A Child's Conversion Compels Father to Torture and Sequester Her

BWERA, Uganda, January 16 (Compass Direct News) – A 15-year-old Christian girl in western Uganda who lost the use of her legs after her father locked her in a room for six months for leaving Islam has begun to take tentative steps. Susan Ithungu of Isango village, Kasese district, had been hospitalized since September 2010 after neighbors along with police rescued her from her father, Beya Baluku, who had given her hardly any food or water. He was arrested shortly afterward but quickly released. She and her younger brother, Mbusa Baluku, lived alone with their father, who was divorced from their mother. Susan Ithungu Susan Ithungu © Compass Direct News In March 2010, Susan had trusted Christ for her salvation – prompting her father to threaten to slaughter her publicly with a knife. Pastor Joseph Baluku of Bwera Full Gospel Church in Kasese said neighbors who discovered that the girl was locked in a room with almost no food or water notified authorities. After her release, they took her to a hospital on Sept. 6, 2010. She would not be discharged from hospital care until Oct. 19, 2011.

Religion News Blog It's amazing to see people so inundated by religious values that they would treat their child in such a way. The depths to which this allegiance to religious ideals reaches can conquer even the desire of a parent to care for a child. I can't imagine what it must feel like to have that level of faith in one's beliefs. I don't think I could ever have that kind of certainty...

Homophobia Leads 5 Muslim Men to Advocate Murder

LONDON -- Five men are on trial in Britain for allegedly distributing leaflets calling for gay people to be killed, charged under a new law that makes such actions a hate crime.

The men allegedly gave out flyers titled "The Death Penalty" that showed a noose and said gay people would be punished. Two other leaflets were used to publicize a protest against a gay pride march in the central English city of Derby in 2010.

The Crown Prosecution Service said Wednesday this was the first prosecution for stirring up hatred on the grounds of sexual orientation, under the law that took effect in March 2010. It has long been illegal to incite hatred over disability, race or religion. The maximum penalty for the crime is seven years in jail.

Prosecutors said Ihjaz Ali, 42, Mehboob Hussain, 45, Umar Javed, 38, Razwan Javed, 27, and Kabir Ahmed, 28, handed out leaflets near a mosque in Derby and also stuffed them into mailboxes.

HuffPo

Religion has no grey areas when it comes to things like sin or abominations against god. It can lead to instances like this in which murder is advocated against others. What a sad state of affairs....

The Woes of Religion

via Reddit

LOUISVILLE, Ky. – A tiny all-white Appalachian church in rural Kentucky has voted to ban interracial couples from joining its flock, pitting members against each other in an argument over race. Members at the Gulnare Free Will Baptist Church voted Sunday on the resolution, which says the church "does not condone interracial marriage." The church member who crafted the resolution, Melvin Thompson, said he is not racist and called the matter an "internal affair." "I am not racist. I will tell you that. I am not prejudiced against any race of people, have never in my lifetime spoke evil" about a race, said Thompson, the church's former pastor who stepped down earlier this year. "That's what this is being portrayed as, but it is not." Church secretary Dean Harville disagrees: He says the resolution came after his daughter visited the church this summer with her boyfriend from Africa. Stella Harville and Ticha Chikuni — now her fiance — visited the church in June and Chikuni sang a song for the congregation. The two had visited the church before. Dean Harville, the church's secretary, said he was counting the church offering after a service in early August when he was approached by Thompson, who told him Harville's daughter and her boyfriend were no longer allowed to sing at the church.

YAHOO Xenophobia is disgusting.

KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) – Two Malaysian states are set to change their Islamic laws to punish Muslims who engage in homosexuality, raising the prospect of gay Muslims being punished twice and stoking concerns about rising intolerance toward same-gender relationships. Homosexuality is punishable by law in Malaysia by caning and up to 20 years in jail, but the legal amendments planned by Pahang and Malacca religious authorities would give the state governments additional ammunition. If the proposed changes came into force, a Muslim homosexual could be punished under both federal and state religious charges, meaning that jail terms could run consecutively and result in longer time. Analysts said the proposed amendments hinted at an increasing intolerance toward homosexuality and could erode support for the government among the majority ethnic Malays, who are Muslims by birth. "The irony of the situation is that the overwhelming majority of gay people in this country are Malays," said James Chin, a political analyst at Monash University in Malaysia. "When they have these laws to target non-mainstream sexual minorities, they are actually targeting their own people." Malacca's chief minister, Mohd Ali Rustam, said the state would review its Islamic law provisions to allow Muslim gays and lesbians to be tried in court and punished by a jail term or a fine to deter homosexuality.

