Recent evidence for the evils of religion

[Oolon Colluphid]

Kinda like the Recent evidence for evolution (http://secularcafe.org/showthread.php?t=953) thread, but with news stories instead of research papers.

(I'd like to keep this to just the bad stuff; if there's good stuff someone wants to post, please do so in a separate thread.)

[Oolon Colluphid]

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hvWEqwq3CrRvaQCmt21MfoYhjZJQD97I6MUO0

14 April 2009

KABUL (AP) — Taliban gunmen used a firing squad to kill a young couple in southern Afghanistan for trying to elope, shooting them with rifles in front of a crowd in a lawless, militant-controlled region, officials said Tuesday.

The woman, 19, and the man, 21, were accused by the militants of immoral acts, and a council of conservative clerics decided that the two should be killed, said Ghulam Dastagir Azad, the governor of the southwestern province of Nimroz.

The two had fled their homes and hoped to travel to Iran, but their parents sent villagers to bring them home, said Sadiq Chakhansori, the chief of Nimroz' provincial council. Once back home, the pair was either turned over to the Taliban by their parents or the militants came and took them by force, the officials said, providing slightly varying accounts.

Riflemen in the remote district of Khash Rod shot the man and woman with AK-47s Monday, said Chakhansori.

Guardian version of the story: Taliban execute eloping young lovers in Afghanistan (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/apr/15/afghanistan-taliban-lovers-elope-nimroz)
A young couple who tried to elope in one of the most lawless and conservative parts of Afghanistan have been publicly executed by Taliban gunmen after their parents handed them over to be tried by insurgents.

Officials from the south-western province of Nimroz say Gul Pecha, in her late teens, and her boyfriend Abdul Aziz, 21, were shot by a firing squad outside a mosque in their home village of Lokhi on Monday.

The couple had fled to a nearby village and were planning to start a life together without the permission of their parents, according to the province's police chief Abdul Jabar Pardeli.

But they were found by their parents and turned over to the Taliban, who held them for four days in Lokhi's mosque before putting them on trial.

Ghulam Dastageer Azad, the governor of Nimroz, said the couple's execution was "against Islam, against the law and against the constitution".

An unofficial justice system, often dispensing brutal punishment to people found guilty of petty crimes or breaking the Taliban's strict interpretation of Islamic values, has become the hallmark of areas where insurgents enjoy a high degree of influence.

[Oolon Colluphid]

Stone-throwing Afghan crowd swarms women's protest (http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hvWEqwq3CrRvaQCmt21MfoYhjZJQD97IT2E80)

15 April 2009
KABUL (AP) — A group of some 1,000 Afghans swarmed a demonstration of 300 women protesting against a new conservative marriage law on Wednesday. The women were pelted with small stones as police struggled to keep the two groups apart.

The law, passed last month, says a husband can demand sex with his wife every four days unless she is ill or would be harmed by intercourse — a clause that critics say legalizes marital rape. It also regulates when and for what reasons a wife may leave her home alone.

Women's rights activists scheduled a protest Wednesday attended by mostly young women. But the group was swamped by counter-protesters — both men and women — who shouted down the women's chants.

Some picked up gravel and stones and threw them at the women, while others shouted "Death to the slaves of the Christians!" Female police held hands around the group to create a protective barrier.

The government of President Hamid Karzai has said the Shiite family law is being reviewed by the Justice Department and will not be implemented in its current form. Governments and rights groups around the world have condemned the legislation, and President Barack Obama has labeled it "abhorrent."

Though the law would apply only to the country's Shiites — 10 to 20 percent of Afghanistan's 30 million people — it has sparked an uproar by activists who say it marks a return to Taliban-style oppression. The Taliban, who ruled Afghanistan from 1996-2001, required women to wear all-covering burqas and banned them from leaving home without a male relative.

Shiite backers of the law say that foreigners are meddling in private Afghan affairs, and Wednesday's demonstrations brought some of the emotions surrounding the debate over the law to the surface.

"You are a dog! You are not a Shiite woman!" one man shouted to a young woman in a headscarf holding aloft a banner that said "We don't want Taliban law." The woman did not shout back at the man, but told him: "This is my land and my people."

[Oolon Colluphid]

Flogging probe begins in Pakistan (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/7984958.stm)

6 April 2009

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Local sources said the girl in the video had been accused of illicit relations with a man and that the flogging took place about a month and a half ago.

Local officials say it took place before the peace deal with militants, which includes the implementation of Sharia law, was signed.

The burka-clad 17-year-old is heard crying throughout the two-minute flogging and at one point swears on her father that she will not do it again.

Relatives of the man involved in the incident told the BBC he had gone to the house of the girl in the village of Kala Kalay to do repairs as an electrician, but militants accused him of having a relationship with her.

They dragged him from the house and flogged him before punishing the girl, his relatives said.

The Taleban made the girl's brother hold her down during the flogging, they said.

After the incident, the Taleban forced the couple to marry and instructed the man not to divorce his wife. His relatives say he has been left mentally scarred.

http://www.newsline.com.pk/NewsApr2009/coverapr2009.htm

Muslim Khan, spokesman for Tehrik-e-Taliban (TTP), Swat, confirmed the incident, insisting that the girl had illicit relations with her father-in-law who, according to him, was also punished. “The punishment was in accordance with Islamic Shariah,” the militant leader declared, adding that under Shariah she should have been stoned to death.

