Yes, the Boston bombers were radical Muslims. Continue reading
Category Archives: Self-abuse
Australia: A ‘mature child of high intelligence’…
…prefers to die rather than get a blood transfusion. Continue reading
India: Mother Teresa a greedy, faking sadist
Apparently Christopher Hitchens was too kind… Continue reading
Australia: D-I-Y Sharia law — making it up as you go along
Four men have been found guilty of giving a Sydney electrician 40 lashes with a cable, which they said was a punishment under Islamic law for drinking alcohol and using drugs… Continue reading
Russia: Breakaway Islamic sect imprisons children
Age[d] 1 to 17, the children rarely saw the light of day and had never left the property, attended school or been seen by a doctor, officials said on Wednesday. Their parents — sect members who call themselves “muammin,” from the Arabic for “believers” — were charged with child abuse.
The sect’s 83-year-old founder, Faizrakhman Satarov, who declared himself a prophet in contradiction to the principles of Islam, was charged with negligence, said Irina Petrova, deputy prosecutor in the provincial capital of Kazan.
The children were discovered when police searched the sect grounds as part of an investigation into the recent killing of a top Tatarstan Muslim cleric, an attack local officials blame on radical Islamist groups that have mushroomed in the oil-rich, Volga River province of Tatarstan.
Satarov ordered his followers to live in cells they dug under a three-story brick house topped by a small minaret with a tin crescent moon. Only a few sect members were allowed to leave the premises to work as traders at a local market, Russian media reported.
Clearly the sect leaders understand the concept of ‘property’; they were just applying it to the wrong things.
Yemen: More than 20 killed
A suicide attack at a town in south Yemen recently recaptured by the army from Al-Qaeda forces killed 20 people Saturday and wounded another 20, the governor of the province said.
In a separate incident in the east of the country meanwhile, a suspected US drone strike killed five Al-Qaeda members late Saturday, a local official said.
“Twenty people have been killed and 20 others wounded,” governor Jamal al-Aqal said in a statement on the suicide attack posted on the defence ministry’s website.
Thailand: Buddha? Try substituting margarine…
…and it doubles as a tent in wet weather.
A health study of Buddhist monks in Thailand has found that nearly half of them are obese.
A study of 246 monks from the Dhammayuttika Nikaya and Mahayana movements in 11 Thai provinces revealed that nearly half of them are clinically obese and suffering from lifestyle diseases such as high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes.
Germany: Cutting bits off baby boys’ dicks is not ‘child abuse’, because….
“Many secularist campaigners are cock-a-hoop about the ruling”, says O’Neill.
…Brendan O’Neill says so.
There are many bad things about the modern atheistic assault on religion. But perhaps the worst thing is its rebranding of certain religious practices as “child abuse”. Everything from sending your kid to a Catholic school to having your baby boy circumcised has been redefined by anti-religious campaigners as “abuse”. This use of emotionally loaded language to demonise the practices and beliefs of people of faith has reached its ugly and logical conclusion in Germany, where a court has decreed that circumcision for religious purposes causes “bodily harm”, against boys who are “unable to give their consent”, and therefore should be outlawed.
This is an alarming attack on freedom of religion and on parents’ rights to initiate their children into their faith.
No, it’s an attack on anyone’s right to viciously mutilate a person who is unable to resist their physical assault. The reasons for assault are immaterial — literally.
Comments on the article are both hidden and closed — suggesting that perhaps they didn’t get the enthusiastic endorsements they were looking for.
Afghanistan: Islamic suicide bomber kills four French troops
A suicide bomber dressed in a burqa blew himself up near a French patrol in Afghanistan on Saturday, killing four soldiers and wounding five as the Taliban step up a spring offensive.
US: Are you SURE this is what Boy Scouts do, Miss?*
A Florida teacher has been accused of encouraging several of her students to cut and burn each other as part of a pagan ritual to rid their bodies of evil spirits.
Danielle Harkins, 35, allegedly took seven teenagers to a location near a pier in St Petersburg on Saturday and got the ceremony underway by lighting a fire….
St Petersburg Police Department spokesman Mike Puetz said the children chanted and danced around the fire before Harkins urged them to cut each other to release the evil spirits from their bodies.
“They would follow that up with some sort of cauterisation of the wound to keep the evil spirits from getting back into the body,” Mr Puetz said….
Police said interviews with the students involved have been difficult because the children were “quite loyal” and reluctant to disclose what happened…..
A woman who worked with Harkins said she was a good teacher who had recently started exploring religion.
via http://news.ninemsn.com.au
“And then we stuck her head in the fire to.. er .. “
“Cauterise?”
