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Hi everybody!
In Kurdistan of Iraq, "Aram Rashid" –a Kurdish writer, has written a book under the title of "Ignorance of Islam in the contemporary world" in Kurdish language. His books are recollected, he is summoned to the court and the Mullahs have sentenced him to death –Islamic fatwa. So we have written a manifest to defend him. Please help us to set an campaign for defending freedom of press and freedom of speech in Kurdistan of Iraq and also to defend Aram Rashid's rights. There is the text of the manifest, please kindly modify any wrong in my English and help us to publish it in any website that it can be more helpful. It is very urgent.

Manifest for defending freedom of speech and freedom of press, and defending Aram Rashid, Kurdish intellectual and writer

We as writers, intellectuals, writers, free thinkers and democracy and liberalism lovers in defense of Aram Rashid the author of "The ignorance of Islam and the contemporary world" that has been written in Kurdish language, announce our views as below:
1- We think that protecting the rights of free speech and free press cannot and should not be dismissed and we condemn any action for repression the freedom of speech and freedom of press.
2- This announcement is not only for defending any specific idea or any specific person. It is not only in defense of Aram Rashid but is it also in defense of Freedom of speech and freedom of press generally.
3- Aram Rashid in his book either has presented a true argumentation or a false one. If it is true then recollecting his book from the bookstores, summoning him to the court and issuing Fatwa and sentencing him to death by the Islamic mullahs is a false action. If his argumentations are false then they should be answered by argumentations and not the mentioned actions. On the other side the people are wise enough to discern that what are the wrong and right. They do not need to 470 people to think instead of them. So;
4- We ask all intellectuals, writers, Human Rights Activists, Democracy and Liberalism lovers in a unified action prevent the mentioned actions against Aram Rashid and any other thinker and writer. If today we permit this action against him which one of us will be condemned to the same sentence tomorrow?
5- And finally, that a little part of a society permit itself to think for the whole people of the society is a contumely to the individuals' sense and reason. We ask all intellectuals, writers, Human Rights Activists, Democracy and Liberalism lovers in a unified action end this kind of contumely to the individuals' sense and reason and do not permit that these actions to be a formal action here in Kurdistan.

Our main responsibility here on earth is to continue our interaction with the universe, keep it safe, take care of our environment, observe and have a contribution for a continues growth and development of our universe by means of Science.

This is the Meaning of Life for Me...

