Rosio Pavoris a blog

Everyone knows BBCode is a pain to work with, and while WordPress supports limited HTML in user comments, it should be obvious HTML is no better. The unnecessary repetition of SGML-based languages and the insistence on the proper nesting of tags makes them all hideous and unnecessarily error-prone. We can do better.
The discussions of learned societies on the subject have been less than satisfactory, so I decided to just implement my own mark-up language, based on the venerable S-expression:

{b This} is {i {u expert} {o mark-up}}.

This will turn into:

This is expert mark-up.

The immediate effect is that nesting problems and text redundancy immediately disappear. The syntax also lends itself to easy function composition:

{b.i.o.u EXPERT}

EXPERT

Finally, for this first version,⁰ we also support function iteration:

{sup*3 To the moon}{sub*3 and back.}

^{To the moon}_{and back.}

It goes without saying this can be combined with function composition in arbitrarily complex expressions, with the iteration operator having a higher precedence than the function composition operator.

I’ve elected to use curly braces rather than the more typical parentheses, because curly braces barely see any use in natural language, which is where this mark-up would generally be used. If you do need literal curly braces, you can escape them with a backslash (and if you need a literal \{, you can escape your backslash with a backslash).

As a proof of concept, and because I eat my own dog food, I’ve written (and enabled) a WordPress plugin that enables this SexpCode in blog comments. For sanity, iteration doesn’t go beyond *3. Supported tags are b, i, u, s, o, sub, sup, code, spoiler, quote, blockquote, and m. If you want to use it yourself, adding more tags or changing their definitions should be straightforward.
Trying to use an unsupported or empty tag, or having unbalanced braces (except for closing braces at the end), will assume you’re actually trying to post C-like code, and disable SexpCode for your comment.

Ladies and gentlemen, BBCode was our COBOL. This is our Lisp.

Edit: People who want to implement this themselves should be following this document rather than this post.

Edit again: Play with it!

Edit again again: More implementations:

• sexpcode, a CLI utility and a C library
• sexpcode.py, Python bindings for that C library

Know of another implementation (SexpCode⁺ or SexpCode⁻)? Let me know!

⁰ Future versions of the language are expected to add support for function arguments (for things like url, img, and colour) and the ability to define aliases (for example, {define exp b.i.o.u}, which would let you use a new exp function as if it were b.i.o.u).

If you follow these things at all, you’ve probably heard by now: creationists are once again inventing a controversy where there is none, this time by pretending that it matters at all whether Dawkins’ venerable Weasel program uses locking or not, and claiming that his “unwillingness” to dig up code written in the ’80s and release it means… well, something significant.
In case you’ve forgotten what the Weasel program is, here’s a video (using a different phrase, but the same concept):

If you’re a long-time reader and that looks familiar, it’s because I’ve talked about it twice before. The experiment is simple enough that any idiot can repeat it, but of course creationists are a very special kind of idiot.
So this time, let’s walk through writing our own Weasel program and settle this once again.

I’ll be doing this in a kind of “literate Python”, because everyone understands Python and it doesn’t require compilation, so even the most technologically inept don’t have any excuse not to follow along.
If you don’t have Python installed (or aren’t sure if you do), get it here. Get the 2.6.2 one (if you aren’t sure which you need, you’ll need this one). If that’s too hard already, you shouldn’t be on the Internet in the first place.

I’ll be preceding lines of Python code with > signs, façon literate Haskell. The Python interpreter doesn’t understand this style, so I’ll also be providing a link to the final script at the end.

To recap, we’ll start with a random string composed of symbols chosen from a specific alphabet, and a target string which we’re hoping to achieve.
For randomness, we’ll be using Python’s inbuilt random module, so let’s import it.

> import random

The genetic alphabet is just “CGTA” for DNA, but ours will be a bit longer:

> alphabet = "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ "

Note that that includes the space at the end. We could make it even longer by including minuscules and punctuation, but it really makes no difference to the principle of the thing.
And here’s our target string:

> target = "METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL"

Of course it’s important that all symbols in the target string are also in the genetic alphabet, or we’ll never find it.

