Monthly Archives: December 2013

Atheists Face Death Penalty in 13 Countries

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Shared by Wequar Azeem

Atheists Face Death Penalty In 13 Countries, Discrimination Around The World According To Free Thought Report

                       

(Reuters) – In 13 countries around the world, all of them Muslim, people who openly espouse atheism or reject the official state religion of Islam face execution under the law, according to a detailed study issued on Tuesday.

And beyond the Islamic nations, even some of the West’s apparently most democratic governments at best discriminate against citizens who have no belief in a god and at worst can jail them for offenses dubbed blasphemy, it said.

The study, The Freethought Report 2013, was issued by the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU), a global body uniting atheists, agnostics and other religious skeptics, to mark United Nations’ Human Rights Day on Tuesday.

“This report shows that the overwhelming majority of countries fail to respect the rights of atheists and freethinkers although they have signed U.N agreements to treat all citizens equally,” said IHEU President Sonja Eggerickx.

The study covered all 192 member states in the world body and involved lawyers and human rights experts looking at statute books, court records and media accounts to establish the global situation.

A first survey of 60 countries last year showed just seven where death, often by public beheading, is the punishment for either blasphemy or apostasy – renouncing belief or switching to another religion which is also protected under U.N. accords.

But this year’s more comprehensive study showed six more, bringing the full list to Afghanistan, Iran, Malaysia, Maldives, Mauritania, Nigeria, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, United Arab Emirates and Yemen.

In others, like India in a recent case involving a leading critic of religion, humanists say police are often reluctant or unwilling to investigate murders of atheists carried out by religious fundamentalists.

Across the world, the report said, “there are laws that deny atheists’ right to exist, revoke their citizenship, restrict their right to marry, obstruct their access to public education, prevent them working for the state….”

Criticism of religious faith or even academic study of the origins of religions is frequently treated as a crime and can be equated to the capital offense of blasphemy, it asserted.

EU STATES OFFEND

The IHEU, which has member bodies in some 50 countries and supporters in many more where such organizations are banned, said there was systematic or severe discrimination against atheists across the 27-nation European Union.

The situation was severe in Austria, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Malta and Poland where blasphemy laws allow for jail sentences up to three years on charges of offending a religion or believers.

In these and all other EU countries, with the exception of the Netherlands and Belgium which the report classed as “free and equal,” there was systemic discrimination across society favoring religions and religious believers.

In the United States, it said, although the situation was “mostly satisfactory” in terms of legal respect for atheists’ rights, there were a range of laws and practices “that equate being religious with being American.”

In Latin America and the Caribbean, atheists faced systemic discrimination in most countries except Brazil, where the situation was “mostly satisfactory,” and Jamaica and Uruguay which the report judged as “free and equal.”

Across Africa, atheists faced severe or systemic violations of their rights to freedom of conscience but also grave violations in several countries, including Egypt, Libya and Morocco, and nominally Christian Zimbabwe and Eritrea.

(Reported by Robert Evans; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Interesting and challenging Inetractions among TF USA Affiliates!

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Thinkers Forum USA Affiliates!

Mirza I Ashraf wrote a blog “Life is Plugged in Today” about Science and Information Technology.

Wequar Azeem and Babar Mustafa wrote comments. You may read the original article and comments in www.ThinkersForumUSABlog.org

Noor Salik wrote a comment on Wequar Azeem and Babar Mustafa comments.

Saeed ul Hassan wrote a comment on Noor Salik’ comment. The comments of affiliates is the real power of Thinkers Forum USA.

I am entering the comments in chronological order. Please read them and comment on them if you feel like.

Editor of the Month TF USA.  (Editors@ThinkersForumUSABlog.Org)

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

=========  Comment by Noor Salik ======

An interesting comment by Wequer Azeem

Three intellectual giants of TF USA.  (1) Mirza Iqbal Ashraf  (2) Babar Mustafa  (3) Wequer Azeem  There are lot of other intellectual giants in TF USA but normally either  they are busy or they just choose not to participate in intellectual  foray.

TF USA provides you empowering intellectual environment.  You decide what you want to say.> But you should be ready to face some intellectual onslaught by other affiliates who have the capacity to look at an issue from different angles.

TF USA does not have any agenda. All views expressed in TF USA are personal.  You are most welcome if you are a conservative/regressive thinker.> You are equally welcome if you are a progressive/analytical thinker. I mentioned two groups/categories.  I will never know your if your point of view is different until you respond.

NSalik

 

 

 

==========  Comment by Saeed ul Hassan  ====

Who decides based on what criterion that an interacting person is conservative or regressive, analytical or progressive.

Merely being skeptical towards divinity and act of disowning one’s roots gives him or her impressive look?

Only gratitude turns denial into acceptance and chaos into order.

Saeed

My comment is not on trail of the mail below but on Noor’s remarks.