In the social affairs if somebody gets angry about an opposition to her/his ideas we call her him as intolerant. That is right somehow. People should tolerate opposing ideas. As we said there are limitations in tolerance. Mainly when there is no essential difference between ordinary material life that is dependent on food and the like, and the intellectual life that depends on ideas. There are some ideas for people which they think it is about their life. It is important for them as important as food. It is about their feeling of being. If you say to a Muslim that Prophet Muhammad has done mistakes or he was not a prophet at all he will think that you are invading his life. It is very natural that he will invade you. As we will see later it does not mean that we should not criticize his ideas, but it means completely different. On the other side, there are some irrational ideas that tolerating them is not only impossible but also very dangerous. As we see in the appendix of new version of Science and Creationism: A View from the National Academy of Sciences some people deny that "microorganisms cause disease". This idea, I think is a foolish one and every person that believes in it is nothing but a stupid and foolish. Here is not the sphere of tolerance. I myself do not tolerate these kinds of foolish ideas. I do not kill these individuals, but in the meanwhile if tolerating the others' ideas mean that I should say them "yes, I respect your ideas", then I am not tolerant to them. In contrast I say them: "See my friend this idea is foolish, and you are a fool and stupid guy". Why? It is very obvious. Let us set a competition.
Divide the people into two groups. One which is composed of the people who when they are infected by diseases they go to the medicines, because they know that microorganisms cause disease; in the other side are the people who believe that diseases are not caused by microorganisms. Then they will not go to visit doctors and they will die. Then the world will be full of the people who are materialists; Darwin's Natural Selection. These people are right? Yes let's go to this competition. They are using the facilities of a free society and they feel free to say anything that they want. We are tolerating them, but it does not mean that we let them to go in the classrooms and teach their foolish ideas to our children. The court of "Dover Area School District" in Pennsylvania, 2005, showed us that tolerating others' ideas does not mean that we let them to do anything that they want. Then what tolerating others' ideas means?
At first it means that everybody has rights to be fool and stupid and she/he has rights to have foolish ideas. Nobody, not only has not rights to kill people whom have foolish and stupid ideas, but has not rights to enforce them to change their ideas to a better one. To be tolerant means that people have rights to be fool and stupid and superstitious. I have shown before that so many times in the history we have seen that the ideas which at first seemed to be foolish at last were the best and the most intellectual ones. This, however, does not mean that every foolish and stupid idea deserve to be respected. I have said about the relativity of the ideas and I have shown that relativity of ideas and their wrong and rightness does not mean that all the ideas are equally worthy to be called as "equal". And I have shown that there are no essences of anything. Then the stupid ides are not stupid by nature; they are not essentially stupid and foolish. The rationality and irrationality of ideas depends on the structure of the society. This is the society which defines the criterions of rationality. And I have shown that this does not mean that every kind of idea is rational because it was supposed to be rational in some times in the ancient eras. I have said that rationality of the ideas means that every system of ideas have some specifications which to understand it we should know, at least, the most parts of the system. The relativity, also, does not mean that there are no criterions to compare them; it does not entail to incommensurability. So, it means that we can and we should discuss each other. These are us who defines the borders of rationality and irrationality. These are who discover the diseases and the methods of their treatment. These are us who interpret the photographs that our telescopes have taken from the faraway spaces. These are us who set laws. Then tolerance means that we are open to discuss and also we let people to be stupid, but it does not mean that we let everybody do anything. One can say that actions are controlled by our beliefs, then if we do not let people to do anything we are implicitly saying that acting based on some ideas is forbidden. Yes! That is right. You have rights to have any idea, but you have not rights to act on the bases of any idea that you want. Why?

• [groups|Los Angeles Brights]

Hi everyone. I hope this study will be of interest. Sorry for taking up so much room on the bulletin board!
Thanks,
Ben

• [groups|Young Brights of Central New York]

Despite national polling, our state is actually, geographically red-shifted on the political spectrum. New York City, as you well know, throws the entire thing out of whack because of it's higher population comparitive to the rest of us. Leaving geopolitical drudgery out of the way, I'd like to cordially invite you, freethinking reader, to join us.

Our aim is simple: to provide a support network for young Freethinkers in the Central New York area, where Christian Evangelicals are surging.

If the midwest is the Bible belt, I posit that New York is the slowly forming necktie.

Humor aside, the important thing is that we, a collective of college students with like-minded support of the Brights and their admirable movement, are here to support you.

Thank you for your attention to this ramble.

We normally use to avoid suffering and painful experiences, and we consider as normal not being masochist, or at least the majority of us feels in this way. We reasonably tend to create a society, a world without physical and psychic suffering, or at least the majority of us feels in this way.
But let’s suppose for a moment the hypothesis of a world without the suffering experience, as we would live in a sort of Eden. Maybe we would live happily in this hypothetic world without worries, just living, maybe in a simple manner, maybe always in the same way, forever.
So considering this I thought about a hypothetic function of suffering, about an explanation of its existence.
Suffering makes us asking why we are here and what we are living for, it’s a sort of goad, stimulating painful force who pushes us to try to comprehend All, this is how I explain its existence.
I’m not saying we are obliged to experience intense or moderate suffering, to be masochist or searching compulsorily to suffer for trying to comprehend All.
There’s an oriental saying that Truth doesn’t deserve to be discovered if we hadn’t chances of laughing at It while we were making the try.
I’m only trying to give an intelligible explanation of this experience.
It’s what pushes us to solve the Game.

