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Alia speaks
April 11, 2014
Odilon_Redon_-_'Lady_of_the_Flowers',_oil_on_canvas,_c._1890-95Her voice is like glass. It has the clink and tingle of something fine and delicate. Even her hesitation before saying something she had to wring out of the past is like a muffled chime. I can tell just by listening to her, Alia is beautiful. When she was twelve, her mother took her to the local hospital in Egypt for “just a check up”. I asked her how long she had been out.
“I went with my mom around 11 in the morning and woke up at 9… it was dark outside.”
Some doctor had cut out her clitoris and she woke up ‘clean’.
No one wants to see an eyeball being sliced; no one wants to know what that would feel like. So, I wasn’t quite ready to ask her what the pain was like for her that night. Instead I want to know if she had any clue. She said that she had overheard her mother and grandmother speaking in hushed voices about “it”. Now the public service announcements on TV had taught her a thing or two about Female Genital Mutilation and she confronted her mother, terrified out of her young wits.
“Ofcourse not, we wouldn’t do that to you,” Mama had lied.
The lies parents say! For a moment, the significance and heaviness of this particular lie sank and swirled around in my mind, pretending to be a mere entanglement of truth like all other untruths. Eight years later, her parents beg her for forgiveness.
“Yes I blame them … I blame them for a lot of things.”
She doesn’t want me to think her Mom and Dad are any worse than your average misguided but well-meaning parent. Even in her rightful indictment, she has mercy on them.
“I never thought they would do it like this, not telling me.”
“Do you know why they do this to girls,” Alia asks.  I gave my researched response — to discourage women from illicit sexual intercourse, to guarantee marital fidelity. She shook her head and said, “They don’t want want us to ever feel sexual pleasure.”
I wonder what a person would be without the desire for sex. What would sex be without the desire for sex. Like the eye, don’t sexual organs allow a particular kind of perception, something that teach about the self and the world outside of the self. Years later it seems like she still wonders what causes her pain; the circumcision or the betrayal. Perhaps they are the same thing.
I try to relate to her story – in their quest to conform to society’s prescription of “good living”, my parents did loads of foolish things to themselves and to their children. And I try to relate to her parents. I remember my daughter waking me up in the middle of the night because she was worried that the storm outside would crack the roof of the building and blast our top floor apartment to wet bits of driftwood. I tell her “well, if that happens, at least we’ll all be in it together.”
My answer did nothing to assuage the fears of a five year old. Those run on a completely different track than a young adult’s anxiety over alienation and meaninglessness. But my response struck me as stupidly honest and I wondered if I should be proud of it, be proud of not lying to her. My now teenaged daughter reminds me of a lie I did tell her in kindergarten. My answer to her “what is ‘rape’” question had been “its when a man hits a woman…a lot.”
It was the truth. I simply failed to add that when a man rapes, he slams the victim repeatedly with his penis which is somewhat the size of a polish sausage or lead pipe. And when the time came, I also failed to mention the waxing and waning of the male member even as I explained the ebb and flow of the female menstrual cycle.
Parents want to inform their children preferably without shattering their psyche. And sometimes they lie. Like when my dad lied to me that the vaccination shot would simply pinch like a mosquito bite which it so did not. We lie because we want to protect our children. The father from “Life Is Beautiful” is a hero. The desire to preserve our children’s safety, physical and emotional, is instinct.
So what is it that made Alia’s parents lie to her and cause her the kind of pain that is forever? What goes against natural instinct?
That which corrupts the better angels of our nature deserves no reformation, no consideration, no saving abstraction.
If doing this robs people from believing in something then let them believe in Alia. Let them believe that someday she will leave the bloody footprints, the broken childhood of her home and make something of this world.
rorshach
















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To the girls in the video on niqab…
March 20, 2014

They say : This liberates you?
I want to known for my intellect and not for how short my skirt is
…communication barrier…
BEHOLDEN
I don’t want to be just another rape statistic
…status of women is decreasing…
…Western women as sex object…
…honors me, protects me, it tells me my body belongs to me and nobody else…
No one can tell me what to wear, how to dress
…being free from the submission to man’s desires…
True femininity is preserving our beauty and not having it exploited
Aussie Muslim Refused Service Over Niqab
You explain yourselves, your motivations. The ‘why’ and ‘because’ of covering the female body to the extent that you do. I watch you, veiled as you are from me and everyone else, and even though I don’t see you, I am intrigued by your forceful voice; I am struck by your staid eyes. You are so very young. Even underneath that shroud, you move like something new, something strong. The world may bend you every which way, but you won’t snap. You whip back to how you have always stood.


But you are impatient. I get it. Young people find themselves in a threatening world. You are inheriting something quite broken and neglected from your elders. Its like the house upped and went to hell before the dinner party while your Mum fussed over crochet doilies. You may have been born into a nice home but a great many didn’t win that jackpot. Here I assume that your thoughts encompass humanity in grand scales. You look around and see that your people may have only managed to save this one house, or this one neighborhood; this one city or this one nation. Everywhere else burns.


You have it all figured out. Establishing ownership of one’s body is no small feat. Half the time my body seems to run away from me. It bloats and billows in the oddest ways and only I can see this. When you ask me if high heels and lipsticks liberate me, I am struck by how little you know about yourself and about being women. I imagine two things: a model prisoner, that is, a prisoner modelling the prison that keeps her, and another incessantly creating the means to escape it. What state is more desirable depends on the mettle of the seeker. But I would go with the latter, the woman fashioning the wings for escape. It appears to be a doomed cause. She’s scraped and bruised, but with a smattering of hope. When air turns toxic, we cannot simply make gas masks a way of life. And when being a woman becomes so very limiting and oppressive, disappearing into a personal bubble where everything unpleasant exists ‘out there’ is cheating. You think you’re taking a short-cut or something by not dealing with the stupidity and horrors cultivated especially for women.


You want to be known for your intellect and not by how short your skirt is. A sound intellect is a fine thing. But you do realize that like your body, your mind is just one part of you. Some of us aren’t born with what it takes to be clever or well-informed. Some of us are hopelessly stupid. Take away the mind and body, and what do we have? How else does the essence of your being shine through? Is it in the curve of your back as you bend over your work, so unmindful of the perfect moment, when you sat perfectly framed in the golden light of the sun as it slid over the softness of skin, the stillness of infinite hair held together, in place like something that was always meant to be. Is it when unaware of an answer, you gaze up momentarily, surrendering to not knowing. Answers and information saturating the air around you but you, the calm center. Does the essence hide in the way you walk, or how you carry a load, in the way you turn to look at someone or how you suppress casual cruelty thats ready to dart out of you. In the quest to hide the lines and curves of your physical body, are you not shrouding your being here… in this world.


Your body will rebel. It will disengage. Do you see? There is a you that lives at one with your body who will never be because it remained unseen, unwitnessed. You say you don’t care a fig for the tree in the woods that only existed because it was perceived? I don’t buy that. Not for a second. You like very much to be the conundrum that you are. There but not there. Blurry but defined. Benign but severe. Exteriorizing the damned implications of your belief system. It makes me want to yell, as I look at only-your-eyes you, in your gray hoodie with its white drawstrings hanging like they do for everyone else.
















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Watching Women in the KSA



Watching Women in the KSA
January 15, 2014
Sometimes a news article doesn’t come close to the startling insights and drama of the responses it elicits. The recent Arab news piece on the surveillance of Saudi women gives us the best of both worlds — objective news reporting with a smattering of yellow journalism woven into the comments. The interior ministry of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), not to be beleaguered by the policing, supervising and small-time electioning within the country, has also taken upon itself to electronically monitor the cross-border movements of the nation’s women. The Raw Story reported in November 2012:
“Saudi women’s male guardians began receiving text messages on their phones informing them when women under their custody leave the country, even if they are traveling together.”
Instances of men, having never registered or requesting the service from the interior ministry, receiving such notifications indicate that like the attentions of the modesty police, this government resource is also unsolicited. People all over the world read the stories and agree that it is fucked up; even though the monitoring system has been suspended, the KSA in its brilliant career of trampling women’s rights has earned another ignoble medal on its proud chest. But then, tucked away at the bottom are comments from women that make you catch your breath.
This happens to me a lot — faced with shreds of arguments so circular in their reasoning, my mystified mind creates a music video. This one has a panopticon and the music is Nirvana’s Sappy. First things first, why Sappy? When you hear the opening lines, you’ll know why. Plus anything set to Nirvana’s music is true.
And if you save yourself
You will make him happy
panopticon / minaretWhy a panopticon? By erecting a virtual observation tower that electronically monitors the movement of women, the KSA is simply capitalizing on the outcome of its long held social mores that ‘individualize’ the monitored by sequestering them in their homes. Placing them in a state of constant visibility only heightens a woman’s role, Foucault suggests, as”the object of information, never a subject in communication.”
He’ll keep you in a jar
And you’ll think you’re happy
Foucault, in his examination of the ever-visible subjects of the panopticon adds, “[s]he who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; [s]he makes them play spontaneously upon [her]self; [s]he inscribes in [her]self the power relation in which [s]he simultaneously plays both roles; [s]he becomes the principle of [her] own subjection.”
Umm Maha : “What is the big issue? As a Muslim women we shouldnt be travelling without a mahram anyway except for necessity and if your guardian has already given you permission then whats the big deal that he gets a text message? Saudi women need to understand that true freedom isnt by imitating the west, rather its being upright upon the religion and striving to please Allah. These small things shouldnt even be an issue!” (source)
He’ll give you breathing holes
And you’ll think you’re happy
Another questions why women have any objection to their guardians or husbands being informed about their movements.Then comes the inevitable Rorschach test, the pathological ills of the East and West held up as bilaterally symmetrical forms. “If you take the west it has gone to such an extent that a husband cannot ask his wife why you are late to home and vice-versa. This system is only to protect the women and her safety so that she has a happy life with family.”
Really?
But wait, there’s more.
ISM : “What harm in it letting your parents/guardians know where you are traveling, unless you want to hide something or cheat.Its very immature and childish to compare with babysitting, it actually helps you if you are in trouble in traveled country so that your guardians can help you in time. By notifications guardians can know you exited the country safely. There is no question of ‘freedom’ here you are already freed since you are at the airport.” (source)
He’ll cover you with grass
And you’ll think you’re happy now
Rameez Sehgal’s comment insists that the skewed policies are put in place to protect the desire of Saudi men to keep the nation racially pure. He mentions the liberal lifestyles of Saudi men, spreading their wild oats on their “edu-ventures”. Saudi women thus have to bear the burden of, among other things, maintaining national identity by making Saudi babies only. Let’s add genetic purity to the long list of must haves, right under your traditional kabssah and your doughy samboosak. Never mind that Muslim women already bear the unfair burden of keeping their men chaste by making themselves blurry. The insane imperative to compensate for the failings of men in their civic responsibilities has already turned women’s bodies as the site whereupon Muslim men demonstrate their moral convictions.
**Look at Abu Hashim; he is a fine, upstanding member of society, no one has ever set eyes on the women of his household.**
“If the inmates are convicts, there is no danger of a plot, an attempt at collective escape, the planning of new crimes for the future, bad reciprocal influences; if they are patients, there is no danger of contagion; if they are madmen there is no risk of their committing violence upon one another; if they are schoolchildren, there is no copying, no noise, no chatter, no waste of time; if they are workers, there are no disorders, no theft, no coalitions, none of those distractions that slow down the rate of work, make it less perfect or cause accidents.”
Foucault’s analysis sheds light on the condition of Muslim women as persons infantilized and disciplined. No matter how mangy the man may be, a Muslim woman must “save” herself in order to  purify her husband. The KSA takes this a step further because it always does stupid bigger and better than anywhere else. With the aid of travel restrictions and constant surveillance, Saudi women must purify their men and only their men..
You’re in a laundry room
You’re in a laundry room
The clue that came to you, oh
















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Women – An Irresistible Force
December 16, 2013
I watched the Maryam Namazie interview with the lady who was defending gender segregation. It is intriguing how she made MSA events look like feminist projects that will end up being abandoned because of the “Separate is never equal” movement. According to her line of reasoning, muslim women can only find agency if they do this:
1) Establish a platform and system of showcasing some men.
2) Then let other men run the damn show as if they did all the work.
3) Apparate in flowy abayas at the tail end of the event with “important” announcements (which offer some insight, to the mindful, of the drudgery that MSA really is).
So this is how muslim women come into their own in universities. That’s a pretty protracted, “if-you-build-it-they-will-come”, way of going about raising the ghosts of feminism past in order to find the player in you.
But it must be hard for some; the dissonance must be immense. All those flashy, spiritually-stunted, yet naturally endowed with the milk of human kindness, super-sensitive, unreliable–especially in a court of law, bearers of the next generation, companions of the soul, loose-tongued, vain, idle-minded, corruption-sowing, ‘perfectors’ of men’s deen, maintainers of their modesty, crafty as hell, rebellious bitches, spilling all over the hall, crossing the line, and coming over to the other side — the side of the room that aches to be the immovable object.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2d25-rXuJyo
















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“Separate Is Never Equal”
December 12, 2013
A case study by universities in the UK has sparked opposition and a good deal of attention in social media sites. It explores gender segregation as a practice to accommodate speakers from ultra conservative religious groups. People are rightfully upset. I have been to a bunch of MSA events on campus and the people there segregate themselves based on gender as a matter of course. The behavior is so common that it is not questioned. Muslim men and women pray separately and tend to adhere to this separateness wherever possible. So I endorse all forms of bellyaching on this matter.
When my daughter was younger, she attended a summer program at the local mosque with my friend’s son. We carpooled so the kids would ride together. But the whole time they were at the mosque where the program was held, they were kept separated. Rows of strategically placed screens-on-wheels (because thats what they are) would keep the children segregated. If they did happen to catch a glimpse, they would ‘unsee’ the other.
‘Unseeing’ is an interesting thing. I came across the word in China Mieville’s “The City and the City,” and it was one of those words you ‘do’ but don’t have a name for. Like we ‘unsee’ homeless people whenever we can. A friend ‘unsaw’ a happy, naked guy running down a busy street in DC once. When I did hijab in my past life, I got unseen all the time. How many of us have walked into a high-end store and had the sales people pay us no mind? Unseeing is lazy, and it helps us stay lazy.
Many people create  fragile systems with which they order their worlds. Issues of identity and the attendant baggage one is bequeathed with can coagulate into some serious muck. This plus social, emotional stresses in one’s environment could make the world a complex place to navigate. So I get why people choose to ‘unsee’ what doesn’t fit. It tells me that we live pathetic, narrow lives and tend to be myopic and self-centered. Don’t get me wrong; unseeing happy, naked guy because you rather let him be — good. Unseeing happy, naked guy because spontaneous effusions of joy and nakedness embarass you — bad. Unseeing something because god doesn’t want you to compromise your purity / your good intentions / your single-minded pursuit of him / your clear mind, free of sexual preoccupations is creating an ‘other’ that is intrinsically inferior or ‘inferiorating’.
In a school cafeteria, students gravitate to their little cliques and circle of friends. How ridiculous if the principal were to walk in and tell the students they had permission to sit with their friends. Its like when I know my daughter is going to sneak her tablet to her bed and I bolster my parental authority by giving her permission to do it. Come on, parents do this sort of mind fuckery all the time. We are constantly negotiating a position of control in an ever-shrinking island of power and respect.
Yes, my angelic toddler, you may feed the DVD player pennies.
And you, teenaged child, may touch yourself if it cannot be helped.
Like god, sometimes, we too establish sovereignty by allowing the already. So the University goes –
Yes, you insipid patriarchs, you can sit where you are sitting and make others sit where you are making others sit. We say, this is how it shall be.
If someone’s conscience wants to grow out of the snares and traps of rigid ideology then it must now jump through hoops to get beyond the newly “okay” and “acceptable”.
I can see my kid in the cafeteria with her posse of friends; how they stare down the freshmen who dare encroach upon their sacred space. Not only would I never tell her that its okay to do that but I tell her every chance I get that creating discrete social watering holes is lazy and ill-mannered.
















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Talking Across the Pond — How getting hung up on form and mechanics turns people into assholes.
December 12, 2013
This is not a post on parenting per se but I am discovering how any and every thing can be linked to the shrill cry – “but think of the children”. You will not, however, have to deal with an appeal to emotion or an illogical argument.
In a recent Facebook post–
The term “Proper English” is both offensive and just plain wrong. The beauty of English is that it is an adaptable and evolving language. We do not have a board that determines “correct” usage (as other languages like French do), and dictionaries of English are catalogs, not textbooks. English, like many languages, has distinct spoken dialects. The particular dialect chosen to represent the elite may become the most commonly spoken, but it is technically no more or less “proper” English than other dialects of this living, spoken, language and to suggest otherwise is ignorant and elitist, no matter what pretty high-blown language you express it in. — feeling annoyed.
This came as a response to the following –
There is no such thing as an “Arab-American”, “Pakistani-American”, “Jewish-American” or “African-American” language etc, these are dialects and you will observe that the more integrated and educated the the (sic) person is the more he/she knows how to spell and pronounce English correctly.
Great three examples of African Americans who speak English perfectly and that I look up to
Neil Degrasse Tyson (scientist)
Barack Obama (politician)
Thomas Sowell (Economist and social theorist)
It’s not ‘racist’ to demand whether they were born here in the U.S or immigrants to know English.
Canada does it, Australia does it, New Zealand does it, all these 3 great new world countries have official languages.
And actually it has nothing to do with race or culture, there are many uneducated whites who do not speak English well.
Let’s not be too politically correct for goodness’ sake.
The person who posted this status received a lot of online attention. Sometimes social media sites transcend the mundane and become arenas for meaningful discourse. What was interesting about this thread was not that a person would present his thinly veiled racial prejudice dressed in the rhetoric of practicality. Is was surprising how many people backed him up and attempted to flame opposing points of view by repeating the uncompromising necessity for doing something the ‘right’ way.
Before addressing this sort of rigid opposition to every form of discourse other than what is considered the standard, let me introduce the notion of the ‘contact zone’. They are social spaces “where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today.”  Vernacular expression, which is being denigrated and dismissed in our Facebook status, is one of the literary arts of the contact zone among parody, denunciation, bilingualism, etc. Mary Louise Pratt, who named and investigates these social spaces that allow the intermingling of two or more cultures had this to say about the artistic expressions that arise from it — “they all live among us today in the transnationalized metropolis of the United States and are becoming more widely visible, more pressing, and … more decipherable to those who once would have ignored them in defense of a stable, centered sense of knowledge and reality.”
Perhaps the desire to silence the literary arts of the contact zone lies in the reluctance to receive oppositional points of view directed toward positions of authority. Much of the failure in educating African American youth is chalked up to their resistance in acquiring literacy skills that are regarded in their community as instruments of deculturation without true assimilation. Unlike other minorities, for whom participating in oppositional discourse can be a conscious choice, the “oppositional identity, growing from the specific history of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and institutional racism, is what differentiates African Americans from other minorities”(Tom Fox, California State University). When the oppositional identity becomes an intrinsic part of one’s being, how does one negotiate spaces where conformity and assimilation is the order of the day?
Resistance to including differing dialects into “standard” communication is often a reaction against the incoherence, miscomprehension, and sometimes vulgarity present in the discourses comprising the contact zone. I am from a southern state in India and my community, which has historically been an underclass, speaks a hybrid Urdu. Compared to the refined Urdu of the northern states, ours is what some may call ‘ghetto’. Because our state runs along the Western Ghats, the faulted edge of the Deccan Plateau, the dialect is called Ghati Urdu among its users as a way to distinguish between the more polite Hyderabadi Urdu or the courtly Urdu of Lucknow. Ghati Urdu is a mix of Urdu, Kannada and who knows what else ( I heard my Afghan friend use a Ghati word and turns out ‘wanti’ means “all alone” to Pushto speakers as well). But more importantly, it is the dialect of an under represented under-class. No one from my father’s then village, now a bustling college town, was invited to speak in local universities or to represent the interest of the Ghati Urdu speaking minority in local elections. Nor is their a strong desire to preserve Ghati Urdu in all of its corrupt glory; the speakers of the language do not hold the catastrophic communal upheavals and political persecutions of the North as part of their history. At the time of the Partition,when the muslims in the north were debating whether they should cross the river of blood into Pakistan, the Ghati Urdu speakers among other Southern muslims dug in their heels and embraced familiar miseries and lack of opportunities. This collective act of what could be seen as solidarity or loyalty did not, however, lead to acceptance or assimilation. Not being officially recognized as a discrete or separate group by the immediately larger community that one belongs to seems to happen often enough. My recognition of all things Ghati only happened here in the US. I recognize that Ghati Urdu is limiting; I cannot think critically or argue a complex point in it. I am not aware of any poems in Ghati Urdu. What I do know is that taking high poetry and corrupting it with the injection of Ghati Urdu is so commonplace that it has ceased to be clever. For example, a song on good travels  –
 Kawn hasta hai phoolon me chip kar…(who hides and laughs among the flowers) is changed to –
Kawn hagta hai phoolon me chip kar…( who hides and defecates among the flowers).
There is a profusion of poetry on the higher aspirations and sensibilities of people in Urdu. The only poetry I can imagine being framed in Ghati Urdu would at best be rhymes about hooking up, pranking someone or getting robbed — in short, the human condition after cynicism and apathy have set in. It is a strange sort of tabula rasa where only the crude and simple exist. Because I belong to both discourse communities, a few lines of Faiz Ahmed Faiz can leave me breathless and the subverted versions of all things wholesome, like shown above, brings on the kind of belly laugh that can only be construed as mean-spirited. My inability to perform higher-order mental activity in Ghati Urdu does not mean that someone from the Ghati ghetto could not lead a revolutionary movement. Perhaps, following a Freirean education model of dialogue-driven development of concepts could take Ghati Urdu speakers from literacy to critical consciousness. Perhaps a collective project for the common good would enoble Ghati Urdu from where it now languishes. We can never know the impact of a discourse community until it is granted entrance into the contact zone. Similarly, a discourse community can be wholly unmindful of its own dynamic powers until it has to call upon its resources in confronting the appraisal and opposition endemic to the contact zone.
The oral history of African American people, which resonates in the artistic expression of Black culture to the present time, includes rhyming, word play and semantic inversion. Dozens and trash-talk, ingenious ways of insulting a person, are also part of this rich oral tradition that have grown and enriched modern popular culture. The good, the bad and the ugly are laid bare when discourse communities engage with one another. Hip Hop originates from the marginalized subculture of the South Bronx and constitutes a broad array of the artistic expressions of Black and Latino youth. Even though these art forms contrast and clash, they have a common association with the violence and poverty that give them a shared historical context. Spoken word, coming out of the Harlem Renaissance and now a popular form of poetic expression in college campuses everywhere, employs the technique of movement, rhythm and audience participation in much the same way as when black people during slavery found entertainment in two contestants exchanging yo’ mama snaps.
Engaging with others in the contact zone can be hugely transformative; black discourse communities have been empowered and in return have enriched human understanding. What remains key is communication and the desire to hear one another. There is something far greater at stake than the possible negligence of academic standards of communication. When the character from Kathryn Stockett’s The Help tells a neglected child “You is kind. You is smart. You is important,” one would hope that the audience is moved more by the human sentiments behind the words rather than human error.
One’s identity is rarely characterized by a single, discrete, discourse community but more by a series of overlapping, indistinct, and possibly contradictory ones. Instead of endeavoring to “fix” the use of language, the goal should be to complicate it. People should not have to inhabit the specifications of any one form and method of discourse in order to be heard and accepted. Training one’s self to accept and comprehend differing discourses encourages a hesitant and tenuous relationship with language. Confrontation, while important to the contact zone, must be tempered with cooperation which remains the bedrock for change and reform. Extending acceptance and recognition to the literary arts of the contact zone is among the first demonstrations of cooperation.
The 1613 work of the colonized Andean, Guaman Poma, is a twelve hundred page letter addressed to King Phillip III in an ungrammatical and expressive Spanish mixed in with Quecha. It is a haunting reminder of what gets lost when voices are marginalized. The manuscript holds concrete collaborations between people, specifically, the use of a conqueror’s language by a conquered subject to construct a parodic and oppositional representation of the conqueror’s own speech. Guaman Poma’s work disappeared until 1912 when after its accidental discovery in Copenhagen, a paper was written and presented in London. It was much later still before Western scholars found ways to access the text and celebrate it as “the extraordinary intercultural tour de force that it was” (Pratt). But this happened 350 years later, ages after the time and miles away from the place the author had hoped to impact. A fixation on form and rule can be interpreted as one more strategy in the turning away from the metaphoric extended hand.
















