Via New Humanist:
Following on from yesterday’s story about the Cardiff councillor facing disciplinary action for referring to Scientology as “stupid” on Twitter, here’s the man himself, John Dixon, appearing on Newsnight last night (video via Index on Censorship). Good to see this worrying case getting some wider publicity beyond all the web action it has generated.
Continues: http://blog.newhumanist.org.uk/2010/07/councillor-in-trouble-for-calling.html
The government has released its eagerly anticipated response to the Science and Technology Committee’s Evidence Check on Homeopathy and, incredibly, it’s even worse than I thought it would be. The verdict is “business as usual”, with the main recommendations of the committee ignored in a fog of confusion and double-think.
You get a sense of this confusion very early on, with lines like: “given the geographical, socioeconomic and cultural diversity in England, [policy on homeopathy] involves a whole range of considerations including, but not limited to, efficacy.” I actually have no idea what this means – do medicines work differently in Norfolk from the way they work in Hampshire? The report doesn’t elaborate.
Continues: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/jul/27/choice-fetish-homeopathy-policy
Dispatches goes undercover in some African churches in the UK, where evangelical pastors perpetuate a strong belief in witchcraft. They preach that some people are possessed by evil spirits, and that these spirits bring bad luck into the lives of others.
The only way to rid the possessed from the witchcraft spell and lift their curse is to ‘deliver’ them: a kind of exorcism that can be very traumatic. Some pastors charge significant sums of money to perform these deliverances.
Read more and watch online: http://www.channel4.com/programmes/dispatches/episode-guide/series-67/episode-1
Last night’s Dispatches programme on Channel 4 highlighted the harm caused to children in the UK, almost all of whom come from an African background, by church pastors who are apparently labelling them as witches or as in some way “possessed”. The Churches’ Child ProtectionAdvisory Service (CCPAS) condemns such behaviour wherever it exists and over the past few years has worked with statutory and other agencies to expose and deal with such abusive practices.
Where Dispatches has uncovered evidence of such abusive behaviour, we hope and expect that it would be passed on to the police immediately. This is so that it may be thoroughly investigated and proper protection be given to the children involved.
But viewers of the programme need to understand that, shocking as these instances undoubtedly are, huge progress have been made over the past few years in developing and implementing effective child protection policies in African churches in the UK.
Continues: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/jul/27/religion-witches-africa-london-exorcism
Ed Balls points out that ‘faith’ schools have been part of the system for a very long time. Polly Toynbee, journalist and President of the British Humanist Association, responds: “It doesn’t make it good and it doesn’t make it fair.”
See the video from about 10 minutes in: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/video/2010/jul/26/labour-leadership-ed-balls
BHA Chief Executive Andrew Copson and Humanist Philosophers member Simon Blackburn debate Richard Harries on Encounter for ABC Radio National (Australia). The question posed by Wendy Barnaby is whether the West has lost its idea of civic virtue. It’s an interesting debate which gets to the heart of much of the tension between conservative and progressive visions of social morality today.
Andrew Copson: It’s not true that society has forgotten, that politicians have forgotten, that individual citizens have forgotten how to think about things in a moral way, how to think about things in a values-rich way. … You cannot sit through a debate, certainly in the Westminster Parliament, on any subject and not hear ethical questions being addressed-implicitly almost all the time, and explicitly more often than you think. So it isn’t true that some rampant commercialist, materialist, individualist, economy-centred secularism has shrivelled and wizened our public space down to some sort of valueless prune and that we need to pump it up with all the good juices again of old-time religion. It’s just not true. It’s not true that we need religion to revive public values, and in part one of the reasons that it’s not true is that there hasn’t been a decline in public values in the way that propagandists for a reintroduction of religion into public life like to claim.
You can listen and read a full transcript at: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/encounter/stories/2010/2951160.htm
Jean Davies tells us why Ludovic Kennedy, the author and journalist, is her Humanist Hero.
