Skepticism

Global Quickies: Indecent Acts, Rickets, and Diplomatic Incidents

UGANDA (from a bunch of you)
The Minister for Ethics and Integrity told Stephen Fry, on camera, that men raping girls is the right kind of rape.

AUSTRALIA (from Jack99)
Victoria’s Education Department has launched an investigation into what it calls “inappropriate and offensive” religious material distributed at a primary school. The material instructed children to seek counseling if they had homosexual feelings and claims that girls who wear revealing clothes are inviting sexual assault.

CHILE (From Michael)
Dozens of fossilized whales, seals and other marine animals have been discovered piled up in an ancient tidal flat in northern Chile, providing the first fossil evidence of repeated mass die-offs.

LEBANON (From biogeo)
Powerful essay on what is like to grow up in Hezbollah culture and its similarities with fundamentalist Christianity.

UK
A couple has been jailed for the manslaughter of their five-month old son, who died from rickets after they neglected his care because of their religious beliefs.

BRUNEI
Starting this April, non-Muslims will be penalized for using the word Allah to refer to their god, as well as for using any of these other words. Fines, jail time, amputation of limbs, and even death by stoning will be among the punishments for religious crimes, such as leaving a child in a care of a non-Muslim or inter-faith adultery. Criticism of this has prompted the Sultan to order social media users to stop attacking his plans to introduce sharia law, or they will be the first punished by the new laws.

SUDAN
An Ethiopian woman who was gang-raped has been convicted of “indecent acts”. She was sentenced to a one-month jail term but this was suspended because she is pregnant. The men who raped her were sentenced to being whipped.

DOMINICAN REPUBLIC (Via Ateorizar)
Diplomats boycott event after husband of gay U.S. Ambassador is asked not to attend. The organizer was the Dean of the Diplomatic Corps, Archbishop Jude Thaddeus Okolo, who is also the new envoy from the Vatican to the Dominican Republic. Okolo replaced Archbishop Josef Wesolowski, who escaped the Dominican Republic fleeing sexual abuse allegations.

UKRAINE (From Mary)
Follow what’s going on in Ukraine on this blog.

Featured image Vince Rossi / Smithsonian Institution

Daniela

Born and raised in Mexico City, Daniela has finally decided to abdicate her post as an armchair skeptic and start doing some skeptical activism. She is currently living in Spain after having lived in the US, Brazil and Italy. You can also find her blogging in Spanish at esceptica.org.

Related Articles

4 Comments

  1. I too saw Stephen Fry in Uganda, he totally owned the so called Minister for Ethics:
    “Oh, gay sex is tremendously exciting, you really ought to try it!” Ha! Brilliant!
    It must have been a profoundly horrible and frightening experience to confront the Minister, yet Stephen did so and showed him up for the piece of shit that he was .I am in awe.

    1. Thanks for the link! I saw about 15 minutes of the show a few weeks ago and I’ve been meaning to see it all.

  2. On Hezbollah, another parallel to fundamentalist Christianity is the Mahdi as compared to premillennial dispensationalism. Both involve some apocalyptic prediction, and both use it to further a political agenda wrt: the future of the Levant.

    On the Dominican Republic, Okolo condemning homosexuality on Church doctrine after what happened to the last guy to hold his position…I’m going to need a new irony meter now.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Back to top button