No group of people have taught me to hate more, or want to commit violence against more, than Christians and Muslims. Honestly? I fucking hate ALL Christians and Muslims and believe they are a disease to humanity, cockroaches, vermin, puss filled shitstains on the underwear of humanity. Who have committed far too many crimes against humanity, crimes against the children of the world. Crimes of mass genocides, crimes of mass murder, crimes of tortures and persecutions of others. Crimes of pure hate and violence, all for their twisted fucking theologies of bullshit and pure fucking unmitigated evil.
The ones who truly started teaching me how to hate? Were the Christian penguins at the Catholic school I went to. They taught me to hate myself, for supposedly being an evil motherfucker for having been born…..LEFT HANDED.
Then Christians taught me to hate in all kinds of other ways. In the Reich Wing Buybull Baptist Fundie cult church I was brought to while in a foster home? They taught me to hate lgbts and others.
Then the perverted pedophile priests who spent the night at St Thomas More in Durham NH gang raping me really taught me to hate.
And add more ChristoFascist Taliban scumbags whom I have had the unpleasantness to have met or seen etc in my long life. Scumbag ChristoFascist Taliban Cunt shitstains like Theodore Shoebat, Fred Phelps and the psychos of Westboro Baptist Cult; Steven Anderson, Scott Lively, Matt Barber, etc. All great teachers of Christian hate, violence and death.
And of course? You got the Muzzie Goat Fuckers, who hate us atheists so much? They got 13 countries of theirs with the death penalty punishment for being an atheist. And of course? Their deathly hate for lgbts, women who are raped, etc. The bunch of Allah (Shit Be Upon Him) and Momo the Pedophile Profit (Shit Be Upon Him) shit of the world want to take it over and be top dogs too and spew that shit from their well used Muzzie Cunt outhouses on the daily.
The only thing the Quran is good for is to take a shit on it or wipe your ass with the pages.
Yes, Muzzies and Christos are the greatest teachers of hate, of violence, of death, of bigotry, and persecutors of others. Oh but don’t you dare demand the deaths of Muzzies of Christos, or throw hate, bigotry or persecute them, cause then they get their little fucking diapers in a bunch and cry.
Well, I say it is pas t time that Christos and Muzzies reap back all the hate, all the violence, and all the mass death they have sowed upon far too many in their histories. Christos should be rounded up and forced on death marches to death camps and starved to death like they did to us Native Americans. They should be exterminated from the face of the earth as just Karma payback for all the extermination they did of us. And any of them left? Should be put into brutal slavery by black people. Let’s see if Christians like a fucking dose of their own goddamn medicine shall we?
As for Muzzies? For every atheist a Muslim murders? 20 Muslims should be lined up against a fucking wall and fucking shot. For every Muslim that rapes a woman or murders a raped women? 100 Muslim scum men should be lined up against a wall and the shots aimed at their fucking crotches and their dicks blown the fuck off. All psychopathic Muzzie Cunt Extremist? Should be rounded up, fucking beheaded and their fucking heads put on pikes as a warning to any other fucking Muzzie of trying to star t their bullshit.
Yes, see how great a teachers Christians and Muslims are in teaching others to fucking hate. Well they have taught me to hate so well, by their spewing unmitigated hate towards me for 59 years that I just now want to watch them all get fucking wiped off the face of the earth in the most majestic, the most brutal, the most vile and violent ways possible. Maybe then they would learn their fucking lessons?
Fuck that Allah the Muzzie Pedophile god. Fuck that Allah in his fat fucking asshole like he rapes little boys and girls.
This is because Allah is a piece of shit pedophile and scumbag piece of shit. And that is a fact and truth Muzzie Cunts cannot handle. So fuck your Allah, that shitstain on the underwear of camel jockies and sheep fucking Muzzies everywhere.
Fuck your mass murdering pedophile piece of shit Momo the Pedophile Profit. That fucking sand nigger should have been drawn and quartered the moment he stuck his sheep and camel fucking shriveled dick into that nine year old girl Ayisha. The profit of the Muzzie Cunts is a piece of shit who should have been dragged out of his fucking cave and beheaded for raping a little girl. So fuck your piece of shit pedophile profit.
The Muzzie Cunts piece of shit pedophile profit shitting in his own mouth so he can spew his shit from his well used outhouse piehole and the Muzzie fucks suck it up and lick it off his asshole.
