evil
pharyngula | May 9, 2010I'm still wrestling with Sam Harris's and Richard Carrier's ideas that there can be a scientific foundation for morality. I guess I am concerned with the claim that we can science our way to a moral society; I am more comfortable with the idea that we can develop an objective criterion for judging an act as not moral, or not just, or not contributing to the wellbeing of individuals or cultures. Can I, as a godless humanist, say that this is wrong?
An Islamist rebel administration in Somalia has had a 13-year-old girl stoned to death for adultery after the child's father reported that she was…
pharyngula | May 6, 2010The American Academy of Pediatrics has come up with a compromise on female genital mutilation.
International human rights organization Equality Now is stunned by a new policy statement issued by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), which essentially promotes female genital mutilation (FGM) and advocates for "federal and state laws [to] enable pediatricians to reach out to families by offering a 'ritual nick'," such as pricking or minor incisions of girls' clitorises. The Policy Statement "Ritual Genital Cutting of Female Minors", issued by the AAP on April 26, 2010, is a significant set-…
pharyngula | April 5, 2010Here is why we need Wikileaks — because when our soldiers carry out Collateral Murder, we should know about it. Good journalism should be exposing this stuff for us.
This is a video shot from an American helicopter gunship in Iraq. It shows real human beings being shot to death. I wish I could unwatch seeing it now, so be advised before you click on that play button…it is horrific.
A couple of Iraqi journalists working for Reuters are slaughtered in the above clip, gunned down from a distance by American troops who claim their cameras are weapons, that they're walking around with AK-47s and…
pharyngula | March 15, 2010
I have something in common with these guys. That's the Polish death metal band Behemoth, and you can see that they look like real atheists: cadaverous, lots of black leather and spikes, with nice metal jewelry in odd places on their clothing.
Uh, none of that is at all like me.
Here they are in performance. I rather like it, but be warned: it's loud and harsh. See if you can spot the resemblance now:
Get it?
OK, I'll explain, since I guess it isn' quite so obvious. At the beginning of that clip, the lead singer, Nergal, is tearing up a Bible and throwing the pages out to the audience. Hey…
pharyngula | February 24, 2010Cults are all about control, and small children must be very hard to control.
The leader of a religious cult was "outraged" when a 1-year-old boy did not say "Amen" before a meal and ordered her followers to deprive him of food and water until he died, a Baltimore prosecutor told jurors Monday.
Another horrifying detail: the mother of the boy went along with the punishment and watched him waste away…all because she wanted to be accepted as a member of the cult.
pharyngula | February 17, 2010I know from experience how hard it is to raise kids — they tend to be willful and are always trying to think for themselves, and you know we can't have that. But now there's an answer, a book titled To Train Up a Child, which provides all kinds of useful tips on how to bring up children respectful of the word of God, using "the same principles the Amish use to train their stubborn mules".
Doesn't that line right there sell the technique to you?
It worked for Kevin and Elizabeth Schatz, who applied "biblical discipline" to two of their children. Now one is very, very quiet and causes no…
pharyngula | February 13, 2010Tenure reviews are extremely stressful: imagine a job evaluation in which you may be told that you've been doing a fine job, you're doing interesting work, but you aren't quite as dazzling as your employer would like…so you're fired. And then, because academic jobs in your specialty are scattered very thin on the ground, you get to spend a year struggling to find a new position (with the same horror show finale possible), and pack up and move to a completely different part of the country, uprooting all your connections that you may have built up over the last 5 or 6 years. What makes it even…
pharyngula | February 8, 2010Focus on the Patriarchy has always favored punishing children to teach them right from wrong, so I can't imagine them being too upset at this news: a fellow's 4-year-old daughter was having trouble memorizing her ABC's, suggesting that she needed some extra incentives to excel. So Dad waterboarded her. How sweet that Daddy cared so much about the importance of her education.
I'm going back to teaching in the fall. Will this be considered a reasonable educational technique? I'm thinking of putting a rack in the lecture hall and carrying around some thumbscrews just to help my students learn…
pharyngula | January 25, 2010Why do so many of our political leaders support creationism? Here's a disturbing glimpse of the way the neo-conservative elite thinks, discussing specifically Irving Kristol:
Kristol has acknowledged his intellectual debt to Strauss in a recent autobiographical essay. "What made him so controversial within the academic community was his disbelief in the Enlightenment dogma that 'the truth will make men free.'" Kristol adds that "Strauss was an intellectual aristocrat who thought that the truth could make some [emphasis Kristol's] minds free, but he was convinced that there was an inherent…
pharyngula | January 4, 2010I tend to think that most religious people are not interested in flying planes into buildings or making themselves a belt out of dynamite, but that doesn't excuse them: they still make irrational decisions with evil consequences, they are simply a bit more remote and indirect. The same people who would be horrified at the idea of personally lynching someone for blasphemy have no problem with praying that someone else will do the job for them, as we all saw in the reaction to that little cracker incident last year. One of the most revolting examples of this principle at work is the recent…
pharyngula | January 2, 2010Oh, yeah, but they screwed up. Probably the best known of the inflammatory anti-Islam Danish cartoons was the work of Kurt Westergaard, who drew the prophet Mohammed with a bomb for a turban. It was a very misleading portrayal of a Muslim, which was demonstrated lately when a Somali fanatic tried to break into his home and kill him while yelling "revenge!" and "blood!" …with a knife and an axe, not a bomb!