Yahoo

Widow and Daughter Stoned and Shot in Response to Fatwas

A group of armed men have stoned and shot dead a woman and her daughter in Afghanistan's Ghazni province, security officials have told the BBC. The officials blamed the Taliban, who they said had accused the women of "moral deviation and adultery". The police said two men had been arrested in connection with the murder. The attack was only 300m from the governor's office in Ghazni city, which is on a list of places to be transferred to Afghan security control. The incident happened on Thursday in the Khawaja Hakim area of Ghazni city, where the family lived. Security officials said armed men entered the house where the young widow lived with her daughter and took them out to the yard, where they were initially stoned and then shot dead. "Neighbours did not help or inform the authorities on time," an official said. Officials said a number of religious leaders in the city had been issuing fatwas (Islamic religious edicts) asking people to report any one who was "involved in adultery".

BBC

Pedophelia Rampant in Afghanastan

For centuries, Afghan men have taken boys, roughly 9 to 15 years old, as lovers. Some research suggests that half the Pashtun tribal members in Kandahar and other southern towns are bacha baz, the term for an older man with a boy lover. Literally it means "boy player." The men like to boast about it.
"Having a boy has become a custom for us," Enayatullah, a 42-year-old in Baghlan province, told a Reuters reporter. "Whoever wants to show off should have a boy."
Baghlan province is in the northeast, but Afghans say pedophilia is most prevalent among Pashtun men in the south. The Pashtun are Afghanistan's most important tribe. For centuries, the nation's leaders have been Pashtun...
Sociologists and anthropologists say the problem results from perverse interpretation of Islamic law. Women are simply unapproachable. Afghan men cannot talk to an unrelated woman until after proposing marriage. Before then, they can't even look at a woman, except perhaps her feet. Otherwise she is covered, head to ankle.
"How can you fall in love if you can't see her face," 29-year-old Mohammed Daud told reporters. "We can see the boys, so we can tell which are beautiful."

Even after marriage, many men keep their boys, suggesting a loveless life at home. A favored Afghan expression goes: "Women are for children, boys are for pleasure." Fundamentalist imams, exaggerating a biblical passage on menstruation, teach that women are "unclean" and therefore distasteful. One married man even asked Cardinalli's team "how his wife could become pregnant," her report said. When that was explained, he "reacted with disgust" and asked, "How could one feel desire to be with a woman, who God has made unclean?"

 SFGate


Afghanistan has more than "tens of thousands of proud pedophiles, certainly more per capita than any other place on Earth".  That is unacceptable.

This Pope is Out of His Fucking Mind.

Pope Benedict XV has arrived in Britain promoting an outspoken anti-secular message sure to further anger his opponents.
In a speech outside Holyrood House, the Pope warned against "aggressive forms of secularism" and "atheist extremism".
The comments had strong overtones of those which came from his advisor, Cardinal Walter Kasper, who stepped out of the trip yesterday after a German magazine quoted him saying the UK was in the grip of "a new and aggressive atheism.
The Pope's decision to deliver a highly political speech while stood next to the Queen will enhance the sense that he has come with a warning about the direction of British society...
Concluding a passage on the Nazis, he said: "As we reflect on the sobering lessons of the atheist extremism of the Twentieth Century, let us never forget how the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society and thus to a reductive vision of the person and his destiny."

He is just spewing hate now. His claims are not based in facts of any kind.
If religion provided any positive moral influence upon a society, we would see this reflected in crimes committed. Although when we look at the demography of criminal activity, we find that religion has no positive benefit(and in some specific cases can encourage violence or intolerance). The non-religious(per capita) are dramatically under-represented in the prison population. At about 10% of the US population(some count the number as high as 16%), they comprise less that 1% of the prison population.