“Hell yes! — eyes, face, everything.”
*Update: [Apparently the answer is 'Yes']
US: Those whom the gods would destroy…
Look, his t-shirt said ‘Bite Me!’ How was I supposed to know it’s a pop culture reference?
…they first make mad. Or really, really dumb.
A West Virginia Pentecostal pastor who used poisonous snakes during religious services has died of a rattlesnake bite…
Wolford believed that the Bible requires Christians to handle poisonous snakes to test their faith in God, and remain steadfast in their belief that they will not be bitten or will be healed if they are attacked. Death by rattlesnake is “excruciating—the venom attacks the nervous system, and it’s vicious and gruesome when it hits,” a snake expert told the Post. Wolford was the son of a snake-handler preacher who died of a snake bite when Wolford was 15.
via Newser
Sounds like his stupidity was congenital. Praise the Lord, and pass the anti-venene.
UPDATE: The hagiography has begun. A daft reporter for the Washington Post has ‘learnt something’ from this foolish man’s self-initiated destruction — and no, it’s not ‘don’t fuck with rattlesnakes’.
Tibet: Or you could just pop a Serepax…
Monk finds the secret of inner peace — bludge off a relative for nineteen years.
After China invaded Tibet in 1959, a young monk went into solitary confinement. He remained in a tiny dark room in the capital Lhasa for 19 years.
Choden Rinpoche’s confinement was self-imposed and he spent the two decades secretly meditating and reciting sacred texts he had memorised…
At 83, Rinpoche is a respected scholar, teacher and meditation master, and among the last generation of Tibetan-born lamas who studied before the invasion that destroyed much of their culture. He is in Sydney to teach.
To teach what? Escapism?
When he emerged in 1985, his mind felt calm…
Well it would, wouldn’t it?
Afghanistan: Suicide bomber killed
A SUICIDE bombing attack has been foiled at the gates to the compound that is to host a landmark assembly of Afghanistan’s tribal elders this week.
The Loya Jirga – Pashto for grand assembly – begins tomorrow in Kabul.More than 2000 of Afghanistan’s most senior tribesmen will meet to decide on their country’s ties with the US.
Canada: Come on, people! Grovel!!
…New Catholic missal reveals ‘awesomeness’ of self-loathing toadyism.
When Catholics begin using the new Roman Missal on the first Sunday of Advent, they will find an “awesomeness” to the new translation that maybe wasn’t as present in the previous incarnation, said Ottawa Archbishop Terrence Prendergast.
The Roman Missal’s new translation will mark the shift from using current principles of “dynamic equivalence” to “formal equivalence” on the first Sunday of Advent. Its aim is an improvement of the liturgy, said the Ottawa archbishop.
“It’s a historic moment in the life of the Church and the English-speaking world,” said Prendergast.
Here’s a quote from this ‘awesome’ document:
“We praise you, we bless you, we adore you, we glorify you, we give thanks for your great glory, Lord God, heavenly king, O God, almighty Father, Lord Jesus Christ, Only Begotten Son, Lord God, Lamb of God, Son of the Father, you take away the sins of the world, have mercy on us, you take away the sins of the world, receive our prayer; you are seated at the right hand of the Father, have mercy on us.”
This is really sick. Can any sane person honestly believe that a loving God wants his believers to fawn and grovel in this nauseating way? And if he does, does he deserve to be worshipped? This is people getting their rocks off on raw power. And it’s ugly.
Australia: Jehovah’s Witness dies for her faith
A JEHOVAH’S Witness who died of complications after surgery would probably have survived if she had accepted a blood transfusion, a Tasmanian coroner has found.
Glenorchy woman Judith Louise Allen, 49, died of internal bleeding in July 2009 after surgery to adjust a lap band at the Royal Hobart Hospital, Coroner Rod Chandler said in findings released today.
Ms Allen and her husband Simon were practising Jehovah’s Witnesses and therefore forbidden from accepting blood transfusions.
But…
The coroner said the couple’s compliance with their religion had a “tragic consequence”.
“No criticism should be made of Mr and Mrs Allen for their choice of religious faith,” he said.
Why not? People who choose to speed, take drugs or drink and drive get criticised when they die; why should other stupid behaviours be immune?
Australia: Tamil detainee suicides when refused permission to attend religious festival
Immigration Minister Chris Bowen has denied that a Sri Lankan man who died in an apparent suicide attempt at Sydney’s Villawood Detention Centre overnight had been cleared of being a security threat.
Mr Bowen said the man was still being investigated by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation pending his release from detention and his “ongoing links with various organisations was being assessed”.