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Intellectual Judo: Framing the Debate Between Skeptics and Believers
December 1, 2013
The following post, while it does not deal with parenting per se, is an example of the intellectual training we should be giving to our kids to prepare them for all of the hucksters trying to push their own brand of religious snake oil on them.  Just as we ought to teach our children to defend themselves physically, we must prepare them for intellectual self-defense.

Very often debates between freethinkers and the followers of the proselytizing religions become stuck in the mire of abstract metaphysics. While it is true that a ‘foundation up’ resolution to the question of the existence of God could have important implications to our lived experience, I think it makes more sense to go in the other direction and assess the evidence for specific religious claims that are being urged upon us.
If person X is claiming that I need to believe that Jesus died for my sins and was resurrected ‘on the third day’ so that, if I believe in him, I will gain eternal admittance to heaven and avoid eternal punishment, that is a much more existentially compelling claim to investigate than generic questions about whether there is a creator because if I get the answer wrong the stakes are definitely much higher (either a life burdened by unnecessary rituals and codes of behavior or eternal hellfire). Getting the question of whether there is a creator wrong, in abstraction, is a lower stakes affair- the mere existence of a creator does not imply adherence to a specific code of conduct nor that one ought to have any specific expectations regarding an afterlife.
The traditional approach to these debates, focusing on foundational issues in logic such as necessity and possibility and building up ever more byzantine arguments to support or negate the affirmation that a god or goddess exists seems like a very obtuse way of confronting the issue. It is a methodology that seems self-evident to people who view the only living options as ‘particular religion x or atheism/non-belief.’ This is not surprising because these types of discourse have historically developed in the context of a single dominant religious tradition being contested by skeptics.
I don’t think it makes sense to proceed in this manner from a position of lived religious pluralism. Because when there are a large number of living alternatives that each make specific claims about historical occurrences and the nature of reality and that each demand of us adherence to specific codes of behavior, it behooves the investigator with limited time to investigate these specific claims which are, to a great extent, more easily soluble than to engage in abstract speculation that has a good chance of not even being materially relevant to lived experience even if resolved.
To be specific, if I had good reason to believe that Jesus was resurrected, that would be much more compelling than abstract speculation about whether there is a creator. Similarly, what initially compelled me about the Qur’an was specific, concrete claims it made that I believe at the time to be risky predictions that turned out to be correct. I believed in the claims about Haman that have been readily debunked here. I was also impressed by the prophecy that begins Surah Rum and by the apparent knowledge that the author of the Qur’an had about ancient civilizations such as that of the ‘Ad people. I have since come to realize that the historical claims are incorrect (the chronology in particular is quite mucked up) and that the aforementioned prophecy is most likely a lucky guess. This, combined with numerous scientific inaccuracies, leads me to reject the Qur’an as being evidential of any kind of supernatural reality. With this rejection, I can categorically rule out the claims made by Muslims upon my credulity with far greater finality than I could if I happened to ‘win’ a debate about the existence of God. Similarly, the numerous historical issues regarding the composition and veracity of the gospels and the contradictions between the claims made therein and well-established historical fact give me a similar warrant to categorically rule out the claims made by evangelical Christians. To my lights, this seems to be a much more practical methodology than debate over abstract metaphysics and is capable of being extended to any religious claims that touch upon historical matters or affairs of empirical science. Scientific claims made in Hindu scriptures can be debunked and psychological claims made by various Buddhist sects can be scrutinized without engaging in the minutiae of logical dissection.
Besides the fruitfulness of an approach grounded in the specificity of religious claims, the more abstract foundationalist approach is not preferable because it is directly undermined by the reality of this specificity. Even within the various religious traditions there are so many competing definitions of ‘God’ that a compelling argument against the existence of one would not disqualify the others. Some definitions are so constructed that there is simply no way of determining whether such a being exists. There are some serious differences between how Allah is conceived in Sunni Islam and in non-Sunni Islam, for example. The belief that Allah will be seen in the afterlife is a credal issue between the Sunnis and the non-Sunnis (Shiah, Mutazilah, Ibadis). This belief carries with it all kinds of metaphysical implications that must be taken into account during any debate on whether God exists. In short, the question is not whether God exists but which gods and goddesses, if any, exist. It makes no sense to debate with specificity over a recondite subject when the basic point in contention can be resolved authoritatively by an appeal to empirical evidence or a logical analysis of a less abstract claim.
A focus on foundational metaphysics masks a shift in the burden of proof from the proselytizer hawking a particular religion to the skeptic who is asked to compare the reasonableness of foundational beliefs regarding the nature of causality, time, and other metaphysical subjects. In fact, the missionaries are asking us to believe in a very specific range of religious claims, not submit to an agnostic-tinged deism. The very specificity of the claims involved requires increasing amounts of evidence to justify belief in them. Even within a particular religion there are competing claims as to what the afterlife is like, the specific answers to particular moral questions, the finer points religious ritual, and even the fundamental nature of deity being propitiated (compare Reconstructionist Judaism to Orthodox Judaism, for example) These claims are made with extreme seriousness and often made a point of sectarian contention. As freethinkers, we should do the evangelists no favors by shifting away some of the burden of proof unto our own shoulders (why should the onus be on us to provide a coherent account of causality or a plausible cosmology?) and should instead press forward with our skepticism about specific claims. After all, can we really believe that Muhammad rode a flying horse into space?
















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Religion won’t save your soul but atheism will save your self-respect
November 24, 2013
I happen to scroll up the chat window, to the very first message my friend had sent me in 2009 and it started like so –
Assalam aleikum wa ramatullahi wa baraktuh,
I hope you, (husband), and the kiddos are doing well. My best wishes and congrats on the new addition to your family.  He’s adorable, Mash’Allah. May Allah (swt) shower your family with His mercy and blessings and may He increase you and your family in iman. Ameen.

Granted its just like four lines long here but in a narrow chat window, its a veritable skyscraper of regurgitated claptrap. But wait, my friend was having man troubles and my response was an even more ascendant pile of horse shit.

As salaam alaikum D. Please don’t think i forgot about you. I have been thinking a lot about you.
I spoke to [L, hubby inserted for dramatic effect] and his opinion of  [M, one of those unreachable holy dudes] is that he is not looking to get into a relationship. L’s opinion is based on past conversations he has had with M on marriage but he is aware that M does not generally tell him much about such matters.
I wanted to give you a more definite answer but i doubt i’ll have any luck.
Please forgive me but i feel compelled to share some insights with you. To have strong feelings for a person can infuse one with a certain kind of energy and with a supple heart. You will find yourself moved by the smallest of things. This is a good time to open your heart up to the world. Read more about our Prophet and his people.
You are very young and you, as all women, have a lot to do. I am sure that you know well that life is not easy. Give yourself time. Let your love be a cooling rain for yourself and others.
I have to admit, I threw up a little in my mouth. How was I okay with sublimating all the shit out of everything?
















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Cognitive Dissonance & Parental Evil
October 23, 2013
This is a guest post, penned by Muhammad The Atheist. Tweet him your thoughts at @MoTheAtheist
The only thing that is required for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing…..
If one looks at the history of human social advancement, it’s the story of people standing up and fighting for that which they deemed to be right and true, be it encouraging emancipation of slaves by Mohammad to a civil war to eliminate its scourge – from elevation of women from property to actual citizens to suffrage to the on-going struggle for equality. As such I believe it to be all of our duty to stand up and fight for what we believe to be right, to push the boundaries of what is permissible , to rail against injustices around us and move the world forward. Not doing so would be an abdication of our responsibility to not only our fellow man but to the generations that follow.
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has – Margaret Mead
Growing up, the most important formative influences we have are primarily those of our siblings and parents. What they tell us and how they interact is regarded as gospel. As with most relationships being open to others while leading to deep, long-lasting connections also conversely leaves one open to abuse and manipulation. Being able to view those closest to us objectively is inevitably a struggle.
There is a fundamental disconnect , a cognitive dissonance prevalent among many non-western societies wherein parents are regarded as beyond reproach. Just as priests invoke their divine mandate parents invoke their right for respect and obedience without any factual basis. Like religion this conditioning usually begins at a young age often with the aid of religion itself (Hadith: Heaven lies at the feet of ones mother). Contrast that with other relationships we enter into voluntarily, be it friendships, romantic relationships , marriage or whatever else – the bar set is closer to mutual respect and caring not respect by virtue of the relationship itself. If a friend or husband or wife forced one to follow their will, be it via emotional blackmail, force or other means of coercion it would generally be regarded as an abusive relationship nothing more. Extend the same to the parent-child relationship and more often then not it’s justified with ‘they do it out of love’ or ‘they seek to protect us’. Somehow when a parent abuses the trust and respect we place in them we’re forced to justify and rationalize their behavior instead of calling it out for what it is.
Paraphrasing Sam Harris simply because someone claims to be or even actually is acting out of love does not by fiat make their actions moral or any less repugnant then other motives. A father may choose to murder their homosexual child out of love – logical from the point of view of someone viewing homosexuality as a path to eternal suffering (hellfire). Even though they experienced love and acted out of it, does not take away from the crime they committed, the barbarians they are or the punishment they deserve.
How exactly are grown people controlled by others.. if one were to actually examine the phenomena dispassionately it invariably involves the same themes – themes that are often echoed in emotional abuse scenarios.
Growing up as a child one is taught how sacrosanct ones relationship with their parents is. Obedience to their opinions is invariably expected and required. As one enters adolescence the natural transition involves establishing self-control over our own lives. If you’re even remotely familiar with the methods employed to control others the most crucial aspect is preventing the victim from believing that they can exercise control over their own destiny.. thus the appearance of control must be delayed and sabotaged. In an abusive situation often the abuser controls financial power, dictates permissible social interactions (people one can befriend) , so on and so forth. The missive is usually of love (I do so because I love you) but the end-goal of control is anything but.
A significant portion of the associated culture is setup to reinforce this control. The idea of keeping ones children close – most live with their parents, the stigma that is culturally enforced particularly on women striking out on their own. By conditioning a child to accept their parents word as gospel and reinforcing that societally, where trying to establish ones own identity is associated with immorality; the open prison they inhabit is further entrenched. The damage this does to ones psyche is evident wherein the raison d’etre of life by many young women is considered to be landing a mate… What percentage of these parents have you seen encouraging their children to move out to make a life of their own on their own terms? Consider the growing experiences one has , the sense of confidence one gains by knowing ones capabilities and exercising them instead of being treating as chattel traded from father to husband?
For those that actually choose to stand up for themselves besides the social stigmas hinted at above a deep campaign of emotional blackmail and abuse invariably follows. As shocking as it may seem, having to consider ones own parents as abusive, please lets call a spade a spade. What is evil is evil regardless of how much we care about those displaying the behavior. Unlike celluloid life usually involves villains that do not believe they are in the wrong, that they in fact are standing up for what is good and true, despite their convictions the definition of evil does not change.
Evil is unspectacular and always human, And shares our bed and eats at our own table. – W. H. Auden
Beyond recognizing bad behavior among those that attempt to control us we also must be aware that we are not responsible for their happiness (repeat after me … I am not responsible for the happiness of others….), for their life-choices which led to their health problems , for the stigma’s they and the culture propagates. We’ve often seen the formulaic soap where-in a parent at their death bed, as a dying wish, asks their child to ‘obey’… we’ve also all laughed it off as being idiotic and unreal. On the other hand threats such as these are common place and aren’t decried as being nothing more then a perverted and sick attempt at using ones owns life to gain control over another. The level of perversion apparently has no limits. Contrast the behavior of a loving parent with that of a controlling one, if your child was in distress was being forced against their will and you were on your death bed would your instinct be to emotionally beat down the child into submission or to use your dying breath to liberate them and free them of the pain they were undergoing. The definition of love does not involve the words ‘obey my wishes’ but rather involves a deep empathy where one is literally willing to walk over a river of fire to assuage the pain of a loved one. Consider the situation where you do have that feeling for your significant other but their reaction is how do I manipulate your affection to achieve my goals. Most of us will instinctively revile the cynical and manipulative person involved and be repulsed by them but when a parent exhibits the exact same behavior…
Another aspect of the same is manipulating someone the victim loves to achieve their goals , you can’t leave (a bad marriage) because… think of the children? or I will deprive you of the children or I will make them suffer like no other so on and so forth. Identifying the evil inherent in these patterns of behavior is also casual but extending it to a parental situation where they threaten to deprive you of your own family (siblings, mother, father whatever), where a father beats down a mother (physically, emotionally or mentally) to force compliance among a child is given a pass. Instead of recognizing those being used to promote coercion as willing participants or victims that have long since given up on being able to stand up and fight, we accept the situation. Consider a younger sibling of yours being treated this way by their significant other, would you not raze down hell and heaven itself to set them free? Why is a father not treated with the same passionate defiance when he seeks to force his own agenda; at the expense of his own family?
One of the primary reasons it is hard to break free is the life-long shackles that have been chained upon us since birth. When most realistic possibilities are cordoned off as being immoral, unconscionable and unthinkable when actually standing up and fighting is deemed immoral we enter an Orwellian realm where war is peace… evil is good and control is love.
For those of us in such situations, not only is there a dire need to recognize reality for what it is but to understand that there are no actual limits imposed upon us. Those perceived limits are simply an illusion designed to enslave and control us.
In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.
 William Blake
For those wishing to pursue an unorthodox career ranging from Hollywood to Archeology to modeling to whatever else – it is your life to live and not of your society. To those wishing to marry someone that would horrify their families delicate sensibilities again – it is your life not theirs. To those that aren’t of the mainstream heterosexual proclivities it is your right to live your life free happy and in the open, those that love you will celebrate you, those that don’t never will. To those that despise the belief-set of their parents again, your own life, your own beliefs… To those that need to get away from regressive families but feel that would be an act of abandonment, you live but once and as a happy, complete and healthy individual can do far more.
In conclusion, by following patterns of control and abuse parents condemn their children to stunted emotional growth, to being in future abusive situations (where one grows up expecting to be controlled, where power resides with another the corruption of that power by and large is inevitable), to living an unfulfilled and bitter life. The moral imperative when viewing injustice, when viewing someone in a position of power, abuse others is to stand up and fight for the weak, for the oppressed – not doing so is nothing short of moral cowardice. Too often, those of us that view or experience behaviors that are downright criminal condone it simply because of the supposed sacredness of the parent-child relationship. There is a cost associated with this acquiescence to evil , in human terms as well as in societal terms, as we all have far too often seen.
If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality. ~Bishop Desmond Tutu
















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Both Broken
October 21, 2013
They must train doctors to drop their impatience with human frailty long enough to strike a dulcet tone and tell a parent that their child is indeed broken. I had a car mechanic do the same once, “It doesn’t look good and I can’t tell you that it can be fixed.” I wanted to put my arm around him and tell him that it will be alright.
 Impairments and disorders are fickle in how they introduce themselves. Some come through the front door covered in mud and sit with their feet on the coffee table. Others slither in through a gap or crevice that I should’ve sealed. Mother and child fade away. Well meaning friends wanted to know in what way can the world make room for this alien way of being that has a name. I told them what they could live with — I and my son had to make way, get out of the way, because the world was one way and we two another. He, always lost and I forever searching him out.
 Utterly alone and in it together, we lie with eyes looking at nothing, black holes into which everything that ever was and could never be collapsing. My mind reaches out for the impossible because it’s all I know. Its what happens when the ordinary, everyday becomes spectacularly miraculous. The whole planet saturated with cheap, abundant marvels and my little boy stands outside all of that. Isn’t the world a lonely enough place then to win this insane lottery of utter alienation. “Its a test” they say. Affirmations of my special status in the after-life, my get-out-of-hell-free card, all cover uglier thoughts — I must have done something to deserve it. This because children only amplify or fix one’s state of being.
 In my muslim community there were two women. One’s child had down syndrome and the other’s, autism. The doctor’s wife became saintly, the custodian’s wife whispered a nuisance before she dropped out of the social scene. Folks so very obsessed with reward and punishment look for reasons and patterns. Their faith is the lucky coin in their pocket. They fit all of existence on perfect little discs and rub it for strength and pleasure. Me? All I had ever known and had ever been told ran like ash between my fingers.
My son and I live inside awkward moments — the brief faltering before the steadying, the inchoate fog before thought, the stutter before purposeful speech. Its like we were getting ready to happen but didn’t. Like some aborted space mission we are fantastic yet interrupted. I walk into my house late one night and find him sitting, resplendent in his indifference to all, by the door. One fleeting look asking “and where have you been all this while” before he hydroplanes into his mind’s space. Another time I peer through a fever, my chest tightened by some vice, coughing till everything hurt and he sits beside me in my bed, the same spot he was hours ago. The impossibility of his always being there with me leaves me undone. What sort of love is this? Where does it begin and where does it end? No ready answers. And no questions, not really.
















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Ex-Muslims of North America
Losing my religion: Clergy who no longer believe gather online http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/religion/losing-my-religion-clergy-who-no-longer-believe-gather-online/2014/04/24/401e07d8-cbcf-11e3-b81a-6fff56bc591e_story.html
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Catherine Dunphy came to seminary in her mid-20s, full of passion to work in the service of the Catholic Church. By the time she left, for many...
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'I have to help the people of Bangladesh' Asif Mohiuddin is one of Bangladesh's most famous bloggers. As an open atheist in a mainly Islamic country, he has been attacked and thrown in jail for his beliefs. DW caught up with him after his recent move to Germany. http://www.dw.de/i-have-to-help-the-people-of-bangladesh/a-17581354
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One killed as Moroccan leftists, Islamists clash http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/2/8/99812/World/Region/One-killed-as-Moroccan-leftists,-Islamists-clash.aspx
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One,killed,as,Moroccan,leftists,,Islamists,clash,-,Region,-,World
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Jesus & Mo on their partners
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Islamists kill second Somali lawmaker, threaten more attacks Islamist rebels shot dead a Somali lawmaker on Tuesday, a day after blowing up one of his colleagues, and vowed to keep killing politicians and wreck efforts to secure the country. http://english.alarabiya.net/en/News/2014/04/22/Islamists-kill-second-Somali-lawmaker-threaten-more-attacks.html
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7 Ways Westerners Can Help Ex-Muslims http://www.patheos.com/blogs/camelswithhammers/2014/04/7-ways-westerners-can-help-ex-muslims/
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Secular Thought of the Day My people are going to learn the principles of democracy the dictates of truth and the teachings of science. Superstition must go. Let them worship as they will, every man can follow his own conscience provided it does not interfere with sane reason or bid him act against the liberty of his fellow men.” ― Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938)
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Pakistan’s Islamists Returning with a vengeance Seven years after the Red Mosque affair, a renowned extremist re-emerges http://www.economist.com/news/asia/21601047-seven-years-after-red-mosque-affair-renowned-extremist-re-emerges-returning-vengeance
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Scripture of the Day Quran 7:50 And the companions of the Fire will call to the companions of Paradise, "Pour upon us some water or from whatever Allah has provided you." They will say, "Indeed, Allah has forbidden them both to the disbelievers." Quran 47:15 shall dwell for ever in the Fire, and be given, to drink, boiling water, so that it cuts up their bowels (to pieces)? Admin's Note: More torture from Allah - on how either the unbelievers will have boiling water poured down their throats or suffer from dehydration
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How to go to Brazil , check out the world cup and not spend a dime of your own money - praise be to the invisible guy in the sky http://www.gofundme.com/dawahtrip
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Salamu Alaykum Warahmatullahi Wabaraktu ***DAWAH TIME** **DAWAH TIME*** **DAWAH TIME** Backgroud: My name is Jabir Mohamed, and I am currently...
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Neil deGrasse Tyson Said Earth Is 4.5 Billion Years Old on TV: Creationists' Heads Explode It did not take long for the creationists to take issue with Neil DeGrasse Tyson and the latest episode of Cosmos on Fox. Why you ask? Well, because Tyson dared to declare the age of the earth to be 4.5 billion years old. http://www.alternet.org/belief/neil-degrasse-tyson-says-planet-45-billion-years-old-national-tv-creationists-heads-explode
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The evolutionary tree of myth & religion
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#ExMuslim Meetups this weekend - email us for more info 25th April - Chicago, IL - chicago@exmna.org 26th April - New York, NY - newyork@exmna.org 26th April - Washington, DC - washingtondc@exmna.org 26th April - Houston, TX - houston@exmna.org

Jesus & Mo on Muslims not being a monolith http://www.jesusandmo.net/2014/04/23/group/
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Muslim drivers at Cleveland airport refuse to drive cabs with Gay Games advertising Roughly 25 Muslim drivers dispatched to Cleveland Hopkins International Airport are refusing to drive cabs adorned with advertising for the region’s upcoming Gay Games, citing religious reasons. http://www.foxnews.com/us/2014/04/18/muslim-drivers-at-cleveland-airport-refuse-to-drive-cabs-with-gay-games/
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Disclaimer: All statements in this article reflect the author's position and opinions. They in no way represent the Army's views, concepts, or regulatory guidance. Someone once asked me how many Humanists there are in the Army. I answered,
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When Muslims renounce their faith Fearing ostracism by their family, or even death, many former Muslims keep their disbelief secret. A German organization offers support to people who leave Islam for another religion, or for none. http://www.dw.de/when-muslims-renounce-their-faith/a-17574172
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Empowering? Really? http://wp.me/p40KmF-1o
When I asked this question as a little girl, here is the answer I was given: “Women are just created by Allah in such a way that the responsibility lies with them. With great beauty comes great responsibility.” Hahaha, what the fuck, honestly.…

Even Stephen: Islam vs Christianity Old but awesome segment from The Daily Show https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_tc2H6SbJY
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Colbert and Carell debate which religion is best. Segment from Jon Stewart Show.
Colbert and Carell debate which religion is best. Segment from Jon Stewart Show.