> On Dec 6, 2013, at 1:19 AM, editors@thinkersforumusablog.org wrote: > > > An interesting comment by Wequer Azeem > > Three intellectual giants of TF USA. > (1) Mirza Iqbal Ashraf > (2) Babar Mustafa > (3) Wequer Azeem > There are lot of other intellectual giants in TF USA but normally either > they are busy or they just choose not to participate in intellectual > foray. > > TF USA provides you empowering intellectual environment. > You decide what you want to say. > But you should be ready to face some intellectual onslaught by other > affiliates who have the capacity to look at an issue from different > angles. > > TF USA does not have any agenda. All views expressed in TF USA are personal. > You are most welcome if you are a conservative/regressive thinker. > You are equally welcome if you are a progressive/analytical thinker. > > I mentioned two groups/categories. > I will never know your if your point of view is different until you respond. > > NSalik >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> > <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> > <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< > > > > > > > A new comment on the post “Life is plugged in today” is waiting for your > approval > http://www.thinkersforumusablog.org/archives/6875 > > Author : Wequar Azeem > E-mail : Wequar Azeem > Comment: > Hear,  Hear,  Baber Saheb ! Well said. Those days are gone when 3 R’s used > to be the foundation of education. We are in cyber age. I realize that > elderly among us are stuck in the 1950’s and 60’s and find it difficult to > keep pace with march of Time. The only constant in the universe is Change. > Not many people understand the difference between moment to moment passage > of time and the continuum of Absolute Time and its essence. We the humans > have come a long way and have a longer way to go. But the pace of change > is accelerating at geometric progression and even one life-time is too > long to cope with the changes. >

 

 

 

======  Comment by Babar Mustafa ========

Mr. Saeed has raised a very interesting question, “who decides …?”.

I would like to question the labels he mentions (and applies pretty clearly) in his question too of skeptic, gratitude, acceptance, denial, one’s roots, chaos …. Who is skeptic, one who thinks there is a God or the one who can’t find an iota of evidence of divinity? Who is in denial, one who can’t accept that all life is related and has diversified from a single origin or the one who thinks he (species wise) is created as a special being? Who is accepting myths as reality and who is following logic and reason to get to reality? Who is lost in a chaos, one who looks at diversification of life or the one who sees the symmetry in the building blocks of all life? Who is showing gratitude, one who is humbled to accept one’s origins and relations to all animal kingdom and even plants or the one who believes that angels bowed on one’s creation? Roots, ah roots; who decides that one’s roots lead back to ethnic divide, race divide or Garden of Eden or out of Africa or to the primordial soup or from out of other planets of solar systems or other galaxies may be or from the core of stars of this universe or perhaps from multiverse? There are some labels I would like to throw in too for my friends to elaborate, for instance” self righteous”, “custodians of morality”, “enforcers of one’s belief on others”.

Babar

============  Comment by Mirza I. Ashraf ========== Dear Brother Salik Sahib,

Please do not bury me under the weight of “intellectual giant.” Though it is to compliment the drop of knowledge which I am still trying to understand, but I have not yet stepped into the shoreless sea of knowledge . . . . Mirza

بس اتنا جانتا ہوں کچھ نہیں میں جانتا لیکن میں بے خبری سے با خبری کے افکاروں میں ڈوبا ہوں

اشرف

 

 

For Mandela, Reverence, but Criticism, Too

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At his death, Nelson Mandela received a saint like praise around the world, but he has his critics also. Rick Lyman looks at him from critic’s point of view. ( F. Sheikh)  Some excerpts;

“When Andile Mngxitama, a black-consciousness advocate and frequent critic of Mr. Mandela, fired yet another broadside at the former leader before he died — comparing him unfavorably to neighboring Zimbabwe’s authoritarian president, Robert Mugabe — it certainly caught the attention of South Africa’s political class.

“It’s not an exaggeration to say Mandela’s leadership style, characterized by accommodation with the oppressors, will be forgotten, if not rejected within a generation,” he wrote in June.

““There isn’t this kind of mania about him here that there is in some quarters overseas,” Mr. Friedman said of Mr. Mandela. “This sanctified image of him has always been more extreme elsewhere in the world than the local attitude.”

“Often, criticism of Mandela was disguised as criticism of others,” said Adam Habib, vice chancellor of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. “Some of the things that his successor, Thabo Mbeki, was criticized for were actually things that Mandela had initiated or supported.”

“The criticism has been that he made too many concessions, while the real victims of apartheid still have to live with the consequences,” Mr. Habib said. “He is a global icon, a great leader, but he was not perfect.”

In a widely noted 2010 interview with Nadira Naipaul in The London Evening Standard, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela leveled blistering criticisms at her ex-husband.

“Mandela let us down,” she is quoted as saying. “He agreed to a bad deal for the blacks. Economically, we are still on the outside.”

“Who really gains from the elevation of a political figure into an untouchable icon?” Anthony Butler, a University of Cape Town political science professor, wrote in his column in the June 28 issue of South Africa’s Business Day newspaper. “Not Mandela himself, who does not need our plaudits. The mythmakers who claim that a leader is beyond fault are ultimately seeking to shield a whole political class, and not just one individual, from the public scrutiny upon which democracy depends.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/07/world/africa/mandela-politics.html?pagewanted=2&emc=eta1