At the heart of every genetic algorithm, there’s a fitness function. In our case, this is just something that compares our string of “DNA” with the target string symbol by symbol, and just says how many symbols match. Strings with more matching symbols are obviously more like the target string, and will be selected to breed for the next generation.

> def fitness(child):
>     fit = 0
>
>     for a, b in zip(child, target):
>         if a == b:
>             fit += 1
>
>     return fit

The built-in zip function pairs items in a given list, creating a pair of the first character in both the “organism” and the target string, then the second, then the third, and so on. For each pair, it’s then going to check if both members of the pair are the same symbol. If they are, the fitness value is incremented by one. At the end, it’s returned.
This should be obvious.

Equally important, of course, is the reproduction function. Dawkins’ Weasel strings reproduce asexually, so there’s only one parent for each child. The parent copies his entire “DNA”, and each locus has a small chance of mutating.
How high the mutation rate is isn’t that important, because the point of the Weasel program isn’t to simulate real-life life perfectly, but just to demonstrate that descent with modification is more effective than a random search. Let’s give our strings a mutation rate of 1 chance in 50 at each locus. If that seems too high, remember that our genome will be 28 loci in length, so there’ll already be a lot of generations where no mutation will happen at all.

> def reproduce(parent):
>     child = ""
>     for gene in parent:
>         child += random.choice(alphabet) if random.randint(1, 50) == 1 \
>                                          else gene
>     return child

Did you follow that? Our child starts off as an empty string, and then we iterate over the genes of the parent. There’s 1 chance in 50 that a mutation occurs, in which case we randomly select a gene from the alphabet to add to the genome. Otherwise, we use the parent’s gene.
At the end, the constructed child is returned, ready to have its fitness judged.

Now that we have those two important functions, the rest of the program is straightforward. First, we construct a completely random starting point:

> parent = [random.choice(alphabet) for _ in target]

Our Adam. Let’s put him and his fitness on display:

> generation = 1
> print "%d %s (%d)" % (generation, parent, fitness(parent))

The generation variable will keep track of how many generations have passed.
We’re just about ready to enter our reproduction cycle now. Every generation, our parent will have one child, and if this child is fitter than his parent, this child will be the next parent. Otherwise it is mercilessly discarded and the parent will parent the next generation as well.

> while True:
>     child = reproduce(parent)
>     generation += 1
>
>     child_fit, parent_fit = fitness(child), fitness(parent)
>
>     if child_fit > parent_fit:
>         parent, parent_fit = child, child_fit
>
>     print "%d %s (%d)" % (generation, parent, parent_fit)
>
>     if parent_fit == len(target):
>         break

As you can undoubtedly tell, this loop will exit once the fitness of the mutating string equals the length of the target; that is, when both strings are equal.
The string "METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL" is 28 symbols long. With a 27-symbol alphabet, a random search would take on average 2728 / 2 generations to match it. That's 5,986,​257,​591,​281,​009,​894,​301,​370,​013,​358,​523,​552,​840 generations. Even if we're doing a trillion1 generations a second, that would take 189 million trillion2 years to finish.

> print "Finished! Target reached in %d generations!" % generation

And as promised, the full code is here. Just save that somewhere and double-click it to run it (you'll need to chmod +x on sane platforms, but you know that).

And that really should be that. Dembski can wave giant-sleeve-clad arms about free lunches all he likes, but in the real world, not everyone is innumerate. It’s just sad that decent people have to waste time on his bullshit.
I doubt this will actually do much good (of course it won’t; even the creationists themselves (exceptionally dense specimens excepted, as usual) realise this time that there’s no controversy here, just a giant heap of time-wasting nonsense), but if nothing else, I hope I’ve demonstrated even an elementary school student could do this. If the original code is of any interest at all, it’s because of archaeological reasons, because old code is usually interesting, not because the algorithm is that fascinating or complicated.

