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from the give-thanks-to-those-who-speak-out-for-freedom dept.
A gang armed with machetes has hacked a secular blogger to death at his home in Dhaka in the fourth such murder in Bangladesh since the start of the year, an activist group and police have said.
Niloy Chatterjee, who used the pen-name Niloy Neel, was murdered on Friday after the men broke into his flat in the capital's Goran neighbourhood, according to the Bangladesh Blogger and Activist Network, which was alerted to the attack by a witness.
"They entered his room in the fifth floor and shoved his friend aside and then hacked him to death. He was a listed target of the Islamist militants," the network's head Imran H Sarker, told the AFP news agency.
Chatterjee, 40, was a critic of religious extremism that led to bombings in mosques and the killing of numerous civilians, Sarker said.
First found here: http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/08/fourth-secular-bangladesh-blogger-hacked-death-150807102408712.html
Search led to these sites: http://www.itv.com/news/2015-08-07/machete-wielding-gang-kill-blogger-in-his-home/
http://www.firstpost.com/world/dhakas-secular-claims-get-increasingly-blood-soaked-as-another-bangladeshi-blogger-is-killed-2383420.html
http://www.nirapadnews.com/english/2015/08/07/news-id:29841/
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Saturday August 08 2015, @08:05PM
If atheism is a form of extremism, then so are all forms of religious belief... if everything is 'extremism', then nothing is.
But i see where you are coming from... should have said "Even atheists have their extremists", maybe.
But a couple of weeks ago (i am an atheist with a sense of humour about God), in frustration said, "I GOD DAMN YOU TO HELL, GOD!", and since then, my life has been going along quite a bit better. So either,
1. I feel better having done it and it shows in my personal life
2. I really have damned God to hell and now s/he can't f*ck with my life anymore?!?
As William Shatner would say, "Weird, or what?"
Or Depeche Mode:
"I don't want to start
Any blasphemous rumors
But I think that God's
Got a sick sense of humor
And when I die
I expect to find Him laughing"
(I'm expecting God is a she, is cis-gendered, looks like Oprah and spends every moment mugging in front of a camera and giving away prizes for audiences who clap the loudest.
Or its Donald Trump. 50/50)
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Saturday August 08 2015, @08:28PM
Any belief that is not able to be modified through experience and empirical evidence, is a form of extremism. Agnostic is the position that reflects reality, and probably reflects a significant population.
My point is that personal responsibility, great reduces the power of centralised authority, hence the most extremism comes from fantastic dogma.
(Score: 2) by TrumpetPower! on Saturday August 08 2015, @11:12PM
Ah. Either a militant agnostic or a True Believer in a sorry joke of an attempt to intimidate atheists into shutting up and going back to where they belong at the back of the bus.
First, are you agnostic with respect to Bigfoot, or leprechauns, or Zeus? Considering that the definitive text that serves as "evidence" for the existence of YHWH and his pantheon opens with a faery tale about an enchanted garden with talking animals and an angry wizard, might you not accept that agnosticism with respect to the Abrahamic religions is as childish a position as agnosticism with respect to Quetzalcoatl?
Humans have searched for the divine for millennia and failed to even agree upon the most basic facts relating to the gods. Are there many, or just one? If one, which one? Do gods actually manifest in crackers and wine on the verbal command of certain shamans, or do they have blue skin and thousands of arms?
In stark contrast to religion and its dependence on revelation, tradition, and faith, science has discovered previously-unimaginable facts about the Universe. And everything we've learned about through science practically screams that the gods simply couldn't do the things claimed for them. Are we supposed to remain agnostic about a man born of a virgin who becaume a zombie who beamed up to the mothership, but have confidence in the evolutionary and molecular biology as well as physics that tells us it's all childish bullshit?
Once you understand the true nature of the gods, agnosticism is a laughable position. And that true nature is most obvious: the gods are a stock character in a certain class of fiction whose sole purpose is to provide an unquestionably authoritative voice for the authors of the fiction. Within the story, the gods establish their authority by doing that which is truly impossible; having thus demonstrated their bona fides, the gods go on to parrot whatever the conman getting the revelation wants them to say. And it is obvious and essential that the gods do that which truly is impossible and not the merely impressive, else some other conman might come along and actually perform the feat and thus usurp the power of the gods and the original conman.
If it's extremist to laugh in the face of the priests, then call me extreme. But humanity remains chained so long as we fail to give the priests and their lackeys and dupes the complete and utter lack of respect they so desperately deserve.
I mean, seriously? A talking plant gives magic wand lessons to the reluctant hero, or the triumphant hero rides a flying horse into the sunset, and we're not supposed to laugh?
Cheers,
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday August 09 2015, @02:14AM
Either a militant agnostic or a True Believer in a sorry joke of an attempt to intimidate atheists into shutting up and going back to where they belong at the back of the bus.
Do you know anyone who can be cowed by moderately bad poetry? I don't think it was an attempt at intimidation.
And everything we've learned about through science practically screams that the gods simply couldn't do the things claimed for them.
No, it doesn't. If your philosophy is based on things which can be observed, then by the foundation, it has nothing to say about stuff that can't be observed. But this sort of thing contains one of the more well-known cases of cognitive dissonance in religion. It is routinely claimed that whatever supernatural beings we're supposed to believe in make themselves known to us. But at the same time, they don't. The being who reveals and hides at the same time has to be part of the most annoying religious argument of all time, namely, that you known the truth, but refuse to acknowledge it.
(Score: 2) by TrumpetPower! on Sunday August 09 2015, @02:28AM
A wise man once remarked that the unobservable and nonexistent are indistinguishable. Sure, there might be an invisible dragon in your garage that breaths heatless flames...but until it actually interacts with something else in the Cosmos it might as well not be there at all.
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 08 2015, @11:58PM
You're making the foolish assumption that atheism is a belief system.
It is not.
I don't walk around, each day reaffirming my faith that the Abrahamic god doesn't exist. If I did that, I'd also need to walk around reaffirming that Vishnu and Kali don't exist either, as well as the sun god and on and on and on. I also don't walk around having faith that the stars have no impact on my life, that tea leaves hold no knowledge of my future, nor that animal entrails hold next week's lottery numbers.
I walk around, each day, with no thought for the imaginings and faiths of other people. They are meaningless.
Or perhaps I should walk around believing that tomatoes scream when we slice them?
(Score: 1) by throwaway28 on Sunday August 09 2015, @12:42AM
Therefore, as an extremist believer in euclidian geometry and minkowski space;
DEATH TO THOSE RIEMANN INFIDELS !!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 09 2015, @12:56AM
> Agnostic is the position that reflects reality,
That presumes the question is valid in the first place.
There are practically an infinite number of questions with unknowable answers, what makes the question of God worth the effort of even thinking about versus all the other less popular, but equally unknowable questions like if you are really conscious or not?