This week Hemant Mehta from the Friendly Atheist blog joins us to talk about his recent woes with the Illinois Family Institute. A woman named Laurie Higgins wants to let families know that they have an atheist blogger for a math teacher and Hemant was kind enough to come on the show and let us know how things are going at school. Laurie Higgins was unavailable for comment.
No seriously, I called and asked for an interview and everything.
In the news:
Remember the burqa you bought to swim in? Well, it turns out you don’t need it anymore. Damn. A priest has elevated child abuse to a new height and bus drivers are martyrs for Jesus. If you plan on killing your children, make sure you do it for religious reasons, apparently that is a bullet proof defense. Scientists may have just proven that you didn’t just evolve from a monkey, you evolved from a FRICKIN COMET. Praying at Lunch: go directly to jail. Do not pass go, do not collect $200. And of course, if you need your money cleansed of The Jesus, go ahead and send it to me. I will TOTALLY take care of that for you. No problem!
Richard has some pretty sweet shirts to sell over at Atheist Nexus, go check them out.
And I’m running a blog contest to see who the next writer on the Atheist News Blog will be, come to the site and take a look.
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Another great podcast, guys!
As for the excomunication case you mentioned - Yeah, it was here in Brazil, and it was met with HUGE national backlash. Basically, this nine year old girl got raped by her stepfather (and it was not a one-time thing either), got pregnant as a result and had an abortion. So, the archebishop responsible for the diocese decided it was in his duty to excomunicate her mother, the social workers AND the doctors involved in the case, but NOT the stepfather. Apparently, the rape was aminor offense compared to the abortion. As far as I know, the Vatican supported the archebishop, but the reaction against this shit was so bad that the excomunication was later reversed.
The kicker is, apparently if the girl had been older, say 15 or 16, she wouldn’t be safe from excomunication either, if it was determined that she had an understanding of the whole thing and presumably could have objected to the abortion.
About the case of the pimping priest (I hadn’t heard about it) - I agree that 10 years is an awfully short time, but here in Brazil the law prevents anyone from staying in prison for more than 30 years, regardless of the crime (even if the sentence is much longer, go figure). On the flipside, you really have no idea how abhorrent the prisons here actually are, so ten years could well mean plenty of horror to last this douchebag his lifetime.
Abiogenesis is life coming from non-life. The word you’re looking for regarding the comet thing is panspermia - the idea that life on Earth came from outside of Earth.