¹ Short scale. 10¹².
² 10¹⁸. Yes, I know the proper name for that is a quintillion in the short scale and a trillion in the long scale.

In which I am bored and write a ridiculously thorough, line-by-line review of a worthless piece of fluff.
Didn’t actually take that long.

C. S. Lewis¹ is much maligned, and for good reasons, but his “lunatic, liar, or Lord” trilemma is one that still sees quite a lot print, also for good reasons.
On the topic of Jesus going around and forgiving random sins, he had this to say (I’ve added some newlines to improve legibility; the internet is not print after all):

Now, unless the speaker is God, this is really so preposterous as to be comic.
We can all understand how a man forgives offenses against himself. You tread on my toes and I forgive you, you steal my money and I forgive you.
But what should we make of a man, himself unrobbed and untrodden-on, who announced that he forgave you for treading on other men’s toes and stealing other men’s money?
Asinine fatuity is the kindest description we should give of his conduct.
Yet this is what Jesus did. He told people that their sins were forgiven, and never waited to consult all the other people whom their sins had undoubtedly injured. He unhesitatingly behaved as if he was the party chiefly concerned, the person chiefly offended in all offenses.
This makes sense only if he really was the God whose laws are broken and whose love is wounded in every sin. In the mouth of any speaker who is not God, these words would imply what I can only regard as a silliness and conceit unrivalled by any other character in history.

I disagree that it would make much sense even if he was that god, and the quiet assumption that Jesus is a “character in history” is perhaps a bit hasty, but the point is clear enough, and leads into the famous argument nicely:

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God.
That is the one thing we must not say.
A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell.
You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse.
You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher.
He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

It would probably be too generous to believe that Lewis intended “Devil” and “demon” metaphorically, but he is essentially right, and this is a very important thing to keep in mind.
Jesus emphatically wasn’t a great moral teacher (see “Christ, what a role model” at the bottom of the “So what does the Bible tell us” box, though there are plenty more examples) most of the time, and this “moderate” Christianity is incoherent (which seems to be the one thing fundamentalists and the New Atheists agree on).
The point is by no means less potent if Jesus never existed, because it is about the character Jesus as it exists in people’s minds and in Christian doctrine.

Of course, Lewis’ conclusion is total crap:

Now it seems obvious to me that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God.

(No actual evidence, of course, just a completely unfounded “it feels right”.)

But you can hardly blame a man for being a credulous wanker. Apparently.

¹ Fun fact: did you know “C. S.” stands for “Clive Staples”? When I found out about this I made a promise to myself I would refer to him as “Clive ‘Staples’ Lewis” from then on, but for the sake of clarity I didn’t here. Consider yourself warned for the future, though.

There’s something profoundly frightening about the type of person who takes a story about all life on Earth (except for a violent drunk and his dysfunctional family and the handful of critters they take with them on their boat) drowning in a catastrophical global flood brought on by a spiteful god, and tells it to his children as a happy story about happy animals and a loving God and his promise of a pretty, pretty rainbow to a happy Noah and his happy, happy family.

Or who tells stories about their god turning rivers to blood, inflicting disease on livestock and unhealable boils on people, bringing plagues of frogs, lice, flies, and locusts, bringing down a rain of fire, and killing all of a nation’s first-born, while maintaining that said god is “Love and Mercy”.

Or who takes the message that all unbelievers should be shunned and hated and will burn in Hell for all eternity, and by the way so will believers unless they’re really, really good, but that’s impossible since we’re all filthy, sinful wastes of flesh, and calls it Good News.

But no, religion is not a mental illness, and suggesting it is is hyperbole and we’re all big meanies for doing it.

I really wonder who Jack Chick’s target audience is. I find it hard to believe anyone could be so deeply ignorant of human nature and science they could find any of them at all credible. In fact, I’ve yet to meet any non-Americans who don’t think they’re parodies.
Outside of the US, depending on which people you hang out with, their tract on Dungeons & Dragons (Dark Dungeons) is probably the most famous one, but another one fundies are fond of throwing around is Big Daddy?, which (near as I can tell) they think is about evolution.