Isn’t happiness only a momentary disposition, state of our mood that we experience when we do something felt as positive and disappears when we experience something bad, painful, etc.?
Isn’t happiness only relative, dependent from the actual judgement about our current situation?
Does absolute happiness exist? No, I think it’s always relative to our current wishes, we never reach absolute happiness or satisfaction and we start to wish something greater if we get something we was craving for.
So have we to aim continuously at reaching an higher stage of happiness or is this race vain and probably without an ultimate finish?
Is it fruitful a vocation toward only a continue research of a hedonist self-realization which oblige us to search always for something more satisfying?
I’m not patronising privation, masochism or priesthood, we have selfish needs too, but as Schopenhauer said, we tend to remember more vividly painful experiences than the positive ones.
I think the only thing we have never to be tired of is a greater knowledge of All.
In my opinion this constitutes the best alternative to the continue attempts of being always “happy”.
The major game we have to play is getting the Explanation of All, maybe if another entity or being exists, the Game was created with this Mission.

I'm erik from quezon city. i signed in at the Brights Net website two days back and later found a link to this site. Great! i used to send messages to a yahoo e-group called "Philippine Atheists" or "Atheistang Pinoy." I hope the people there have also joined the Brights, as our common broader umbrella. i'm interested in helping set up or in joining a Brights Local Constituency in Quezon City.

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i forgot my password and so i created a new account erikv. then i remembered my password for this account.

• [syndicated|from secularoutpost.blogspot.com]

According to a paper in PLoS Biology by Michael B. Berkman, Julianna Sandell Pacheco, and Eric Plutzer, 16% of US secondary school biology teachers are creationists.

Well, 16% is a high number. Or maybe it's low, given that more like 48% are creationists among the general public.

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I apologize to everyone on behalf of physicists.

The infamous Shroud of Turin, believed to be the burial cloth of Jesus with a miraculously imprinted image of Jesus on it by some conservative Protestants and Catholics, is yet more evidence that supernatural convictions are impervious to criticism. It's a bizarre claim at face value, and there's good evidence the shroud is a medieval forgery. Joe Nickell, in particular, has extensively debunked Shroud claims, along with other skeptical investigators. It should be as clear as it can be that the Shroud is no miracle. It's not even interesting to talk about any more. And yet, the Shroud never goes away.

It's not just the popular apologists who blissfully ignore the skeptical criticism who perpetuate Shroud belief. It's also a bunch of scientists who act like True Believers, continually coming up with far fetched scenarios about how the carbon dating to medieval times might be a result of contamination etc. etc.

And I'm sad to say that the last two times the Shroud has come to my attention again has been due to physicists making fools of themselves.

The first was Frank Tipler, who endorses the Shroud and comes up with ludicrous modern physics scenarios to validate it in his embarrassment of a book, The Physics of Christianity. Tipler has long been known to have drifted off the deep end, what with his Intelligent Design sympathies and all that. But this book turns the craziness up another notch.

The second is John Jackson, a long-time Shroud "researcher" who is a physics Ph.D. and lectures on physics at the University of Colorado. Yesterday the Chicago Tribune ran a wide-eyed article on Jackson's latest scheme to validate the Shroud. Oh bloody hell, not again...

So, I apologize again on behalf of physicists. We have our fair share of lunacy.

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I ran into a former student who once took my Weird Science course. She's pretty religious and a creationist, and she told me that she recently watched a movie featuring Lee Strobel that she liked. It made her think of my course.

I've read a couple of Strobel books, and I regularly lend out his The Case for a Creator to students who want to learn more about creationism and intelligent design firsthand. It's basic conservative Christian apologetics. In other words, intellectually dishonest propaganda. Strobel makes a point of repeating how he once used to be an atheist but then saw the light, and his trick of the trade is to go visiting conservative Christian scholars, interviewing them and popularizing their views in such a way as to give the impression that conservative Christianity is an intellectually formidable edifice. All the best science, all the best historical scholarship turns out to prove fundamentalist Christianity correct. Strobel creates this impression by being extremely selective in the views he represents, giving little indication of the fringe nature of most of his interviewees positions as far as mainstream academia is concerned. He certainly does not detail why in most of the intellectual world, such fundamentalism is not taken seriously.