Mr Bowen said the Immigration Department had not yet been able to contact the man’s next of kin, a brother in Sri Lanka…
He confirmed the Tamil man, who was in his mid-20s, had asked to leave the centre for a religious festival, and that his request had been denied.
UK: Three HIV victims die after taking church advice
At least three people in London with HIV have died after they stopped taking life saving drugs on the advice of their Evangelical Christian pastors.
The women died after attending churches in London where they were encouraged to stop taking the antiretroviral drugs in the belief that God would heal them, their friends and a leading HIV doctor said.
Where was God when they got sick, then?
Italy: Churchgoer rips out eyeballs
An Italian man reportedly ripped out his own eyeballs during Sunday Mass at a church in Viareggio, near Pisa, northern Italy, according to British news reports.
Aldo Bianchini, 46, a Briton who had lived most of his life in Italy, according to the Daily Mail, reportedly stood up during the Mass at St Andrea’s and used his bare hands to tear out his eyeballs. He then collapsed on the floor in a pool of his own blood…
NBC reminded readers that in the Bible’s Gospel of St Matthew, Jesus says: “If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell.”
What do the Gospels say about seeking proper psychiatric care when you get ill, rather than trusting what you’re told by old men in frocks?
Not enough, obviously.
Global: Eco-apocalypse approaches but we MUSTN’T INTERFERE!
But it is the fourth rule that is the most striking: ‘No Silver Bullets’, where Smith refuses to allow the possibility of any industrial or technological revolution to interfere with his predictions. In his flights of fancy, he tells us, there will be ‘no cold nuclear fission or diesel-growing fungus… no God-like genetic engineering to grow wheat without water.’ He says: ‘This is not to say a radical technological breakthrough can’t or won’t happen, only that the possibility will not be entertained here.’
This ‘Rule’ effectively means that the one active agent of history, the one force capable of consciously shaping the future according to his needs and desires – mankind – is disarmed and decommissioned, voted off the island, in Smith’s readings of the future. In common with other crystal ball-gazers disguised as heavyweight thinkers, Smith refuses to entertain the idea that, through exploration and ingenuity and labour, mankind might radically alter the world in which he lives and find a way to get more out of Mother Nature than she is willing to give us.
via sp!ked review of books | Why the Third World poor must continue living in shit. — Brendan O’Neill.
US: Megachurch pastor found dead, with drugs, in NY hotel
Zachery Tims, Jr., the pastor of an 8,000-member megachurch in Orlando, Fla., was found lying dead in a room in the Times Square W Hotel on Monday morning. An envelope containing “a white powdery substance” was found in his pocket; and while the substance hasn’t been identified, police believe that it’s drugs, and not, say, confectioner’s sugar. The cause of death hasn’t been identified either.
Because to die in a hotel room from an overdose of powdered sugar would be just — you know — sick.
Australia: Muslim convert whipped for drinking
A man who was allegedly held against his bed by four bearded attackers while he was whipped with a cord in Sydney’s west has said he was the victim of sharia law.
The 31-year-old man said he was a recent convert to Wahhabism and had been punished by members of his congregation for drinking.
Another man and a youth have been arrested.
They say Australia was founded on rum, sodomy and the lash. Well, two out of three’s not bad.
Afghanistan: Now suicide bombers cost an arm and a leg
SMH.
MILITANT groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan are trading the lives of would-be suicide bombers for up to $US90,000 ($83,800), three times what they were paying just two years ago.
…
Mr Hassan said he had been sold by the Pakistani Taliban for the mission, a statement from Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security said.It continued: ”The detained man added that a commander under Hakimullah Mehsud sells suicide bombers at six to eight million Pakistani rupees [$65,000 to $87,000], to the Haqqani network for suicide missions.”
I was wrong: clearly we have taught them about the importance of a free market economy.
India: man stops washing on priest’s advice
Mr Singh, 65, has not bathed or cut his 6ft-long dreadlocks since 1974, shortly after he married.
Explaining his unconventional decision, Mr Singh claimed a priest guaranteed him a much-prized son and heir if he followed the advice.
So obviously it worked, right?
Despite neighbours joking the sweaty farmer would be lucky [to] persuade his wife to have any children at all, his religious guidance clearly failed – he has seven daughters.
Your answer for ten: It’s obviously stupid and fails at what it’s supposed to achieve, but you go on doing it because somebody told you to a long time ago.
Hmmm… I’m going to guess ‘What is Religion?’, Tony. Although ‘politics’ is good, too.