Needless to say, it’s full of straw men, non-sequiturs, and just made-up bullshit. The “six basic concepts of evolution”? The nonsense about circular dating methods? The idiocy about polystrate trees? Haeckel?

Judging by how long these claims have been discredited, you might guess this tract to be somewhere between 70 and 150 years old. You’d be wrong.
The first version of the tract appeared in 1972. The current version (which is also the one on the Chick website) was written in 1992 (by our good friend Kent Hovind).
Since even AiG refuses to endorse Hovind anymore, you might think it’s time to just let this tract fade into obscurity, but apparently a lot of creationists disagree. It’s still being pushed as fact, so I think it merits a brief response.

I’m just going to address the bit that seems to be subject of copy pasta most often: the faux “human evolution” chart.

(For the other claims, and a whole lot more, I refer you to TalkOrigins’ Index.)

I’m not sure why they’re presented as if they represent a direct lineage, as nobody has ever claimed they do.
Anyway, one by one.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Catholic Church is an organisation of worthless vultures and thieves.
Remembering the dead is important, of course, and it’s important for people to be with their family when they’re at their emotionally most vulnerable. That makes it all the more disgusting when these ghouls pervert these occasions to make them all about themselves and their little cult, pushing the deceased—and the family—entirely to one side, and hiding them behind stock one-size-fits-all prayers (they had grandchildren read prayers calling him “opa”; not a single one of us ever called him anything but “bonpapa”) and bullshit stories (because obviously glorified accounts of God raining death down on the Israelites are very relevant to my grandfather).

Anyway, that was the wake. Funeral’s tomorrow.

This news is actually a few days old, but it just hit our local newspapers, and now it made James Randi’s Swift, and given the fact that I seem to be keeping track of the march of fundamentalism in the lowlands, I guess it bears mentioning.

Chances are you’ve heard of David Attenborough’s BBC nature documentary series, The Life of Mammals. It’s a few years old at this point, and is comprised of ten episodes. It’s a pretty good series, which, apparently, is also what the Dutch TV station EO thought.
EO stands for Evangelische Omroep (“Evangelical Broadcast”), and due to the idiosyncracies of religious history in the Netherlands, it’s a public broadcasting association. And it is, of course, fundie. Young Earth Creationist, even.

Imagine its surprise when The Life of Mammals suddenly started talking about evolution, and things happening millions of years ago!

The short of it is that they cut an entire episode, and bowdlerised a few of the others.
It’s all documented in greater detail on this (Dutch) blog (including YouTube videos), which was also the first one to notice it. Basically, everything mentioning evolution, fossils, common descent, or the fact that the Earth is older than a few thousand years has been cut or mistranslated in the dub.

I wonder if the BBC knows about this. I know Attenborough wouldn’t take kindly to being censored like this.
The fact that a public broadcasting association gets away with this is shameful.

Quit sucking, Netherlands.

Pope Benedict admits evidence for evolution

POPE Benedict has said there is substantial scientific proof of the theory of evolution.

The Pope, speaking as he was concluding his holiday in northern Italy, also said the human race must listen to “the voice of the Earth” or risk destroying its very existence.

Welcome to the 19th century, Benny! Perhaps in a few decades, you’ll have caught up with the rest of us in the 21st, even?

In a talk with 400 priests, the Pope spoke of the current debate raging in some countries, particularly the US and his native Germany, between creationism and evolution.

“They are presented as alternatives that exclude each other,” the Pope said.

“This clash is an absurdity because on one hand there is much scientific proof in favour of evolution, which appears as a reality that we must see and which enriches our understanding of life and being as such.”

But he said evolution did not answer all the questions and could not exclude a role by God.

Well, I guess not.