QATAR: 'MY SLEEP IS MY BREAK': EXPLOITATION OF MIGRANT DOMESTIC WORKERS IN QATAR More than half of all women migrant workers in Qatar are employed in private homes. Qatar’s laws do not limit the number of hours a day or the number of days a week that domestic workers can be asked to work. At its worst extreme, the abuse of domestic workers can involve physical and sexual abuse. In some cases, their treatment can amount to forced labour and human trafficking. This Amnesty International report examines the way in which domestic workers are failed by serious flaws in Qatar’s laws and policies. http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/MDE22/004/2014/en
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More than half of all women migrant workers in Qatar are employed in private homes.
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Happy Earth Day!! Be kind to your Earth. It's the only home we have https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=923jxZY2NPI
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Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/thesaganseries Twitter - http://twitter.com/reidgower G+ - http://bit.ly/VpHzQh The Sagan Series is an...
Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/thesaganseries Twitter - http://twitter.com/reidgower G+ - http://bit.ly/VpHzQh The Sagan Series is an...

ables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fantasies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after years relieved of them. - Hypatia of Alexandria (350-415 AD)
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The 'Halal Version' Of The 'Happy British Muslims' Video Gets Rid Of All The Women https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0c9DWVuOHI
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Alternative version of the Happy Muslims video by The Honesty Policy. Simply trying to find a middle ground to express ourselves without using...
Alternative version of the Happy Muslims video by The Honesty Policy. Simply trying to find a middle ground to express ourselves without using...

Flipping the tables - (via https://www.facebook.com/TrueLebaneseFeminist/photos/a.513913795320077.118655.441363492575108/744102392301215/)
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Ahmaddiya Islam, Animal Rights, Animal Sacrifice, Eid ul Adha, Human Rights, Islam, Pakistan, Religion, Uncategorized
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Eid ul Adha: Sacrifice For A Psychotic God
October 14, 2013
Time to stab this little bastard!
Time to stab this little bastard!

It’s that time of the year again when streets are bloody and meat is eaten like there’s no tomorrow. It’s Eid ul Adha. The Islamic festival of animal sacrifice. The ritual has it’s origin in the Koran when Abraham was asked by God to sacrifice his most beloved son,Ismael. When Ismael was about 13, God tried to test Abraham’s faith. So one night God showed up in Abraham’s dream and commanded him to sacrifice his only son,Ismael,who was born after many years of prayers. It is important to note here that Islam and Christianity both agree that Abraham was commanded by God to sacrifice his son,but what these two religions don’t agree on is the identity of the son. Islam says it was Ismael who was offered for sacrifice while Christians say that Isaac was the son who was being sacrificed.
“After these things God tested Abraham, and said to him, ‘Abraham!’ And he said, ‘Here am I.’ He said, ‘Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering upon one of the mountains of which I shall tell you’.” (Genesis 22:1-2, R.S.V.)
Muslims argue that the Bible supports Ismael as the son who was offered for sacrifice because the Bible says “only son” (see above verse). Ismael was Abraham’s only son for 13 years, which would make it impossible for Isaac to be the child of sacrifice.
Anyway,back to the story. So,what happens when this guy dreams up voices from God who is telling him to sacrifice his only beloved son? Of course he went along with it! The guy must be on some hardcore drugs to actually act on his dream. A DREAM! Which only compels us to ask,did he ALWAYS act upon his dreams? Damn,there should be a whole new chapter in the Koran about this guy’s dreams but unfortunately for us (and fortunately for the rest of his family),there isn’t. Maybe it was just once,right?
Anyway,so Abraham being the obedient believer he was,never questioning a thing,went ahead and told his folks about the dream that he just had. What happened then? Did those folks try to talk him out of this madness? Of course they didn’t! Either this guy was living in a neighborhood of Crazy Town or offering your son for a sacrifice wasn’t frowned upon in that society. But wait,he just couldn’t drag his son to the place of the sacrifice and cut his throat,right? He had to be thoughtful about it. Right. He had to ask for his son’s consent. TIME FOR ISMAEL’S TEST OF FAITH,BABY!
Is Ismael’s faith mature enough? Is he an obedient believer? So when Abraham consulted Ismael and told him about his dreams of slaughtering him,Ismael was overjoyed and couldn’t wait to be slaughtered. No kidding. To be clear,the little courageous boy did not show even the slightest hesitation. What else do you expect from a 13 year old? The kid just trusted his dad too much! Ismael was willing to be sacrificed and asked Abraham to “do what you have been commanded”. We all know where this is going,right? BAD PARENTING! No,scratch that. FUCKING INSANE PARENTS. Yeah,that’s it.
Finally when the day comes,Abraham offers his son for sacrifice and cheerfully cuts his throat open only to be disappointed to see the boy still alive. Turns out Ismael was replaced with a lamb by God in a last ditch effort to improve his PR. And today millions of people follow this demented ritual every year in the Muslim world. Expensive animals are bought and then sacrificed in the name of God who somehow feels pleased every time a goat gets beheaded.
Eid ul Adha is one of the most barbaric,medieval festivals we still get to witness in today’s modern world. If you’re not turned off by the blood soaked streets and the disturbing celebration after the slaughter of the sacrificial animals,the mythical event from where this ritual originates is quite gruesome itself. Just imagine your dad happens to hear voices in his dream one day and decided he had to drag you up on a mountain and slaughter you. Now imagine that this is all part of his belief that he holds more dear than himself and his family. Imagine the psychological abuse on the son and how he instantly agrees to be sacrificed,which shows us exactly how dangerous such indoctrinated beliefs could be for an innocent child. Those who have had the distasteful experience of corporal punishment at home would know that sinking feeling when your father is about to grab that leather belt and give you a good beating. Now imagine if your father is doing that because he believes he’s pleasing God and you’re told to play along because you can’t question your father OR his imaginary friend.
Why would a perfect, all-knowing and merciful god need to ‘test’ anybody to prove their faith? And why would anyone want to worship a God who would test them in this way?
God goes one step ahead with his psychotic behavior in this story by commanding Abraham to sacrifice “only son whom he loves”. He doesn’t want you to sacrifice just anyone from your 24 children from your 13 wives. Oh no. God wants you to sacrifice your most beloved child. That’s what he tells Abraham in this story.
What kind of psychotic God is this? What kind of sick God wants a sacrifice of a child? What kind of twisted God would want a father to do that to his child? I know at this point some people would want to point out that Abraham’s son was replaced with a lamb and he didn’t get killed after all. Well then,what kind of perverted God would play a joke like that? Imagine this conversation between Abraham and Ismael after Ismael was replaced with a lamb.
“Oh, nevermind, God told me it was all just a big test. Good news is,we passed,son.”
“Pheeeew!  Thanks, dad!  What a relief!  Let’s go back to our father-son relationship but dad, first promise me you’ll never try to sacrifice me again? I nearly shat my pants!”
Today, parents kill their children because of ‘God’ or ‘angels’ or ‘witches‘ or ‘demons’ or ‘spirits‘ etc. None of these inhumane acts are justifiable in any way. These people are called insane. Abraham is no exception.
I come from a culturally Muslim family and this year I’ve managed to convinced my parents to skip animal sacrifice and instead donate to a struggling local school and an elderly care home. If you believe the whole point of Eid ul Adha is to give away generously to others and help those who need your help the most,then there are many ways to do that. You don’t necessarily have to take an animal’s life with your own hands and feel good about it. There are many causes and charities that you can donate to but beware,some Jihadi outfits out there are posing as Islamic charities/organizations and collect hides and donations from people on Eid,the money is used to fund Jihad. Don’t fall for them. Donate wisely.
Eid Mubarak!
















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Poll: What Do You See As The Biggest Threat To Our World Today? (You can select multiple answers)
September 24, 2013 







What Do You See As The Biggest Threat To Our World Today? (You can select multiple answers) (Poll Closed)


Climate Change  23.42%  (37 votes)





Islamism  20.25%  (32 votes)





Religion  17.09%  (27 votes)





Meteor Strike  2.53%  (4 votes)





Terrorism  14.56%  (23 votes)





Homosexuality  3.16%  (5 votes)





Weapons of Mass Destruction  18.99%  (30 votes)





Total Votes: 158






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Ahmaddiya Islam, Apostate, Asia, Blasphemy, Christianity, Christians, Church, Conservative Right, Drones, Human Rights, Islam, Jihad, Pakistan, Political Opinion, Pope, Religion, Shi'ite Islam, Taliban, Terrorism, Uncategorized
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The Sad Tale Of Pakistani Minorities
September 22, 2013
This article was also published at AAI
Pakistan is a country that celebrated Minorities Day in Canada – because it was too unsafe in Pakistan. That alone is enough for anyone to get a decent idea how bad the situation is for Pakistan’s minorities. Pakistan’s minorities have a long history of persecution,sometimes at the hands of Muslim hardliners and sometimes at the hands of the very State they pay taxes to for protecting their life and property. Today it seems there is little to no place for Pakistani minorities in the country that they helped create 66 years ago.
The trouble for Pakistani minorities started way back when Ahmaddiya Muslims were declared heretics and a huge persecution campaign was launched against them in Pakistan. The most memorable are the anti-Ahmaddiya riots of 1953. Jamaat-e-Islami was one of the notable parties that participated in the persecution campaign against Ahmaddiya Muslims and is still aggressively anti-Ahmaddiya today. Later Ahmaddiya Muslims were declared non-Muslims through an amendment in the constitution which gave Islamists the green signal to persecute Ahmaddiya Muslims,no questions asked. Another amendment was made in 1984 which restricted the freedom of the religion of Ahmaddiya Muslims even more. Today Ahmaddiya Muslims can face jail time (if they’re not lynched by a mob before that) just for identifying as Muslims or simply greeting someone with ‘Assalam-u-Aleikum’,an Islamic greeting. Most recently Pakistani police demolished domes of Ahmaddiya mosques in the central Punjab province. And this is nothing new. Pakistani police and State actors routinely deface Ahmaddiya graves and mosques. The grave of Pakistan’s only Noble Laureate Dr Abdus Salam was also defaced because he was an Ahmaddiya Muslim. The oppression that Pakistani media accuses of Indian forces in Kashmir is nothing in comparison to what Pakistani State puts it’s minorities through every day and which also goes unnoticed because Pakistani media avoids reporting on persecution of Ahmaddiyas out of fear of retaliation from Islamists. In short,Pakistan treats it’s Ahmaddiya Muslims the way Nazi Germany treated Jews and gypsies. Today Ahmaddiya Muslims have to fight State sponsored discrimination and persecution and also have to put up with the abuse,threats and violence from Muslims of other sects.
While Pakistani State was busy persecuting Ahmaddiya Muslims all this time,it has also been busy protecting Pakistan’s controversial blasphemy laws from any criticism or change. The blasphemy laws play a huge role in the persecution of Pakistani minorities where these laws are also often misused. Between 1986 and 2007, Pakistani authorities charged 647 people with blasphemy offences. Fifty percent of these were non-Muslims, who represent only 3% of Pakistan’s population. No judicial execution for blasphemy has ever occurred in Pakistan,but 20 of those charged were murdered. By 2010, the total number of people charged under these laws had grown to about 1274. The most recent case of blasphemy occurred in Karachi where a Christian man was mercilessly slaughtered by fellow Muslim worker for allegedly blaspheming against Islam’s Prophet.
The situation for Christians is just as worse. The most recent case of violence against Christians in Pakistan happened at 11:30 a.m on Sunday,22nd September when twin suicide blasts outside a 130-year-old Anglican church left 78 dead and over 100 injured. Many victims were children and women. Pope Francis called it an act of hate.  Pakistan quickly declined into a three day mourning when two of the biggest secular political parties MQM and ANP joined the call for mourning. Protests also erupted in different parts of Pakistan against the attack on the Church. But all this will do nothing to help improve the situation of minorities in Pakistan where Pakistani government is desperate to engage in ‘peace talks’ with the barbaric Taliban despite public outrage. Pakistani media routinely uses racist and derogatory language for Pakistani minorities. After the bombing of the church in Peshawar,a Pakistani channel ended up calling Christians ‘street sweepers’. The news channel’s Twitter account later tweeted an explanation but didn’t apologise. Hindus,Shi’ite Muslims and Sikhs also face more or less similar level of persecution in Pakistan simply on the basis of their religion.
To be fair,22nd September was a big day for Islamists. The weekend was one of the deadliest as Islamists attacked three different places at different time and managed to kill a glowing number of infidels. From Nairobi to Peshawar to Baghdad,Islamists slaughtered people they deem undesirable left and right. In Nairobi,Muslims were escorted to safety by Islamist terrorists and non-Muslims were asked the name of Prophet Muhammad’s mother. Those who didn’t know the answer received a free bullet in the head. And you thought shopping was boring?
The situation in Pakistan is only a small reminder of a far bigger threat the world faces today: Islamist terrorism. Those who tip toe around the reality of Islamic fanaticism and blame Western imperialism and drone strikes for Islamist terror are part of the problem,not part of the solution. It’s time for the world to wake up and face the reality – which it has to face sooner or later.
















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Creationism and censorship of evolution: US and UK
October 13, 2013















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Stampede on Bridge Kills 89 Indian Pilgrims
October 13, 2013















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The Liberty of Balochistan.
October 13, 2013















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Fatwa Say Wha? Taking Photos Is an Insult to Islam, Muftis Declare
October 13, 2013
They get more ridiculous every day.
















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Malala Yousafzai amazing answer on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
October 11, 2013















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I Had Been Hoping…
October 11, 2013















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OPCW Wins Nobel Prize Over Malala
October 11, 2013















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I Am Malala!
October 11, 2013















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Senior Pakistan Taliban Captured in Afghanistan
October 11, 2013















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Recent Posts
Eid ul Adha: Sacrifice For A Psychotic God
Creationism and censorship of evolution: US and UK
Stampede on Bridge Kills 89 Indian Pilgrims
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Fatwa Say Wha? Taking Photos Is an Insult to Islam, Muftis Declare

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Losing my religion: Clergy who no longer believe gather online http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/religion/losing-my-religion-clergy-who-no-longer-believe-gather-online/2014/04/24/401e07d8-cbcf-11e3-b81a-6fff56bc591e_story.html
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Catherine Dunphy came to seminary in her mid-20s, full of passion to work in the service of the Catholic Church. By the time she left, for many...
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'I have to help the people of Bangladesh' Asif Mohiuddin is one of Bangladesh's most famous bloggers. As an open atheist in a mainly Islamic country, he has been attacked and thrown in jail for his beliefs. DW caught up with him after his recent move to Germany. http://www.dw.de/i-have-to-help-the-people-of-bangladesh/a-17581354
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One killed as Moroccan leftists, Islamists clash http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/2/8/99812/World/Region/One-killed-as-Moroccan-leftists,-Islamists-clash.aspx
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One,killed,as,Moroccan,leftists,,Islamists,clash,-,Region,-,World
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Jesus & Mo on their partners
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Islamists kill second Somali lawmaker, threaten more attacks Islamist rebels shot dead a Somali lawmaker on Tuesday, a day after blowing up one of his colleagues, and vowed to keep killing politicians and wreck efforts to secure the country. http://english.alarabiya.net/en/News/2014/04/22/Islamists-kill-second-Somali-lawmaker-threaten-more-attacks.html
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7 Ways Westerners Can Help Ex-Muslims http://www.patheos.com/blogs/camelswithhammers/2014/04/7-ways-westerners-can-help-ex-muslims/
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Secular Thought of the Day My people are going to learn the principles of democracy the dictates of truth and the teachings of science. Superstition must go. Let them worship as they will, every man can follow his own conscience provided it does not interfere with sane reason or bid him act against the liberty of his fellow men.” ― Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938)
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Pakistan’s Islamists Returning with a vengeance Seven years after the Red Mosque affair, a renowned extremist re-emerges http://www.economist.com/news/asia/21601047-seven-years-after-red-mosque-affair-renowned-extremist-re-emerges-returning-vengeance
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Scripture of the Day Quran 7:50 And the companions of the Fire will call to the companions of Paradise, "Pour upon us some water or from whatever Allah has provided you." They will say, "Indeed, Allah has forbidden them both to the disbelievers." Quran 47:15 shall dwell for ever in the Fire, and be given, to drink, boiling water, so that it cuts up their bowels (to pieces)? Admin's Note: More torture from Allah - on how either the unbelievers will have boiling water poured down their throats or suffer from dehydration
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How to go to Brazil , check out the world cup and not spend a dime of your own money - praise be to the invisible guy in the sky http://www.gofundme.com/dawahtrip
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Salamu Alaykum Warahmatullahi Wabaraktu ***DAWAH TIME** **DAWAH TIME*** **DAWAH TIME** Backgroud: My name is Jabir Mohamed, and I am currently...
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Neil deGrasse Tyson Said Earth Is 4.5 Billion Years Old on TV: Creationists' Heads Explode It did not take long for the creationists to take issue with Neil DeGrasse Tyson and the latest episode of Cosmos on Fox. Why you ask? Well, because Tyson dared to declare the age of the earth to be 4.5 billion years old. http://www.alternet.org/belief/neil-degrasse-tyson-says-planet-45-billion-years-old-national-tv-creationists-heads-explode
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The evolutionary tree of myth & religion
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#ExMuslim Meetups this weekend - email us for more info 25th April - Chicago, IL - chicago@exmna.org 26th April - New York, NY - newyork@exmna.org 26th April - Washington, DC - washingtondc@exmna.org 26th April - Houston, TX - houston@exmna.org

Jesus & Mo on Muslims not being a monolith http://www.jesusandmo.net/2014/04/23/group/
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Muslim drivers at Cleveland airport refuse to drive cabs with Gay Games advertising Roughly 25 Muslim drivers dispatched to Cleveland Hopkins International Airport are refusing to drive cabs adorned with advertising for the region’s upcoming Gay Games, citing religious reasons. http://www.foxnews.com/us/2014/04/18/muslim-drivers-at-cleveland-airport-refuse-to-drive-cabs-with-gay-games/
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Disclaimer: All statements in this article reflect the author's position and opinions. They in no way represent the Army's views, concepts, or regulatory guidance. Someone once asked me how many Humanists there are in the Army. I answered,
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When Muslims renounce their faith Fearing ostracism by their family, or even death, many former Muslims keep their disbelief secret. A German organization offers support to people who leave Islam for another religion, or for none. http://www.dw.de/when-muslims-renounce-their-faith/a-17574172
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Empowering? Really? http://wp.me/p40KmF-1o
When I asked this question as a little girl, here is the answer I was given: “Women are just created by Allah in such a way that the responsibility lies with them. With great beauty comes great responsibility.” Hahaha, what the fuck, honestly.…

Even Stephen: Islam vs Christianity Old but awesome segment from The Daily Show https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_tc2H6SbJY
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Colbert and Carell debate which religion is best. Segment from Jon Stewart Show.
Colbert and Carell debate which religion is best. Segment from Jon Stewart Show.

QATAR: 'MY SLEEP IS MY BREAK': EXPLOITATION OF MIGRANT DOMESTIC WORKERS IN QATAR More than half of all women migrant workers in Qatar are employed in private homes. Qatar’s laws do not limit the number of hours a day or the number of days a week that domestic workers can be asked to work. At its worst extreme, the abuse of domestic workers can involve physical and sexual abuse. In some cases, their treatment can amount to forced labour and human trafficking. This Amnesty International report examines the way in which domestic workers are failed by serious flaws in Qatar’s laws and policies. http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/MDE22/004/2014/en
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More than half of all women migrant workers in Qatar are employed in private homes.
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Happy Earth Day!! Be kind to your Earth. It's the only home we have https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=923jxZY2NPI
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Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/thesaganseries Twitter - http://twitter.com/reidgower G+ - http://bit.ly/VpHzQh The Sagan Series is an...
Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/thesaganseries Twitter - http://twitter.com/reidgower G+ - http://bit.ly/VpHzQh The Sagan Series is an...

ables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fantasies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after years relieved of them. - Hypatia of Alexandria (350-415 AD)
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The 'Halal Version' Of The 'Happy British Muslims' Video Gets Rid Of All The Women https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0c9DWVuOHI
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Alternative version of the Happy Muslims video by The Honesty Policy. Simply trying to find a middle ground to express ourselves without using...
Alternative version of the Happy Muslims video by The Honesty Policy. Simply trying to find a middle ground to express ourselves without using...

Flipping the tables - (via https://www.facebook.com/TrueLebaneseFeminist/photos/a.513913795320077.118655.441363492575108/744102392301215/)
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Do You Believe in Magic (Part 2)
April 20, 2014
CEU

Before I start I would like to thank you all for your patience with me as I dropped off the face of the earth for a few weeks there by interrupting my blogging. I am back now and do hope you continue to enjoy my writing.






Continuing on the topic of Magic, allow me to share with you the above picture which has not been altered except to add the description at the bottom. These are the men of much religious authority in Saudi Arabia. The function of these men is to patrol the streets, malls and essentially everywhere they possibly can. They do this by guidance and in order to carry on the seerah of Mohammed, to enforce what they deem to be virtue and prevent what they determine to be vice.
The picture above was taken in the time frame of the 21st century, might I add. The men of religion are keeping up to date with the latest in their religious education so as to not fall too far behind on their knowledge base – all evidence based too…or is it?
You might have heard of reports coming out of countries like Saudi, involving men and women being sentenced to death through the ever-so humane manner of beheading after being implicated of performing sorcery and/or witchcraft.
Most educated, well reasoning and rational people would laugh at such an accusation and immediately dismiss it. But the palpable horror of the reality that plagues countries controlled by men like those in the above picture who enrol is such courses to ‘further their education’ should never be taken out of focus.
Neither should we shut our eyes to the countless victims who literally went up on the chopping block and had their lives terminated by the deranged sword of religion.
No one is a ‘Threat To Islam’
“Amnesty International says that Saudi Arabia does not actually define sorcery as a capital offence. However, some of its clerics have urged the strongest possible punishments against fortune-tellers and faith healers as a threat to Islam.”
Amina bint Abdul Halim bin Salem Nasser was beheaded in the Saudi northern province of Jawf in 2011. This same fate followed many after her as it did many preceding her. When you research this trending manic crisis you will find that a frighteningly high percentage of the people arrested, accused and executed are foreign workers (mainly domestic workers).

Amina was the second person to be executed for witchcraft in Saudi Arabia in 2011. A Sudanese man was executed in September despite calls led by Amnesty for his release.
In almost all cases, no further details on charges, how they came about or any tangible evidence, are ever delivered by the arresting bodies or courts. In Amina’s case, the interior ministry stated that the verdict against her was upheld by Saudi Arabia’s highest courts but no details on the charges were ever presented.
A member of the religious police said that Amina was in her 60s and had “tricked people into giving her money, claiming that she could cure their illnesses.”
Personally, I would label this as a scam. Not witchcraft and not sorcery. Call me crazy.

Another devastating case occurred In 2007, when an Egyptian national was beheaded for allegedly casting spells to try to separate a married couple.
My question is this; How do you prove someone effectively “cast a spell” in a court of law?
If you know the answer please feel free to comment and share your thoughts because I cannot help but refer back to my case when I was forced to sign sheets of blank paper under threats of harm after I was arrested. These papers were eventually filled in by the religious police, taken to court while I was in jail and I was never informed or allowed to be given the chance to attend my court case, I was denied a trial, my family was never informed and a verdict was handed down in my absence solely based on the “evidence” delivered by the religious police in the form of stories they made up.

And thus, I find myself in serious doubt of an authority figure that claims to have personally seen a naked witch fly on a broom out of her apartment window.