Fuck all you Muzzies. YOU want to put to death atheists? YOU want to put to death lgbts? YOU want to put to death anyone with intelligence who refuses to bow down to your disgusting, vile Allah and your pedophile profit Momo? Fuck you.
Your Allah is shit. Your Momo is shit. Your Islam is shit. You Muzzies are shit licking, sheep fucking scumbags. Go fuck yourselves.
You Muzzie cunts love spreading hate and death against others? Time for you Muzzie Cunts to reap what you sow and have done unto you exactly as you do to atheists and lgbts. Time for an all out war against you sheep and goat and camel fucking, pedophile loving shitstain scumbags off the face of the earth.
See what I have learned from you bigoted, hateful, vile, violent disgusting Muzzies?
Allah pig is shitting out Quran while ass fucking the pedophile Muhammed.
Muslims have the death penalty punishment for atheists in 13 of their countries. Time to declare war on all Muslims and time for the death penalty for all Muslims. As Muslims sow? So should they reap and as Muslims want to do unto atheists? The same should be done unto Muslims.
To all you disgusting, degenerate, foul, generational inbred, camel and sheep fucking, diseased, Muzzie scumbag shitstains on the underwear of humanity? Go fuck yourselves. With unending hate for all Muslims. An Atheist.
THE ONLY GOOD MUSLIM IS A FUCKING DEAD MUSLIM
In 13 countries around the world, all of them Muslim, people who openly espouse atheism or reject the official state religion of Islam face execution under the law, according to a detailed study issued on Tuesday.
And beyond the Islamic nations, even some of the West’s apparently most democratic governments at best discriminate against citizens who have no belief in a god and at worst can jail them for offences dubbed blasphemy, it said.
HEY MUZZIES….FUCK YOUR ALLAH, FUCK YOUR PEDOPHILE PROPHET SCUMBAG PIECE OF SHIT MUHAMMED. AND GO FUCK YOURSELVES YOU DEGENERATE PIECES OF SHIT. YOUR ALLAH IS A CUM GUZZLING PEDOPHILE FAGGOT, YOUR MUHAMMED IS A DISEASED CHILD RAPING SCUMBAG SHIT STAIN AND ALL YOU MUSLIMS SHOULD BE DRAGGED OUT AND FUCKING EXECUTED.
FUCK YOUR MUHAMMED, FUCK YOUR ALLAH, FUCK YOUR PEDOPHILE PROFIT, FUCK YOUR ISLAM, FUCK YOU MUSLIMS. FUCK YOU ALL.
“You atheists are just taking on the mantle of victimhood. There are laws protecting you — especially the First Amendment. Therefore, you’re not really discriminated against. And it’s ridiculous for you to claim that you are.”
Atheist activists get this one a lot. When we speak out about ways that anti-atheist bigotry plays out, we’re told that we’re not really oppressed. We’re told that, because we have legal protection, because anti-atheist discrimination is illegal, therefore we don’t really have any problems, and we’re just trying to gain unearned sympathy and win the victim Olympics. (I’d love to hear Bob Costas do the commentary for that!) It’s a classic Catch-22: If we speak out about oppression and point to examples of it, we’re accused of “playing the victim card,” and the oppression becomes invisible. And if we don’t speak out about oppression … then the oppression once again becomes invisible.
If you’ve ever made this “discrimination against atheists is against the law” argument, I have some really bad news for you. You may want to sit down for this, it may come as a shock:
People sometimes break the law.
Theft is against the law — but people sometimes steal. Bribery is against the law — but people sometimes bribe other people. Arson is against the law — but people sometimes set buildings on fire.
Anti-atheist discrimination is against the law; in the United States, anyway. But people still sometimes discriminate against atheists.
It’s illegal for public schools to prevent students from viewing atheist Web sites, while allowing them to look at religious ones. But the San Antonio Independent School District did it anyway.
It’s illegal to make atheists swear religious oaths when they testify in court. But the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida in Fort Myers did it anyway.
It’s illegal for businesses to give church-goers discounts they don’t give to non-believers. But the Fisherman’s Quarters II restaurant in Asheville, N.C. did it anyway.