Either way, this is the guy who recently said the exact opposite (which itself was the opposite of what his equally infallible predecessor said), and claimed that passing laws to ensure our children get a halfway decent scientific education (that is, laws against the teaching of Genesis as a fact that is true) amounts to totalitarianism.
Too much of what is labelled as “flip-flopping” is just changing one’s mind when new evidence arrives, but this isn’t one of those. Not so infallible all of a sudden, are we?

Oh, and:

“Above all it does not answer the great philosophical question ‘where does everything come from?’”

Protip: evolution isn’t about the origin of the fucking universe. Any six-year-old could have told you that.
I guess this isn’t so much news as it is just business as usual.

(Via Pharyngula.)

… about my opinion regarding that scarlet A:

I don’t approve.
Not because I think it’s too in-your-face or because it makes atheism into a religion of its own (both opinions I’ve seen expressed with a straight face, if you can believe it), but because it’s not pretty.

The campaign itself is a good idea, and we desperately need to raise awareness (especially in certain North-American countries), and the gay community has proven branding works (and the scarlet A isn’t an attempt to turn atheism into a religion, or even a centralised movement, any more than the gay rainbow was for homosexuality), but I still very much prefer the asterisk as a symbol.

Having said that, I’ll probably still order a shirt.

If more of you were on IRC I wouldn’t have to repost this.

Read the rest of this entry »

Pope: Other denominations not true churches

LORENZAGO DI CADORE, Italy – Pope Benedict XVI has reasserted the universal primacy of the Roman Catholic Church, approving a document released Tuesday that says Orthodox churches were defective and that other Christian denominations were not true churches.

Internal Church wankery such as this isn’t particularly interesting, obviously, but it’s worth noting that combined with the return to traditional Latin masses he announced last week, this is the second Vatican II decision he reversed.
Vatican II, obviously, was mostly aimed at liberalising the Church and making the teachings of Cathol more accessible to the masses.

This is what you get when you put a traditionalist in charge: regression and alienation of the younger members. “Younger” in this case meaning anyone under 70.
Let’s hope he manages to implode the Catholic Church entirely before he dies.

(As a side note, stop calling him “Benedict”, media. If I started calling myself “The Great Gozango” and made the news, you’d report it as “Crolla, who calls himself ‘The Great Gozango’, (…)”. Do the same thing with Ratzinger.)

This is something that’s been annoying me recently.
If you’ve ever had a discussion with a creationist (not, like, a run-of-the-mill creationist whose only argument is “evolution is false because my pastor says it is”, but a creationists who thinks his views are defensible), chances are that at one point, they said something like “evolution is false because it can’t even explain how life began”, or something along those lines.

And if this was on a public forum, chances are also good the very next reply was from a non-creationist, saying that evolution doesn’t deal with the origin of life, only with how life behaves when it’s already there, and that what he’s thinking of is abiogenesis, and this has nothing to do with evolution one way or the other.
That possibly annoys me more than the actual creationist, because it shows that the person either doesn’t understand evolution, or that he’s copping out.

Evolution isn’t separable from abiogenesis; it doesn’t have to be. This is because evolution doesn’t just apply to living things (unless you specifically define life as “that which evolves”, which is probably too permissive a definition, in my opinion), and there is no clean break between life and non-life anyway.
The break between evolution and abiogenesis is artificial and contrived.

Evolution

How do you define (Darwinian) evolution?
There have been many definitions over time, but for the most part, they require randomly variable heritable traits on the one hand (genes, for example), and a (non-random) selection process on the other.

Does something have to be alive for evolution to apply to it?

When you’re talking about life, viruses always seem to come up.
By most accounts, they aren’t alive. They’re strands of genetic material in a simple protective coat of protein. They don’t eat, they don’t drink, they can only reproduce by literally being copied by a host cell’s copying apparatus, which is a relatively simple chemical reaction.
They’re large but simple aperiodic crystals, and they aren’t alive.