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Do you Believe in Magic? (part 1)
February 28, 2014
Angry-Muslims1
The details of this topic have near infinite variations, to do it justice I had to divide this post into three parts to cover most major aspects. You are currently reading part one.
The idea for this post was inspired by the current Muslim uproar in reaction to Katy Perry’s latest music video (Dark Horse) where an Egyptian man is incinerated into a pile of sand by Queen Cleopatra (Kety Perry) using her magical powers. The man appears to be wearing a necklace carrying a pendant with the word Allah on it alongside about a dozen other chains/pendants and symbols.
Yes, predictably over 60,000 Muslims worldwide gathered in angry defense of the all mighty and powerful allah whom Katy Perry supposedly insulted. I am sure allah was very pleased with the change.org petition outcome as now the word allah has been taken out/deleted/blurred or whatever it is they did to make it go away on the YouTube version of the music video.
See, all Muslims know that allah likes to watch You tube videos in his spare time (Think of it as a hobby.)
And now that the symbol is removed from the You Tube version of the song, allah can safely resume watching it again without being too bummed out about seeing his name on a necklace worn by a guy who gets demolished by a woman’s magical powers.
All is good in the Muslim world now. No problems what so ever exist…
The irony of the entire situation has so many angles that I am having a hard time figuring out what to mock more; the side splitting stupidity and superficiality of those who engaged in initiating this petition and signing it. Or the emptiness that occupies the minds of those (Muslims) who sit and dissect music videos in such a manner to create chaos over absolute nothingness and manage to succeed at it.
What are you doing watching Katy Perry dude? Shouldn’t you be off somewhere doing a downward dog for the almighty?
But wait there is more! Now that Youtube was actually witless enough to be bullied by some 60,000 easily angered Muslims with nothing better to do with their lives but to raise their voices against a music video. Now that they have deleted the symbol from the video (shortly after the signatures were gathered), does that actually make things better?
Does that mean that POOF and WAHLAH! the symbol has been taken off all channels, off the original video, and in fact they managed to go back in time to a point during the actual shooting of the video and took it off the man’s neck there too?
Or does this create the illusion that things have been made better?
And what world problems does this actually solve?? Who was helped by deleting the allah symbol? Whose life was axiomatically improved by this action? Who did Youtube save? Besides they themselves avoiding a minor noise induced headache? What rights were actually conserved here? and most importantly whose??
How was the world made a better place by the making of this petition, the signing of it or the You Tube response to it?
What message is being delivered to those, like myself, who fight every day of their lives for basic freedoms like freedom of speech and expression?
Those of us who lived decades of forced silence and induced terror by the likes of those who created, carried on and signed this petition along with their insecure puny allah? What message is being delivered to those who took time and placed effort into suppressing others?
Whose feelings are being cared for here?
Do you really think allah’s feelings were hurt by Katy Perry?
If you do, you might want to consider sitting down and rethinking your religion and it’s deity. I would suggest a large cup of some dark roast coffee while you are at it…because you obviously need to wake up.
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Allah is a Bigger Dick Than Your God
February 20, 2014

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So I recently read this post about the biggest Dick moves done by God and thought to myself that the Muslim god (Mr. Allah) has done some major douchebag moves himself.
Now, I don’t know if all the Abrahamic religions worship the same entity or not and we could go on in circles discussing this but regardless if they do or not I thought of listing the Biggest Dick moves of the deity I grew up being forced to acknowledge as a god.
So here we go and I do hope to impress… er emmm I mean allah impresses!
1-We have no clue what the brother looks like: When you look up images of god on line or off line you mainly get the old man with a white beard and a majestic appearance (that aint allah BTW.) Or You get The Middle Eastern featured, nailed to a cross with blood dripping Jesus. Well, that isn’t him either. So what does the all mighty allah look like then?
Sorry guys, but we will never get a chance to see him/her/it/they as allah forbids us from even attempting to imagine what he/she/it/they looks like. No pictures allowed! all pictures/images are (haram) in Islam by order of the faceless deity. Why else do you think Muslims lose their minds when certain cartoons surface??
2- Breathes Jesus into Mary. Gives Mary an EXCRUCIATING labor by a date tree, alone: The claim is he supported her after she conceived and withdrew from everything and everyone she knew. He supported her during all stages of pregnancy but when it came to labor he cut her off.
Well, sort of…
He did help her out by ordering her to shake the date tree to get three dates as she delivers her baby and use the stream between her feet. This is after she said this “”Oh, I wish I had died before this and was in oblivion, forgotten.” (surat Maryam 19:23)
Wow, talk about love and support.
3- Kills Noahs son right in front of him; tells Noah “he wasn’t your family so don’t ask about that”: (Surah Hud: 25–49) Tells the story of Noah (the guy with the ark) and how his people did not heed his command to follow Allah. So, after refusing to provide Noah with any evidence to back up his claims the unbelievers were drowned in a flood. This included Noah’s son. When Noah asked allah about this act, allah called him ignorant and told him that his son is “not a member of his family.”
Then to top it all off, he says that Noah’s wife is an unbeliever burning in hell and that she was unfaithful to her husband. (Al Tahrim 66:10)
Murder, drowning, genocide, burning , disowning, and infidelity diagnosing seem to be allah’s speciality.
4-Moses seeks guidance from Khidr who kills an innocent boy because he was a disbelieving son to believing parents. Hopes that allah will replace him with a better son (Al- Kahf 18;74-18:81) Such compassion, love an understanding are exhibited here….NOT. Moses learned from his mentor how to punish an innocent child by execution for a crime he had yet to commit? For a choice he was going to make for his own self because allah said so.
5- Randomly curses disobedient people and turns them to apes:  So when they were insolent about that which they had been forbidden, We said to them, “Be apes, despised.” (Surah 7:166) The disobedient people were Jewish fishermen who broke their Holy day and went fishing on the Sabbath day because allah was testing them by only making fish appear on that one day.
Screw it, who needs to eat right?
6- Allah gloats about atrocities he commits: (Yunus 10:13) “And We had already destroyed generations before you when they wronged, and their messengers had come to them with clear proofs, but they were not to believe. Thus do we recompense the criminal people.”
Not believing is a crime in allah’s eyes worthy of genocide. Can you say deranged lunatic?
7- Yunus (Jonah) gets fed up with his people, takes a break from them. Allah has him thrown off a ship and swallowed by a whale; Now here is an impossible situation. Allah put him in charge of people who simply refused to believe (see a pattern here?) The poor man becomes depressed and takes a vacation on a ship. Not only does allah near kill all of his people and scare them shitless into believing but then he turns around and punishes Jonah for leaving.
Swallowed by a whale, in complete darkness and amazingly alive he calls for allah’s forgiveness and allah says O.K. and the whale vomits him out.
(21:87) “And [mention] the man of the fish, when he went off in anger and thought that We would not decree [anything] upon him. And he called out within the darknesses, “There is no deity except You; exalted are You. Indeed, I have been of the wrongdoers.”
Messed up right?
8- Allah tells Muslims to break contract with mushrikeen (polytheists) and KILL THEM ALL. (First page of Surah Tawba- the only surah without “Bismillah” since mass murder is kind of not merciful or gracious). Don’t believe me? See for yourself.
9-Has a Love/Hate relationship with the female gender. Also views them as a prize or objects: Where to start with this one? try this essential information provided in (2:221-2:240) all you need to know about bleeding women, breastfeeding times/duration, how long for women to abstain after the husbands death…etc. Then here you see the worth of a woman (2:282) which is half that of a man. “Allah instructs you concerning your children: for the male, what is equal to the share of two females.” (4:11)
Man can marry 2-3-4 women or slaves (4:3)
Allah is so obsessed with women he wrote an entire surah and called it (women). Here is the punishment of lewd women “Those who commit unlawful sexual intercourse of your women – bring against them four [witnesses] from among you. And if they testify, confine the guilty women to houses until death takes them or Allah ordains for them [another] way.” (4:15)
Also, men are in charge of women “Men are in charge of women by [right of] what Allah has given one over the other and what they spend [for maintenance] from their wealth.” (4:34)
Women are filthy “And if ye are sick or on a journey, or one of you cometh from the closet, or ye have had contact with women, and ye find not water, then go to clean, high ground and rub your faces and your hands with some of it.” (5-6)
Women are a prize “They will be reclining on thrones lined up, and We will marry them to fair women with large, [beautiful] eyes.” (52:20)
Lot prostitutes his daughters and gives his blessing for them to be raped
I would go on but I am starting to get nauseous…
10- Last but not least; My personal favourite on the obligation of warfare: (2:216) “Warfare is ordained for you, though it is hateful unto you; but it may happen that ye hate a thing which is good for you, and it may happen that ye love a thing which is bad for you. Allah knoweth, ye know not.”
And there you have it! A small list of why Allah is a bigger dick and Islam is not a religion of peace.
(Much thanks for EXMNA members for the great references and collaborative efforts.)

















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Saudi Arabia (allah’s self appointed defence attorney)
February 1, 2014
AF
Just when you thought I was done writing about Saudi Arabia’s malignant religious grandiose disorder and it’s hideous crimes against humanity, here I go again exposing the proud (birth place of Islam) protector of it’s holy grounds for the blood thirsty enraged monster it really is.
Ashraf Fayadh  is the latest victim (that we know of) of Saudi Arabia’s war against free thought, free speech and free anything really…oh yes, and long hair.
Ashraf Is a Palestinian poet and accused Atheist who lives In Saudi Arabia. He has been in an Abha jail since January 1st 2014. He was brought to the attention of Saudi religious authorities after he released a book in 2008 containing some of his art/poetic work. Complaints arose from readers about the book and against Ashraf himself with accusations of Atheism and promotion of Atheism.
hisbook
Last Ramadan Ashraf was apprehended but thankfully released the next day due to a lack of evidence against him. He was re-arrested in January of this year after tensions arose in a gathering with some of his Saudi friends where he was threatened of being deported. Someone apparently informed the religious police about him and threw some Atheism accusations in there..again. The religious police, who are always keen in responding to these critical matters, arrested him on the spot and he has been detained since.
Might I add that after the religious authorities (kidnapped) Ashraf they failed to notify his family of his whereabouts. His family frantically searched for him for 25 hours before being notified by his friends of Ashraf’s imprisonment.  His Father AbdelSattar Fayadh decribes how his son was interrogated by 5 religious police men for hours and how they threatened and demoralized him because he was a Palestinian living in their country.
His current accusation according to the men of god , (no joke)
‘Harassing the Godly self and letting his hair grow long’
Are you as sick of this as I am?
















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The Start of an End V
January 31, 2014
blog8
I hated being Saudi…
Being raised there is what I would describe as an affliction. The people of Saudi that were in my immediate surroundings accelerated my devastation, anger and sadness. This is a country where a woman is taught that her entire physical being is erroneous and unacceptable.
After all it is all in the that book they call the word of allah; the Quran.
In Saudi – as in many other Muslim majority countries – a woman is defective by nature. We are also so incapable and inept that we need to be handled in every aspect of our lives and led by our presumed superior counterparts. We need papers signed from Mahrams and approval from anything male to handle some very personal and in many cases life altering decisions.

So don’t bother falling in love because you have no choice in whom you marry as a woman. Don’t bother planning a future for yourself either because it must be planned on your behalf by a man who knows what is best for you. If you don’t fall under this law then you are one of the lucky ones who has a nice enough male guardian that approves your decisions for you, making you think it was actually your choice and that you are free to do what you want.
Do not be fooled young Muslimah…for you remain on a leash…
This becomes apparent when as a Muslim Saudi woman you are harassed, abused or sexually assaulted. All of a sudden it is your behavior, your wrong ways that caused this deserved harm and by all means you must be punished. Suddenly, you become not only responsible but devious enough to have mastered a way to bewitch our all-knowing and ever so wise male counterparts into committing a sin.
Women are ordered to cover up for what reason exactly? What bogus modesty claim is this? How is it that by uncovering or putting perfume on or wearing make up we are blameworthy for a man’s beastly urges? Who decided it is a must that we be punished MORE after we have been torn to shreds by a raging lunatic who believes we wanted it?
Is it not enough that we are beaten with sticks in the street if one of our eye lashes is showing in the name of allah and modesty. Is it not sufficient to teach us that we are the demons who want nothing but to drag men into our sexual webs of sin. That we are whores by default. Does it not suffice that we are the criminalized victims of bipolar teachings.
Why did you not report it when it happened?
My answer:  WHY WOULD I HAVE?
I was not Canadian (i.e.; I had no rights.) I was a Saudi in Canada on a work permit and I was fully funded and controlled by the Saudi government. If I were to open my mouth about this by going to the police there was no doubt that I would lose my funding and training spot when the Saudis found out (which eventually happened as I had predicted). I would have been dragged back to Saudi where who knows what the outcome might have been. Most likely, knowing the corrupt system they call Sharia law over there, I would have ended up being lashed and jailed for being alone with a man I did not know.
To sum it up: I worked with my attacker for another year after the incident happened without notifying anyone but those I worked with. I watched him become more popular and more supported. Once I could no longer take it I went to the police as well as informed the Saudi Bureau who swiftly terminated my position but not his (Yes he was a Saudi too.) Then I was sent a bill of 200,000 dollars for a refund of the money the Saudis had wasted on me during this scholarship.
Luckily by then, I had met my husband, gotten married and immigrated. So I had full and equal rights as any other Canadian and thus was untouchable by the Saudis.
Did other Saudies in positions of power do everything possible to get me deported back to Saudi so I could face punishment? Yes.
I divulge this information to explain how and why I came to the decision of delaying reporting the attack. The teachings of shame that are ingrained in those like myself and the horrid abusive lifestyle of constant victimization make it impossible for a person from this background to stand up…to not be victimized again. I grew up with no rights and it is hard for people who have not experienced it to fully comprehend the consequences of that experience and world-view.
How does one claim something they never had??
The moral code of those in the current culture I live in sadly was no better (at least not at the time I made my attack public.) I found myself battling misogynistic teachings from the East while confronting victim shaming/blaming from the West.
The blend was a vile mix and repugnant enough to push anyone into the depression/suicide frontier.
At some point you turn on your own self and life no longer becomes worth the constant battle. Giving up becomes the better, often more sane option…
And that is when connecting with those who care becomes a literal matter of life and death. Finding a community that will support you without feeding the victim inside. People who empower you and stand with you in solitude.
I dedicate this series to the on-line Atheist community who went above and beyond to help me and my family in this battle for justice. I am so lucky to have you all.
Thank you for hearing my voice,
The End
















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The Start of an End IV
January 19, 2014
blog 7
The start of an End III
This is the story of a woman named Faith
Faith was a timid young woman and quite the eccentric one
she was of serious character but never did mind a little fun
she had anxiety about dogs which she aspired to overcome
some negative past experiences with man’s best friend
rendered Faith untrusting of the animal;  around it she was constantly on the fend
serious faith was welcomed to a work party one day
she ummed and ahhhed in worry and dismay
There would be a dog there, she knew this to be fact
and this specific breed was known to fiercely react
but Faith trusted in her friends and finally let her guard down
She attended the gathering which was way out of town
to her pleasant surprise there was no dog in sight
happy Faith laughed and conversed endlessly through the night
a delightful weekend event this gathering was intended to be
only she woke up the next morning to dismayingly see
that her friends had gone out to run a variety of errands
she was left all alone, that was readily apparent
suddenly the steps of the 4 legged creature came to sound
the fear alarm in Faith’s heart and she began to potter around
perhaps the animal was here for another reason
outside, after all, it was the snow season
perhaps it wanted to eat, warm up and rest
but what would happen next Faith would’ve never had guessed
Faith was hunted by the beast and taken down like prey
yet somehow, miraculously, she managed to get away
devastated Faith knew not what to do
so she defaulted to the only thing that she ever knew
to suffer alone the indignity and the shame
for she knew too well who the people would blame
but silent Faith could take it no more
she broke through the wall of fear; speaking against the dog
the beast that everyone had trusted and lovingly adored
Faith was labelled a problem maker…a fabler
the dog could do no such thing, for it was a hero; a saviour…
No one saw the attack. Where was the evidence?
she only wants attention claimed those driven with ignorance
Lost Faith would eventually give in
to the depression, anger and hate boiling within
we can offer you no help they said; you need the loony bin
Faithless Faith gave up all hope
she gave up her career and found a new scope
of humane practice that helped her heal from her wounds
she found love and acceptance; a life within Faith bloomed
though she moved on with her life; became a mother and a wife
burdened she remained by memories of the strife
Faith’s message to us is not one of Boo Hoo
look at me, my poor luck and what should I do
patient Faith speaks not out of selfishness and definitely not out of hate
lets get that out of the way and set the record straight
what was equally devastating yet appallingly true
was how people reacted once she spoke…once they knew
the message here should be loud and perfectly clear
blaming the victim is cowardice; it is a sign of fear
Please stop adding insult to injury by outright denying such claims to be true
Just think of it this way:
How would you feel IF IT HAPPENED TO YOU?
















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The Start of an End III
January 17, 2014
blog3
The Start of an End II
Over the next 2 months I would enroll in a local driving school to learn how to drive. After all, driving was not a felony in Canada and I had intentionally arrived two months early to achieve a goal that was denied to me for 26 years.
This was the first objective on my “TO DO” list in this new life of mine.
For me, tackling this driving issue was like unsealing a can of slimy worms. Here was something I was forbidden from even thinking about my entire life in Saudi Arabia and now I was on the verge of accomplishing it.
Throw any defibrillator model at me and I could work it without a blink, but put me in the driver’s seat of a car and I would be good for nothing. I had mastered the most complex and diverse forms of cardiac arrhythmia, knew by heart all the algorithms, which class of drugs to administer for each stage, and had an immediate back up plan should the drug not work. But my brain circuitry would flounder when it came to memorizing a route to physically get somewhere.
I never felt so imbecilic, puny, incapacitated, unproductive, limited, mentally and emotionally handicapped, afraid, suspicious, and so easily intimidated as I did when I was fresh out of Saudi and in the real world.
The Saudi practice of Islam, along with the environment itself, had me on such a tight leash of inhibition and anti intellectualism for so long that I might as well have been buried alive.
The driving instructors would frequently inquire as to why I was having such difficulty and failing every other driving test. I could never offer a solid rebuttal because I didn’t know why. All I could perceive at the time was an exaggerated prohibitive fear that I could not and should not drive. I was still Saudi and thus had limited privileges as a woman.
Four driving tests later, I passed and earned my first ever driver’s license. Now I had the car and the license but I refused to actually operate my car because of this or that reason.
The rationalizations were endless.
Fear, however, was never a rationale that I would own up to and here is the bone I would like to pick with you over the next few minutes.
“Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”  Robert F. Kennedy
Every word I write, every intimate story I share, every argument I make against Islam/Sharia law or religion in general, and every news item I examine out of countries like Saudi Arabia (the holy land of Islamic birth), I do while bursting with retaliative resentment to the stained 26 years of terror I endured under the bloodied rusting sword of Islam. Only now I am more educated, polished and more in control. Now I can present my argument without heightened emotion or fear.
Fear…
Fear is the chisel religion uses in the most sinister of ways to violently mutilate the lives of those like myself. It is the oppressor’s most cherished tool. But I prefer to think of it as an enchantment spell that is delivered to us through mosque platforms and ancient scriptures in a variety of flavors suited to meet our preferences.
Or so we are made to think…
Fear of ostracism by family, of ridicule by friends, of becoming an outlaw in society, fear of being labelled a whore by the (so called) religious, fear of punishment by the fascist state, fear of Satan’s whispers, and last but not least: fear of god’s wrath…the fear of eternal damnation and the bone eroding fires of hell.
Learn this word people, for it is a travesty many are burdened with. Learn to diagnose it and then learn how to overcome it. This ailment can and will devour the very essence of your humanity if you cave into it.
Now, allow me to list some of the highlights of my first year as a free Arab woman living in the West:
•Extreme anxiety related to any dealings with men. This would eventually lead to embarrassing panic attacks.
•Inability to perform the ABC’s of looking after myself without the aid of a driver or a nanny (I couldn’t even fry an egg).
•Ridiculous culture shock that lasted for 6 months
•I went through a terrible divorce after marrying a Saudi man whom I thought I had known (I walked out on him the morning after our wedding because he smashed my face in with a phone in a jealous fit)
•I started intense medical residency training which was excessively demanding, physically exhausting and mentally draining.
• Depression reached it’s peak (I spent the first 6-7 months either at home or at work and refused to socialize)
•I was introduced to the devastating world of racism (“Why are you in pants? You should be in a Burka”) and the old boys club of Medicine (“Women doctors who want to have a family should quit and become librarians”). Needless to say, I met some nasty people with M.D after their names. And yes, they were Canadians in Canada.
•Hate mail began “You Arab Terrorist pig”
Suddenly everything became overwhelming. I felt defeated and contemplated calling it quits, packing my shit up and heading back to a hell I knew how to deal with but for some strange reason I stuck with it.
This was not what I had imagined…this was not what I had dreamt of…
End of part III
















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The Start of an End II
January 13, 2014
onelongflight
The Start of an End I
In Heathrow I ponderously found my way to a Starbucks where I grabbed a muffin, coffee and a large water then overdosed on flu meds confident that they would help me get through the next 8 hours. Luckily I found a nice quiet spot in this busy airport where I drowsed off for a bit.
A coughing spell woke me up. I frantically checked the time and realized I was an hour away from boarding my next flight. So off I went on a mile hike in this enormous airport to find my gate. I looked like death and by all means felt like it too. It would have been now that my panic of being quarantined would intensify to a noticeable level.
Avoiding eye contact at all costs; I checked in with security. Then again at the boarding gate and bizarrely managed to pass both points with absolutely no questions asked. I must not look as bad as I feel I thought to myself…
Sick and once again alone I would find myself at the second boarding gate in this turbulent journey of my life. I hunched over in my seat as the flight began boarding its passengers. Breathing had become incredibly taxing as were other simple things like trying to stay focused. As the lines dwindled, I moved my distressed body out of the seat and slowly boarded the plane that would get me closer to my destination of freedom.
This flight was a light one…
All together I think we were 60 or so passengers. I was allowed to find 4 non-occupied seats in the back of the plane to sleep and that was exactly what I did. I was out for the entire 6 hours and when I woke up the plane had began it’s descent into St. John’s. N.F.
I sat up and smiled. My dry lips hurt from cracking caused by my dehydrated state, but I wasn’t dehydrated enough to ward off the stream of tears from pouring out of my swollen, drooping eyes as the plane touched Canadian ground.
I was physically in very bad shape yet vibrant with my triumph. Little insignificant me had done it, against all odds, and there were too many of those, I had actually done it.
But I wasn’t there just yet.
This was the final 45 minute transit and I had to remain on the plane. Within time we departed from St. John’s to Halifax and landed safely. I exited the plane and made my way to the immigration office where my paper work was quickly analyzed for accuracy and I was granted admission into Halifax.
I collected my luggage which didn’t take long at all, breezed through Canada customs and passed through the large revolving exit doors of the Halifax international airport.
It was windy out…
I stopped for a minute to allow the mighty breeze saturated with freedom to embrace my near annihilated body and senses. I stood on the sidewalk, in disbelief, charged with an incredible sense of lack of fear. I was not covered up from head to toe and I was in public.
You know what the best part about that was? I didn’t feel like I was doing something wrong and I didn’t fear large angry men with beards punishing me for it.
Why have I been denied such a pleasurable feeling all my life?? To feel the wind blow through my hair like this.
But now was not the time to question things. I needed to find a cab and get to my hotel. I needed to rest…to recover and I needed to be somewhere close to a hospital. I got into a cab and asked the driver to take me to the Hotel I had reserved a room in.
As the cab drove and as I lay in the back seat limp, short of breath, colliding with emotions, I was charged by the beautiful scenery of green trees and hills. It was as if I was receiving an infusion of life during this drive.
My eyes had become too used to the image of a dull yellowish brown sandy desert and date trees that a simple maple tree was just fascinating.
My Kleenex box -my friend- was still with me and running low on its supply. I knew I was approaching the recovery process of this anguish. I was alive and though not well, I gladly highly doubted the diagnosis of SARS.
The cab came to a stop after a 40 some minute drive, I paid him, got my suitcases out of the trunk and slowly walked into the beautiful lobby of the downtown Hotel. Once I was in, a front door clerk looked at me and was so taken aback by my appearance that he asked: “Rough trip?” I smiled and answered “Yes.”
I finished all the formalities at the front desk, took my key and went up to my room. There I undressed, indulged in a much needed long hot bath, ordered some room service, and enjoyed the feeling of being a female alone in a hotel room without the shame of not having a male guardian on site.
Such an abnormal feeling to not worry about getting accused of being a whore waiting to get fucked by a man who is not her husband by virtue of being in a downtown hotel room. Here I was, barely a day out of Saudi and already being faced with the shock of culture change.
Eventually after watching some non Islamic or Arabic TV I crashed at around 4 pm. I woke up the next morning at 8 am.
End of part II
The Start of an End III
