Ludovic Kennedy
My humanist hero is Ludovic Kennedy. I’ll never forget the opening words of his Memorial Meeting in Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford last November. “We are here to celebrate the life of a great man. Ludovic was a four-square atheist.” The speaker was one of the most senior Church of England dignitaries on the staff of the Cathedral.
Ludo’s book All in the Mind – a Farewell to God (1999) is every bit as compelling as The God Delusion in revealing the absurdity of postulating the existence of God on the basis of no evidence whatsoever. In this book Ludovic explores the idea that it is time to see God as just a man made creation that is there just to satisfy needs that we have. The book is also a personal account of Kennedy’s thought processes as he became less involved with the Church and became an atheist.
Kennedy played major role in the abolition of capital punishment. One of the most influential ways that he did this was through his book 10 Rillington Place. This book was about the life of Timothy Evans. His wife and daughter, on moving to the eponymous address, were murdered and Evans was arrested and hung. In 10 Rillington Place Kennedy gives evidence that it was not Evans who was the murderer but the landlord. With the help of this book, Evans was granted a posthumous pardon from the Queen in 1966. He once told me that this book was the only one of his books that had never been out of print.
Ludovic spent years looking into miscarriages of justice. He also presented the current affairs programme Panorama for several years and used his broadcasting platform to highlight the campaign against capital punishment.
After success with abolishing capital punishment, years later he concentrated on campaingning for reform of the law on assisted dying. Kennedy was a great contributer to the Voluntary Euthanasia Society as a co-founder and former chair. He attended most Committee meetings, even though he had no vote. His strong views on legalising euthanasia led him to resign from the Liberal Democrat party after Charles Kennedy would not take a pro-euthanasia stance.
Ludovic Kennedy died last year. See the obituary from the BHA.
This post is part of a series written by members, friends and Distinguished Supporters of the British Humanist Association about their own “humanist heroes”.
You can find out more at www.humanism.org.uk/humanism/humanist-tradition/heroes
Jean has been a BHA member for many years and spoken at national and international Humanist conferences. Jean has been a humanist representative on her local SACRE for a number of years.
Some 500 to 2,000 British schoolgirls will be genitally mutilated over the summer holidays. Some will be taken abroad, others will be “cut” or circumcised and sewn closed here in the UK by women already living here or who are flown in and brought to “cutting parties” for a few girls at a time in a cost-saving exercise.
Then the girls will return to their schools and try to get on with their lives, scarred mentally and physically by female genital mutilation (FGM), a practice that serves as a social and cultural bonding exercise and, among those who are stitched up, to ensure that chastity can be proved to a future husband.
Even girls who suffer less extreme forms of FGM are unlikely to be promiscuous. One study among Egyptian women found 50% of women who had undergone FGM “endured” rather than enjoyed sex.
Cleanliness, neatness of appearance and the increased sexual pleasure for the man are all motivations for the practice. But the desire to conform to tradition is the most powerful motive. The rite of passage, condemned by many Islamic scholars, predates both the Koran and the Bible and possibly even Judaism, appearing in the 2nd century BC.
Although unable to give consent, many girls are compliant when they have the prodecure carried out, believing they will be outcasts if they are not cut. The mothers believe they are doing the best for their daughters. Few have any idea of the lifetime of hurt it can involve or the medical implications.
There have been no prosecutions for “FGM” in the UK.
The full article contains some disturbing personal stories and a video that comes with a “distressing and disturbing images” health warning: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/jul/25/female-circumcision-children-british-law
Neo-Darwinism is, very roughly, the claim that natural selection is by far the most important explanation of biological form, the particular characteristics of particular kinds of organism. … Neo-Darwinism is, however, a perspective under ever-growing pressure, not (or not only) from the antiscientific assaults of the religious, but from the advancement of science. The decline of this intellectual monolith is generally to be welcomed, not least because it may be expected to bring down with it some of its less appetising academic fellow travellers, most notably Evolutionary Psychology. At the same time those contributing to the demise of neo-Darwinism must be aware of the risk, especially in the United States, that they will provide succour for fundamentalist Creationists and aficionados of so-called Intelligent Design.