It’s illegal to deny atheist organizations the right to advertise in venues where religious groups advertise regularly. But when American Atheists and the NEPA Freethought Society tried to place a bus ad in Pennsylvania that simply had the word, “atheists,” with the names and URLs of the organizations in smaller type, the transit system rejected the ad because it was “too controversial.”
It’s illegal to deny atheist students in public high schools the right to organize clubs. But it happens all the time. Talk to Secular Student Alliance high school specialist JT Eberhard. He spends a ridiculous amount of his working day pushing high school administrations to stop throwing up illegal roadblocks to atheist students, and to let them have the clubs they’re legally allowed to have.
And then tell me — or any other atheist — that we don’t experience discrimination.
Getting anti-discrimination laws and court rulings is hugely important for any marginalized group. But it’s only a first step. After that, you typically have to play a decades-long game of Whack-A-Mole, in which violations of the law pop up in local venues all over the country, and have to be smacked down again, and again, and again. That’s true of sex discrimination, racial discrimination and sexual orientation discrimination in states where that’s illegal. To give just one example among zillions: It’s illegal for banks to discriminate in lending practices on the basis of race… and yet Wells Fargo just settled a $175 million lawsuit over charging higher fees and rates on housing loans to racial minorities. Not in 1946, not in 1969 — in the last decade, in the years 2004 to 2009. It’s illegal to do that. It’s been illegal to do that for decades. They did it anyway. The mere existence of anti-discrimination laws is no guarantee that those laws will be obeyed.
So yes. Anti-atheist discrimination is illegal in the United States — and it happens anyway. I know. I haz a sad. And I’m going to have to hit you with even more bad news:
Standing up for your legal rights sometimes has ugly consequences.
Ask Jessica Ahlquist. High school student and atheist Jessica Ahlquist fought a legal battle she never should have had to fight: the battle to get her public, taxpayer-paid high school to take down a prayer banner from the auditorium. From a purely legal perspective, this was an utterly non-controversial issue: decades of legal precedent clearly supported her position, and to anyone familiar with the law, the ruling in her favor was almost entirely unsurprising.
But as a result of filing this lawsuit, Ahlquist was bullied, ostracized and threatened with violence. She was called “evil” in public by her state representative, and was targeted with multiple threats of brutal violence, rape and death. And this wasn’t just from hateful strangers trolling on the Internet — it came from her own schoolmates and her own community. This wasn’t in the Bible Belt — it was in Rhode Island.
And Ahlquist is hardly alone. When atheist student Damon Fowler tried to stop his public high school from having an illegal prayer at his graduation, he was physically threatened, publicly demeaned by one of his teachers, pilloried and ostracized by his community, and kicked out of his home by his parents. When atheist student Skyler Curtis tried to publicize his group at his high school, his posters were torn down, the local newspaper ran a letter from a parent calling his atheism an “atrocity,” and he received threats of violence. When atheist John Kieffer protested prayers at his local school board meeting, he was arrested.
Not everyone is able to fight these fights. Not everyone is able to risk hateful ostracism and violent threats from their community. It’s hard enough for a 16-year-old high school student like Jessica Ahlquist to face down this kind of venomous hostility. It’s even harder when you’re trying to hold down a job and support your family, and you literally can’t afford to alienate your bosses and co-workers and customers. Yes, the law is mostly on our side, and atheists and church-state separation advocates generally win these lawsuits. (Although not always — more on that in a tic.) But it doesn’t do much good to have the law on your side if fighting a legal battle is going to destroy your life.
And I have yet another piece of shocking news for you. I know, the terrible news just keeps on coming:
Sometimes laws aren’t enforced.
To give just one appalling example: It is — or it should be — illegal to deny custody to atheist parents, purely and explicitly on the basis of their atheism. And yet this happens, again and again and again. It has happened in states including Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Texas. According to Eugene Volokh of The Volokh Conspiracy, “In 2001, for instance, the Mississippi Supreme Court upheld an order giving a mother custody partly because she took the child to church more often than the father did, thus providing a better ‘future religious example.’ In 2000, it ordered a father to take the child to church each week, as a [lower] Mississippi court ordered… reasoning that ‘it is certainly to the best interests of [the child] to receive regular and systematic spiritual training.’”
Try to imagine a judge in this country denying or limiting custody to parents, explicitly and specifically, because they were Jewish. Because they were Mormon. Because they were Baptist. And now, try to imagine a judge in this country denying or limiting custody to a parent, explicitly and specifically because she’s an atheist. You don’t have to imagine it. This is real. This happens.