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The Start Of an End I
January 10, 2014
fly

The Start of an End posts will answer some of the questions I have been receiving from readers. Mainly; “How did you leave Saudi?” It will also eventually tie into one of the most critical events that lead to my abandoning of medicine. An event I will be grilled on again in less than two weeks from now, so stay tuned.
May the 1st of 2003 marks the day I got off the plane and set foot on Canadian soil to stay. I landed in Nova Scotia after 20+ hours of frenzied travel and prolonged airport transit times.
My last few days in Saudi Arabia were nothing less than dramatic…
It was a ceaseless conflict between myself, my brother and his wife and it dragged on for 6 or so months.They both had laid down the law that I would never leave Saudi or see Canada in this life time. They had ceased my passport in a final thundering attempt to rip away the only dream and purpose I had worked so hard for.
Through my father, who just wanted me out of his life, and with much persuasion I managed to regain my passport along with the final O.K to leave. I energetically finished up all the essential paperwork to exit the country safely and come to Canada legally on a work permit. I had managed to secure a scholarship position to commence my specialty training that was funded by the Saudi government. A rare opportunity indeed…
This was it!
I was weeks away from achieving the one thing I thought I could never accomplish; to leave the Kingdom of wretchedness for a very long time. All those days I spent in my room acting out what I would wear during my travels and who I would meet. All those castles I had built in the sky; everything was about to materialize.
My bags were packed weeks ahead of time, my medical books and furniture had been shipped through sea ahead of me to arrive sometime close to when I would be there.
My hotel was booked for my stay while I got my apartment ready. The concept of living on my own made me giddy with excitement. For once in my life I spied a glimpse of the silver lining behind the clouds that people spoke of. I had been waiting too long for this and now that it’s here nothing was getting in my way.
Then, about two days before my flight, I would fall ill. This was one of the most debilitating febrile illnesses I would ever have the misfortune of encountering and funny enough one that would serve as a right of passage for me. At that time, the world was being ravaged by the SARS epidemic. People were being quarantined everywhere in airports all around the world.
The countdown to my departure had already begun when father suddenly turned into a compassionate being who was concerned about my current state of health.
The day I was scheduled to leave my temperature shot up to 40 degrees C which was consistent with SARS. I was toxic, my eyes were swollen and my throat felt like it was being corroded by acid. Every joint in me was weakened by this pernicious virus. I ached in agony as my body failed me on the one single day that I have been waiting for my entire life.
I remember laying on my bed crying as father stood in front of me telling me that he could not allow me to travel in this state and that I should cancel my flight. These were words I did not want to hear and an outcome that I was unwilling to accept. His words echoed through me as I drifted in and out of consciousness.
I was scheduled for a 1:00 a.m departure and there was no way I was missing this. I knew what I had to do and so by 11 pm I got out of bed, got dressed, took my flu meds and called my driver to pack up the car with my suitcases because I was heading to the airport to catch my flight.
Father came down with his wife to see what was going on and I managed to convince him that I was feeling better. We said our goodbyes at the front gate of the house. He hugged me tight as I teared up with turbulent emotions fully knowing that this was going to be the last time I would ever see him and the last I would ever see of that house.
The house of horrors…
I got in the car, the car drove away and I never looked back. I was detaching myself, once again, from my physical body.
Out of pure obligation, my brother accompanied me to the airport. He was cold and silent throughout the entire process as was I. He checked me in and cleared me at the security gate by presenting the yellow permission slip from my male guardian allowing me to exit the country. Then he stood there behind the metal gates watching me walk away.
When I approached the terminal’s escalator, he waved goodbye to me and I nodded my head in recognition that this was indeed a goodbye. As I went up the escalators, my brother slowly disappeared from my vision and with every step I took forward towards my boarding gate I felt a shackle break off me.
I found an empty seat at gate G27 (the gate to my freedom) and sat there with my Kleenex box, gently sighed then closed my eyes to rest.
Oh how I longed for this day…
But never would I have foreseen myself to be so banefully ill and sidelined from reveling in last few hours I would spend on Saudi ground.
I took off my abaya and found my way to the bathroom; I was coughing hard and didn’t want to freak people out. In the bathroom there was a South Asian woman who had just finished washing up as I was walking in and hacking terribly. She panicked and dashed out of the washroom mumbling something about SARS. I walked around the sink and looked in the mirror to barely recognize myself. My eyes were red and swollen, my skin pale and jaundiced, my lips so dry they were cracking and bleeding. This was scary…
I fixed my hair and touched up my make up, in an attempt to look somewhat normal, then left the washroom just in time for my flight’s boarding call. I sat far away from people waiting for the majority, who were mainly South Asian mixed with some Europeans, to board. Once they did I approached the gate, showed them my I.D and letter of permission to travel alone then boarded the flight.
On the plane, I had the window seat which was next to a middle-aged man whom I didn’t say a complete word to the entire flight. My flight path was from Riyadh to London, Heathrow, which would take about 7 hours and then I would transit in London for 8 hours to catch a connecting flight from London To St. John’s N.F.(another 6 hrs.) There I would transit for 45 minutes then fly to Halifax, my destination.
This was only my second time traveling completely alone; I had never traveled this sick before so the scenarios of me getting quarantined at Heathrow and what I would do if that happened played in my head relentlessly.
They wouldn’t send me back would they?
The flight was equally long as it was burdensome on my system which was engaged in a brutal war.It was sad that in this monumental transition of my life, a Kleenex box would be my only companion.
I was only able to stomach the soup on the flight’s menu which I took small sips of as time passed by ever so slowly. I was also unable to rest but the man seated next to me however had no such problem as he both slept and snored through half of the flight.
We finally landed in London at around 8 am and though I was captivated to be there, my physical state continued to further decline. Thus far,no one had approached me about my illness.
End of Part I
The Start of an End II
















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“exotic practices”
January 2, 2014
free-hugs
A few weeks ago I watched a clip that was circulating through social media of a young Saudi man walking through one of Saudi’s busy streets giving out (Free hugs).
Nothing new here right? I mean, we have all seen these nice touchy-feely short clips of people doing admirable things to each other just for the sake of being nice. They leave you feeling nice and fuzzy inside.
Only this one didn’t… leave me feeling nice and fuzzy inside…
First let me assert that after deciding to write this post, I hunted EVERYWHERE for the original YouTube video in order to show it to you but alas, it has been (removed by the user) who initially made it. The clip has vanished!
Having said that, shorter copies of the video remain in circulation but not the original.
One is left questioning why?? Why would you go through all the trouble of producing it only to take it down?
Your answer is here .
Allow me to clarify why I was not left feeling warm and fuzzy after watching the (Saudi Free Hugs) MIA video. The YouTube production was made with marvelous intentions and was altogether rather inspiring. Here was a young Saudi man walking through the street holding a sign that read (Free Hug), being filmed as people ran towards him and in many circumstances literally jumped on him to get their free hugs.
Pause here….
When I say “people” one would infer that we are talking about men and women of diverse ages and nationalities but essentially men AND woman accordingly. Well, that wasn’t the case here. The clip unveiled no women. None walking, or sitting, or standing, or in the distance, or behind the corner, and most notably none participating in the (free hug) sessions. To put it bluntly, the women were just missing and his filmed exhibition of this fact – as unintended as it was – speaks volumes of truth to the general state of Saudi women.
Though Saudi Arabia surely has women, they are for the most part behind the scenes…invisible. Well, minus those who claim to be female activists yet whole-heartedly support the Saudi Regime and the extreme form of Wahhabi Sharia law it enforces. You know, the ones being manipulated to lie to the world.
But back to the topic; The clip unintentionally showcased the startling non-existent state of an entire gender of a species in a country most of the world still accommodates to in this day and age. It was an eye opening hard capture of how distressingly mangled Saudi society is.
Call it gender segregation, call it female body shaming, call it tradition, or bastardized modesty. I prefer to call it Islam.
But why is it this way? Is it religion or is it tradition?
Though I imagine the guy giving away the free hugs might have done some editing to essentially bypass any areas with women, to avoid disciplinary action by the religious police, the whole setting seemed schizophrenic to me.
PDA (public display of affection) is absolutely anti-Islamic. Why? For starters, because the prophet never did it.
Add to that Quranic verses like this:
“And tell the believing women to lower their gaze and be modest, and to display of their adornment only that which is apparent, and to draw their veils over their bosoms, and not to reveal their adornment save to their own husbands or fathers or husbands’ fathers, or their sons or their husbands’ sons, or their brothers or their brothers’ sons or sisters’ sons, or their women, or their slaves, or male attendants who lack vigour, or children who know naught of women’s nakedness. And let them not stamp their feet so as to reveal what they hide of their adornment. And turn unto Allah together, O believers, in order that ye may succeed.” (Al-Noor Verse No:31)
 
Innocent acts like holding the hand of your wife in public can place you under the direct line of fire of religious authorities. Growing up both Muslim and Saudi I can tell you that zero interaction is expected between members of the opposite sex in public. Now as for men jumping on each other for hugs… that could easily land you in jail with a (homosexuality) accusation and a potential death sentence.
Knowing the above, I was perplexed as to why this young man was challenging a rigid system this way? After all, who dares to poke the sleeping bear and why?! Surely he is cognizant of the human rights breaches of Saudi Arabia and it’s barbaric implementation of Islamic law.
So why go there??
One week later I read that the two men involved in the creation of this project have been arrested for their unholy and anti-Islamic “exotic practices”. The arresting body was, as always, the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice  (i.e The Religious Police). But the men of god did not stop at the arrest of the two corrupt young adults. They went further by forcing them to sign a pledge that they would not commit this atrocity ever again.
They went there because we can’t all leave…
From “You are lucky to have been able to escape” to “You are a coward that ran away” to “instead of speaking out against Saudi in an ill manner, you could have stayed and created change” you name it I have heard it. If I had thought for a moment that I could change anything in Saudi by remaining in it I might have indeed returned or never left in the first place but I knew my limits. I knew I could do more on the outside than from within.
These young men are trying to create change.
So, Kudos to the young Saudi generation bringing about the waves of change – however they choose to do so. The waves might look and feel minuscule but they are a force you have created in an attempt to bring down an iron wall that is rotten to it’s core. Keep adding to the waves from the inside while people like us work at bringing the wall down from the outside.
Together one day we will bring the wall down and the rot will all wash away.
(For more media coverage on this topic click here)
















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Losing my religion: Clergy who no longer believe gather online http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/religion/losing-my-religion-clergy-who-no-longer-believe-gather-online/2014/04/24/401e07d8-cbcf-11e3-b81a-6fff56bc591e_story.html
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Catherine Dunphy came to seminary in her mid-20s, full of passion to work in the service of the Catholic Church. By the time she left, for many...
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One killed as Moroccan leftists, Islamists clash http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/2/8/99812/World/Region/One-killed-as-Moroccan-leftists,-Islamists-clash.aspx
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Jesus & Mo on their partners
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Islamists kill second Somali lawmaker, threaten more attacks Islamist rebels shot dead a Somali lawmaker on Tuesday, a day after blowing up one of his colleagues, and vowed to keep killing politicians and wreck efforts to secure the country. http://english.alarabiya.net/en/News/2014/04/22/Islamists-kill-second-Somali-lawmaker-threaten-more-attacks.html
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7 Ways Westerners Can Help Ex-Muslims http://www.patheos.com/blogs/camelswithhammers/2014/04/7-ways-westerners-can-help-ex-muslims/
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Secular Thought of the Day My people are going to learn the principles of democracy the dictates of truth and the teachings of science. Superstition must go. Let them worship as they will, every man can follow his own conscience provided it does not interfere with sane reason or bid him act against the liberty of his fellow men.” ― Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938)
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Pakistan’s Islamists Returning with a vengeance Seven years after the Red Mosque affair, a renowned extremist re-emerges http://www.economist.com/news/asia/21601047-seven-years-after-red-mosque-affair-renowned-extremist-re-emerges-returning-vengeance
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Scripture of the Day Quran 7:50 And the companions of the Fire will call to the companions of Paradise, "Pour upon us some water or from whatever Allah has provided you." They will say, "Indeed, Allah has forbidden them both to the disbelievers." Quran 47:15 shall dwell for ever in the Fire, and be given, to drink, boiling water, so that it cuts up their bowels (to pieces)? Admin's Note: More torture from Allah - on how either the unbelievers will have boiling water poured down their throats or suffer from dehydration
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How to go to Brazil , check out the world cup and not spend a dime of your own money - praise be to the invisible guy in the sky http://www.gofundme.com/dawahtrip
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Salamu Alaykum Warahmatullahi Wabaraktu ***DAWAH TIME** **DAWAH TIME*** **DAWAH TIME** Backgroud: My name is Jabir Mohamed, and I am currently...
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Neil deGrasse Tyson Said Earth Is 4.5 Billion Years Old on TV: Creationists' Heads Explode It did not take long for the creationists to take issue with Neil DeGrasse Tyson and the latest episode of Cosmos on Fox. Why you ask? Well, because Tyson dared to declare the age of the earth to be 4.5 billion years old. http://www.alternet.org/belief/neil-degrasse-tyson-says-planet-45-billion-years-old-national-tv-creationists-heads-explode
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The evolutionary tree of myth & religion
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#ExMuslim Meetups this weekend - email us for more info 25th April - Chicago, IL - chicago@exmna.org 26th April - New York, NY - newyork@exmna.org 26th April - Washington, DC - washingtondc@exmna.org 26th April - Houston, TX - houston@exmna.org

Jesus & Mo on Muslims not being a monolith http://www.jesusandmo.net/2014/04/23/group/
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Muslim drivers at Cleveland airport refuse to drive cabs with Gay Games advertising Roughly 25 Muslim drivers dispatched to Cleveland Hopkins International Airport are refusing to drive cabs adorned with advertising for the region’s upcoming Gay Games, citing religious reasons. http://www.foxnews.com/us/2014/04/18/muslim-drivers-at-cleveland-airport-refuse-to-drive-cabs-with-gay-games/
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Disclaimer: All statements in this article reflect the author's position and opinions. They in no way represent the Army's views, concepts, or regulatory guidance. Someone once asked me how many Humanists there are in the Army. I answered,
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When Muslims renounce their faith Fearing ostracism by their family, or even death, many former Muslims keep their disbelief secret. A German organization offers support to people who leave Islam for another religion, or for none. http://www.dw.de/when-muslims-renounce-their-faith/a-17574172
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Empowering? Really? http://wp.me/p40KmF-1o
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Even Stephen: Islam vs Christianity Old but awesome segment from The Daily Show https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_tc2H6SbJY
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More than half of all women migrant workers in Qatar are employed in private homes.
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The 'Halal Version' Of The 'Happy British Muslims' Video Gets Rid Of All The Women https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0c9DWVuOHI
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Muhammad The Atheist 
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Dear Abujee (father)
November 25, 2013
I am writing this letter to you to explain why the value of a God in the twenty first century is deteriorating. By looking at the history of the human race one can notice a pattern of evolution. We have evolved in every aspect and nothing is as it was a hundred years ago. As a computer programmer you have single handedly experienced the evolution of technology in your field. You once told me that you worked on creating an instant messaging software as an undergraduate in the 1980’s. You told me it was remarkable to send one message from one computer to another. Now just thirty years later this technology has exponentially progressed to something even greater. This is just one simple example of human progression with ideas through time. This progression is a common trend amongst our species. This trend also exists with the concept of God. By looking at our history one can see that the concept of a higher power has evolved to what it is today. It started with a concept of a spirit and eventually turned into the concept of a single almighty creator of the universe. The evolution of God did not stop there. The concept of a God even existing is being questioned and deteriorating slowly. I believe that the increasing discoveries in science undermine the reason for God’s existence. One day God will play no role in an individual’s life and this day will come sooner than one can imagine.
First I want to examine why people believe in God. The concept of God arose so we could have answers to life’s hardest questions. Why are we here? What is the purpose of life? Why is there so much suffering? God became an answer to these questions. In Islam the purpose of life is to please Allah. A true Muslim’s sole purpose in life is to submit to him. In return for this submission a Muslim is to be rewarded with eternal paradise in the afterlife. I used to not question this and believe that life was a test. I believed that if people suffered it was because God was making them stronger. If I was having a tough time I remember I would feel ease when I read the verse in the Quran that says, “Our Lord, and burden us not with that which we have no ability to bear. You are our protector (Quran 2:286).” This verse gave me a sense of hope knowing that someone was watching over me. I remember when I used to get sick and could not bear the pain I would ask Allah to take this pain away and that would make me feel better. Allah was merely a psychological healer for me. I never thought about him during the good times and only thought about him during the bad. I thought I was selfish for doing so and at that time I never questioned him but questioned myself. When I did start to question him I saw many flaws in the ideology behind God. I saw it as a fairy tale. Why would a supreme being that made the entire universe care if humans obeyed him? If he were so great why would we matter? It seemed to me that Allah was playing a game. This made me feel that Allah had characteristics of a human. It made me believe that Allah was a man made concept. An American poet Charles Eliot Norton said, “ The loss of religious faith amongst the most civilized portions of the race is a step from childishness to maturity (Armstrong, 251).” Believing that someone is watching over you is very childish. In times of need one truly is alone. You have to work your way out of your mess because no one is going to clean it up for you but yourself.
With this said it is very easy to fall into the trap of believing in God, as believing in God has a lot of perks. However, it is always easy to believe something that one is told but by believing it without evidence we are degrading ourselves to a lower level. If humans always followed this trend of believing and not questioning we would not be where we are today. A professor of mathematics in London named William Kingdon Clifford argued that it was intellectually and morally perverse to accept any opinion-religious, scientific, or ethical-without any suffice (Armstrong, 253). If one told you that it was ok to murder an innocent life because you are doing it for a greater good and you go ahead and do it because you believed what you were told then you are at fault. You are at fault for believing in something without sufficient evidence. This same theory should coincide with our belief system for God. Why do we blindly believe in something that has no factual evidence? Convenience should no longer be an answer as there are many flaws behind the ideology of God.
Aside from the flaws in the ideology behind God another reason behind his diminishing role in the twenty first century is due to the increase in our mental capacity. Humans have always been intrigued by how the universe worked. This caused the birth of God as well as science. As science developed God was no longer the only scientific explanation of the universe (Armstrong, 246). This theory was portrayed through scientist Charles Darwin’s findings. Darwin’s findings concluded that species had evolved slowly over time as they adapted to their immediate environment and during this process of natural selection innumerable species had perished (Armstrong, 245). This meant that human beings were not the pinnacle of purposeful creation but instead a result of trial and error (Armstrong, 246). This implies that God could not have been the direct creator. If God was not the direct creator than what is he? Is he just in our imagination? We no longer need a God to justify the reason for who created us, as we are merely accidents. With this said God and science do not mix. I believe that it is time for humanity to allow science to allay our fears and provide a new basis for morality (Armstrong, 259). We need to step away from the religious fairy tale and focus on finding answers through science and evidence. We need to continue to educate ourselves further because the amount of knowledge available is limitless. We need to fill in the gaps not with hopeful thinking but with facts.
 At the rate that technology and scientific discoveries are occurring God will soon have no role in the twenty first century. God will be a myth that people will not live their lives by. It is hypocritical to say that God does not exist because that is just as dogmatic as saying that God does exist. But I can say that the God we believe in today does not exist. There is no way a protector would allow so many atrocities to take place. Until we unlock more discoveries we will just have to accept that we do not have the answers to everything rather than believing in something without factual evidence.
With this said I hope you now understand my lack of faith in Allah. I cannot believe in something that does not make sense to me. I wish I could believe in the fairy tale that I was grown up to but I would rather drown in my questioning than float in a lie.
Sincerely,
 Saima
References:
 Armstrong, Karen. The Case For God. 1st. New York: First Anchor Books, 2009. Print.
