Kenya: Man suicides in church on ‘doomsday’
The victim reportedly made his way into a store at the Holy Family Basilica in Nairobi, hours before American evangelist Harold Camping had predicted the world would end at 6 p.m. Witnesses say the man entered the prayer sanctuary during the early morning mass.
In a statement to police, catechist Michael Waweru, who found the body hanging from metal bars above the store’s entrance, said he opened a side security door at the back of the church at around 7,15 a.m. At that time, the body was not there.
Not so funny now, is it?
US: Atheists have better sex, too
From Greta Christina:
In January 2011, organizational psychologist Darrel Ray, Ed.D. (psychologist for 30 years and author of The God Virus as well as two books on psychology) and Amanda Brown (undergraduate at Kansas University, focused on sexuality and sex therapy) conducted a sex survey of over 14,500 people — atheists, agnostics, and other people in the secular community. The survey was looking at religion, atheism, and sex: how religion affects sex, how leaving religion affects sex, whether lifelong atheists feel differently about sex than people who have recently deconverted, and so on. The report — “Sex and Secularism: What Happens When You Leave Religion?” — is on the Internet, and if you want all 46 pages of the naughty details, including the charts and graphs and personal stories, you can download it free (you just need to register on the site).
But if you just want to know the gist?
Leaving religion improves people’s sex lives.
A lot.
Teenage boys, please form an orderly queue. We’re processing your papers as fast as we can.
Afghanistan: If faith falls short, just threaten to mutilate
SMH.
The Taliban are recruiting a growing number of children as suicide bombers as NATO steps up its war against the insurgents. In some of the country’s most restive provinces, the Taliban are resorting to threats, inducement and deceit in order to send children to their deaths against US and Afghan targets.
A 14-year-old boy has explained how he came close to blowing himself up at a US military base two weeks ago. The Taliban gave Noor Mohammad a simple choice – either they would cut off his hand for stealing or he could redeem himself and bring glory on his family by becoming a suicide bomber.
And remember — you can’t spell ‘Imam’ without ‘maim’.
Australia: Bible-thumping MP blames everyone else for his conviction
Jailed former minister Gordon Nuttall has told ex-Labor colleagues they deserted him in his time of need during a historic address to the Queensland Parliament.
Nuttall, serving 12 years in prison on corruption and perjury convictions, was brought before the bar of the Parliament at midday to explain why he should not be fined for failing to disclose secret payments from businessmen.
“Today all of us have the opportunity cease and forgive,” he said, noting the biblical virtue of loving one’s enemies….
With a sombre mood in the air, Nuttall ended his speech by urging MPs to read Matthew 7:1-2.
Having conveniently forgotten about Mark 12:17.
US: Newville pastor wasn’t Steven Seagal after all
Note: The Rev. Jim Moats on Sunday came forward and said he was not a former member of the Navy SEALs. PennLive and The Patriot-News will have more on this story later.
Here is the original story he told; there’s no indication anyone else in the story was untruthful:
When he learned of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, the Rev. Jim Moats almost got out his old Navy SEAL flag to run up the pole in front of his home in Newville.
Moats was a Navy SEAL four decades ago during the war in Vietnam.
When you do fantasy for a living it’s hard to keep the real facts straight.
Brazil: Religious nut kills 12 children and self at school
From PZ Myers’ blog, a translation of the suicide note:
First of all you should know that the impure can’t touch me without gloves, only the chaste or the the ones that lost their chastity after their marriages and haven’t been adulterous may touch me with no gloves, i.e., no fornicator or adulterer may have direct contact with me, nor anything impure touch my blood, no impure may have direct contact with a virgin without permission, those that take care of my burial should take off all my clothes, bathe me, dry me and wrap me while totally naked in a white cloth which is in this building, in a bag I left in the first room of the first floor, after wrapping me in this cloth you may put me in my coffin. If possible, I’d like to be buried next to the grave where my mother sleeps, my mother is called Dicéa Menezes de Oliveira and is buried in the Murundu cemetery. I need the visit of a faithful follower of God in my tomb at least once, I need him to pray in front of it asking for God’s forgiveness for what I did asking that when Jesus comes he will wake me up from the sleep of death to life.
Clearly he was crazy: but if he had recognised his own craziness and not mistaken it for religious enthusiasm, perhaps he might have been cured.
Now twelve children are dead.
Pakistan: Islamic bomb kills ‘at least 14′ troops
SMH.
A suicide attack targeting a military parade on Thursday killed at least 14 soldiers in Pakistan’s northwestern city of Mardan.
Straight from the SMH — except the word ‘Islamic’. The Herald apparently regards it as politically incorrect to point out that this particular kind of lunacy is religiously-inspired.
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