And yet, Lee Strobel is apparently a big shot in popular Christian apologetics. I read this as an indication of the insularity of conservative Christian culture. Most believers who read Strobel and similar literature are apparently satisfied with such highly selective presentations. I expect most don't know or perhaps even care about the misrepresentation of intellectual life in such apologetics. It's enough that someone out there is doing battle for the Lord, I suppose.

Now, most people, I imagine, tend to read and watch things that they tend to agree with. Most people who read my books must be nonbelievers. But I have to say, I don't think nonbelievers are anywhere near as insular as conservative Christians in this regard. If Richard Dawkins, for example, is an icon of nonbelief today, he may get a lot of criticism but it would be hard to make a charge of gross misrepresentation of the current intellectual landscape stick against him. And I don't think people who own a copy of The God Delusion are quite as insular as the audience for Lee Strobel and company.

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I recently posted a rant concerning honor killings, using an Iraqi Muslim example. Well, I just ran into a Hindu example that is just as horrifying to modern liberal moral sensibilities.

Again, note the connection to religion. There should be no surprise here: traditional communities depend on their religion for their sense of moral order. Any moral order is kept in place by a degree of coercion, and one important function for old-fashioned religion is to tell when coercion, including violence, is legitimate. And again, note how many in the community concerned celebrate the act of violence as honorable, as a cleansing, as a way to restore the proper moral order.

Is religion then a bad thing? Maybe. I don't see that we can say a lot based on such examples, other than that since just about everything in traditional communities is entangled with their religions, their religions must be involved in whatever we praise or condemn about them. If we dislike violent control of sexuality, yes, we can assign some blame to traditional religions. If we like the warmth of tight-knit communities as opposed to modern individualism and anomie, yes, we can praise the religions that condition people to go beyond their selfish inclinations and commit to a higher purpose.

And then there is the complication that traditional religion is not all of religion. There are plenty of modern, individualistic variants and interpretations of supernaturalistic belief systems. They tend to go along with the modern, liberal moral consensus.

So if we're looking for a secularist case against religion in general, it's not easy to get this on the basis of sweeping statements about what kind of social order religions support. Maybe we can try to argue that there is something about supernatural belief—the attitude of "faith" is a good candidate—that tends to make it dangerous or dysfunctional too often in modern conditions. Maybe liberal religions are quasi-secular to begin with; their positive (from our point of view) characteristics come about despite their endorsement of transcendent realities. There are respectable arguments in favor of such a view. I don't, however, think that the case has quite been made yet.

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Steven Pinker has a very good essay on The New Republic online, "The Stupidity of Dignity." It examines the uselessness of the concept of dignity in bioethics, particularly the Catholic-inflected "theocon" version of bioethics that has become very influential in the US government.

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Here is a gut-wrenching story from The Guardian about a young Iraqi woman brutally killed by her father and brothers because of an infatuation with a British soldier. The police did not detain the father, and even supported him. By and large, the local community considers such honor killings right and proper. Honor killings, indeed, are quite common throughout the Middle East, and are carried out in Muslim immigrant communities in Western countries as well.

Now, as far as I'm concerned, honor killings are among the more appalling, disgusting acts sanctioned by religion. And make no mistake, religion is deeply involved. It is not true that "True Islam" never allows such brutality. There is no such thing as True Islam. The varieties of popular Islam that permeate the everyday lives of very large numbers of Muslims either directly sanction honor killings, or sanctify a relentlessly male-dominated sexual morality that supports an environment in which honor killings are perceived as just.

But I also think that secularists and nonbelievers nevertheless have to be cautious. I am not so sure we can using examples such as honor killings to condemn supernatural beliefs. Look at the very end of the story, and notice that the mother of the murdered woman, who has left her monstrous husband, says "God will make her father pay, either in this world ... or in the world after." In other words, even in the eyes of the people most harmed by the custom of honor killings, God and religion is not something that is called into question. If someone's moral perceptions go against honor killings, they will rarely doubt Islam. Instead, they will be inclined to think that God's commands, properly understood, must go against this sort of murder. True Islam, they will come to think, condemns honor killings.