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When I Leave
November 6, 2013
This article was first published at http://exhijabi.wordpress.com


Dear Dad,
I don’t know if I’ve ever told you this, but I look up to you. I know we argue a lot. I know I haven’t always listened to you and my unwillingness to conform to your image of the perfect family has, at best, puzzled you. But I do want to tell you that I do look up to you. I look up to you because I have yet to meet a more caring, hardworking, and faithful man than you. On the nights I forego sleep, I hear you waking up on the other side of my wall. I always have to check the time, because it seems that no matter how many times you tell me, I still can’t believe you wake up at four in the morning for work. For us. For me. I still can’t believe you work seven days a week and never utter a complaint. I know for sure that if I was in your shoes, I would have given up a long time ago. But that’s another reason why I look up to you, dad, you’re stubborn. Once you’ve made up your mind about something, you stick to it. I probably got that from you (the stubbornness, not the hardworking aspect, unfortunately.)
You have always been my role model. Whenever elementary school teachers used to ask us who we looked up to, I always wanted to say it was you but I didn’t want to seem strange for being the girl who wanted to be like her dad. Once I hit middle school, I modified my message and instead said I wanted to marry someone like you rather than be you. I even remember telling a classmate of mine how much I respected you. “He’s so religious!” I’d told her at the time, before promising that I would marry “A good Muslim, just like him!”
Funny how things change.
Your devotion to Islam had always been comforting to me. Even though by seven, I understood enough about Islam to know what I was supposed to do, I never followed through and you never forced me to. Instead, I would watch you pray while thinking and hoping that your prayers would count towards me, too. I thought maybe there was some way to reason with god so I could share some of your good deeds. You had more than enough to cover your path to heaven. When I was nine and learned of the Day of Judgment and the Dajjal (anti-Christ), I was so scared for myself. I thought surely I would be caught. I would be caught and I would be sent straight to hell for my many misdeeds. But then I was told that good Muslims would never fall for the Dajjal’s tricks because they would be able to read the word Kaffir on his forehead. And just as suddenly, I was relieved! What did I have to worry about? My father was a good Muslim! As long as I was with you, I knew I would never fall victim to the anti-Christ. You would protect me.
Your faith was what bridged us together. Your faith was what made me feel special. I even remember a time when we were reading through one of our many Islamic books. I was sitting on one side of the couch, barely seven years old, my sister was sitting on the other side, and you were sitting between us. As we thumbed through the book, you told us how there were people who once thought (and still believe) that daughters were worthless. You told us how it was once a common practice to kill girls and the prophet had put an end to it. And then you reached over and hugged me and my sister, and said, “I am so proud to have daughters.”
It should come to no surprise, then, that when you asked me to take on the hijab almost a year later – not just on Saturdays for Saturday school anymore, but every day – I didn’t disobey. I took it on. I wanted to make you proud.
And as I write this, I want you to know that I still want to make you proud, that everything I do is for you, just like everything you do is for me. I want you to know that my leaving Islam is not because of you or anything you did.
This is for me.
Because, dad, as much as I respect you and love you, I know in my heart that I cannot follow this religion anymore (or any religion for that matter). Dad, I’m sorry. I know this is breaking your heart, but I cannot stand beside you anymore. I wish I could. I really do. Because standing where I am right now feels so lonely. Because the second I realized I was in the process of leaving Islam was the second my world fell apart. And honestly, dad, if I could have anything in the world right now, if god existed, I would ask him to return me to my childhood. I would ask him so I could get the chance to hear your car pull up in the driveway once more, so I could see you standing in the entryway, so I could hear your voice calling out to me, hoarse from working all day, “Where are my princesses?”
I want to go back so I can record the tired joy on your face when my sister and I raced down the stairs and into your arms. Because those guys they show on the TV now, dad? The ones that are grouchy and have a permanent scowl on their faces? The ones that abuse and marry off their young daughters without their permission? The ones they call “Muslims”? They’re nothing like you. They’re monsters who hide under Islam’s archaic laws and use them to protect themselves. They are not Muslim monsters, they are monsters who are Muslims. They are not you, dad. And I wish I had that recording of you, smiling and hugging us, so I could show it to the world. So I could show them that it wasn’t you who made me take the first step towards apostasy, it was me. It was my own hypocrisy.
When I leave Islam, dad, I hope you don’t become angry with me or hate me or feel sad. Instead, I hope you remember the little girl I was. I hope you remember the little girl who left cookies for you on your pillowcase and the one who fell asleep that night on the couch, who tried so desperately and failed to stay up with you before you left for overseas. I say this because I want you to know that just as I have changed from that little girl, I was bound to change from the ten year old girl who prayed and informed you of her decision to wear long sleeves without you having to tell her first. I was bound to change from the teenaged girl who searched for Islamic videos online and memorized passages of the Quran. But change isn’t a bad thing, is it? You yourself worked hard to take my mother out of your warring homeland and to America. You changed your plan of having your family live in the same neighborhood you did as a kid. You said you did it to give us a better chance at happiness. So I want you to know that I, too, am doing this to give myself a better chance at happiness. No longer will I relegate myself to the status of a second class citizen because of my gender. You taught me that, didn’t you, dad?
If you are still reading this, you are probably wondering why I’m leaving this out for you. I am doing it so you know that I didn’t leave Islam because of Shaytan (devil). I didn’t leave Islam because of “Western Influence”. I left Islam because you taught me to be better than what this religion thinks of me. I am doing it because, just like I did as a child when I first wore the hijab, I want to make you proud.
After all, everything I’ve done in my life was to make you proud.
Love, E
















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My Leaving Was Not the Effect of a Single Cause
October 29, 2013
Maha is a Denver-based writer and law graduate, specializing in international criminal law, civil rights law, and international affairs. This is her first piece about leaving Islam. This article was first published at http://myoped.org/?p=245

Photo Credit: WikipediaPhoto Credit: Wikipedia
“If the people of this religion are asked about the proof for the soundness of their religion, they flare up, get angry and spill the blood of whoever confronts them with this question. They forbid rational speculation, and strive to kill their adversaries. This is why truth became thoroughly silenced and concealed.” —Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi
I’ve been asked the same question twice in the past two days, so I thought I’d answer it in a bit more detail: “Did a particular incident prompt you to leave Islam?”
The short answer is no – abandoning a set of personal beliefs is, and continues to be, a process for me. Certain events were influential catalysts –such as estrangement from family, but were not in and of themselves necessarily sufficient to prompt my abandonment of the religion in its entirety.
As much as many parents are influential in the child’s adoption of their religious beliefs, they can also equally influence a child’s decision to abandon such beliefs. There are many reasons why a child may continue to self-identify with her parents’ religious beliefs – including the fear of abandonment and estrangement, as was my case. This is due to the concept of group cohesion and identity. Apostates have long suffered discrimination, oppression, and persecution as a result of leaving their faith. This history is no doubt a scary reality – and doubly so for a dependent child of religious, or culturally religious, parents.
Parents are responsible for their children – after all, they chose to bring a child into the world, or otherwise by some decision of their own choosing the child was born (excluding force such as rape, in which case responsibility is tragically arguable). Their low level of emotional intelligence, or complete lack thereof, may result in their heavy reliance on religious beliefs to substitute for  their ability to parent. This jeopardizes their roles as caretakers and mentors. For example, religion can be used as an effective tool to control a child, through fear-mongering, as well as shaming. It can also be used to quell a child’s curiosity by substituting intellectual discourse with religious stories and rhetoric. The parent may not even theologically subscribe to a religion, but by virtue of his or her own upbringing in a culture heavily influenced by a particular religion, still possess beliefs similar if not identical to religious ones. In this case, the child is exposed to both direct and indirect religious ideations and expectations.
A child is not exclusively exposed to parental influence. As she grows, she is (if she’s lucky) exposed to new ideas, people, and experiences through schooling. This was my case. For a curious, young intellect, religious substitution for questions involving the sciences, for example, can only remain satisfactory for so long. Introduction to other schools of thought, such as philosophy or the scientific method, will challenge her to analyze and reconsider which belief system best suits her intellect.
For example, I was fascinated when I learned about evolution and Gregor Mendel’s pea experiments. Unfortunately, these ideas conflicted with the religious beliefs I had been raised with. In fact, they were absent from them. The more I began to study evolution, the more I came to realize that worship of deities and religiosity were inextricably linked in history to the survival of ancient societies. They were, in a sense, a sort of evolutionary adaptive trait. I began to examine the concept of God as this advantageous trait – particularly for an individual in a desperate situation. Concepts of “hope” and “faith” encouraged the individual to show resistance during a time where succumbing to the threat most certainly guaranteed death or serious injury.
That is not to say, however, that whatever religious beliefs inspire the individual to resist in times of despair are necessarily rational or true. But from an evolutionary and psychological point-of-view, these beliefs can be explained scientifically. This accounts, in part, for their continual persistence throughout human civilization. I thought very seriously and deeply about these concepts at an early age. I also developed a liking for authors like Mark Twain, and his historical resistance to religion.
I secretly wrote many essays on the subject of God as an evolutionary adaptive trait in my high school years. I was fascinated by the psychology of religion and its powerful role in group cohesion. Sadly, this would ultimately lead to my exclusion from my own group. I would not say I’m a modern-day Galileo, but I can most certainly empathize with his situation.
I am also often challenged over the concept of science in Islam. I do not find this to be convincing. Galileo, along with hundreds of other scientists throughout documented history, lived in religious societies where apostasy meant certain death. Many Islamic scientists faced the same fate (see here, here, and here for a non-exhaustive list of examples). It was impossible for them, or anyone, to self-identify as anything but Muslim. One only needs to look to the earliest of atheists during the rise of Islam,  such as Abu Bakr al-Razi (865-925 CE), to realize how deeply ingrained Islam was in society during these purported eras of Islamic scientism.
Al-Razi understood the hold of religious belief on these societies, which he attributed to several factors. Firstly, systems of beliefs spread mainly through the human propensity for imitating and copying others. Secondly, religion’s popularity rested on the close alliance between clerics and political rulers. The clerics often used this alliance to impose their own personal beliefs on people by force whenever the power of persuasion failed. Thirdly, the lavish and imposing character of the attire of religious men contributed to the high regard in which they were held by common people. Lastly, with the passage of time religious ideas became so familiar that they turned almost into deep-seated instincts that were no longer questioned.
This insight from al-Razi’s work helps to debunk the flawed assertion that all individuals at the time of these scientific discoveries would have voluntarily subscribed to the faith. He is also not an exhaustive list of examples. Sadly,  in almost all Islamic countries, the criminalization of apostasy continues today and many are condemned, imprisoned, and executed for choosing to leave their country’s state religion.
The one question which has resonated with me since childhood is this: If a religion such as Islam insists it is inherently peaceful, then why has it struggled since its inception to achieve peace?
So yes, the excommunication served as a catalyst for my leaving Islam. But it was certainly not a single incident which prompted my decision to abandon it.
















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The Western Convert‏
October 27, 2013
This is a guest post by Melanie. She has been active in the apostate community for some time and having experienced the damage that Islamism can cause first-hand, it weighs heavy on our heart. She wants to help ex-Muslims of all backgrounds: “We are all in this together, whether we we born, married or beguiled into Islam”

1. My Early Years
Although I was an American born and raised in Tokyo, Japan in 1959, I felt at home there and thrived in the international environment. My family was very secular, although Catholic in name. My school mates and friends were from every culture and every faith imaginable. If there was ever a Utopian society or sub culture, this was certainly it. We thoroughly enjoyed and embraced the diversity – except for the Russians – of course. Anyone who has lived in Tokyo knows about the “American Club” and when on the roof, could look down on the back of the Russian Embassy. We used to go up there as kids, and watch them play tennis. We were fascinated with these people who – what with it being the Cold War and all – were our enemies.
I attended Catholic schools for most of my youth, and my mother was always trying to push me towards becoming a nun. I was in awe of God, and I excelled in religious studies in school. I could think of no greater occupation or calling than devoting my entire life to God. This carried over into my adult years.
(Note: I am still agnostic at various times, because things have happened to me that had no rational explanation)
While disco was in its prime – and I was certainly a dancing ‘queen’ – my mother was extremely abusive towards her children. She did not have the excuse of being ‘religious’ or drinking alcohol to justify her heinous treatment of us. We all grew up fearing her. She tortured us, and I still have trouble at times forgiving her.
I remained fairly secular until I moved to the USA in 1977. I was getting into serious trouble in Tokyo with the wrong crowd, and my father decided to make my older brother my legal guardian in Santa Barbara, CA. I went from being in want of nothing, rubbing shoulders with the elite of Tokyo, to dirt poor. I had to get vouchers from a social worker just to have bus tickets to get to and from school, and one meal at school a day. I sold flowers on street corners just to make ends meet, and for little extra pocket change.
I then met some people who were ‘born again Christians’ and it didn’t take much to beguile me into the fold. I was obliviously happy, and thought I had found ‘IT’. I had a bad case of pleurisy, but we could not afford to go to the doctor. The pastor offered to pray for me. I went up front, and the next thing I knew, the entire congregation was all around me – laying hands on me – and praying. I suddenly felt what seemed like a bowling ball hitting me in my chest, and I passed out. When I came to, everyone was back in their seats, and I was on the floor up front feeling baffled. I was hyperventilating and realized….. There was absolutely no pain in my chest! A miracle? I was convinced it was the power of prayer, and God himself (or the Holy Spirit) had healed me!
My brother was also very abusive, and at one point attempted to rape me. I had no recourse and was terrified. Then one day he said goodbye, and never returned. Still being a minor, I had no idea what to do and was too young to pay for the small apartment we were living in.
In the interim, after my parents split up, my mother had moved to Foster City, CA. I called my father in Tokyo, and told him what had happened. I was forced to move up north to live with my mother – again. The abuse continued. I was in hell. And this is where I can fully sympathize with muslimahs. She started bringing men home, some as old as 35, trying to get me married off. I was only 17! She would come home with them, introduce us, then leave the apartment, with me alone with them for hours on end. It was a nightmare! I had to get out of there. My only option at the time was joining the military. It was the fastest way I could think of escaping, and so, I joined the United States Air Force.
2. Adulthood
I became a ‘fence rider’: one who is part of the church, but still enjoyed partying and my new found freedom. For the next 16 years I served all over the world, and my religion tagged along here and there. I started to see that my greatest focus of interest was cultural anthropology. Wherever I traveled, I would saturate myself in the culture, people, customs, etc.
In 1979, i was stationed in Mississippi at a pilot training base. We had international pilot trainees there, including many Persian trainees. I preferred the international crew, as that was within my comfort zone. Then the Iranian hostage crisis hit. The Persian pilots were desperate to marry American women so they wouldn’t have to go back. The short of it was they were given an ultimatum. Go back to Iran and be executed for treason, or seek asylum/or get married in the US, and in that case, they were threatened that their families would be executed. Being in Mississippi was no help either. The KKK became very active, and burned a cross in front of the Iranian commander’s house. And just like that, all my friends disappeared.
The bomb threats began – usually in the barracks – and I cannot count the times that we were awoken in the middle of the night and evacuated while bomb squads would comb the barracks for several hours. Security was heightened beyond belief.
In December 1983, I was shipped off to Diyarbakir, Turkey. I was terrified. Right before leaving, I watched, “Midnight Express”. BAD idea! But my fascination outweighed any fear I had. The PKK had started some heavy hitting and refugees from all over the region came to Diyarbakir for refuge. I remember hearing the adhaan when we would go to the bazaar. It fascinated me. It sounded beautiful to me! I made many friends there, and also got deeply involved with the local orphanage. Because of the PKK, the orphanage was overcrowded, and they did not have the means to support the ever growing number of children there. I never distinguished the Kurds from the Turks. They were all just little ones, victims of crazies, and I loved them all with every fiber of my being. Since I spent so much of my free time there, the locals offered to take me and a few other Americans to various archaeological digs, and sites, that I doubt very few foreign eyes had seen. It was a bitter sweet assignment. The one thing that we were warned about on a continual basis was to NEVER even discuss Jesus in public. That just someone overhearing a discussion could have been considered us trying to proselytize muslims which carried SEVERE consequences.
3. The Cult
In 1987, I was befriended by this woman I worked with in the Air Force. Turns out she was a pastor of a church, and I decided I was going to fully dedicate my life again to Christianity. It was a Pentecostal Holiness church. This means NO pants for women, dresses/skirts to the ankles, no sleeveless shirts, no makeup, not cutting of the hair, no movies, no swimming, no unisex sports, no interaction with the ‘brothers’ outside of the church (sound familiar?). NO dating without the pastor’s consent, and definitely NOT being alone with your date. But the doctrine we learned seemed amazing at the time, revelations of the bible I had never heard before. I soaked it up like a sponge. I was immediately called to teach (which came naturally to me), and then called to be an apprentice pastor. I wanted to do missionary work, working with the poor and orphans. But because I was not married, they refused to send me overseas. And like in all cult religions, exclusivism abounded. Everyone else was either going to wind up in hell, or some lower level of heaven than we were. Many people snubbed outsiders, but I just felt sorry for them.
In 1993, now completely saturated in the fear-based doctrine, I was in a living hell. When the man I had fallen in love with was killed in a car accident, I came to realize that there was no way out, and I was suicidal. The idea of leaving my religion was out of the question because by now, they had convinced me that if someone left, they would be attacked by dragon (demon) spirits, and even possessed by them, with a one way ticket to hell. ALL contact with anyone in the church would be severed, because we were afraid those dragon spirits would jump off the person onto us. The sharp claws of this cult dug deep into every member. I was at their bible institute at their headquarters in Indiana. I HAD to get out of there if I was to have any hope of having ANY quality of life.
In 1995, I finally got the “elders” to agree to me moving back to California, to assist a small mission in Redwood City. The pastor there was a friend of mine. And to a degree, I could breathe again after so many years. I spent about two years in that church. Well, some things went down with the pastor, and they threatened to pull her license. Instead, they gave the church over to this young couple who were barely out of their teens. I was like, “Screw this!” Slowly I stopped attending services, prayer meetings and bible studies.
My dad was then living in Mountain View, CA. One morning, sitting on the front porch it hit me all at once. I had been 1) sucked into a cult, 2) falling for ALL their shit, 3) If there WAS a god, why the HELL did he let me get involved in that living hell for so many years! I started crying in absolute disbelief! I was PISSED! One of the things they accused me of before I left Indiana was that I was unknowingly practicing witchcraft! I didn’t even know what witchcraft was! I couldn’t call my friends because now I had dragon spirits on me and they wouldn’t even speak to me. I was completely cut off.
I started studying witchcraft, because I wanted to know what I was being accused of. Once I got the general idea (no belief in biblical god, or the devil, or heaven/hell) I thought, “wow, that was actually a compliment”, vs. the insult they intended!
So I started practicing paganism. Still feeling a strong spiritual pull, I couldn’t identify where it was supposed to be. I didn’t seem to fit into any organized religion.
2001 – I had spent about a year taking care of my father, who was suffering from Parkinson’s disease. Eventually, it became too much for me, and my sister and her husband took over. In Oct 2001, I drove cross country and moved to Reno, Nevada. I still had strong resentments that the cult had taken the best years of my life, and no longer was I interested too much in paganism. I still had this nagging fear about hell, however. Several years had gone by, and I went back to school. I took an anthropology class, and my professor said he would give me a degree for my experiences alone, all I needed to do was learn the terminology. Well, lo and behold, throughout the course, several Islam based cultures were studied.
4. The Revert (Out of the frying pan, into the fire)
I started surfing the web for everything I could find about Islam. I was fascinated! Much of it felt familiar and I became more curious. I found a Muslim chat room, and before I knew it, I was feeling ‘at home’ there. One day, I came across this Shia site, and I pulled up this very long prayer. It was written, and spoken in English. I fell prostrate because that prayer said everything I was thinking for many years. I WANTED to have hope again. I WANTED to believe there was a god. I WANTED assurance, that I wouldn’t go to hell! I told my internet ‘dawagandists’ my revelation from that prayer, and while they frowned on it being ‘Shia’, they were elated I was ready to do my shahada. Plus, they showed me how absolutely ridiculous Christianity was, which I still held much resentment for. So I embraced Islam wholeheartedly. They helped me find a Masjid. I was no stranger to praying for hours on end, fasting, and studying scripture – it was second nature for me. They claimed they were Sunni, but after much studying, and dialog, I am convinced they were Salafis. They were slowly grooming me for the ultimate goal — to be a niqabi.
Then, the private messages started coming in. “ASL?” I was swarmed with perverts wanting cyber sex, and the ultimate acquisition – an American visa! Even one of the dawagandists, probably the most conservative of them all, started messaging me and our conversations went south, very quickly. I finally told him, I was trying to be a good muslim and our conversations were seriously haram. The guilt saddened me.
The masjid… well… They HATED me there! I was an American white woman. They stared at me constantly, and I could feel the mistrust and daggers flying at me. I got very discouraged and left. The first “sermon” for Jummah that I heard freaked me out. “Shaytan will piss in your ear if you miss Fajr”. What the…???! I was happy that Fajr was my favorite time to pray. But the wudu and repetitive prayers started me wondering. I studied diligently! Hours on end of recitation and rote memorization. But the more I studied, the more I realized that Islam was nothing more than a plagiarized, twisted version of Christianity. The contradictions started appearing everywhere. The glorified holy wars sickened me. Reading about Safiyya bint Huyayy horrified me! This was good? This was “holy” and a reward from god? After what they did to her husband???
I gradually frequented that website less and less. I realized that it was ALL bullshit. ALL OF IT. ALL Abrahamic religions! I had just gone from one irrational and insane religion to the next. I cannot say which is more twisted to be honest. I think they are equal in how much heinous acts are condoned and REWARDED by god!
I was lost again. About a year or so later, I found the Council of Ex-Muslims (CEMB). I had never heard of Ex-muslims (once in the chat room someone came in, and I was privately warned to block them because they were kaffir. I had no idea what a kaffir was at the time).
I realized I was now a Murtad (apostate, or one who leaves Islam after having believed in it), and all that that encompassed. I became really nervous and fearful of running into someone from the masjid (I had long since removed my hijab), since I had now learned about the consequences of leaving Islam.
The amazing people in CEMB helped me through what I liken to the five stages of grief when someone dies. Not only the leaving of Islam, but the realization that this god was a fraud. I WAS LIVID! I got depressed, really depressed. I tried bargaining. I tried everything until acceptance finally came.
After being on CEMB for approximately two years, I joined Facebook and found some of my CEMB friends there. Kiran, who works for the CEMB, was one of them. It was recently that she referred me to a group she had just co-founded, the Ex-Muslims of North America (EXMNA). For a couple of years on CEMB, I kept asking about and looking for Ex-Muslim groups in the USA, since the CEMB is based in England. I had pretty much given up looking for a stateside organization, as the only ones I found were ultra conservative Christian groups looking to both damn all Muslims, and convert those who left Islam to Christianity. A few years ago, I managed to get together a small group of Ex-Muslims from different states and organized a meetup in New Orleans, where we had the time of our lives! I am looking forward to working with EXMNA, making new connections with other Ex-Muslims, especially other former converts, and helping out in any way that I can.
Once I accepted the truth, I had a sense of a freedom like never before. I could be me for the first time in my life!
















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When I Went Public With My Atheism – A Pakistani Atheists Story
October 22, 2013
“This article originally appeared on the Larrikin Post. Give them a visit for more intelligent, free-thinking opinion.”

