The Bish

Seriously, let just roll everything back 2000 years, im sure it will make things better.

By Laura MacInnis

GENEVA (Reuters) – A United Nations forum on Thursday passed a resolution condemning “defamation of religion” as a human rights violation, despite wide concerns that it could be used to justify curbs on free speech in Muslim countries.

The U.N. Human Rights Council adopted the non-binding text, proposed by Pakistan on behalf of Islamic states, with a vote of 23 states in favor and 11 against, with 13 abstentions.

Western governments and a broad alliance of activist groups have voiced dismay about the religious defamation text, which adds to recent efforts to broaden the concept of human rights to protect communities of believers rather than individuals.

Pakistan, speaking for the 56-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), said a “delicate balance” had to be struck between freedom of expression and respect for religions.

The resolution said Muslim minorities had faced intolerance, discrimination and acts of violence since the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, including laws and administrative procedures that stigmatize religious followers.

“Defamation of religious is a serious affront to human dignity leading to a restriction on the freedom of their adherents and incitement to religious violence,” the adopted text read, adding that “Islam is frequently and wrongly associated with human rights violations and terrorism.”

It called on states to ensure that religious places, sites, shrines and symbols are protected, to reinforce laws “to deny impunity” for those exhibiting intolerance of ethnic and religious minorities, and “to take all possible measures to promote tolerance and respect for all religions and beliefs.”

ISLAMOPHOBIA, CHRISTIANOPHOBIA, ANTI-SEMITISM

The 47-member Human Rights Council has drawn criticism for reflecting mainly the interests of Islamic and African countries, which when voting together can control its agenda.

Addressing the body, Germany said on behalf of the European Union that while instances of Islamophobia, Christianophobia, anti-Semitism and other forms of religious discrimination should be taken seriously, it was “problematic to reconcile the notion of defamation (of religion) with the concept of discrimination.”

“The European Union does not see the concept of defamation of religion as a valid one in a human rights discourse,” it said. “The European Union believes that a broader, more balanced and thoroughly rights-based text would be best suited to address the issues underlying this draft resolution.”

India and Canada also took to the floor of the Geneva-based Council to raise objections to the OIC text. Both said the text looked too narrowly at the discrimination issue.

“It is individuals who have rights, not religions,” Ottawa’s representative told the body. “Canada believes that to extend (the notion of) defamation beyond its proper scope would jeopardize the fundamental right to freedom of expression, which includes freedom of expression on religious subjects.”

A separate, EU-sponsored resolution about religious discrimination is due to be discussed by the Council on Friday.

Earlier this week, 180 secular, religious and media groups from around the world urged diplomats to reject the resolution which they said “may be used in certain countries to silence and intimidate human rights activists, religious dissenters and other independent voices” and ultimately restrict freedoms.

Condemnation of defamation of religion had been included in a draft declaration being prepared for an April U.N. conference on racism, known as “Durban II,” but was removed earlier this month after Western countries said it was unacceptable.

Full article here.

Mr. Pope says, ““So many of them are living in fear of spirits, of malign and threatening powers. In their bewilderment they even end up condemning street children and the elderly as alleged sorcerers.”

…

Satan? Demons? Exorcisms? Talking snake? The 10 plagues? How are these things not considered spirits or malign and threatening powers? … Oh yeah, the Pope is batshit crazy.

Stuff. Things. Update. Pointless.

Wewt.

Bored as hell.

Fuck yeah

Homeopathy with no borders.

First off. For those who do not know what homeopathy is, let me provide you some insight.

From Wikipedia.

“In producing treatments for diseases, homeopaths use a process called “dynamisation” or “potentisation” whereby the remedy is diluted with alcohol or distilled water and then vigorously shaken by ten hard strikes against an elastic body in a process called “succussion”. Hahnemann thought that the use of remedies which present symptoms similar to those of disease in healthy individuals would only intensify the symptoms and exacerbate the condition, so he advocated the dilution of the remedies. During the process of potentisation, homeopaths believe that the vital energy of the diluted substance is activated and its energy released by vigorous shaking of the substance. For this purpose, Hahnemann had a saddle maker construct a special wooden striking board covered in leather on one side and stuffed with horsehair.”

Now lets get back to “succussion”, or from here on out, we’ll call it shaking shit, as that’s all they’re fucking doing.

