Dawkins’ publisher faces jail over ‘atheist manifesto’

http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article3209882.ece — Richard Dawkins’ best-selling atheist manifesto The God Delusion was at the centre of a growing row over religious tolerance yesterday after the Turkish publishers of his book were threatened with legal action by prosecutors who accuse it of ‘insulting believers’.  Erol Karaaslan, the founder of the small publishing house Kuzey Publications, could face between six months and a year in jail for “inciting hatred and enmity” if Istanbul prosecutors decide to press charges over the book, which has sold 6000 copies in Turkey since it was published this summer.

Boing Boing and the 9 most Badass Bible Verses

I love it when respectable blogs like Boing Boing and Cracked.com join our sense of incredulity at what actually exists and is written in the “good ??” book.  Some of these stories I’ve shared before in postings on this blog but they’ve added pictures which just add so much to the experience.  See Moses about to slaughter an unsuspecting Egyptian in a Quake-like mockup or roll around with mirth at Elisha riding bears and raining down judgment on some cocky youths who dared mock him.

Christians are constantly asking for prayer in schools to help get today’s kids in line, but we beg to differ. We need bears in schools. If every teacher had the power to summon a pair of child-maiming grizzly avengers, you can bet that schoolchildren nowadays would be the most well-behaved, polite children, ever. It’s a simple choice: listen to the biology lesson, or get first-hand knowledge of the digestive system of Ursus horribilis.

clap, clap … view the posting here

Tags: christian, bible, WTF, atheism

T Minus 6 Weeks and Counting …

I finish up at work tomorrow, after six years at the same company I am finally moving along.  December will be filled with frantic organisation, my moleskin thrums with activity to make even the most hardy GTD jedi knight gasp in awe, and I will tackle with increased gusto the discarding of personal effects hoarded over the years.  the movers arrive in early January and we board our plane shortly thereafter bound for a new country and a new life. 

The pendulum arc of emotions range from excitement and optimism to the throat clasping ‘oh my God what have I done’ but those who have moved life and country assure me this is a perfectly normal reaction and not due to horrible disorders of my autonomic nervous system. 
Tonight is our work Christmas function where I can say goodbye in good cheer to people who I’ve known for a long time even if the cogs, enthusiasm and workings of the job have long since gone luke-warm.

It is indeed a great moment in time, a closure on things now done and a crisp new page on which to etch a new beginning.

Tags: job, emigration, leaving, christmas, party, closure, GTD

I Love My new MacBook Pro

I have suffered grievously under Micro$oft Windows. I have run the gamut of inadequate upgrades from the early days of Windows 3.0 all the way up to the last OS-vomit called Vista. Enough was enough and it was time for an upgrade so I went Apple and I am loving every minute of it. My home machine (with Vista) has been formatted and uBuntu installed on it as a file server; most of my current personal dev is done in Rails so the Mac is a wonderful choice with rails installed with Leopard and the king of editors TextMate purchased shortly thereafter.

I really can’t rave enough about this machine and how happy the switch has made me; here is a little peek at my desktop with on old rails tut loaded into textmate.

Sooo pretty! (click for bigger view)

Why I Love and Hate Facebook

Social networking website such as Myspace and more recently Facebook have been creating huge publicity over the last couple of years. Their addictive nature have caused many a work place to have them banned from their employees web access and many a person has found themselves trolling around mindlessly for hours looking for long lost friends and family.

My Facebook profile was a revelation to me though; I set it up initially as a closed network for friends and family to share some of the things I find interesting, like my photography, and for me to see what they were up to however I never really expected the deluge which followed. First up were the work colleagues; failure to accept them into my profile would create all sorts of embarrassing shuffling in the hallway and low level mutterings so on they came. Then came the work colleagues wives … er ok … how do you respond when the bosses wife sends you a ‘naughty gift’; big potential problems right there.

Then the friends/acquaintances from school 15 years ago suddenly started popping up wanting to be best buds … ok … so we had something way back in the annals of history, let’s say hi … on they came. Then came the friend collectors who suddenly wanted to be big buds with me and share my personal virtual real-estate and swap stories of their progeny; guys back at school who, in the throws of effervescent schoolboy testosterone, you’d like to smack in the face (and probably did) all of a sudden want to be super-best-chums …. they are ‘obviously’ still way cool though because their network has 476 friends hence the need to collect you for meaningful social interaction.

Facebook looks set to create groups for your friends; each group will have privacy options that you can set which will dictate how much of your information you allow these people to see. I can’t wait for this new development and have my groups thought up already.

Family
Friends
Work Colleagues
Hobby Sharing
Dicks from my youth

Can’t wait

Help Protect Ayaan Hirsi Ali

She has been included in Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world. Born in Somalia she chose not to submit to a forced marriage to a man she did not know and she fled to her country of exile; the Netherlands. She is fluent in Somali, Arabic, Amharic, Swahili, English and now Dutch and she soon became a prominent translator for Somali refugees fleeing some of the horrors woman find themselves living under in their Islamic world. She is an outspoken critic for Muslim woman who have no voice and whose lives are filled with abuse, mutilation, sexual subjugation and forced child-bearing. She now lives in exile under constant guard for she is a vocal Islamic apostate and critic and for her sins she is sentenced to die.

Sam Harris and Salmon Rushdie wrote and article about Ali in the Los Angeles Times:

Hirsi Ali may be the first refugee from Western Europe since the Holocaust. As such, she is a unique and indispensable witness to both the strength and weakness of the West: to the splendor of open society and to the boundless energy of its antagonists. She knows the challenges we face in our struggle to contain the misogyny and religious fanaticism of the Muslim world, and she lives with the consequences of our failure each day. There is no one in a better position to remind us that tolerance of intolerance is cowardice.

Her promised protection by the Dutch government has been rescinded and she is in hiding in the United States. The costs of making someone disappear from the eyes of fanatics are great; Sam Harris has created a place where free-thinking people can pledge a small amount of money to help towards her protection and continuing loud and brilliant voice against intolerance and religious extremism.

Links:

Los Angeles Times: Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Abandoned to fanatics
New York Times: Daughter of Enlightenment
Sam Harris’ website: URGENT APPEAL: Please help protect Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Tags: extremism, islam, muslim, rushdie, atheism, religion, extremist, apostate, apostasy