Fodor and Piatelli-Palmarini’s (henceforth FPP) book is intended as a contribution to the critical task just mentioned, and they are well aware of the potential hazards. Sadly, however, the book is an almost tragic failure: it is unlikely to be taken seriously as a contribution to the dismantling of neo-Darwinism and it has been, and will continue to be, picked up by the fundamentalist enemies of science.
The first half of the book does a decent job of summarising the recent scientific insights responsible for the growing difficulties facing neo-Darwinism. Neo-Darwinism, by virtue of its emphasis on natural selection, sees evolution as driven from outside, by the environment. Central among the difficulties that FPP emphasise are crucial respects in which evolution is constrained, or even driven, by internal features of the organism. This realisation has been promoted by evolutionary developmental biology (“evo-devo”), which has also highlighted the unacceptable black-boxing of development in mainstream evolutionary theory, a concomitant of the exclusive focus on external determinants of change. Also crucial has been a gradual move away from excessively atomistic views of organisms and an appreciation of the necessity of treating them as integrated wholes, illustrated by the impossibility of analysing the genome into a unique set of discrete elements, “genes”. And equally important has been the disclosure of the complexity of the relations between genomes and phenotypes.
While much material is presented that does indeed reveal the dire straits in which neo-Darwinism finds itself, the overall argument is generally elusive.
Continues: http://www.philosophypress.co.uk/?p=1398
Lenore Skenazy, author of Free-Range Kids, How to Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Children (Without Going Nuts with Worry), has an editorial in Forbes, driving home the point that not just some parents but institutions supposed to protect children can be so overprotective as to recall perfectly safe, time-tested toys. It could almost sound like “health and safety gone mad” stories, except that these concerns about overblown fears seem to be backed up with evidence. Skenazy mentions the high chair which has bumped or bruised only one child for every 50,000 products sold (isn’t that remarkably low?) and the schools which stop children studying real rocks and replacing them with posters. A toy workbench with large, very unswallowable parts, nearly managed to choke one child having been on the market since 1994, and was then recalled by what Skenazy calls the “now danger-hallucinating Consumer Product Safety Commission” in the US.
So we’re talking about a product that has been on the market for 15 years and sold 1,600,000 units. It is popular, safe and time-tested. To me that’s an exemplary toy.
[... And] Take cadmium, the latest “threat.” Last month McDonald’s and the CPSC issued a recall of 12 million Shrek 3 commemorative glasses because some of the paint on the cups contained trace levels of cadmium. It’s good to get those off the market, right? Cadmium can cause bone softening and kidney problems, right?
Well, possibly it can–if you absorb massive amounts of it by working at a cadmium plant. But cadmium has been used in paint and jewelry for decades with no appreciable danger. “You’d have to scrape the paint off of hundreds of those glasses, and EAT it, in order for your body to even develop a measurable level of cadmium in the blood,” says Jack Glass, a certified hazardous material manager. And you’d have to do it more than once. By the time your child is scraping the paint off thousands of commemorative cups–and calling it lunch–you’ve got bigger problems than cadmium contamination.
Full article: http://www.forbes.com/2010/07/21/consumer-product-safety-hazard-opinions-columnist-lenore-skenazy.html
In a move designed to coincide with the pope’s visit to Britain in September, London buses are to carry posters calling for the ordination of women.
The initiative, from the UK group Catholic Women’s Ordination (CWO), will see buses carrying the slogan “Pope Benedict Ordain Women Now”.
According to the weekly Catholic magazine the Tablet, CWO has paid about £10,000 for the posters to appear on 10 buses for a month from August 30.
