madfilkentist

CAIRO (AP) — Thousands of Egyptian mourners marched behind the coffin of the "martyr of the head scarf" on Monday — a pregnant Muslim woman who was stabbed to death in a German courtroom as her young son watched.

Many in her homeland were outraged by the attack and saw the low key response in Germany as an example of racism and anti-Muslim sentiment.
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Christian Avenarius, the prosecutor in Dresden where the incident took place, described the killer as driven by a deep hatred of Muslims. "It was very clearly a xenophobic attack of a fanatical lone wolf."

He added that the attacker was a Russian of German descent who had immigrated to Germany in 2003 and had expressed his contempt for Muslims at the start of the trial.

URUMQI, China — The government imposed a curfew Tuesday night in this regional capital of western China after mobs of Han Chinese with meat cleavers and clubs roamed the streets looking for Muslim Uighurs who had earlier beaten up people in the country's worst ethnic violence in decades.

Rioting in the Xinjiang region broke out Sunday and killed at least 156 people. Tuesday's new violence came despite swarms of paramilitary and riot police enforcing a dragnet that state media said led to the arrest of more than 1,400 people in the often tense region.
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On Tuesday, some among the Han Chinese mob retreating from the tear gas were met by Urumqi's Communist Party leader Li Zhi, who climbed atop a police vehicle and started chanting with the crowd. Li pumped his fists, beat his chest, and urged the crowd to strike down Kadeer, the 62-year-old Uighur leader.

"Those Muslims killed so many of our people. We just can't let that happen," said one man in the crowd, surnamed Liu. He carried a long wooden stick and said the Han Chinese were forced to take up arms.

So I've been thinking about this topic for quite a while now, and I still can't find an answer. What do atheists do with their children? is it okay to raise a child to scrutinize all religions?

I consider myself a moderate antitheist. Basically, all religion is dumb, but you can believe what you like- should I pass this sort of 'bigotry' over to my child? (Not that I'm getting one any time soon; but anyway, irrelevant.) Honestly, I probably will end up passing over my beliefs to a T; I can't bare the thought that a spawn of mine would go around claiming that he has a *puke* personal god or something wretched like that.

I can't help but think that that thought is a little specious, though. I have a huge beef with parents labeling a child 'Christian' or 'Muslim' before the kid has enough little grey cells to even comprehend what that would mean. I want to see parents do the hippie thing and let the child choose for themselves, but that isn't always easy if you're trying to stay unobjectionable with the sorts of beliefs I've got. Claiming a child is 'Christian' or 'Muslim' sounds awful, and in a way, so does claiming that a kid is Atheist before he figured it out for himself.

Is anyone else as bothered about this as I am?

If we were a more honest society, and therefore a more healthy society, there’d be no need to ban this ridiculous outfit because it would already have been ridiculed out of existence.

The worlds of academic paleontology and creationism rarely collide, but the former paid a visit to the latter last Wednesday. The University of Cincinnati was hosting the North American Paleontological Convention, where scientists presented their latest research at the frontiers of the ancient past. In a break from the lectures, about 70 of the attendees boarded school buses for a field trip to the Creation Museum, on the other side of the Ohio River… Many of the paleontologists thought the museum misrepresented and ridiculed them and their work and unfairly blamed them for the ills of society.