So lets say I’m a crazy person who practices homeopathy. I’m now going to make a remedy for the flu. Whatever substance I have for this remedy im going to take 1 part of it and dillute it into 99 parts water. I.E. for every drop of the remedy substance, I will mix it with with 99 drops of water. This is just the fist step. This dillution is called 1C. The C stands for centesimal or “c scale”, basically a system to determine how well a remedy has been produced/its potency. 1C being the smallest. Each scale of C means it’s been dilluted by a factor of 100.

Oh yeah, after you mix the 1 drop with the 99 drops of water, you gotta shake it up too…so you can release the energy and stuff. But yeah, shaking it around is the important part.

So now we want to make this remedy stronger, as 1C is not good enough. So after mixing the remedy with 99 parts water we now have a solution that is 1% the remedy and 99% water. Normally in modern medicine you increase doses to provide stronger effects, this is not the case in homeopathy. So we can now take this new solution which already contains a mere 1% of the remedy and throw away 99% of it . Now take the remaining 1% and start the entire process over again. So we started out with 1% of 100%, shake it up, take away 1%, and mix this with another 99 parts water. You do this over and over and over again, until you reach an acceptable homeopathy centesimal level of 30C.

Let me put this into perspective.

A 30X dilution means that the original substance has been diluted:

1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times.

That’s a pretty big fucking number. What gets even crazier, is that 30C is not the end. Some remedies continue up to and beyond 200C. Numbers don’t work too well to convey the enormosity in my opinion. So check this. This is in referrence to 30C, so you can (not really) imagine the ridiculousness of 200C.

Information below pulled from:
(http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/homeo.html)

Assuming that a cubic centimeter of water contains 15 drops, this number(30C) is greater than the number of drops of water that would fill a container more than 50 times the size of the Earth. Imagine placing a drop of red dye into such a container so that it disperses evenly(you have to shake it!). Homeopathy’s “law of infinitesimals” is the equivalent of saying that any drop of water subsequently removed from that container will possess an essence of redness.

And this is the shit that will cure you.

There are laws of chemistry that state that there is a limit to a dilution that can be made without losing the original substance altogether. This limit, which is related to Avogadro’s number, corresponds to homeopathic potencies of 12C. Once you past this limit, the chances of a SINGLE MOLECULE that you started with existing in any future dillutions is non-existant.

Homeopathy has a counter though. MAGIC! Remeber that shaking we did earlier to release the ENERGY? Well, you don’t need the actual matter/molecules you started out with, because we have the MAGICAL ENERGY NOW! How convienent!

If this is truely true, ANY SUBSTANCE that contacts water would transfer it’s essence and/or energy to it. Which would mean, any water you drink in the world, could have a multiude of unwanted medical effects.

Even under the most scrupulously clean conditions, airborne dust in a manufacturing facility must carry thousands of different molecules of biological origin derived from local sources that would contaminate and release unwanted energy durring the shaking process.

If anything, homeopathy is a placebo effect. The placebo effect is very strong, and works very well, in regards to the fact it reduces stress. It’s a scientific fact that a reduction of stress can help the human body recover faster. The placebo effect does not CURE anything, it aids your body by reducing stress…that’s it.

When you start marketing placebos to cure aids, malaria, cancer, or any other un-cureable disease, that’s when you cross the fucking line. Right now, look around at some homeopathy sites and you will definately fine “cures” for many uncureable diseases. And people actually take this as truth and will avoide western/modern medicine and instead, trust magic.

And now they want to take this shit to other countries with substandard healthcare and medicine, so they can improve their well being. I fucking hate people.

THIS

You know how they say a picture is worth a thousand words? This is kinda like that, but instead of 1000, it’s more like 1,107.

I fucking hate football.

A customer on the phone has been talking about football for the past 15 mins. I watched 2 mins of last nights game.

I should retaliate with a discussion of China’s best offensive penhold player Ma Lin vs Korea’s best defensive player Joo See Hyuk.

ping pong ftw?

by Johann Hari

Reposted from Independent.co.uk

Whenever a religious belief is criticised, its adherents say they’re victims of ‘prejudice’

The right to criticise religion is being slowly doused in acid. Across the world, the small, incremental gains made by secularism – giving us the space to doubt and question and make up our own minds – are being beaten back by belligerent demands that we “respect” religion. A historic marker has just been passed, showing how far we have been shoved. The UN rapporteur who is supposed to be the global guardian of free speech has had his job rewritten – to put him on the side of the religious censors.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights stated 60 years ago that “a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief is the highest aspiration of the common people”. It was a Magna Carta for mankind – and loathed by every human rights abuser on earth. Today, the Chinese dictatorship calls it “Western”, Robert Mugabe calls it “colonialist”, and Dick Cheney calls it “outdated”. The countries of the world have chronically failed to meet it – but the document has been held up by the United Nations as the ultimate standard against which to check ourselves. Until now.