But evolution obviously applies to them. They grow resistant to medication used against them, they adapt to changing host environments, and they even speciate (though virus speciation isn’t entirely comparable to speciation of higher organisms, because they’re so damn simple).¹

Abiogenesis

Abiogenesis is simply about evolution applying to prebiotic molecules similar to viruses (but even simpler) and the chemical reactions they go through.²
It’s not something that magically happened before evolution kicked in. It’s inextricably intertwined with evolution, and evolution is a very important tool in understanding how it worked.

Now, it’s true that if we didn’t have any clue how abiogenesis could possibly have happened, evolution is still a fact, in the same way that umbrellas don’t stop working because we don’t know where rain comes from, but that’s no reason to claim rain and umbrellas are unconnected.

I can see the appeal of separating them. It catches the creationists off guard, and often destroys their entire argument. They don’t have a logical basis for their beliefs, so they often can’t adjust to that new bit of information by themselves.
It also gives theistic evolutionists something to feel good about, by allowing God to move into another gap. “See, evolution is real, but God still created life!”

However, when creationists say evolution is false because it can’t account for the origin of life, the mistake they’re making isn’t that they’re conflating evolution and abiogenesis—it’s that they assume we don’t have a clue how life started.

If you don’t want to explain the whole thing to them, or you don’t know enough about the whole thing to explain it to them in the first place, saying they should be separated is a handy cop-out, but a cop-out is all it is.

¹ If you do want to define life as “that which evolution applies to”, then yes, viruses are alive. But then you have to deal with things like the Weasel program also being alive.

² Darwinian evolution isn’t the only force that applied to these things, obviously—non-Darwinian selection played its part as well. But then, it still does.

… that anyone who doesn’t understand there’s a difference between “I know there is no God” and “I do not believe in God” is an idiot, and that anyone who answers “agnostic” when asked about his religious beliefs hasn’t understood the question.

Godlessness a growth market

THE 1981 census documented the fact that 88 per cent of the Australian nation held some form of religious belief. By 2001, the proportion of “believers” had dropped to 83 per cent. Yesterday’s release of the 2006 census results places the proportion of those with a faith at 79 per cent. Non-believers have gained nine percentage points in market share in 25 years.

Believers evaporated from this nation at a rate of five percentage points over the final 20 years of the 20th century. But in the first five years of the new century, this group yielded yet another four percentage points. Godlessness, it would seem, is on the up and gathering momentum.

Yes, yes, good news, and whatnot.

Still, it keeps surprising me how the entire English-speaking world is essentially insane.
Australia seems to have the excuse of mostly consisting of the descendents of prisoners (which, as you know, are statistically more likely to be religious), and the US has the whole religious persecution thing, driving fundies away from Europe and into the Americas.
Canada is just the US’ little brother (Québec, interestingly, is the least religious part of Canada; most of Canada has a level of creationism more or less in line with the US, but Québec could almost pass for a European country, so not another bad word about the Frenchies), but I’m not sure what excuse the UK has. Cultural protectivism seems to lead to incestuous degradation, I guess.

This time a little too close to home. Not Flanders yet, no. It’s the Dutchie Bible Belt again.

I’m not sure why fundies are so obsessed with children’s literature; that’s perhaps the only thing parents have complete control over. Still, after Harry Potter (obviously), they’ve now gone after a Flemish writer’s new book.
The writer I’m talking about is, of course, Marc de Bel.

De Bel has always been the only Dutch-language author I’ve been able to read. The first real book I ever read was Blinker en het Bagbag-Juweel, when I was five (though I think the target audience was twelve-year-olds).
He never treated his readers like idiots just because they were loli, and he didn’t ignore “naughty” topics if they made sense. So yes, his books had kissing occasionally, and death, and the recurring minor villains in at least one of his series were regular drug users.
But now the Dutch fundamentalists think he’s gone too far! And why?

Because a main character in his newest book might be… an ALIEN!

The Flemish title of the book (which is cowritten with Guy Didelez and aimed at ten-year-olds) is Alien (pronounced “ah-LEEN”; it’s the name of aforementioned main character), and it’s apparently about a guy who wonders if one of his friends is an extra-terrestrial.
But the Bible says extra-terrestrials don’t exist, apparently!