Danial (a pseudonym) went public with his atheism after studying for a few years in Australia. But it wasn’t until he got home to Pakistan that he started to realize the repercussions of his decision.
By Danial Haider
“As religious as a Pakistani,” should be formally inducted as an idiom in the English language. I undoubtedly was one. But some children’s intellectual activities transcend outer influences, and I was undoubtedly one of them, too. A skerrick of doubt creeping into your faith has a domino effect, and the whole stack tumbles  down without warning. I spent some time on the fence, researching and contemplating, but eventually thanked God I that was finally an atheist!
Fortunately for me, I had moved far from my home in Pakistan to Australia to study. Upon declaring my atheism there, I evoked nothing but a “good on you mate, let’s grab a beer”. Over a cup of tea with my friends, I was always told that every other person here is secular, if not an atheist, and faith was such a personal topic it was rarely discussed. And so even though I had become an “uber-atheist” (as one my friends once called me), in the various social interactions I had, there were no problems at all pertaining to my faith or the lack of it.
And yet, anticipating my return to Pakistan after the completion of my degree, I was often warned by concerned friends over drinks (as the tea had now changed to scotch), to keep my mouth shut about my transformation when I got back. I would dismiss this concern, but still I decided to keep my new found atheism to myself. After all, rant all one may, it is a personal matter. But the reality in Pakistan was quite different from what I had imagined.
Take for instance, the dinner table; everyone bows and shakes their head in unison when a diner thanks God and solemnly declares how Gracious is He who gave us this wonderful food, even though as sinful as we are, we surely deserve to starve to death. If one head out of the many does not move, and one face remains remorseless, then eyebrows go up and eyes widen; especially if that head has been out of the sanctity of the country of Allah for a while and the face has caught a whiff of the infidel.
Or, take the instance when, during Azaan (call to prayer) you do not turn off the music. Or when you do not swear on Allah’s name. Or you mistakenly eat in public during Ramadan when all the faithful are fasting for Him. Or you reject the idea that women are man’s property and you are allowed to beat them – the problem with this one is that it is unequivocally mentioned in the Qur’an, and the Qur’an is sacrosanct. You just cannot contest something explicitly mentioned in the Qur’an, because in order to reject it, you would inevitably have to declare that you don’t believe in God. That is apostasy. Which is, well, death, in other words.
I had a discussion with a friend, who is an esteemed author and a self-proclaimed Jewish agnostic. We were discussing the virtues of agnosticism compared to atheism, and she declared that classifying oneself as either theist or atheist is rather childish and simplistic. Rather, we should be committed to our doubt, by not falling on either side. But in my country, you do not have the luxury to sit on the fence: everything you do, how you live your life, the whole of the societal discourse, draws from religion. For you to reject their way of life is simply unacceptable. No part of your personal life is your own, not even your bedroom. Deviate slightly, and be persecuted.
One might ask, where does the society get the moral authority to assert their way of life on you from? The Qur’an, the unquestionable word of Allah. Challenging even the smallest idea inevitably leads to the contention about the existence of God. And when I say assert their way of life, I do not allude to a mere moral harangue, but to Kalashnikovs, TNTs, scimitars and slit throats.
Another aspect about Pakistan which sets it apart from other countries where religious persecutions thrive, such as Iran, is that in Pakistan individuals are a bigger persecutor than the State. The State is largely absent and/or incompetent. There is a large chance that you’ll be executed by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard for being an atheist, but not by Pakistan’s Inter-Services-Intelligence or the Police, because they have bigger to problems at hand such as fighting terrorists, battling India, maximizing their own political clout and extorting money in their spare time. But 27 bullets can be lodged in your body by your own bodyguard, if as the Governor of Punjab you propose amendments to the blasphemy law, while staunchly asserting that you love the Prophet just as everyone else in the country. Your killer is showered with petals and is regarded as a hero.
A lot of people in Australia, including two of my professors, told me they were at loss to explain Pakistan’s obsession with religion and the accompanying religious terrorism. Well, a crude statistical analysis can make a significant connection: more than 98% are practicing Muslims, with more than 80% of those being Sunni. Within that 2% minority, only 1.6% are Christians. The rest are Hindus, Sikhs, Baha’is and Ahmadis. The minorities are impoverished, mistreated and face extinction. Now, while my stance might seem anti-Pakistan, it must be understood that a country with very high income inequality, severe social stratification, economic downturn, ravaging floods and earthquakes, presence in the strategic hot-zone of the region, and the rather belligerent mentality of the people of the Indian subcontinent, does put Pakistan’s difficult position into perspective. All of this is accentuated by belief in a religion that, in the opinion of many, is in a phase similar to what Christianity went through in the dark ages. When societies have less, they will tend to cling to faith more.
In such a religious society, avoiding discussions about God and the Qu’ran is difficult, but I have to do it, as a price for keeping my heart thumping.
This is serious. And what worries me more is that, in my experience, many people back in Australia, upon being presented with this dilemma of mine, regarded it as “no big deal”, as if Kohsar Market is no different a place than the Kirribilli Markets. It is a big deal. A very, very big deal.
As for informing my family of my decision, well, it is very difficult to let the person you love, condemn himself to a volley of bullets in this world, and an eternal hellfire in the next. But your family almost always does not abandon you. There is an implicit pact between family members that each will clean up any mess made by the other. Most honour it, some don’t.
Even though I came from a fairly influential family, I always thought it was a tad pointless to advocate freedom of expression in a place like Pakistan, where the majority had empty stomachs. Just as Lenin once said: “No amount of political freedom will satisfy the hungry masses”. But now that I have been excommunicated by some of my mildly religious acquaintances, warned of awaiting eternal hellfire by the more devout, and outrightly threatened by Allah’s self-anointed contractors, I can now fully appreciate the value of being able to think for myself and express my opinions.
People living in liberal societies such as Australia should be thankful for the freedoms they enjoy and empathetic to people living in those societies where simple liberties are restricted; rather where a pursuit of such liberties is life-threatening. And such liberal societies should not take lightly to protecting their freedom.
















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Why I Do Not Believe
September 23, 2013
“Good people will do good things, and bad people will do bad things. But for good people to do bad things—that takes religion.” – Stephen Weinberg
After spending ones life being a ‘believer’ a religious moderate so to say the very idea of disbelief is somehow anathema. Even while writing this essay, there’s a part of me that’s in denial about where I stand today.
I’ve always held religious conservatives in open disdain being of the opinion that their regressive ideals are a product of a flawed intellectual conclusion, with the idea that they do not adhere to the faith so much as to a dogmatic view promoting a very specific agenda. I still believe that to in essence be true.
Over the past year I’ve been undergoing what I now see as a cathartic experience of rejecting the last vestiges of unreason from my life.
Due to various events I was forced to reexamine what I believed in and what the essence of my faith was. I was doing this with the intention of further solidifying my beliefs and buttress them against conservative forces which I as always thought to be anti-thetical to my belief system.
I beefed up on my reading about theology and Islamic history, one of the best books I read during this period was Reza Aslan’s “No God But God” which proved very illuminating. One of the key points that somehow in my utter naiveté had eluded me was that previous leaders were just like the leaders now “What does any man with power want? More power” and as such were willing to employ any measure at their disposal including corrupting faith at will. Reading about Caliph’s declaring themselves to be the “Caliph of Allah” instead of the more pedestrian “Caliph of the Prophet”. Power grabs even in the metaphysical world .
There was tension from the very beginning between those that simply believed and those that wanted to understand their beliefs. Early Islamic history is littered with great thinkers, scientists and philosophers. What we aren’t usually told when people look back nostalgically is that all of these thinkers weren’t representative of the mainstream faith but were ostracized. Ibn e Sina one of the greatest muslim scholars if not the greatest had multiple attempts on his life for his so called ‘apostasy’.
The Golden period of Islam wherein the Islamic culture contributed massively to the advancement of the world and preservation of knowledge ‘being a product of Islam’ was a myth. As today the masses were superstitious and deeply irrational with religious zealots holding sway over them. The only difference being the scholar’s patrons (Caliphs and Royal Courts) allowed them to flourish both by defending them and with monetary support.
Correlation does not equal causation, simply because those advancements occurred during Muslim rule does not by fiat mean that the Conservative narrative of it being the product of Islam is true. The scholars that produced all the amazing feats and revivified science were invariably branded heretics by the religious right so to speak. Most of them drank, questioned the existence of god etc etc. Not to mention the questions they raised traumatized the religious then as they do now. I might be confusing the exact name but I believe Ibn e Sina survived three assassination attempts on his life for being a heretic. The ‘golden age’ that occurred was in spite of Islam not because of it. The primary reason for that in my opinion being that the ‘faithful’ did not hold the reins of power at that point.
This flickering light went out with Imam Ghazali almost single handedly destroying rational thought (Fire does not intrinsically burn but only direct action of God causes the burning action…..). The conservative ideal of all knowledge flowing from religion rather than reality gained supremacy. The immediate consequence of this was a wholesale slaughter of all rational thinkers in the Islamic sphere. If you follow the flowering of Islamic scientific discoveries they whither n die within a century of Ghazali (12/13th century).
Upon further reading various inconsistencies became glaringly obvious. For example for those that adhere to the Hadith , there is a Hadith in Sahih Muslim that expressly forbids the collection of Hadith. Why would a successful businessman married into wealth who actively encouraged literacy among his followers refuse to learn how to read and write? Why would Shia’s still believe in the Imamat when the Imam-designate Ismail died during the lifetime of the prior Imam Jafar Sadiq (with it being supposed to be passed on generationally). Why was Mariyah never mentioned? The sheer quantity of questions and contradictions that I hadn’t ever encountered reading any classical Islamic text was an obvious indicator of the self-censorship being exerted.
I suddenly found many aspects of the faith to be deeply troubling.
In that vein I had previously discounted the Islamic homophobia as being a cultural issue and that perhaps my understanding of it was deficient. On the one end I was giving God a free pass for homophobia while believing that denying anyone their rights as human beings is a grotesque violation. The idea of a God that would smite down an entire nation for the high crime of sodomy is the very definition of bigotry. The fact that this is prominently mentioned in the Quran makes any excuse of it simple denial. (Ref Sodom n gomora). How is it just and right for a God to create a segment of the population to have differing sexual needs and desires and then punish them for following through on them? Imagine being forced to go against your natural sexual instinct (If you’re a heterosexual imagine being forced to be with a member of your own sex) at the risk of not only being killed in this world but suffering eternal torment in the next.
One of the pillars of my belief was justice, that faith itself wasn’t as important as content of character, I guess you could call it a further extension of the Prophet’s last sermon. The idea that the most important thing in life was not which diety you worshipped but the good you did in this world, people like Mother Teresa, Gandhi, Mandela etc would be judged by what they did not what they believed/disbelieved. I often quoted “Those who believe (in the Qur’an), and those who follow the Jewish (scriptures), and the Christians and the Sabians,- any who believe in Allah and the Last Day, and work righteousness, shall have their reward with their Lord; on them shall be no fear, nor shall they grieve.” – 002.062, as evidence of the same. Anyone with a critical eye will notice the erroneous conclusion I drew. The verse specifically mentions the belief in Allah being a pre-requisite, one if charitable may take that as monotheism but even with that charitable definition, a sizable majority of the world including the Christian Trinitarians (Mother Teresa etc) are condemned to hell. Denying so seems to be denying the Quran itself.
From the same Quranic section when Lot was asked to hand over the angels as sexual fodder for the local heathen population, he defended them as any rational human would but then he runs counter to all moral values wherein he offers his daughters up for rape to save his male guests. Again its worth emphasizing that this is verbatim from the Quran itself which turns the idea of female rights on its head.
Around the same time a friend sent a paper she was working on (for her thesis) which was about a Coptic slave Mārīyah that the Prophet received as a present. The prophet was so taken with her beauty that she became his favorite companion in bed. The altercation with Hafsa mentioned in the Quran was a direct consequence of this. Hafsa walked in on the prophet spending time allocated to her with Mārīyah. Up until this point I was in denial, including a friends explanation about the slavery bits in the Quran being incorrectly interpreted. But on the other hand if the prophet himself had a sex slave all other bets were off (and that’s without going into his wives)
Moving on to the parable of Abraham….
Oh God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son”
Abe says, “Man, you must be puttin’ me on”
God say, “No.” Abe say, “What?”
God say, “You can do what you want Abe, but
 The next time you see me comin’ you better run”
Well Abe says, “Where do you want this killin’ done?”
What parent in their right mind would consent to killing their offspring regardless of what power is presented or what repercussions lie ahead. The very idea of parenthood is to protect ones offspring not to offer them up to the first deity demanding homage. Again this is something that’s usually justified and thought of in the abstract, but why do we afford it such a luxury. Imagine your own niece, daughter, nephew son etc , their faces and imagine taking their life, can you honestly say you can contemplate any scenario where you could do so or where the societal response will be anything beyond sheer horror and revulsion. Why then do we treat Abraham with kid gloves? The same goes to Lot beyond the women’s right issues, this great prophet was not exactly what one would call the perfect parent.
Switching gears for a moment what is the nature of miracles? Is it that which is highly improbable, one in a million chance perhaps? one in a billion? What’s the threshold between improbable and miraculous. Does someone recovering from a terminal illness with a survival rate of 0.1% constitute a miracle? Or is that person just the 1 in a 1000 case illustrated directly by the survival rate.
Looking at some of the miracles quoted in the Quran stretches its credibility to say the least. I personally had been of the view that God did not intervene in the worldly plain but had set things in motion, being an omnipotent omniscient being he had the foresight of knowing what decisions mortals would take, and miracles though extremely improbable did not involve suspension of natural law.
Unsurprisingly examining these same miracles with a critical eye yields a very different result.
Adam for example was supposedly the first created human, on the flip side of which we have a clear evolutionary line of human lineage that dates back over the course of millions of years. Disregarding human evolution we have ample evidence that all life on the planet originated from common origins. How then does one special case human beings without any evidence and disregard all evidence to the contrary? How is that not the ultimate expression of human hubris?
Jesus borne of the Virgin Mary, the infamous immaculate conception (3:47 She said: “O my Lord! How shall I have a son when no man hath touched me?” He said: “Even so: Allah createth what He willeth: When He hath decreed a plan, He but saith to it, ‘Be,’ and it is!). Looking at the same through the lens of reason, there Is no known instance of that occurring, and modern history has covered somewhere north of 10 billion people being born and the countless other mammals with no other known instances. At this point the faithful would chime in with yes that is precisely why it was a divine miracle. But we now know that human sexuality is determined by the male genetic contribution, having a female egg simply split providing extra genetic material would result in two X chromosomes and the result would be Miss Jesus. Actually in nature that does happen, there are animals (some reptiles) that can and do reproduce asexually by a process called Parthenogenesis. The problem being that the resultant offspring are all female, notwithstanding the fact that due to the way mammalian pregnancy progresses Parthenogenesis is impossible in humans.
During Noah’s term on earth there occurred a great flood wiping out disbelievers. According to the story the earth was drenched in water killing all flora and fauna in addition those that disbelieved. Due to the scale of the event Noah had to preserve life by preserving the various species along with him. The obvious problem being the ability to collect and preserve the complete species of our planet is impossible. The diversity that we live in is far beyond even all our technical capabilities today. Every day scientists discover new species, new forms of life. Even with all our advancements we have not managed to catalog all life. The idea of being able to preserve it a catastrophic incident is beyond laughable well into the territory of absurd. Ignoring that though an event as cataclysmic as that would have left an imprint in the geological record of the earth or in the fossil record, no such event exists that coincides with human existence.
The tale of Moses and the exodus of the Israelites features prominently in all Abrahamic faiths. The quran asserts the series of Miracles, ranging from plagues to crossing the red sea to divine sustenance and yet throughout that period god was continually doubted by the Israelites, can you imagine the power and awe someone would feel on seeing a sea parted in front of them for their survival while drowning their oppressors, the sheer power of such a god would convince the most cynical minds, yet according to the Quran itself, this was not so. To put this in context, imagine a man doing a feat of that magnitude today coupled with the other miracles, how many would believe his claims despite our current technological prowess.
What benefits do we as a civilization, as a species garner from faith itself?
 One of the key idea that is used for justification of faith is Human Morality. Without faith we are told that we would have nothing to anchor us to provide us with a sense of right and wrong. The argument is fallacious; do you believe that if today you were given a blank check by god to do as you please, without any ramifications to your eternal life, you would turn into a serial killer, a child molester? The answer for the vast majority of the human population would be an unequivocal no.
This idea also fails to address the universality of human ideals far beyond the reach of religions. There exists a set of basic ideals, basic principles upon which the edifice of human morality rests. These cross all racial, religious and geographic boundaries. Human beings defend their own; believe that killing their own (group) is abhorrent, that have empathy for others, so on and so forth.
All of these behavior patterns are not unique to humans but are present in higher primates. Chimpanzees have been observed to leap into water to save a drowning member of their group… Chimpanzees are not of fond of water and do not swim. An experiment was conducted on a rhesus monkey wherein it was denied food, the food was available at the push of a button, the associated side effect of this was electric shocks to a companion of the monkey…turns out the hungry monkey chose to starve rather then torture…
Directly equating human morality with primate morality is not completely accurate though, there’s one significant difference, we took these basic rules hard wired in our brain for survival and quite literally ran with them. We infused these with our intellect to create a framework of ethics over the millennia. The code of Hammurabi being a prominent early example.
The corrosive influence of blind faith and the extremes it has driven humanity to are something that is an obvious concern. No the claim that all wars are because of religion and would cease to exist is obviously spurious. On the other hand the appeal to unreason that is an essence of organized religion is something that has held back society for thousands of years. It stunted the growth of Islamic civilization in the 12th century. Similary Roman and Christian influences destroyed the Greek civilizations march towards rationality.
Similarly today most Muslim countries are stuck in a medieval society simply because of the group-appeal of unreason. These range from the well documented human rights abuses to a certain fatalism about ones fate and control over one’s destiny to the complete lack of a scientific initiative. From Pervez Hoodbhoy’s excellent treatise Islam and Science: Religious Orthodoxy and the Battle for Rationality; Israel with a population of 6 million outpublishes (scientific papers) the entire Muslim world of 1.2 billion put together. Ascribing these massive disparities to external factors is again ignoring the reality of the situation where thinking is not only actively discouraged but feared and condemned. There’s a video available online of Sam Harris talking about his book The End of Faith wherein one of the initial comments is would he able to formulate his thesis and speak about it publicly in a Muslim country without fearing for his life? The thread of intolerance and unreason is something common to all major religions, ranging from the churches condemnation of condoms quite literally ending the lives of millions of believers that as a direct result got infected with HIV in Africa, or the denial of taboo social issues in Muslim countries to the popularity of obscene pseudo-science authors (Harun Yahya et. al) that mislead a pliable audience. Faith is more then just complicit in all this and more it is the primary source of it.
As you may have noticed in all the above one of the ongoing themes was intellectual dishonesty and denial. Happily (or sadly depending on your point of view) that can only last so long. Enter stage left, Richard Dawkins with his documentary on Faith being “The Root of All Evil”. Even though I knew most of the arguments coming from an evolutionary biologist one of the themes that I hadn’t come across was his moral outrage and complete condemnation of religious moderates.
The thesis of his argument was that religious conservatives believe in their religious text and follow it to the letter. Moderates on the other hand fuse secular ideals that have evolved over the past millennia with their religious ideals and pass this off as being the best of both worlds. In reality they filter out inconvenient sections of their religious treatises thus being unfaithful to their religion. On the other hand adhering to a set of beliefs that by definition are resistant to logic, runs counter to reason itself.
What exactly does it mean to be a moderate adherent? By definition regardless of which faith you look at moderates cherry pick what they believe and disbelieve in. On the other hand the idea of faith flowing from divine authority is that right and wrong is ordained from up high. If one was selectively implementing, selectively interpreting verses, sections then one has already made themselves to be the ultimate arbitrar. They themselves are deciding what constitutes right and what constitutes wrong not the divine text itself. In essence the very idea of moderation in faith is bankrupt.
The point itself became evaluating faith from a neutral standpoint, without giving it any free passes on reason. As laid out above, logically questioning the faith leads to the conclusion that the divinity of the message is suspect.
Further, my belief-set is largely inspired by what I believe to be good and true and with hindsight I was projecting the same back onto the Islamic message not the other way around. There is obviously significant overlap between the two due to which I believed for so long, not to mention the formative influence it has had on me. On the other hand treating it as something divine rather then another codex of laws derived from a man that was trying to make the world a better place is an untenable position that I can no longer subscribe to.
There is no evidence of a divine being, of any religion on the planet having any more of a grasp on reality or divinity then Zeus on Mt. Olympia did. The argument of where did the universe originate does not implicitly prove that there is a god but actually raises the question of where did God himself come from? Employing Occam’s razor the probability of a simple uncreated universe is much higher then a complex uncreated god. Not to mention, my opinion of a god is far more just, inclusive, humane and compassionate then what’s articulated in the Quran.
The parable of the teapot from Bertrand Russel comes to mind:
“If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.”
At the moment I personally hope that there is a divine presence but that is all it boils down to, the human need to belong, to mark ourselves with something less ephemeral then our brief existence on this rock we call home, on our need for justice and equality where we see none. I too share that hope but acknowledge that it is a hope nothing more.
















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Ex-Muslims of North America
World’s first Anti Shia Alliance convention results in calls for violence and sectarian purging The anti-Shia declaration The alliance is a preaching forum to promote virtues and prevent abominable acts. The alliance will take any necessary measures to maximize the prevention of the proliferation of heretical teachings by Shia followers. The alliance will forge good relations with other preaching organizations. The alliance will demand that the government immediately ban Shia and revoke all licenses for foundations, organizations and institutions owned by Shiites. http://www.commdiginews.com/world-news/worlds-first-anti-shia-alliance-convention-results-in-calls-for-violence-and-sectarian-purging-16020/#4s5kbfIWw5c8EiUw.16
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Losing my religion: Clergy who no longer believe gather online http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/religion/losing-my-religion-clergy-who-no-longer-believe-gather-online/2014/04/24/401e07d8-cbcf-11e3-b81a-6fff56bc591e_story.html
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Catherine Dunphy came to seminary in her mid-20s, full of passion to work in the service of the Catholic Church. By the time she left, for many...
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'I have to help the people of Bangladesh' Asif Mohiuddin is one of Bangladesh's most famous bloggers. As an open atheist in a mainly Islamic country, he has been attacked and thrown in jail for his beliefs. DW caught up with him after his recent move to Germany. http://www.dw.de/i-have-to-help-the-people-of-bangladesh/a-17581354
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One killed as Moroccan leftists, Islamists clash http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/2/8/99812/World/Region/One-killed-as-Moroccan-leftists,-Islamists-clash.aspx
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One,killed,as,Moroccan,leftists,,Islamists,clash,-,Region,-,World
english.ahram.org.eg

Jesus & Mo on their partners
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Islamists kill second Somali lawmaker, threaten more attacks Islamist rebels shot dead a Somali lawmaker on Tuesday, a day after blowing up one of his colleagues, and vowed to keep killing politicians and wreck efforts to secure the country. http://english.alarabiya.net/en/News/2014/04/22/Islamists-kill-second-Somali-lawmaker-threaten-more-attacks.html
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7 Ways Westerners Can Help Ex-Muslims http://www.patheos.com/blogs/camelswithhammers/2014/04/7-ways-westerners-can-help-ex-muslims/
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Secular Thought of the Day My people are going to learn the principles of democracy the dictates of truth and the teachings of science. Superstition must go. Let them worship as they will, every man can follow his own conscience provided it does not interfere with sane reason or bid him act against the liberty of his fellow men.” ― Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938)
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Pakistan’s Islamists Returning with a vengeance Seven years after the Red Mosque affair, a renowned extremist re-emerges http://www.economist.com/news/asia/21601047-seven-years-after-red-mosque-affair-renowned-extremist-re-emerges-returning-vengeance
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Scripture of the Day Quran 7:50 And the companions of the Fire will call to the companions of Paradise, "Pour upon us some water or from whatever Allah has provided you." They will say, "Indeed, Allah has forbidden them both to the disbelievers." Quran 47:15 shall dwell for ever in the Fire, and be given, to drink, boiling water, so that it cuts up their bowels (to pieces)? Admin's Note: More torture from Allah - on how either the unbelievers will have boiling water poured down their throats or suffer from dehydration
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How to go to Brazil , check out the world cup and not spend a dime of your own money - praise be to the invisible guy in the sky http://www.gofundme.com/dawahtrip
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Salamu Alaykum Warahmatullahi Wabaraktu ***DAWAH TIME** **DAWAH TIME*** **DAWAH TIME** Backgroud: My name is Jabir Mohamed, and I am currently...
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Neil deGrasse Tyson Said Earth Is 4.5 Billion Years Old on TV: Creationists' Heads Explode It did not take long for the creationists to take issue with Neil DeGrasse Tyson and the latest episode of Cosmos on Fox. Why you ask? Well, because Tyson dared to declare the age of the earth to be 4.5 billion years old. http://www.alternet.org/belief/neil-degrasse-tyson-says-planet-45-billion-years-old-national-tv-creationists-heads-explode
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The evolutionary tree of myth & religion
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#ExMuslim Meetups this weekend - email us for more info 25th April - Chicago, IL - chicago@exmna.org 26th April - New York, NY - newyork@exmna.org 26th April - Washington, DC - washingtondc@exmna.org 26th April - Houston, TX - houston@exmna.org

Jesus & Mo on Muslims not being a monolith http://www.jesusandmo.net/2014/04/23/group/
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Muslim drivers at Cleveland airport refuse to drive cabs with Gay Games advertising Roughly 25 Muslim drivers dispatched to Cleveland Hopkins International Airport are refusing to drive cabs adorned with advertising for the region’s upcoming Gay Games, citing religious reasons. http://www.foxnews.com/us/2014/04/18/muslim-drivers-at-cleveland-airport-refuse-to-drive-cabs-with-gay-games/
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Disclaimer: All statements in this article reflect the author's position and opinions. They in no way represent the Army's views, concepts, or regulatory guidance. Someone once asked me how many Humanists there are in the Army. I answered,
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When Muslims renounce their faith Fearing ostracism by their family, or even death, many former Muslims keep their disbelief secret. A German organization offers support to people who leave Islam for another religion, or for none. http://www.dw.de/when-muslims-renounce-their-faith/a-17574172
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Empowering? Really? http://wp.me/p40KmF-1o
When I asked this question as a little girl, here is the answer I was given: “Women are just created by Allah in such a way that the responsibility lies with them. With great beauty comes great responsibility.” Hahaha, what the fuck, honestly.…

Even Stephen: Islam vs Christianity Old but awesome segment from The Daily Show https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_tc2H6SbJY
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Colbert and Carell debate which religion is best. Segment from Jon Stewart Show.
Colbert and Carell debate which religion is best. Segment from Jon Stewart Show.