Starting in 1999, a coalition of Islamist tyrants, led by Saudi Arabia, demanded the rules be rewritten. The demand for everyone to be able to think and speak freely failed to “respect” the “unique sensitivities” of the religious, they decided – so they issued an alternative Islamic Declaration of Human Rights. It insisted that you can only speak within “the limits set by the shariah [law]. It is not permitted to spread falsehood or disseminate that which involves encouraging abomination or forsaking the Islamic community”.

In other words, you can say anything you like, as long as it precisely what the reactionary mullahs tell you to say. The declaration makes it clear there is no equality for women, gays, non-Muslims, or apostates. It has been backed by the Vatican and a bevy of Christian fundamentalists.

Incredibly, they are succeeding. The UN’s Rapporteur on Human Rights has always been tasked with exposing and shaming those who prevent free speech – including the religious. But the Pakistani delegate recently demanded that his job description be changed so he can seek out and condemn “abuses of free expression” including “defamation of religions and prophets”. The council agreed – so the job has been turned on its head. Instead of condemning the people who wanted to murder Salman Rushdie, they will be condemning Salman Rushdie himself.

Anything which can be deemed “religious” is no longer allowed to be a subject of discussion at the UN – and almost everything is deemed religious. Roy Brown of the International Humanist and Ethical Union has tried to raise topics like the stoning of women accused of adultery or child marriage. The Egyptian delegate stood up to announce discussion of shariah “will not happen” and “Islam will not be crucified in this council” – and Brown was ordered to be silent. Of course, the first victims of locking down free speech about Islam with the imprimatur of the UN are ordinary Muslims.

Here is a random smattering of events that have taken place in the past week in countries that demanded this change. In Nigeria, divorced women are routinely thrown out of their homes and left destitute, unable to see their children, so a large group of them wanted to stage a protest – but the Shariah police declared it was “un-Islamic” and the marchers would be beaten and whipped. In Saudi Arabia, the country’s most senior government-approved cleric said it was perfectly acceptable for old men to marry 10-year-old girls, and those who disagree should be silenced. In Egypt, a 27-year-old Muslim blogger Abdel Rahman was seized, jailed and tortured for arguing for a reformed Islam that does not enforce shariah.

To the people who demand respect for Muslim culture, I ask: which Muslim culture? Those women’s, those children’s, this blogger’s – or their oppressors’?

As the secular campaigner Austin Darcy puts it: “The ultimate aim of this effort is not to protect the feelings of Muslims, but to protect illiberal Islamic states from charges of human rights abuse, and to silence the voices of internal dissidents calling for more secular government and freedom.”

Those of us who passionately support the UN should be the most outraged by this.

Underpinning these “reforms” is a notion seeping even into democratic societies – that atheism and doubt are akin to racism. Today, whenever a religious belief is criticised, its adherents immediately claim they are the victims of “prejudice” – and their outrage is increasingly being backed by laws.

All people deserve respect, but not all ideas do. I don’t respect the idea that a man was born of a virgin, walked on water and rose from the dead. I don’t respect the idea that we should follow a “Prophet” who at the age of 53 had sex with a nine-year old girl, and ordered the murder of whole villages of Jews because they wouldn’t follow him.

I don’t respect the idea that the West Bank was handed to Jews by God and the Palestinians should be bombed or bullied into surrendering it. I don’t respect the idea that we may have lived before as goats, and could live again as woodlice. This is not because of “prejudice” or “ignorance”, but because there is no evidence for these claims. They belong to the childhood of our species, and will in time look as preposterous as believing in Zeus or Thor or Baal.

When you demand “respect”, you are demanding we lie to you. I have too much real respect for you as a human being to engage in that charade.

But why are religious sensitivities so much more likely to provoke demands for censorship than, say, political sensitivities? The answer lies in the nature of faith. If my views are challenged I can, in the end, check them against reality. If you deregulate markets, will they collapse? If you increase carbon dioxide emissions, does the climate become destabilised? If my views are wrong, I can correct them; if they are right, I am soothed.