The pope will be in the UK from September 16, spending two days in the capital, and the posters will appear on routes that go past Westminster Cathedral and Westminster Hall. Both venues feature on the papal itinerary.
Continues: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/22/london-bus-female-ordination-pope
The Accord Coalition has welcomed an announcement during the House of Commons Second Reading debate of the Academies Bill by the Secretary of State for Education, Rt Hon Michael Gove MP, that Religious Education will be included in the Government’s curriculum review later this year.
Religious Education has a unique status in England and Wales. It is a compulsory subject in all state maintained schools, but is not part of the National Curriculum in either country.
Instead most schools follow a RE syllabus that has been produced by a committee of its local authority responsible for education, called an Agreed Syllabus Conference, which comprises of members of different religious groups, teachers and also local councillors. …
Chair of the Accord Coalition, Dr Rabbi Jonathan Romain, said ‘not only are the arrangements for local syllabus RE incredibly bureaucratic and costly, but they often lead to a provision of RE that is unbalanced and of poor quality.[']
The British Humanist Association is a founding member of Accord, a wide coalition of organisations which includes religious groups, humanists, trade unions and human rights campaigners, campaigning against religious admissions criteria in ‘faith’ schools and for fair and balanced teaching on religion and belief.
C.J. Pieffer explains why Mark Twain, the American author and humourist, is her Humanist Hero.
Mark Twain
As a teenager, I was introduced to one of the world’s most beloved authors, Mark Twain.
I loved Twain’s humor, but I admired the humanism in Twain’s fictional characters. Huckleberry Finn rejects the notion that it is better to obey the law and go to heaven than betray his friend Jim, a runaway slave. Huck decides, “All right, then, I’ll go to hell.” In 1885, Jim was one of the first black characters depicted as a three-dimentional person, with thoughts, emotions, and desires, just like everyone else.
Yet, I don’t think I met the real Mark Twain until I read Letters From the Earth and some of his other social commentary. That was when I fell in love with Twain and his reverence for humanity rather than supernatural matters.
It was then that I realized that Twain had been singing my tune. He had thought what I was thinking. He had written what I wish I could have put into words as eloquently and with as much humor as he did.
Although he was a great humorist, Twain was dead serious about the underlying messages in his social commentaries. He said,
“Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever.” (Mark Twain in Eruption)
He blew away hypocrisy with his pen. He cut through the rhetoric to tell the truth about war, race, imperialism, religion, government and a myrid of other subjects. His thoughts had such a universal quality that they are as relevant today as when he wrote them.
Twain’s War Prayer is recycled each time the United States becomes involved in another war, for it makes us realize that when one prays for one’s own army, one is also praying for the destruction of one’s enemy. The unsaid prayer includes:
…Help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells;… help us to lay waste their humble homes…
A religious skeptic, Twain frequently mocks man’s thoughtless acceptance of religion. In his autobiography he wrote:
In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.
One of my personal definitions of a humanist is one who overcomes upbringing and convention to arrive at a more humane stand on issues. Twain grew up in a slave-holding state (as chronicled in Searching for Jim Slavery in Sam Clemens World by Terrell Dempsey.) In his autobiography, Twain told how the church used scriptures to condone slavery in Hannibal. However, he married into a northeastern abolitionist family and lived next door to Harriet Beecher Stowe, who Lincoln described as “the little woman who wrote the book that started this great [civil] war.” Gradually, Twain changed the opinions he had accepted in his youth.
Twain’s United States of Lyncherdom rails against mob mentality and the cowardness of spectators at the frequent southern lynchings of his day, perpetrated by religious white men. He appeals to missionaries to “come home and convert these Christians!”
Upon paying the tuition of a black student, he wrote in an 1885 letter to Francis Wayland:
I do not believe I would very cheerfully help a white student who would ask a benevolence of a stranger, but I do not feel so about the other color. We have ground the manhood out of them, & the shame is ours, not theirs, & we should pay for it.