It is illegal. Or it should be. But custody laws vary greatly from state to state — and family court is something of a special case, where judges have far more leeway than they do in other courts. So this is a very, very difficult legal battle to fight. The laws against it exist — but they are very difficult to enforce.
And finally, I have one last piece of earth-shattering news that will almost certainly shake your worldview to its foundations:
Not all bigotry is illegal.
The fact that atheists are the least-trusted group in America? Totally screwed-up — and totally legal. The fact that atheists are the minority group Americans least want their children to marry? Totally screwed-up — and totally legal. The fact that only 54 percent of Americans think atheists could share their vision of society? Totally screwed-up — and totally legal. The fact that only 54 percent of Americans would vote for an atheist for president — a lower number than any other group? Totally screwed-up — and totally legal. People have the legal right to not vote for an atheist… just like they have the legal right to not vote for a woman, or an African American, or a Muslim, or a Jew. It’s still discrimination. It’s still screwed-up.
And it’s still worth fighting.
Plus, of course, all of this is just in the United States, where we do have a Constitution that ostensibly gives us the legal right to not be religious. In much of the world, the situation for atheists is far worse. In much of the world, it is literally against the law to be an atheist, and to say so, and to say anything critical of religion. To give just one example of many: In Indonesia, atheist Alexander Aanwas beaten by a mob, arrested, convicted, and sentenced to over two years in prison — for stating his atheism on Facebook. (There is currently a petition to the White House, asking President Obama to speak out about the Alexander Aan case and call on the Indonesian government to correct this gross violation of human rights.)
Is anti-atheist bigotry as bad as homophobia or racism, misogyny or transphobia? No. Almost certainly not. Not in the U.S., anyway. It’s worse in some ways — we consistently show up in polls as the least trusted group in America, and the least likely to be voted for — but atheists don’t seem to be subject to the same level of physical violence as gay or trans people, or the same level of economic oppression as women or people of color.
That’s not the point. Here is the point.
If you were mugged, nobody would tell you, “Quit whining — there are laws against mugging, you have legal protection, you don’t have anything to complain about.” The fact that there are laws against mugging did not stop you from getting mugged. It is reasonable for you to say something about it, and to express distress that it happened. And if muggings are happening a lot in your town or your country, it is reasonable to ask your community to pay attention, and to do something about it.
Atheists are getting mugged. Atheists are experiencing real, law-breaking discrimination. The fact that it’s illegal does not always stop it from happening. It is reasonable for us to speak out about it. And it is reasonable for us to expect people to give a damn. It is reasonable to expect our friends, our families, our colleagues, our communities, our country, to pay attention — and to do something about it.
A secular blogger has been hacked to death in north-east Bangladesh, the third such deadly attack this year.
Police said Ananta Bijoy Das was murdered as he headed to work at a bank in the city of Sylhet, an attack that fellow writers said highlighted a culture of impunity.
Kamrul Hasan, commissioner of Sylhet police, said a group of about four masked attackers pounced on Das with machetes at about 8.30am on Tuesday on a busy street in Bangladesh’s fifth-largest city.
“They chased him down the street and first attacked his head with their machetes and then attacked him all over his body,” Hasan told Agence France-Presse. The attackers fled into the crowds and Das was taken to hospital but declared dead on arrival, police and medics said.
Hasan would not be drawn on the motive for the attack but fellow writers said Das had been on a hitlist drawn up by militants who were behind the recent killing of a blogger who was a US citizen.
Imran Sarker, head of a Bangladeshi bloggers’ association, said Das was an atheist who wrote blogs for Mukto-Mona, a website formerly moderated by Avijit Roy, a Bangladeshi-born US citizen who was stabbed to death in the capital, Dhaka, in February.
Sarker told the Guardian: “They [the government] should not stay in power, if they are not able to bring the perpetrators to justice. One after another incident is happening and they are not able to do anything.”
Debasish Debu, a friend of Das, said the 33-year-old banker was also an editor of a quarterly magazine called Jukti (Logic) and headed the Sylhet-based science and rationalist council.
Debu said Das had been receiving threats for his writing and that their frequency increased after the killing of Roy. “He had written about superstitions, but he wasn’t among the writers that would hurt the sentiments of religion,” Debu said.
