What would you say?

Short video: Stephen Fry answers

A total refutation of Pascal's wager.

Those who live by the sword

What would the barbarian do? One choice was to reexamine the often brutal ways in which they treat their fellow human beings. The other choice was to arrest the person who made and presumably shared a video of the authorities brutally beheading a person.

Regarding this story:
Barbarians doing what Barbarians do...

Human Rights

Quote:
Religion isn't a person. It is a set of ideas in a book. It doesn't have rights. It doesn't have emotions. It doesn't have a family or children. Those cartoonists were living, breathing human beings. They had rights, emotions, and families. Which of these deserves your respect?

The article linked below was written by a Pakastani-born author. That shouldn't matter but I thought I'd mention it for those who've been terrorized by the notion that any criticism of Islam is tantamount to Islamophobia. The author currently resides in Canada, and I leave it to the reader to determine why that was a healthy choice on his part.

how terrorism won

Thoughts are the most dangerous things

Please read: wife-of-jailed-saudi-blogger-my-husband-is-a-victim-of-the-thought-police.html

Saudi Arabia is one of our closest allies in the middle east. I can't help wonder what might happen in these situations if things were different. What would it be like if there was a very powerful country that was perceived to have a deep well of untainted moral authority from which to draw? Those who love compassion and justice might look to such a noble land for guidance and leadership. A few words of scorn from this country, added to the cries of decent people everywhere, may well turn the tide in cases of barbarism and injustice. I know, I'm such a dreamer. Perhaps I need to just snap out of it.

Addendum

I am not certain for whom I should be more afraid, Saudi liberals/secularists or Americans. I think this is a good moment to mention a couple of facts. Christianity is by far the dominant religion in this country and its believers own most of everything and control most of everything. Therefore claims by Fox news and others that Christianity is under attack and hanging by a thread, are laughable. Here is the more troubling part. Right-wing religiously motivated Christian Conservatives are ever attempting to swing the legal pendulum of our country to a more religious based system. That is not a claim made by me. That is their claim. Any number of these folks have openly stated they would prefer something more like a theocracy here. Consider this, if I said the new congress was quietly trying to inch us toward Sharia law, it would be easy to imagine huge protests. When I say that our elected leaders, federal and state, have flatly stated that they are boldly trying to move us toward the Christian version of religious law, what happens then?