As such, the censors tried to take the book apart. They got de Bel to replace all instances of the blasphemous “godverdomme” (“goddammit”) with “verdikke” (closer to “darn” in connotation) and “shit” (which was apparently fine by them), and the Dutch release title will be Ik moet je iets vertellen (“I have to tell you something”).
They also tried to change the romantic relationship between the main character and Alien to a “just friends” one, but at that point, de Bel predictably told them to go fuck themselves (politely, I’d think).

I wish I could say this sort of thing was unexpected. At least it raised awareness of the dangers of ignoring fundamentalism for too long, and I think that’s why de Bel allowed them to change the title at all.

Hey, remember when Flanders used to be the backwater nest of religiosity, and the Netherlands were a beacon of progressive openmindedness?
(Yes, a handful of benighted idiots getting more vocal doesn’t necessarily constitute a threat to civilisation. Still, though.)

South Africa, arguably the least pathetic of the African nations, has a new prophet: 17-year-old Francesca Zackey.
She was in the news a few weeks ago because she claimed to have visions of the Virgin Mary (which is surprisingly common, as far as cries for attention among young girls go), and rather than being turned over to a psychiatrist, she’s been visited by hundreds of idiots believers, because clearly she’s magic.
So now she’s been telling people that if they want to see the Virgin Mary themselves, they should stare into the sun.

Guess what happened.

Zackey reportedly advised a Gauteng woman, Amal Nassif (37), earlier to look at the sun, and if she had faith, the Virgin Mary would appear.

Nassif stared at the sun for about a minute and lost her sight.

“I can’t seen anything. There is a large dark blind spot,” she was quoted as saying.

It’s just like Jesus, except the other way around!

Apparently the Catholic Church (well, the South African Council of Churches, which goes by a delightful acronym) has paid her a visit as well, and ordered her to stop talking to people while they’re “investigating” her “visions”.
Maybe they’re afraid her blindness-striking powers mean she’s the Antichrist.

(Via Pharyngula.)

Later today, the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain will be officially launched, sponsored by the British Humanist Association and Britain’s National Secular Society. Britain isn’t the first country with a Council of Ex-Muslims (Germany, Finland, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden all have one, and they’ve apparently been an astonishing success; the founders of many of them have, of course, received death threats), but in a country with 1.6 million Muslims, I’d say one is needed.
This British branch will be led by Maryam Namazie, an Iranian-born rights activist.

It’s worth keeping in mind that under Sharia law, apostasy is punishable by death. Britain’s Sharia courts aren’t, of course, allowed to pass that kind of sentence, much less carry it out, but then, they technically require permission of all parties involved before they pass any kind of sentence, and that hasn’t stopped them in the past.
Either way, this sort of thing takes courage, and should be encouraged.

(Via RichardDawkins.net.)

I’m guessing you heard about Salman Rushdie’s (deserved) knighthood by now. You’ve probably also heard of various idiots speaking out against it in the Muslim world, including the Pakistani Minister of Religious Affair (“If someone exploded a bomb on his body he would be right to do so unless the British government apologises and withdraws the ‘sir’ title.”) and the Minister for Parliamentary Affairs (“I demand the British government immediately withdraw the title as it is creating religious hatred.”), and a fuckload of people in Iran (that fatwa was issued by Khomeini, who was the spiritual leader of Iran at the time, and it was recently reaffirmed by his successor, Khamenei), but there’s one voice that surprised me: Baron Ahmed, the first Muslim member of the British House of Lords.

“This man – as you can see – not only provoked violence around the world because of his writings, but there were many people that were killed around the world and honouring the man who has blood on his hands, sort of because of what he did, honouring him I think is going a bit too far.”

What the fuck is wrong with people? This is like condemning the Jews for inciting the hatred of the Nazis, and it goes against everything freedom of speech is supposed to be.
It’s like the entire Muslim world is fucking four years old.