According to the Mukto-Mona site, Das won the publication’s annual rationalist award in 2006 for his “deep and courageous interest in spreading secular and humanist ideals and messages”.
While most of Das’s output for Mukto-Mona focused on science and evolution, he wrote a number of blogs that criticised some aspects of Islam and also of Hinduism. He also wrote a poem eulogising the famed Bangladeshi secular writer Taslima Nasreen, who fled to Europe in 1994 after protests by Islamists.
In comments on Facebook posted early on Tuesday, Das criticised the local member of parliament from the ruling Awami League party for criticising one of the country’s top secular and science fiction writers.
His murder comes a week after al-Qaida in the Indian Subcontinent claimed responsibility for Roy’s killing on 26 February in which his wife was badly injured. An Islamist has been arrested over his murder. Another atheist blogger, Washiqur Rahman, was hacked to death in Dhaka in March. Two madrassa students have been arrested over that attack.
Bangladesh is an officially secular country but more than 90% of its 160 million population are Muslims. There has been an increase in attacks by religious extremists in recent years. Supporters of Bangladesh’s largest Islamist party, which is banned from standing in elections, have been accused of being behind a spate of firebombings this year aimed at toppling the government.
Since 2013, at least five bloggers have been attacked by Islamists after another hardline group, Hefazat-e-Islam, publicly sought the execution of atheists who organised mass protests against the rise of political Islam.
Hefazat, led by Islamic seminary teachers, also staged a massive counter-protest against the bloggers in May 2013 that unleashed violence and left nearly 50 people dead.
Increasing attacks on Bangladeshi activists – some facts Islamic fundamentalists have stepped up attacks on secular Bangladeshi bloggers and campaigners in the past few months, with the latest being the murder of an LGBT activist. DW presents some facts about the killings. By Arafatul Islam https://www.dw.com/en/increasing-attacks-on-bangladeshi-activists-some-facts/a-19217814
War criminals and bloggers’ murders
On February 15, 2013, blogger Ahmed Rajib Haider was hacked to death in front of his house in the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka. Soon after his murder, an Islamist group claimed that Haider was an atheist who had made “blasphemous” comments about Prophet Muhammad and Islam on social media.
Haider was killed at a time when thousands of people had taken to the streets demanding capital punishment for a number of top Islamist leaders accused of war crimes during the country’s War of Independence in 1971. The unprecedented protest was organized by a group of secular bloggers and activists, who mobilized the people through Facebook. It was also the first of its kind demonstration representing the power of social media in the South Asian country.
Atheists are targeted
Since Haider’s assassination in 2013, five more secular bloggers have been slain in Bangladesh. All of these activists were self-proclaimed atheists and critics of religious fundamentalism. Islamist groups claimed responsibility for each of these killings on Twitter, releasing press statements in English and Bengali languages stating the reasons for their deaths. The jihadist organizations have said they killed the activists for their “blasphemous activities.”
Social media is considered a threat
Bangladesh is not a developed country but due to growing Internet connectivity, the number of people using social media and expressing their views publicly has been on the rise.
Bangladesh has now more than 30 million Facebook users, and secular bloggers and activists are making good use of it, criticizing religious fundamentalism and promoting secular values. After the murder of American-Bangladeshi blogger Avijit Roy in Dhaka on February 26, 2015, it became clear that the country’s Islamists felt threatened by the secular writers’ social media activism.
Bloggers are not the sole target
Islamic militants have carried out 34 attacks over the past 14 months in Bangladesh. “Islamic State” (IS) has claimed responsibility for at least 15 of these attacks, whereas Ansar al-Islam, an al-Qaeda affiliated Islamist group, has claimed responsibility for eight. The IS attacked mostly foreigners and religious minorities, whereas Ansar al-Islam targeted atheist bloggers, freethinkers and gay activists. The recent killing of two LGBT activists is another proof of the expanding influence of Islamists in the Muslim-majority country.
Government denies IS existence
Recently, IS published a six-page interview with its chief in Bangladesh in its propaganda magazine, Dabiq, detailing why the South Asian country is strategically important for them. The militant group said it intended to carry out attacks in India and Myanmar using Bangladesh as a base. Despite these claims, the Bangladeshi government has always denied the presence of international terror groups on Bangladeshi soil.