See also: Reuters: Pakistani president approves sharia in Swat valley (http://www.reuters.com/article/featuredCrisis/idUSSP457439)

[Oolon Colluphid]

Reuters, 15 April 2009: Saudi speeds up education reform, clerics resist (http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSL9588418)

RIYADH, April 15 (Reuters) - Accused of promoting the religious radicalism that inspired the Sept. 11 attacks, Saudi Arabia has stepped up efforts to reform its school curriculum, but clerical opposition means change will be slow, analysts say.

[...]

The United States zeroed in on Saudi schools after it emerged that 15 of the 19 attackers who killed some 3,000 people there on Sept. 11, 2001 were Saudi. They acted in the name of an Islamist group, al Qaeda, headed by a Saudi, Osama bin Laden.

Foreign and Saudi critics said Saudi educational material permitted the killing of non-Muslims and promoted the idea of cleansing Muslim countries from Western cultural influences.

[...]

"It became clear that one of the most important causes of terrorism is the monopoly of a certain group of people ... over building the curriculums in the kingdom," he said. In 2005 King Abdullah launched a 9 billion riyal ($2.4 billion) project for "education development", laying the ground for bigger changes in the Islamic Studies curriculum.

The curriculum changes will rephrase certain principles depicted in the textbooks, allowing for a more moderate interpretation, said Ahmed Modi, a Sharia expert and writer.

"There are certain individuals who have extremist views in Islam. The changes (to textbooks) have ushered in a realistic view, that Islam is a hospitable religion," he said.

CLERICAL RESISTANCE

Analysts say reformers in government have faced resistance over changing textbooks at the behest of foreigners, and as a result the changes so far -- to sections on jihad and Muslims' relationship with non-Muslims -- are not enough.

Saudi Arabia, home to Islam's holiest sites, imposes a strict version of mainstream Sunni Islam and the ruling Al Saud family accords the powerful religious establishment wide powers in the justice system and education.

"The current (Saudi) schoolbooks are still laying the ideological foundations of terrorists and suicide bombers, foundations that have produced thousands of Saudi suicide bombers in September 11, Iraq, and Afghanistan," said Ali Al-Ahmed, a Saudi opposition figure in Washington.

Many Saudis and other Arabs have gone to Iraq to fight U.S. forces and the Shi'ite-dominated Iraqi government.

"Our concern about these books is that the interpretation is very conservative and a narrow understanding (of Islam) which is promoting intolerance in some cases," said Dwight Basheer, senior policy analyst at the US Commission for International Religious Freedom, which visited Saudi Arabia in 2007 and produced a report on the Saudi schoolbooks.

He said some Koranic verses required explanation lest they be seen to promote violence. "We are just saying it should be clarified, we are not saying remove it," he said, referring to passages that discuss the concept of jihad, or holy war.

Critics are concerned not just by the nature of religious material but the amount of it, since it creeps into other subjects taught such as Arabic and History. They say the focus on religion means the education system does not prepare Saudis for life and work in the modern world.

Many influential clerics and their supporters are angry about the changes so far and fear what could come next. They say the changes are the result of Western political pressure.

"What is happening is unjust to Islam. They are changing the principals in Islam and presenting things in an incorrect way," said an Islamic Studies teacher at a Saudi public school who declined to give his name.

[RBH]

Well, there are U.S. equivalents, of course. For example, from the March 29. 2009 Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/28/AR2009032801936_pf.html):Answering to a leader called Queen Antoinette, they denied a 16-month-old boy food and water because he did not say "Amen" at mealtimes. After he died, they prayed over his body for days, expecting a resurrection, then packed it into a suitcase with mothballs. They left it in a shed in Philadelphia, where it remained for a year before detectives found it last spring.

...

Psychiatrists who evaluated Ramkissoon at the request of a judge concluded that she was not criminally insane. Her attorney, Steven Silverman, said the doctors found that her beliefs were indistinguishable from religious beliefs, in part because they were shared by those around her.

"She wasn't delusional, because she was following a religion," Silverman said, describing the findings of the doctors' psychiatric evaluation.

...

Silverman said he and prosecutors think Ramkissoon was brainwashed and should have been found not criminally responsible; prosecutors declined to comment. Although an inability to think critically can be a sign of brainwashing, experts said, the line between that and some religious beliefs can be difficult to discern.

"At times there can be an overlap between extreme religious conviction and delusion," said Robert Jay Lifton, a cult expert and psychiatrist who lectures at Harvard Medical School. "It's a difficult area for psychiatry and the legal system."

...

According to charging documents, in December 2006, Javon stopped saying "Amen" at mealtimes. Queen Antoinette told members the boy had developed a demonic spirit and needed to be cleansed through fasting and by being denied water, law enforcement officials said.

Ramkissoon found it "unbearable" to watch but followed the instructions, the officials said. "In her mind, an apostle of God had ordered this," Silverman said. The mother, Ria Ramkissoon, got a plea agreement, pleading guilty to a charge of child abuse leading to death. The plea agreement specifies that the deal is off if Javon, the dead child, is resurrected. The "apostle of God" who goes by the name "Queen Antoinette who gave the orders to starve the child is still in jail, not yet charged AFAIK.