QATAR: 'MY SLEEP IS MY BREAK': EXPLOITATION OF MIGRANT DOMESTIC WORKERS IN QATAR More than half of all women migrant workers in Qatar are employed in private homes. Qatar’s laws do not limit the number of hours a day or the number of days a week that domestic workers can be asked to work. At its worst extreme, the abuse of domestic workers can involve physical and sexual abuse. In some cases, their treatment can amount to forced labour and human trafficking. This Amnesty International report examines the way in which domestic workers are failed by serious flaws in Qatar’s laws and policies. http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/MDE22/004/2014/en
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More than half of all women migrant workers in Qatar are employed in private homes.
www.amnesty.org

Happy Earth Day!! Be kind to your Earth. It's the only home we have https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=923jxZY2NPI
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Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/thesaganseries Twitter - http://twitter.com/reidgower G+ - http://bit.ly/VpHzQh The Sagan Series is an...
Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/thesaganseries Twitter - http://twitter.com/reidgower G+ - http://bit.ly/VpHzQh The Sagan Series is an...

ables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fantasies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after years relieved of them. - Hypatia of Alexandria (350-415 AD)
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The 'Halal Version' Of The 'Happy British Muslims' Video Gets Rid Of All The Women https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0c9DWVuOHI
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Alternative version of the Happy Muslims video by The Honesty Policy. Simply trying to find a middle ground to express ourselves without using...
Alternative version of the Happy Muslims video by The Honesty Policy. Simply trying to find a middle ground to express ourselves without using...






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DignityUSA envisions and works for a time when Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Catholics are affirmed and experience dignity through the integration of their spirituality with their sexuality, and as beloved persons of God participate fully in all aspects of life within the Church and Society.


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Holy, Wholly Holy: Catholic Women's Routes to Holiness

Sponsored by DignityUSA and Women's Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual (WATER)

Starting:  Jun 13 2014 - 6:00pm


DYAC Retreat: Discovering Our Place at the Table

Sharing our passion, nurturing our spirits, & building our community

Starting:  Jul 25 2014 - 7:00pm
All times are Eastern. Place cursor over text to stop slideshow.



​


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​DignityUSA PO Box 376 Medford, MA 02155 ♦ tel: 800.877.8797 • 202.861.0017 ♦ fax: 781.397.0584 ♦ email: info@dignityusa.org



Copyright ©1998-2014, DignityUSA. Permission is granted for use and alteration by any DignityUSA affiliated chapter without permission.
 For further use contact DignityUSA for permission. 

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DignityUSA works for respect and justice for people of all sexual orientations, genders, and gender identities—especially gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender persons—in the Catholic Church and the world through education, advocacy, and support. -- DignityUSA Mission Statement









Apr
26
2014
The work of DignityUSA on April 26, 2014 could have been sponsored by you. Click here for more information.

National Board of Directors










Lourdes Rodríguez-Nogués
 (Boston, MA)
President


Lewis Speaks-Tanner
 (Jackson Heights, NY)
Vice President


Mary Kaye Radtke
 (Madison, WI)
Secretary


Glenn Crane
 (Detroit, MI)
Treasurer


Bill Baird
 (San Francisco, CA)


Robert Butts
(Dayton, OH)


Leo Egashira
 (Seattle, WA)

 
Jack Frielignsdorf
 (Verona, NJ)


Alice Knowles
 (Boston, MA)

 
Deborah Myers
 (San Antonio, TX)

​
Ray Panas
 (Washington, DC)

 Victor Postemski
 (Boston, MA)

Patricia Russell
 (Bronxville, NY)


Allen Rose
 (Washington, DC)


































































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Vision Statement

DignityUSA envisions and works for a time when Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Catholics are affirmed and experience dignity through the integration of their spirituality with their sexuality, and as beloved persons of God participate fully in all aspects of life within the Church and Society.


Search the Site



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DYAC Retreat: Discovering Our Place at the Table

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​DignityUSA PO Box 376 Medford, MA 02155 ♦ tel: 800.877.8797 • 202.861.0017 ♦ fax: 781.397.0584 ♦ email: info@dignityusa.org



Copyright ©1998-2014, DignityUSA. Permission is granted for use and alteration by any DignityUSA affiliated chapter without permission.
 For further use contact DignityUSA for permission. 

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DignityUSA works for respect and justice for people of all sexual orientations, genders, and gender identities—especially gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender persons—in the Catholic Church and the world through education, advocacy, and support. -- DignityUSA Mission Statement









Apr
26
2014
The work of DignityUSA on April 26, 2014 could have been sponsored by you. Click here for more information.

Staff








Marianne Duddy-Burke
 (Boston, MA)
Executive Director
 617.669.7810


Peggy Burns
 (Malden, MA)
Operations Manager
 800.877.8797

Jim Smith photo
Jim Smith
 (Minneapolis MN)
Associate Director


Logan Bear
 (Columbus OH)
Technology Services Manager


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Vision Statement

DignityUSA envisions and works for a time when Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Catholics are affirmed and experience dignity through the integration of their spirituality with their sexuality, and as beloved persons of God participate fully in all aspects of life within the Church and Society.


Search the Site



Search     





Preregister here


Upcoming Events








Holy, Wholly Holy: Catholic Women's Routes to Holiness

Sponsored by DignityUSA and Women's Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual (WATER)

Starting:  Jun 13 2014 - 6:00pm


DYAC Retreat: Discovering Our Place at the Table

Sharing our passion, nurturing our spirits, & building our community

Starting:  Jul 25 2014 - 7:00pm
All times are Eastern. Place cursor over text to stop slideshow.



​


Log in




Leadership Team
•National Board of Directors
•Staff
•Media Contacts
•National Office
   





​DignityUSA PO Box 376 Medford, MA 02155 ♦ tel: 800.877.8797 • 202.861.0017 ♦ fax: 781.397.0584 ♦ email: info@dignityusa.org



Copyright ©1998-2014, DignityUSA. Permission is granted for use and alteration by any DignityUSA affiliated chapter without permission.
 For further use contact DignityUSA for permission. 

http://www.dignityusa.org/staff









































































































































































































































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DignityUSA works for respect and justice for people of all sexual orientations, genders, and gender identities—especially gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender persons—in the Catholic Church and the world through education, advocacy, and support. -- DignityUSA Mission Statement









Apr
26
2014
The work of DignityUSA on April 26, 2014 could have been sponsored by you. Click here for more information.

National Office







DignityUSA
 PO Box 376
 Medford, MA 02155
tel: 800.877.8797
 202.861.0017
 fax: 781.397.0584
 email: info@dignityusa.org
Share  
     



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Vision Statement

DignityUSA envisions and works for a time when Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Catholics are affirmed and experience dignity through the integration of their spirituality with their sexuality, and as beloved persons of God participate fully in all aspects of life within the Church and Society.


Search the Site



Search     





Preregister here


Upcoming Events








Holy, Wholly Holy: Catholic Women's Routes to Holiness

Sponsored by DignityUSA and Women's Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual (WATER)

Starting:  Jun 13 2014 - 6:00pm


DYAC Retreat: Discovering Our Place at the Table

Sharing our passion, nurturing our spirits, & building our community

Starting:  Jul 25 2014 - 7:00pm
All times are Eastern. Place cursor over text to stop slideshow.



​


Log in




Leadership Team
•National Board of Directors
•Staff
•Media Contacts
•National Office
   





​DignityUSA PO Box 376 Medford, MA 02155 ♦ tel: 800.877.8797 • 202.861.0017 ♦ fax: 781.397.0584 ♦ email: info@dignityusa.org



Copyright ©1998-2014, DignityUSA. Permission is granted for use and alteration by any DignityUSA affiliated chapter without permission.
 For further use contact DignityUSA for permission. 














































































































































































































































Skip to main content
 





Join - Renew Membership

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DignityUSA

DignityUSA
Celebrating the wholeness and holiness of LGBTQ Catholics
   

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DignityUSA works for respect and justice for people of all sexual orientations, genders, and gender identities—especially gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender persons—in the Catholic Church and the world through education, advocacy, and support. -- DignityUSA Mission Statement









Apr
26
2014
The work of DignityUSA on April 26, 2014 could have been sponsored by you. Click here for more information.

30 Years of Welcoming Guests for a Meal and Company







Dignity/Boston and Arlington Street Church Celebrate Anniversary
 Submitted by Peggy Hayes, Dignity/Boston Board member
The simple pleasure of a meal at the end of the day on Friday, usually coming at the end of a long week for most of us, was, for a long time, not something that the most vulnerable members of the Boston area community could count on.  But in 1984, members of two faith communities, Dignity/Boston and the Arlington Street Church, decided to change that by founding the Friday Night Supper Program, to fill a gap in the schedule of area meals for people in need. Here is how the program describes its mission: “The Friday Night Supper Program provides a warm, nutritious meal to anyone in need in a safe and dignified environment every Friday night.
Gritty determination, countless volunteer hours, and a loving spirit of giving have kept the Program alive for three decades, a bittersweet anniversary for staff, volunteers, and guests.  While all celebrate the staying power of the Friday Night Supper Program, the thousands of meals served, and respite from the busy city streets it has offered, over and over volunteers and staff voice the wish the Program would no longer be needed.
At the founding of Friday Night Supper, Dignity/Boston and Arlington Street Church worshipped at the Arlington Street Church, a community with a social justice mission reaching back to its efforts to abolish slavery.  When Dignity/Boston moved across Boston Common in 1988 to St. John the Evangelist Church, the chapter maintained its commitment to Friday Night Supper.
A loyal corps of volunteers, many of them longtime Dignity members, work each Friday afternoon to prepare the meal, and each Friday evening to serve it and attend to other basic needs with a clothing closet and toiletries, or simply providing a friendly welcome and a place at the table out of the rain, wind, sun, or snow of New England weather.
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Vision Statement

DignityUSA envisions and works for a time when Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Catholics are affirmed and experience dignity through the integration of their spirituality with their sexuality, and as beloved persons of God participate fully in all aspects of life within the Church and Society.


Search the Site



Search     





Preregister here


Upcoming Events

















DYAC Retreat: Discovering Our Place at the Table

Sharing our passion, nurturing our spirits, & building our community

Starting:  Jul 25 2014 - 7:00pm
All times are Eastern. Place cursor over text to stop slideshow.



​


Log in
   





​DignityUSA PO Box 376 Medford, MA 02155 ♦ tel: 800.877.8797 • 202.861.0017 ♦ fax: 781.397.0584 ♦ email: info@dignityusa.org



Copyright ©1998-2014, DignityUSA. Permission is granted for use and alteration by any DignityUSA affiliated chapter without permission.
 For further use contact DignityUSA for permission. 

http://www.dignityusa.org/content/30-years-welcoming-guests-meal-and-company









































































































































































































































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DignityUSA works for respect and justice for people of all sexual orientations, genders, and gender identities—especially gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender persons—in the Catholic Church and the world through education, advocacy, and support. -- DignityUSA Mission Statement









Apr
26
2014
The work of DignityUSA on April 26, 2014 could have been sponsored by you. Click here for more information.

Deb Myers and Nickie Valdez Celebrate 25 Years







On February 15, 2014, on a sunny and brisk Valentine's Day weekend, Deb Myers and Nickie Valdez celebrated their 25th Anniversary of Holy Union with a liturgy at Beacon Hill Presbyterian Church in San Antonio, Texas. Officiating for Deb and Nickie was Daniel Helminiak, a long-time friend and Dignity supporter.
Today Deb and Nickie celebrated with their friends in the LGBT community, including many couples who have worked hard to sustain lifelong relationships. Dignity/San Antonio continues to meet at Beacon Hill. It's very seldom that the both of them are not at liturgy together, unless Deb has an out of town meeting with the DignityUSA Board.
After the community witnessed their Union, all were invited to Club Miami for dinner and dancing. The food was great, as was their cake. Everyone had a great time dancing, taking photos, and mostly enjoying fellowship.
Thank you Deb and Nickie for sharing with our LGBT community and the San Antonio community your time and talents. Dignity/San Antonio would not be the same without you both. May you be blessed with many more anniversaries and for truly being a testament that our relationships can be and are life giving and life affirming.
God Bless You Both.
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Vision Statement

DignityUSA envisions and works for a time when Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Catholics are affirmed and experience dignity through the integration of their spirituality with their sexuality, and as beloved persons of God participate fully in all aspects of life within the Church and Society.


Search the Site



Search     





Preregister here


Upcoming Events

















DYAC Retreat: Discovering Our Place at the Table

Sharing our passion, nurturing our spirits, & building our community

Starting:  Jul 25 2014 - 7:00pm
All times are Eastern. Place cursor over text to stop slideshow.



​


Log in
   





​DignityUSA PO Box 376 Medford, MA 02155 ♦ tel: 800.877.8797 • 202.861.0017 ♦ fax: 781.397.0584 ♦ email: info@dignityusa.org



Copyright ©1998-2014, DignityUSA. Permission is granted for use and alteration by any DignityUSA affiliated chapter without permission.
 For further use contact DignityUSA for permission. 

http://www.dignityusa.org/content/deb-myers-and-nickie-valdez-celebrate-25-years










































































































































































































































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DignityUSA works for respect and justice for people of all sexual orientations, genders, and gender identities—especially gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender persons—in the Catholic Church and the world through education, advocacy, and support. -- DignityUSA Mission Statement









Apr
26
2014
The work of DignityUSA on April 26, 2014 could have been sponsored by you. Click here for more information.

Dignity San Francisco screens Alfredo's Fire, Hosts Documentarian







By Emmanuel Romero, Dignity/San Francisco Board Member
Dignity San Francisco kicked off the Lenten season by hosting a community screening of Alfredo's Fire on Sunday, March 9. This short documentary tells the story of Alfredo Ormando, a gay Italian writer who traveled from Palermo to St. Peter's Square, where he set himself on fire on January 13, 1998. The demonstration was an act of protest against the Roman Catholic Church's historic persecution against LGBT people.
As part of the screening, Dignity San Francisco invited the Producer/Director/Cinematographer of the film, Andy Abrahams Wilson, who graciously appeared to introduce the movie and participate in a post-screening Q&A. The lively exchange between Wilson and the audience, which included guests from outside Dignity San Francisco, touched upon issues surrounding the closet, mental health, spirituality versus religiosity for LGBT people, the LGBT rights movement in Italy and beyond, and other topics.
"It was a pleasure to screen Alfredo's Fire with such a captive audience as Dignity, who cared about and could relate to Alfredo's struggles," Wilson said. "Had the support of such a group as Dignity been available to Alfredo, it is likely he wouldn't have chosen the fate that he did. May his story be a reminder and a beacon of light for us all."
"This documentary provided a real opportunity for us today to reflect on the spiritual dimensions of an act which stirred the minds and hearts of the Italian LGBT community and the LGBT community worldwide a number of years ago," said Ed Malcolm, co-chair of Dignity San Francisco. "We cannot help but be touched by this human tragedy, and the documentarian has helped us to see it in very personal way."
During the Q&A, when Wilson was asked what he, as someone from a non-Catholic background, thought of Ormando's story in the context of today's Church under Pope Francis, he replied that he hopes Ormando will inspire compassion in all people, regardless of whether they believe in equal rights for LGBT individuals. Wilson would also love it if Pope Francis were somehow able to watch Alfredo's Fire.
Anyone interested in learning more about Alfredo's Fire, and how they can view or screen it, can contact the filmmakers at www.alfredosfire.com.
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Vision Statement

DignityUSA envisions and works for a time when Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Catholics are affirmed and experience dignity through the integration of their spirituality with their sexuality, and as beloved persons of God participate fully in all aspects of life within the Church and Society.


Search the Site



Search     





Preregister here


Upcoming Events

















DYAC Retreat: Discovering Our Place at the Table

Sharing our passion, nurturing our spirits, & building our community

Starting:  Jul 25 2014 - 7:00pm
All times are Eastern. Place cursor over text to stop slideshow.



​


Log in
   





​DignityUSA PO Box 376 Medford, MA 02155 ♦ tel: 800.877.8797 • 202.861.0017 ♦ fax: 781.397.0584 ♦ email: info@dignityusa.org



Copyright ©1998-2014, DignityUSA. Permission is granted for use and alteration by any DignityUSA affiliated chapter without permission.
 For further use contact DignityUSA for permission. 

http://www.dignityusa.org/content/dignity-san-francisco-screens-alfredos-fire-hosts-documentarian









































































































































































































































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DignityUSA works for respect and justice for people of all sexual orientations, genders, and gender identities—especially gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender persons—in the Catholic Church and the world through education, advocacy, and support. -- DignityUSA Mission Statement









Apr
26
2014
The work of DignityUSA on April 26, 2014 could have been sponsored by you. Click here for more information.

DignityUSA Joins a One-Day Online Fundraising Campaign!







Give OUT Day!
We are excited to announce our participation in an online fundraising campaign that is active for a 24-hour period on May 15, 2014. You may be very familiar with Dignity’s annual PRIDE fundraiser. This year we are offering Give OUT Day as an option to the traditional Pride campaign.
What is Give OUT Day?
On May 15, LGBT organizations are invited to be part of history and participate in the second annual Give OUT Day. Give OUT Day is a national initiative that will engage hundreds of organizations and mobilize thousands of people on a single day across the country to give in support of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer community. DignityUSA is among those organizations.
•It’s a chance for LGBTQ groups, large and small, to work across the wide range of issues and activities that matter to the LGBTQ community policy change, advocacy for families and within faith communities, and the arts, among others. families, advocacy within faith communities, the arts.
•It’s a chance for members of the LGBTQ community and our many allies to stand up and show support on one day. It’s a chance to make history.
•It is an online fundraiser that only LGBT-related non-profit organizations can participate in.
Why Give OUT Day for Dignity?
•It is an easy way to give. You simply go online to our Give OUT Day DignityUSA page and make your gift, and it takes just a few minutes.
•It allows persons who are not members of Dignity to donate easily, too.
•The Give OUT Day sponsors offer prize money for the LGBT organization that inspires the largest number of individual donors to give. Last year, the LGBT organization with the most givers in the 24-hour period received an extra $5,000 prize! Other prizes are given, too.
•It’s a great way to join other LGBT organizations, and a fun way to compete!
You will hear much more about Give OUT Day as we lead up to May 15! Please consider a donation to Dignity on that day. Or you can also make your donation any time prior to May 15th, and it will be processed on May 15. Schedule a donation NOW from our Give OUT Day webpage.
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Vision Statement

DignityUSA envisions and works for a time when Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Catholics are affirmed and experience dignity through the integration of their spirituality with their sexuality, and as beloved persons of God participate fully in all aspects of life within the Church and Society.


Search the Site



Search     





Preregister here


Upcoming Events

















DYAC Retreat: Discovering Our Place at the Table

Sharing our passion, nurturing our spirits, & building our community

Starting:  Jul 25 2014 - 7:00pm
All times are Eastern. Place cursor over text to stop slideshow.



​


Log in
   





​DignityUSA PO Box 376 Medford, MA 02155 ♦ tel: 800.877.8797 • 202.861.0017 ♦ fax: 781.397.0584 ♦ email: info@dignityusa.org



Copyright ©1998-2014, DignityUSA. Permission is granted for use and alteration by any DignityUSA affiliated chapter without permission.
 For further use contact DignityUSA for permission. 

http://www.dignityusa.org/content/dignityusa-joins-one-day-online-fundraising-campaign









































































































































































































































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DignityUSA works for respect and justice for people of all sexual orientations, genders, and gender identities—especially gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender persons—in the Catholic Church and the world through education, advocacy, and support. -- DignityUSA Mission Statement









Apr
26
2014
The work of DignityUSA on April 26, 2014 could have been sponsored by you. Click here for more information.

Now is the Acceptable Time







by Lourdes Rodriguez-Nogues, President, DignityUSA
We are now in the midst of our Lenten season, and as believers we use this time as a preparation to celebrate the mystery of the Death and Resurrection of Christ Jesus. In whatever way we have chosen to prepare our minds, bodies, and souls for the joy of Easter, we know that as a people rooted in the promise of Redemption, our work does not end at the Easter Sunday celebration. . Our faith calls us to faith in action, and to the work of building the kingdom of God. That is the exciting reality of the work of Dignity at the local and national levels.
Many of us currently participate in many local actions through our chapter or caucus affiliations. We continue to need that voice at the local level to be present in media statements; in local challenges to oppressive Church leaders and in support of all people unfairly treated by those forces;   in working with local charities who serve the marginalized; in speaking about the truth of our faith and LGBT identity, .and the list goes on. Many of us have answered the call to work at the national level by being members of the Board of Directors of DignityUSA or one of its national committees. In fact, that call to participate at the national level is out right now as we are in the midst of our next election cycle for Board members. Have you heard that call?  If you have not, here it is again:  "Hello, can you hear me?  Dignity needs your help, right now. How about running for the Board?  You still have a little time to submit your nomination (deadline is April 15). Let's hear from you."
It is indeed an exciting time for our Dignity work. Pope Francis has been in office now for a year, and he has not ceased to amaze us. That he means to renew the Church and send a message to all Church leaders about what it really means to minister to the people of God is an understatement. He wants to and he will; even if it is not as fast, as all of us who have been waiting for this renewal would want. I believe that what Pope Francis call means for us is not the answer that comes out of relief and complacency. I believe that what that means for us is more work; work that is wiser and more strategic; work that needs more planning, more alliances, and collaboration; more funding from external sources; more outreach to the faithful in the pews. And we will respond to that call, for now is the acceptable time to be an inclusive and life-giving Church, not only for all LGBT faithful but for all who, like us, believe in a kingdom of Peace and Justice. 
Having in mind the challenges and the work ahead, and guided by the strategic vision that we presented to all of you at Convention 2013, the Board will meet in Boston, April 11-13 with Monique Meadows, a consultant who will work with your Board of Directors and Dignity staff on new fundraising strategies to take us into the future. We are really excited about Monique's skills and her enthusiasm and understanding of our work. We look forward to this weekend together and to the challenges and rewards that a fresh look at our fundraising and development strategies will give us. You will hear back from us about this in the near future.This meeting in Boston will also give us the opportunity to spend time with members of the Boston chapter. We are looking forward to our dinner together on Saturday night.
As we prepare, as individuals and as a community, to greet Easter in just a few weeks, the Board would like to send out to you and all your families and communities a message of HOPE and LIGHT. May the wonder and joy of that first Easter morn fill your hearts and renew your faith in the Promise of eternal life. 
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DignityUSA envisions and works for a time when Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Catholics are affirmed and experience dignity through the integration of their spirituality with their sexuality, and as beloved persons of God participate fully in all aspects of life within the Church and Society.


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