Police inaction
Activists accuse the nation’s security agencies of inaction against Islamic groups. The general response from the police, they say, borders on apathy. After the murder of atheist activist Nazimuddin Samad earlier this month, Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina said her government shouldn’t be held responsible if someone got killed for criticizing Islam. The premier has generally shied away from condemning the killing of secular activists, with the exception of the assassinations of gay activist Xulhaz Mannan and his friend Tanay Majumder.
Secularism is a strong force
Religious fundamentalism is still not as deep-rooted in Bangladesh as in some other South Asian countries like Pakistan and Afghanistan. The secular culture is extremely potent. However, in the past few years, extremist religious groups have successfully created an environment of fear in the country. That is the reason why most Bangladeshis do not publicly protest the killings.
The single-room apartment in which Goswami and his family, including his wife Juthi and their 16-month-old son Adrij, currently reside is still mostly empty.
There’s hardly any furniture in the flat; only a few suitcases at a corner, a mattress on the floor, some toys and a laptop can be found in it. The family has been living in this tiny apartment in the western German city of Aachen for the past several months.
They were forced to flee Bangladesh last year as a result of increased threats from Islamists as well as government officials. Goswami found himself in their crosshairs due to his criticism of religious radicalism and advocacy for protection of minority rights.
The 29-year-old has been blogging since 2008, focusing initially on writing short stories and poems on “somewhereinblog.net,” the South Asian country’s largest community blog platform.
Gradually, the topics he wrote about shifted to more sensitive subjects, putting him on the radar of Islamists.
After becoming an atheist a few years ago, he began criticizing religious radicalism on the internet. His blog posts on contentious issues have been read by many Bangladeshis. Even though he used pseudonyms to publish his articles, extremists managed to discover his real identity and even government officials started monitoring his online activities.
“The authorities never summoned me, but I found some of them on my Facebook and Twitter followers’ lists. I was warned several times to think about what I write online.”
Threats on Facebook
It was in 2013 when Goswami started receiving threats on his life from religious extremists.
The enormous power wielded by bloggers in the Muslim-majority country became evident that year as thousands of ordinary citizens poured on to the streets of the capital Dhaka, demanding capital punishment for the Islamist leaders who were involved in war crimes during the country’s War of Liberation against Pakistan in 1971.
Some bloggers organized the protests via a Facebook event. Islamists were alarmed, and countered the protests by leveling blasphemy allegations against some atheist bloggers.
Atheism has long been seen as a crime in Bangladesh’s conservative Islamic society. Self-proclaimed atheist bloggers like Goswami thus became a target of attacks by radicals.
At first, Goswami didn’t take the threats seriously. But when Avijit Roy, a famous Bangladeshi-American blogger, was hacked to death in February 2015, Goswami began to worry. Shortly after Roy’s murder, Goswami noticed a surge in web traffic to his blog posts. Petrified, he pulled down his blog from the internet. Yet, he got a message on Facebook: “You may think that we might have forgotten you just because you took your website off the internet. But no, we will remember you and your time will come.”
The frightened blogger turned to the police for help. “But they told me to leave the country as they couldn’t give me protection,” he told DW.
Despite the growing insecurity, Goswami remained in Dhaka, even though he reduced his regular outdoor activities. By the summer of 2015, three other secular bloggers had been killed, including Niloy Neel, a friend of Goswami.
The murders heightened the anxiety of Goswami, who was spending many sleepless nights. His wife was also worried about their increasingly precarious state. The two were also concerned about the future of their three-year-old son.
In April 2016, the risk to Goswami’s life became so great that he decided to leave his country. With the help of an international organization, he first flew to Nepal, a country where a number of Bangladeshi bloggers sought temporary shelter after the series of ghastly blogger murders.
Goswami thought that his wife and son would be safe without him in Dhaka. But he was wrong.
“When I was in Nepal, I received threatening emails and Facebook posts saying that my family would be attacked as I was not in the country. My family is the most important thing for me,” Goswami said.
The blogger later contacted the German embassy in Dhaka, which issued him a visa at the end of September 2016. He then arrived in Germany on October 9. Three months later, his wife and child followed, and the family reunited in Aachen.
Goswami is lucky – Three international organizations supported him in bringing his family to Germany.