But when the religious are challenged, there is no evidence for them to consult. By definition, if you have faith, you are choosing to believe in the absence of evidence. Nobody has “faith” that fire hurts, or Australia exists; they know it, based on proof. But it is psychologically painful to be confronted with the fact that your core beliefs are based on thin air, or on the empty shells of revelation or contorted parodies of reason. It’s easier to demand the source of the pesky doubt be silenced.

But a free society cannot be structured to soothe the hardcore faithful. It is based on a deal. You have an absolute right to voice your beliefs – but the price is that I too have a right to respond as I wish. Neither of us can set aside the rules and demand to be protected from offence.

Yet this idea – at the heart of the Universal Declaration – is being lost. To the right, it thwacks into apologists for religious censorship; to the left, it dissolves in multiculturalism. The hijacking of the UN Special Rapporteur by religious fanatics should jolt us into rescuing the simple, battered idea disintegrating in the middle: the equal, indivisible human right to speak freely.

j.hari@independent.co.uk

From ACLU.ORG

TULSA, OK–In a case reminiscent of the Salem Witch trials, the American Civil Liberties Union of Oklahoma today filed a federal lawsuit charging that school officials violated 15-year-old Brandi Blackbear’s rights when they accused her of casting a hex that resulted in a teacher’s illness.

“These outlandish accusations have made Brandi Blackbear’s life at school unbearable,” said Joann Bell, Executive Director of the ACLU of Oklahoma. “I for one would like to see the so-called evidence this school has that a 15-year-old girl made a grown man sick by casting a magic spell.”

While the ACLU has defended students’ religious beliefs in Wicca and other minority religions, Bell said the Oklahoma lawsuit is believed to be the first in the country involving actual accusations of witchcraft.

In its legal complaint filed today in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Oklahoma, the ACLU said that school officials not only suspended Blackbear for 15 days in December 1999 for allegedly casting spells, but also violated her religious freedom when they told her that she could not wear or draw in school any symbols related to the Wicca religion.

The ACLU lawsuit also accuses school officials of violating the young woman’s due process rights when, in the spring of 1999, they suspended her for 19 days over the content of private writings taken from her book bag. Officials had searched her possessions based on a rumor that Blackbear was carrying a gun, although no weapon of any sort was ever found. To date, school officials have not returned Blackbear’s writings to her.

Before these incidents, the ACLU complaint said, Brandi Blackbear had no discipline problems and had a perfect attendance record. Since being accused, she has “suffered continuous ridicule and humiliation,” and “become an outcast among her fellow students,” according to the complaint. She has also fallen behind in her school work because of the suspensions.

“It’s hard for me to believe that in the year 2000 I am walking into court to defend my daughter against charges of witchcraft brought by her own school,” said Timothy Blackbear. “But if that’s what it takes to clear her record and get her life back to normal, that’s what we’ll do.”

The ACLU is seeking an undisclosed amount of punitive and financial damages on the Blackbear family’s behalf, a declaration that the school violated the student’s rights, an injunction preventing the school from banning the wearing of any non-Christian religious paraphernalia and an order expunging her school record.

“The actions of the school have inflicted severe emotional damage on a very sensitive young woman. This lawsuit will allow her to reclaim some of her self-esteem by vindicating the violation of her rights in a court of law,” said John M. Butler, an ACLU cooperating attorney.

The case is Blackbear v. Union Public School Independent District No. 9, et al. Defendants named in the lawsuit are Union Eighth Grade Center Principal Jack Ojala, Speech Therapist/Counselor Catherine Miller, Union High School Assistant Principal Charlie Bushyhead and Counselor Sandy Franklin.

The Blackbear family is represented by ACLU cooperating attorneys John M. Butler and Aundrea R. Smith of Tulsa.

Although today’s case may well be the first in which a student has been accused of actually using witchcraft against a teacher, the ACLU has defended other students who have professed interest in Wicca. In March 1999, a Michigan school settled a lawsuit brought by the state ACLU on behalf of a Wiccan student who was not allowed to wear a pentacle, a symbol of the Wicca religion.

The Wicca religion has been recognized in United States courts and by the United States Army Chaplain’s Handbook. It stresses individual enlightenment and Celebrates the seasons and the four elements: earth, wind, fire and water. Proselytizing is forbidden.