Twain suffered great personal tragedies, losing four of his six siblings and his father in his youth. He lost three of his four children and his wife before his own death in 1910. Some paint a picture of him in his last years as an embittered curmudgeon. Yet, in his final years, he enjoyed super-star status and wallowed in his notoriety. He became friends with other celebrities of the time, includiing Ethel Barrymore and Teddy Roosevelt. Less than three years before his death he decided to wear white year-round because it represented life to him. He enjoyed making comments on every issue of the day, creating an aura of humor, purpose, and meaning in every matter. For Twain knew that the way to fight injustice in any field was to poke fun at it.
For humanity “in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon–laughter. Power, Money, Persuasion, Supplication, Persecution–these can lift at a colossal humbug –push it a little–crowd it a little–weaken it a little… but only Laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of Laughter nothing can stand.
– Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts
Twain was never just a funny man. Nor was he ever totally serious. In a meeting of the Twains, so to speak, he found a way to become both at once, allowing us to see the shortfalls of our own species, yet simultaneoudsly laugh at ourselves and — perhaps with the weapon of laughter — improve the fate of mankind.
What could be more humanistic than that?
This post is part of a series written by members, friends and Distinguished Supporters of the British Humanist Association about their own “humanist heroes”.
You can find out more at www.humanism.org.uk/humanism/humanist-tradition/heroes
Artist C J. Peiffer served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Brazil, followed by 30 years of teaching art in public schools in the U.S. Besides her interest in Mark Twain, she enjoys film, Brazilian culture, cats, Nordic walking with her husband, and reading.
After France votes decisively against the permissibility of face veils, Britain’s new immigration minister responds by ruling out a similar move here.
Damian Green said such a move would be “rather un-British” and run contrary to the conventions of a “tolerant and mutually respectful society”.
He said it would be “undesirable” for Parliament to vote on a burka ban in Britain and that there was no prospect of the Coalition proposing it.
…
His firm decision to rule out a burka ban will disappoint some Right-of-centre Tory MPs, including Philip Hollobone, who has tabled a private member’s bill that would make it illegal for anyone to cover their face in public.
Mr Hollobone, the MP for Kettering, said this weekend that he would refuse to hold any constituency meetings with women wearing burkas.
Nesrine Malik, initially appalled at being forced to wear a full veil in Saudia Arabia, grew to find it comfortable and freeing. Women’s clothes, either way, should not be so symbolic of national feelings.
On landing in Saudi Arabia, women – all of whom were wearing the veil – were channelled into a separate line for processing. My eyes stung with tears of rage and shame. Most of all, I felt infantilised, stripped of the right to dress how I pleased due simply to the fact that I was a woman, and hence, purely a sexual object to be concealed lest it should inflame desire. For the first few days, it felt almost comical, like some absurd game of macabre fancy dress.
On a practical level, it was cumbersome, hot and uncomfortable. Eating or drinking in public became a chore, as food has to be manoeuvred gingerly under the veil or taken abruptly in small bites. In Saudi’s overwhelming heat, temperatures regularly reach 45C and any physical outdoor activity, even walking, is out of the question. I became anti-social, hardly able to wait until I got home before tearing off the ghastly garb.
The niqab and the burka are a particularly extreme interpretation of the Islamic requirement for modest dress, and were never part of my Muslim upbringing in London. Because of this, I did not feel particularly pious wearing them in Saudi. If anything, it seemed like a throwback to tribal, pre-Islamic times.
Over the next three years, however, my opposition gradually eroded. Initially an ugly burden, the abaya and niqab became a comfort and, eventually, a delight. It was a relief not to have to think about what to wear.