“Leaving my country was not an easy decision. Everyone loves their country,” he said. “But the influence of extremists and militants has become so high in Bangladesh that ordinary citizens think it’s no longer safe to practice freedom of expression.“
Forget everything – at least for a moment
Arnab Goswami showed us his blog and Facebook page while sitting on the mattress in his living room in Aachen. His blog was hacked just a few days ago.
He said he doesn’t know who the culprit was, but suspects that it could be a professional hacker. When his son crawled into the room, Arnab shined. He cuddled with him, made him laugh. At that moment, he seemed to have forgotten all his worries. When his wife took the child to the kitchen, his face once again turned serious.
“My family has been going through a tough time, maybe I’m safe here, but my future is still uncertain. The fact that I have been suffering for my writing hurts me,” he said.
The couple also misses their parents, whom they left behind in Bangladesh.
But Goswami stresses that he does not regret his writing. “It was not possible for me to stop writing in exchange for a secure life in Bangladesh.”
A gloomy situation
“Of course, it’s alarming to see that liberal writers have been killed for writing blogs, but shall we stop expressing our opinion to save our lives?” The answer to this question, he said, is a clear no.
“Someone has to come forward to write on those issues. Otherwise, our country will enter into a dark age,” he warned.
Goswami criticizes Bangladesh’s government for not doing enough to protect secular voices. “It’s clear that they have been supporting Islamists to stay in power,” he underlined. “If they continue doing so, Islamic Shariah laws will be introduced at some point. We don’t want that. That’s why we have to continue writing, even though there’s a risk of being killed.”
Goswami’s wife Juthi backs her husband. “I support my husband’s scripts. Sometimes he discusses a topic with me before writing on it as a blog. Nothing is perfect in our life. No religion is perfect. No society is perfect. Some problems are there. And It’s important to write about those problems,” she stressed.
When Goswami is busy updating his blog site, 27-year-old Juthi takes care of their son and does the household activities. She holds a master’s degree in business administration and wants to learn the German language to explore job opportunities in Germany. But their future in the European country remains uncertain.
Aachen – and then?
Arnab Goswami’s immigration lawyer, Volker Simon, has been supporting the family since February. In the meantime, the three family members have received a residence permit that expires at the end of 2017.
Simon wants to submit an application for asylum and he is optimistic regarding the family’s chances – even if Bangladesh is not considered a priority country by the German Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF). According to BAMF statistics obtained by DW, there were 2,657 asylum applications from Bangladeshi nationals received in Germany in 2016.
The quota for accepted Bangladeshi asylum seekers during this time was 10.9 percent. This includes the number of accepted asylum applications, protection from deportation and granting of refugee status.
Help from the embassy
Arnab Goswami’s case for asylum is a special circumstance. “I see good chances for a successful asylum application,” said Simon. “The German Embassy in Dhaka has emphasized that as a critic of religion, a free thinker and a blogger, Goswami is in considerable danger in his country of origin. A few of his colleagues have already been murdered.”
A tragic incident involving another Bangladeshi blogger adds to the legitimacy of Goswami’s case.
“This person applied for asylum at the Swedish embassy and in the time it took to process the application he was shot in the streets,” said Simon. At the time, this helped give Goswami a reason to get out of the country quickly. Now, his future in Germany remains uncertain.
Writing sometime around the 10th century BC, the furious author of Psalm 14 thundered against those who say there is no God. “They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good.” If the denunciations of wicked atheists coming from today’s apologists for religion are any guide, the spirit of Iron Age Israel is abroad in 21st-century Britain.
In advance of the pope’s visit, clergymen and commentators are deploying every variety of bogus argument against those who advocate the superiority of secularism. Edmund Adamus, director of pastoral affairs for the Catholic diocese of Westminster, led the way when he denounced the “wasteland” secularism produced. If he had been condemning the atheist tyrannies of communism and fascism, I would have no complaint. However, Adamus was not objecting to Cuba, China or North Korea, but to the wasteland of secular, democratic Britain “with its ever-increasing commercialisation of sex, not to mention its permissive laws advancing the ‘gay’ agenda”.
