Pakistan convicts two men, including local government official Arif Khan, for their role in the murder of Mashal Khan, the student who was killed by an angry mob over trumped-up blasphemy accusations in 2017. And what role did these two fellows who will now go to prison until they die play? Reuters reports:
The court ruling noted two videos in which Khan is seen “torturing Mashal” and “congratulating his co-accused for committing the murder”.
Meanwhile, Khalid Hameed, an English professor in Pakistan, was stabbed to death by one of his students who, according to police, “felt that a planned party that women were going to be involved with would be un-Islamic.” We are a bad, bad species.
Speaking of blasphemy, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby says in the aftermath of the Christchurch massacre:
Hatred of Muslims denies and blasphemes Christ. Those who co-opt Christian language and history for hatred commit blasphemy. … Making peace is an action, it doesn’t just happen. It requires us to be curious, to listen, to move across differences of culture, ethnicity, religion and politics in love. Hate crimes against those who are different have no place before God.
New Zealand internet service providers are blocking the websites 4chan and 8chan for hosting the shooter’s video. New Zealand authorities are going even further, arresting those who publish the video and post hate speech.
At the New York Times, Farhad Manjoo debunks the ridiculous “white genocide”/”Great Replacement” conspiracy theory that drives a lot of white supremacist propaganda, particularly the New Zealand shooter.
While the Trump administration is very, very concerned about the “religious liberty” (cough cough) of right-wing Christians, the ACLU says:
Detained immigrants from various faiths — Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, and Christians — have reported incidents in which Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement brazenly violate their religious-freedom rights.
Sarah Graham at Refinery29 looks at how American women are often drawn to alternative medicine (aka fake medicine) because of the crappy or dismissive treatment they get from doctors and the medical establishment.
GoFundMe is blocking a campaign to fund therapy at a German clinic that hawks fake cancer cures. Good.
In a really important exposé, Jezebel‘s Anna Merlan investigates Generation Rescue, Jenny McCarthy’s autism “charity,” which peddles fake treatments and cures for autism (I’m fine, thanks), which then provide a handsome profit for Generation Rescue’s board members and corporate sponsors. Oh, it’s bad, folks. However bad you think McCarthy’s scam is, you’re probably giving her too much benefit of the doubt.
Mike Redmond at Pajiba says of McCarthy’s worse-than-Goop operation:
…if people are that broken down and desperate that they’ll believe anything, goddamn Jenny McCarthy for not only preying on them but risking their kids lives while she’s at it. Goddamn her to hell.
Kentucky, your governor is bananapants. Gov. Matt Bevin says he did not get his kids vaccinated for chickenpox, and instead sent them to one of those ludicrous “chickenpox parties” to intentionally infect his kids. All nine of his kids. “They were miserable for a few days, and they all turned out fine.” I think only time will tell whether these kids “turn out fine,” governor.
There is a magazine called The Horse, which is of course about horses, and it looks like they are on board with fake medicine for equines. And yes, it’s the whole snake oil shebang: acupuncture, homeopathy, chiropractics, and so on. No, you go ahead and put those needles into that horse. I’ll stand way over here.
According to some fascinating research by an anthropologist, a historian, and an evolutionary biologist, it seems that religions involving a “moralizing god” have usually emerged in human societies after their population hit about one million. Nsikan Akpan at PBS reports:
[Anthropologist Patrick] Savage and his colleagues speculate that ancestral groups of this magnitude needed a unifying moral code to get different ethnicities to work together. Early societies started as single families and then ethnic groups. But as chiefdoms or even kingdoms began to interact and merge, leaders needed a single umbrella to keep everyone in line.
“That could be a really powerful and useful way to prevent people from cheating each other, in these very large societies of unrelated people,” Savage said. “They need to fulfill their commitments because if they don’t, they’ll be punished by God.”
The University of Arizona provides an interview with archaeologist Matthew Peeples in which he clears up some myths about the role (or, rather, lack thereof) of aliens in the construction of the Pyramids and other artifacts.
South Dakota must think that it’s on God’s naughty list, because it’s overcompensating with a new law, just signed by Gov. Kristi Noem, to require the display of “In God We Trust” in public schools. At the same time, she signed a law allowing guns in the state capitol, so it sounds like they don’t really trust in God all that much.
Jill Hicks-Keeton and Cavan Conannon at The Revealer report how the Green family, of Hobby Lobby and Museum of the Bible infamy, is using its wealth to buy the guise of expertise in all things biblical:
…the Green family have used their connection to the [museum] to position themselves as experts who can speak authoritatively about the Bible in relation to high-stakes issues like the relationship between church and state, marriage, and gender roles.
Churches in Nashville are being creepy by sending out postcards to every single resident letting them know that they are being prayed, by name, for by someone they don’t know. Um, thanks? And how did you get my address?
For what it’s worth at the moment, a federal court rules that the Affordable Care Act’s mandate to purchase health insurance does not violate the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). Gosh, I thought literally everything violated RFRA.
Pope Francis rejects the resignation of Cardinal Philippe Barbarin, who was convicted of covering up child sex abuse. So we can see how seriously the pope really takes this crisis.
Michael Mann (a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry) and Bob Ward come down hard on Trump’s climate science denial commission in The Guardian, calling the idea “Stalinist”:
The creation of the new panel of climate change deniers, and the recruitment of supporters to provide it with a veneer of legitimacy, echoes the campaign by Joseph Stalin’s regime to discredit the work of geneticists who disagreed with the disastrous pseudo-scientific theories of Trofim Lysenko.
Lysenko wrongly believed that acquired traits could be passed on by parents to their offspring. Stalin embraced lysenkoism as the basis for Soviet agricultural policy, while also denouncing and persecuting Lysenko’s scientific critics.
Quote of the Day
The U.N. War Crimes Tribunal upholds a conviction for genocide of Radovan Karadzic for his role in the massacre of 8000 Muslims in 1995 during the Bosnian war, and gets his sentence bumped from 40 years to lifetime imprisonment. Now, this was a long time coming, because Karadzic had disappeared for a long time. And what did he do while evading justice, you might be asking? NPR reports:
He had been passing himself off as a new-age health guru, practicing alternative medicine, writing articles and even lecturing under an alias. … Originally trained as a psychiatrist, Karadzic as a fugitive passed himself off as an expert in what he called “human quantum energy.” He used the name D.D. David, or Dragon Dabic, and gave lectures all over Serbia on alternative medicine. He even had a website and was a regular contributor to the Serbian alternative medicine magazine, Healthy Life, signing off his articles as a spiritual researcher.
It’s almost too perfect. And here’s the kicker:
His editor was reportedly shocked to learn his true identity.
Yeah, I bet!
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Linking to a story or webpage does not imply endorsement by Paul or CFI. Not every use of quotation marks is ironic or sarcastic, but it often is.