I'm sure Westergaard will be publishing an apology and retraction now. Or maybe he'll just have to admit his error and redraw Mohammed with more personal nasty weapons of death and…
pharyngula | December 3, 2009It's another of those cases where people unfit to be parents abuse their children. Samuel McGehee is accused of murdering his youngest son, suffocating him to death because he wouldn't take a nap. That's horrible, but the next question I have to ask is why this guy was allowed in the same room with small children after what he did last year.
A detective testified that in March 2008, McGehee, concerned about the family's financial state, decided to circumcise his other son at home, using a filet knife.
"There was severe damage to the shaft of the penis," Detective Shawn Jenkins said. "There…
pharyngula | November 29, 2009Uganda's solution is rather shocking: throw any gay people into prison for life, and execute any who are HIV-positive.
Don't blame it on those 'primitive' Africans, though: I can think of a few loud Americans who would find that a reasonable way to address the problem.
I am deeply ashamed to discover that this bill isn't just hypothetically the kind of thing a few Americans would sponsor — it is literally a product of that wretched American 'brain' trust, The Family.
pharyngula | October 27, 2009As I mentioned yesterday, Christopher Hitchens is touring the country with a pastor, Doug Wilson, doing public debates. A reader wrote in to inform me of who Wilson is, and I was appalled. He has a ministry in Idaho which has ties to the white supremacy movement! Doug Wilson has an entry at the Southern Poverty Law Center that explains that he coauthored a book, Southern Slavery As It Was, with Steven Wilkins, a neo-Confederate, that was essentially a mangling of history and theology to assert that slavery in the South wasn't so bad after all. He runs a private school in Idaho that celebrates…
pharyngula | October 19, 2009I happen to be male. I found myself unable to read the following story without feeling an urge to double over and cup my crotch, which was really awkward when sitting in a public coffee shop. So stop here if you are prone to sympathetic pains.
A man in British Columbia decided that he and his four year old son needed to be circumcised.
Already, half my readership has decided to flee to less cringe-inducing websites. That's OK, just leave quietly, and close the door behind you.
All right, so he decides they both need to be circumcised. He tries it on himself first, and it's a botch — only…
pharyngula | October 18, 2009It's a modern-day version of a long-running evil: children in Africa are being murdered in the name of God.
The nine-year-old boy lay on a bloodstained hospital sheet crawling with ants, staring blindly at the wall.
His family pastor had accused him of being a witch, and his father then tried to force acid down his throat as an exorcism. It spilled as he struggled, burning away his face and eyes. The emaciated boy barely had strength left to whisper the name of the church that had denounced him — Mount Zion Lighthouse.
A month later, he died.
Inciting violence against "witches" is only…
pharyngula | September 30, 2009The story of Cameron Todd Willingham (via Digby) ought to be read by everyone. Willingham seems to have been a kind of Texan dumbass, an uneducated, wife-beating piece of work, but he was also the father of three children, who he, by all accounts, loved. Those kids died in a house fire. Forensic 'experts' declared the fire an arson, Willingham was arrested, tried, and convicted of murder, and was executed.
Only problem: he didn't do it. The fire experts were good ol' boys who were operating on folklore and fairy tales about how fires propagated; real experts have looked at the scene and since…
pharyngula | September 26, 2009Pedophiles are wretched people who abuse the helpless, and they get no sympathy from me. However, they are still people — sick people, damaged people, often abused people, sometimes psychopathic people. They have to be treated with due process and concern — we want to end the behavior, not the individual. So now Poland has passed a law requiring mandatory chemical castration for pedophiles. That's a frightening prospect, not just because it's a punishment that can and will be abused — who judged Alan Turing but the state? — and the attitudes behind it are even worse.
Prime Minister Donald…
pharyngula | September 14, 2009Fawziya Ammodi was 12 years old. She was a little girl in Yemen — she would still be in elementary school in the US, or would be just entering middle school. Twelve year old girls are still interested in dolls, and are maybe giggling over those gawky immature boys, and should be learning prior to the awkward business of growing up.
In Yemen, Fawziya was married to a 24 year old man.
She was pregnant.
She was in labor for 3 agonizing days — twelve year old girls usually aren't physically developed enough to cope with childbirth, at least not with the relative (emphasis on that word, please,…
pharyngula | August 28, 2009Phillip Garrido was a man of God with a joyful story to tell.
"If you take this a step at a time, you're going to fall over backward and in the end you're going to find the most powerful, heart-warming story," he said.
"I tell you here's the story of what took place at this house and you're going to be absolutely impressed.
Oh, right. Here's his heart-warming story: in 1991 he and his wife kidnapped an 11 year old girl; they imprisoned her in their backyard; he raped her repeatedly; and she eventually gave birth to two children, who are now 11 and 15, and who were also confined to that…