The burka can be the most versatile of capsule wardrobes. The uniform black costume has a charming egalitarianism about it, and is both a social and physical leveller. Once social status or physical beauty cannot be established, all sorts of hierarchies are flattened.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/7896536/Burka-ban-Why-must-I-cast-off-the-veil.html
The Guardian asks “Should Britain ban the burka?” Anastasia de Waal for Civitas says ‘Yes’ in the public sphere, “burqas impede the necessary interaction for learning and working”. However…
where public and private collide, say walking down the street, a ban would be wrong. France is indeed an open society but with that openness comes the thorn of unwanted “freedoms”.
Mary Warnock says she doesn’t love the burqa and that it reflects badly “on both men and women”, but…
I wouldn’t for that reason criminalise its use, any more than I would criminalise beachwear on the streets of London, much as I deplore it when I see it.
Donald Macleod of Free Church college, Edinburgh, is similarly reluctant to “ban”.
Let’s distinguish between what we deplore and what we criminalise. So that while we may deplore the refusal of some Muslims to integrate, the only alternative to multiculturalism is mono-culturalism, where only English may be spoken and only the state may be worshipped. As for banning the burqa from private space, let’s remember that every British family’s home is its castle, and it should say to the state what the African-American said to the Mississippi, “River, stay ‘way from my door!” We will best serve Muslim women by ensuring that their matrimonial rights as British citizens are never undermined by judicial recognition of sharia law.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/18/should-britain-ban-burqa-panel
Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan argues that banning the burqa because it is political or “undermines” Western values would be hypocritical unless we also want to ban Che Guevara t-shirts.
Doesn’t wearing the image of that squalid murderer glorify his violent and anti-democratic creed? Isn’t it an even more aggressive rejection of Western values?
Wearing a Che Guevara tee-shirt is in the same moral category as wearing an Adolf Hitler or Raoul Moat or Osama bin Laden tee-shirt. When we see someone see some oaf doing it, we should feel free to bollock him. But it is not a matter for the law.
Nor is wearing the burqa.
Another Conservative, Philip Hollobone MP, takes a rather different approach.
A Conservative MP says he will refuse to hold meetings with Muslim women wearing full Islamic dress at his constituency surgery unless they lift their face veil.
Last night Muslim groups condemned Philip Hollobone and accused him of failing in his duty as an MP.
In an interview with The Independent, the Kettering MP said: “I would ask her to remove her veil. If she said: ‘No’, I would take the view that she could see my face, I could not see hers, I am not able to satisfy myself she is who she says she is. I would invite her to communicate with me in a different way, probably in the form of a letter.”
The Daily Mail emphasises public support in Britain for a ban.
Mr Green said a ban would be ‘rather un-British’ and run contrary to the conventions of a ‘tolerant and mutually respectful society’.
This is despite a YouGov survey which found that 67 per cent of voters wanted the wearing of full-face veils to be outlawed. France’s lower house of parliament has overwhelmingly approved a ban on wearing burka-style Islamic veils, and Spain and Belgium have similar votes in the pipeline.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1295665/Banning-burkas-UK-British-says-Green.html
Meanwhile, in Tehran…
Iran’s prosecutor called on Sunday for tighter checks on women who fail to observe Islamic dress code in public, the semi-official Mehr news agency reported.
Under Iran’s Sharia law, imposed after the 1979 Islamic revolution, women are obliged to cover their hair and wear long, loose-fitting clothes. Violators can receive lashes, fines or imprisonment.
“Unfortunately the law … which considers violation of the Islamic dress code as a punishable crime, has not been implemented in the country in the past 15 years,” said general prosecutor Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei.
“Under the law, violators of public chastity should be punished by being sentenced to up to two months in jail or 74 lashes.”
Strict dress codes were enforced in the years after the revolution but in recent years clamp downs have tended to last just weeks or months in summer, when women wear lighter clothing such as calf-length trousers and colored scarves.
Young women in urban areas often defy the limitations by wearing tight clothing and colorful headscarves that barely cover their hair. The codes are less commonly flouted in rural regions.
Enforcement of codes governing women’s dress have become stricter since President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took office in 2005, promising a return to the values of the revolution.
