is that a cancer patient is being “unduly praised”? Where? How? What is an inappropriate level of praise, and is it being given here? If someone compliments Adams on her writing or her courage, is Dr Goodman or Mr Keller going to tut-tut them and ask them to be more reserved? Or is the finger-wagging going to be restricted to cancer patients who lack the decorum to be “calm” and “go gently” into death?

What Goodman should have said in response to that request for an opinion is, “Who the fuck are you, Bill, to stand in judgment over how a cancer patient deals with their disease?” And then somebody should have slapped him with the ethics of airing his distaste for a person who chooses to not go gentle into that good night on the pages of the New York Times. The ugly spectacle is all Keller’s.

Cyanocitta stelleri – Steller’s jay, Chautauqua Park, Boulder, Colorado, 2013.... Matt Young http://www.mines.edu/~mmyoung

I was sent this horrifying data table: an awful lot of people think there are circumstances in which force is legitimate to use in order to get sex.

Now an interesting twist. The source for that table is defunct, but someone else bought the url fearus.org and has put together a fairly detailed analysis of the claims. Before you jump to the conclusion that it was some MRA trying to debunk it, though, read the analysis: it’s substantial and impartial. The original study by UCLA researchers does exist, but it’s more complex than this oversimplified version can accurately reflect.

The actual data contained answers that were on a 5-point scale, rather than just a simple yes/no, so there’s some crunching going on here. But let’s crunch it some more.

Excerpts from the paper reveal that only 24% of men categorically rejected all use of violence against women…so apparently, about 76% of us considered some of those circumstances a possible reason to rape. That is disturbing.

Also disturbing: only 44% of the women categorically rejected all uses of violence against them. So 56% have absorbed the idea that they can be at fault for leading men on? Weird.

Anyway, the fearus site is an interesting effort to dig into the original data. It’s a little off — it seems obsessed with the idea that it is a gross error to simplify a 5-point scale to a yes/no answer — but it does make the excellent point that it is disgraceful that it is so difficult to get access to the original, published scientific data.