Indeed, people who want to fight honor killings generally find it most advisable to say that Islam opposes such acts. The same goes with female genital mutilation. Many who fight against this practice also emphasize interpretations of Islam that reject mutilation. It is best to enlist what is considered sacred in your cause, not to fight against it.

From this perspective, secularist moral outrage against religious atrocities is itself questionable. After all, if our main goal is to prevent atrocities, we should try to work with people's deeply held religious sensibilities rather than giving offense and making the task of changing behavior more difficult. When we hold up honor killings and genital mutilation as particularly disgusting examples of the harm religions cause, we are exploiting tragedy for antireligious propaganda. Worse, we use suffering as a kind of secularist pornography, only to reinforce our righteousness and moral superiority.

I think there is something to such charges. If we want to make a case that most of us would be better off without supernatural religion, we cannot just make lists of religious outrages. It is not even enough to point out that the outrages are directly and organically linked to particular religious views. (Remember, I think this linkage holds true with honor killings.) We need something more comprehensive, and I'm honestly not sure this is available. If we really are concerned about honor killings, maybe we should shut up about the evils perpetrated by religion and just support gentler interpretations of belief. We may even have to knowingly promote a false belief, that there is such a thing as True Islam and that it endorses our moral convictions.

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Here's another book I want to recommend: Philosophers Without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life, edited by Louise M. Antony (Oxford University Press, 2007).

Half the book is taken up by informal descriptions by philosophers of why they don't believe. Many are very interesting, and the more informal reflections are, I think, a good way of bringing out a distinctly philosophical sensibility leading to nonbelief. Plus, mercifully, no one goes on about ****ological arguments or other traditional themes of the philosophy of religion. One thing I noticed, though, is that moral considerations have a large role in what the philosophers in this book think about God and religion. Usually this is something I don't care too much about, but then that's possibly another difference in sensibility.

Especially in the second part of the book, there are a number of contributions that try to do something a bit different compared to more familiar narratives of nonbelief. I want to comment on three that I found especially interesting.

Kenneth A. Taylor's chapter, "Without the Net of Providence: Atheism and the Human Adventure," is something I want to celebrate because it's rare for me to encounter a philosophical essay so in tune with my own sensibilities. In particular, I like the way that Taylor distinguishes between whether something is true and whether it is rational to believe something.

Suppose we ask not what we rationally ought to believe, but how, all things considered, we should rationally prefer to live. The answer cannot be that we should always rationally prefer to lead a life guided by beliefs that are rationally grounded in the evidence or even that we should always prefer that our beliefs be true rather than false. Some beliefs, even if they are both true and rationally grounded in the evidence, may serve only to undermine our deepest, most identity-constituting projects and thus to undermine our very being in the world. Whatever else beliefs are, they are instruments for guiding and supporting our practical projects. If holding a belief would be instrumental to the success of a practical project, then that by itself may give us sufficient reason, in particular sufficient practical reason, for adopting that belief, even if that belief is false or unwarranted by the evidence. [page 151]

Hear, hear! I think this is very important to keep in mind when discussing religion, and not just the different question of whether there is something to supernatural notions or not.

David Owens has a very interesting paper, "Disenchantment," about some moral dangers inherent in secularism and modern science and technology. What happens, he asks, if we attain the capability to easily manipulate not just the world around us but our own minds and personalities: if we have to decide what kind of person we want to be? If we end with a large range of low-cost choices about what kinds of choices we would prefer to prefer, the result is a kind of vertigo. What, Owens asks, if we face this kind of situation without the moral fixed points provided by religion?