The Vatican has failed to send the United Nations a report on child rights that is now almost 13 years overdue, the head of a U.N. panel has told The Associated Press.
Like all countries that have signed the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Vatican is required to submit regular reports on its efforts to safeguard child rights.
But the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child, despite sending repeated reminders, has received no explanation from the Holy See for why it missed a 1997 deadline, according to the committee’s chairwoman Yanghee Lee. In the years since, the Vatican has come under intense scrutiny over its handling of child sex abuse allegations around the world and recently admitted that up to one in 20 priests may be implicated.
“I’ve made contact with the Holy See on several occasions,” Lee said in a recent telephone interview. “I haven’t received anything.”
Officials at the Vatican’s mission in Geneva declined comment Thursday, saying the Catholic city state’s envoy to the U.N., Silvano Tomasi, was unavailable.
Tomasi refused to discuss the report last month, saying he was “only the messenger,” not the author of the report.
A Vatican representative told the U.N. last year that the report was being “finalized as we speak.”
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iVXpIdqtwNCWrNHwSiMtY3LCMNxAD9GVEVMO0
An Iranian woman faces death after having been tortured for alleged adultery.
In 2006 [Sakineh] Ashtiani was convicted of having an ‘illicit relationship’ and received 99 lashes. Since this time the 43 year old has been in jail where she recanted the confession she made under the duress of the lashing.
Just recently she was dragged before a court and retried. Again she was convicted and this time, despite the punishment she has already endured, sentenced to be stoned to death. This barbaric practice involves wrapping a woman tightly from head to toe in white cloth, burying her up to her shoulders in sand, and pelting her to death with large stones.
Yesterday late in the afternoon Iran’s government denied reports that Ashtiani will be executed by stoning, though her death sentence may still be carried out by some other method, likely hanging.
Knowledgeable Iranian human rights activists, including Amnesty International, question the veracity of this statement and remain deeply concerned about Ashtiani’s fate.
WE must not let Ashtinai become another victim of the debasing, inhuman treatment of women that has become the daily reality in Iran. Make your voice count and encourage others to do the same.
Take action against the practice of stoning; take action against abuse of women, sign this petition.
In honor of the Westboro Baptist Church protesting Comic-Con next week on the grounds of “Idol Worship” ( http://ow.ly/2cyoq ), here are the 10 greatest comic book Gods worth worshiping.
1. Thor – Marvel Universe
Of all the super heroes based on mythological gods, it is the Mighty Thor who is the longest running and most popular.
ALL HAIL THE MIGHTY THOR!
Created by Stan Lee in 1962, Thor was created simply because Lee was running out of ideas for giving normal humans super powers. There are only so many radioactive spiders and gamma bombs after all. So why not just make his new hero an actual God?
The full top ten continues: http://www.ranker.com/list/top-10-comic-book-gods-worth-worshipping/eric-diaz
Michael Baum and Edzard Ernst say… No.
Once upon a time, doctors had little patience with the claims made for alternative medicines. In recent years the climate has changed dramatically. It is now politically correct to have an open mind about such matters; “the patient knows best” and “it worked for me” seem to be the new mantras. Although this may be a reasonable approach to some of the more plausible aspects of alternative medicine, such as herbal medicine or physical therapies that require manipulation, we believe it cannot apply across the board. Some of these alternatives are based on obsolete or metaphysical concepts of human biology and physiology that have to be described as absurd with proponents who will not subject their interventions to scientific scrutiny or if they do, and are found wanting, suggest that the mere fact of critical evaluation is sufficient to chase the healing process away. These individuals have a conflict of interest more powerful than the requirement for scientific integrity and yet defend themselves by claiming that those wanting to carry out the trials are in the pocket of the pharmaceutical industry and are part of a conspiracy to deny their patients tried and tested palliatives.
Continues: http://www.amjmed.com/article/PIIS0002934309005336/fulltext
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