I was also intrigued by Georges Rey's paper "Meta-atheism: Religious Avowal as Self-Deception." Many of us skeptics have had occasion to wonder if some of the religious people we encounter really believe in what they insist they do. We get further suspicious when some of their behavior seems to fit badly with their beliefs: why, for example, all the devastation and mourning if a loved one really has gone on to a wonderful afterlife? Rey develops such questions and intuitions into a very interesting philosophical argument. I think it would have been more compelling if it drew on more scientific research on religion. A good number of people working in this area would agree with Rey that there is something odd about religious thinking and that there's more than what meets the eye in avowals of belief. But they'd also temper that observation with a knowledge of the ways that supernatural concepts really are compelling for most normal human brains.

Anyway, it's a good book; take a look.

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A Turkish barber working in Saudi Arabia has been condemned to execution, based on testimony that he had sworn at God during a personal quarrel. (Think of it as a Muslim equivalent of denouncing the Holy Spirit: completely unforgivable.)

You can read about it in the Arab News or Turkish Daily News.

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For a while now, I've been an Honorary Fellow of The Jefferson Center in Ashland, Oregon. When I was first invited to speak there, I thought of it as an ultraliberal religious organization, and soon discovered that quite a few people associated with it were at least ambivalent about supernatural beliefs.

I got to know some of the very nice people involved with the Jefferson Center, particularly Robert Semes, its energetic Executive Director. He has a very interesting background, having spent much of his life as a priest. Recently, he publicly came out as a secular humanist. He will be coming out with a book soon, which should be fascinating.

Anyway, especially if you're in Oregon or the northern end of California, do check out the Jefferson Center. They have some interesting programs, and you can always combine it with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland.

Our civilization is based on these dualisms, but this reality cannot say us anything per se. The cancer or Aids or Schizophrenia are very famous illnesses that they are in our civilization, too. So what? Should we save them just because they exist? Should we save them just because they are being produced by some biological processes? If we go to a Medicine and he says us that we are attacked by cancer and she/he says us that it is very natural because of some certain biological process what will we think?
Our civilization is not based on these dualisms but it is based on finding some ways to solve them
Generally we can see three methods to solve these dualisms as bellow:
1- Chinese Methodology. Maybe we can call that Far-East solution. It can bee understood by the method that a Chinese instructor teaches his pupil to use arch and arrow. You will hear these sentences from your Chinese master: “There is no target, forget about arch and arrow. That is you who should go to the target. The arch, arrow, and also target are just your illusions. Forget about these illusions. …” you see! He tries to dissolve your consciousness in this process. He tries to dissolve you in the “other”. That is nothing like “You” and “other”. We can see the Far-Eastern approach to the process of modernization. See China, India, Philippine, Indonesia, and Japan. All of them have accepted the western culture and modernization. One may say but they are now resisting against western culture. As I will show in this article the idea that they are resisting against western culture is partly wrong and partly it is produced by western culture not by Far-Easterners.
2- Western Methodology. Do you want to learn archery? You will have a theoretical class at first. Your master will say you about the structure of the arch, the arrow, how should you take them in your hand, how should you control your body and especially your breath. Yes. This methodology is based on structuralism. The western culture is based on this structuralism to solve the problem of dualism. The approach that I am highly agreed with and I will show that it is the only real solution.
3- The Middle Eastern methodology. If you want to learn archery in the Middle East you will hear that your master will shout on you while he is full of hate “Destroy the target! Annihilate it!” and then you should forget about arch and arrow and you should pick up an axe and annihilate the target. Nothing should remain, otherwise you will be perished. Eliminating the “Others” is the only way that Middle Eastern culture has discovered.
“Identity” of personals is being shaped in the way of their endeavors to overcome this duality. The identity of cultures also is being shaped in the same way, but a little bit more complicated in practice.

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When you write skeptically on religion, you get some interesting reactions. My favorite so far is is a Muslim comment on An Illusion of Harmony:

. . . that book by the enemy of Allah, and the mini-dajjal of our era Taner Edis.

(I ran across it on an online forum discussing a nasty review of Illusion by some sheikh.)

This is sort of like calling someone an enemy of God, a mini-Antichrist, in a Christian context. I kind of like it, actually. It's over-the-top and weird enough to be amusing.