Rightwing columnists and, depressingly but predictably in these appeasing times, leftwing journalists have joined the moaning chorus. The arguments of Geoffrey Robertson QC and Professor Richard Dawkins that the cops had grounds to ask the pope to account for his church’s failure to stop the rape of children in its care drove them wild. “The hysterical and abusive nature of some of the attacks on the pope will do nothing but discredit secularism,” said Andrew Brown in the Guardian. “I accept, of course, that lots of secular humanists are tolerant and reasonable people,” says the more restrained and judicious Stephen Glover of the Mail. “But there is a hard core which embraces and promotes atheism with the blind fervour of religious zealots.”
Not all of those who condemn atheism are pious themselves, as the presence of journalists among their number suggests. Rather, they believe in piety for the masses and fear that without religion the lower orders will lose their moral bearings. “All religions are equally sublime to the ignorant, useful to the politician and ridiculous to the philosopher,” said Lucretius. And behind many of the demands of today’s religious apologists that we “respect” Catholicism, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism and even the Scientology cult lies a desire to keep the plebs in their place by protecting their ridiculous but politically useful beliefs. Although I am proud to be on the board of the National Secular Society, Britain’s most urgently needed pressure group, I am not a militant atheist. I have seen too many vicars being moved by their Anglicanism to dedicate their lives to others to agree with Christopher Hitchens’s bald statement that “religion poisons everything”.
But the notion that in free countries atheism promotes intolerance and immorality is demonstrably false. Last year, Californian sociologist Phil Zuckerman responded with facts rather than witless abuse to claims from Christian psychologists and theologians that atheists were “selfish and pusillanimous curmudgeons”, “unnatural” or “just damn angry”.
He pulled together the available evidence and found that the more atheists or agnostics a free society has the more moral it becomes.
Predictably, atheists were far more likely to be tolerant supporters of women’s rights and gay rights than believers. The pope, like militant Islamists, orthodox Jews and the ultras in every faith cannot see that struggles for female and homosexual emancipation are among the most moral causes of our age. But as believers in a sternly misogynist and homophobic god, they must want to be tough on crime.
If so, they should welcome the contribution that atheists make to promoting law and order.
A study in the 1990s found that a meagre 0.2% of the US prison population were atheists. In America, the states with the highest murder rates tend to be highly religious, such as Louisiana and Alabama, but the states with the lowest murder rates are among the least religious in the country, such as Vermont and Oregon.
True, there is some evidence to suggest that atheists and agnostics are more likely to engage in underage drinking and illicit drug use. But the wider conclusion on the links between crime and religious belief holds good: if you want safe streets, move to a godless neighbourhood.
Atheism and secularism, Zuckerman continued, are also correlated with higher levels of education and lower levels of prejudice not only against women and gays, but people from other ethnicities as well. For good measure, atheists were less likely to beat their children and more likely to encourage them to think independently.
In many US courtrooms, judges restrict or deny child custody rights to atheist parents. If they want children to grow up to be law-abiding citizens, and not end up back in court as juvenile delinquents, they should stand that policy on its head.
What applies at city and state level applies internationally. Sweden, the most secular country in the world, gives the highest proportion of its gross domestic product in aid. Of the top 10 aid donors, only the United States is a strongly religious country. Needless to add, the oil-rich and religion-saturated Iran and Saudi Arabia are nowhere near making the premier league of charitable nations, which should not be a surprise because Iran concentrates its overseas efforts on exporting terrorism, while Saudi Arabia uses its petrodollars to promote its brutal Wahhabi theology.
An easy point to make is that secular democrats do not stone women to death for adultery or murder Afghan teachers for the crime of teaching girls to read and write. But it is not entirely irrelevant to the argument about the papal visit. Robertson’s and Dawkins’s enemies can accuse them of being “hysterical” and “abusive” and in the grip of the “blind fervour of religious zealots” while knowing that secularists will not respond by trying to kill them. Ever since the ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie they have not dared use the same language about real abusive and hysterical zealots, who just might.
Not that I agree with Robertson and Dawkins that the police should arrest the pope. The best way for anyone caught up in religious crimes to make amends is to convert to secularism. The odds are that they will be better people for it.
A 28-year-old atheist law student has been killed in Bangladesh. The attack follows a string of murders last year targeting outspoken advocates of secularism.
Nazimuddin Samad, a student at Jagannath University, was hacked and shot on Wednesday night while he was walking in Bangladesh’s capital, Dhaka, The Associated Press reports. Multiple attackers, who were reportedly riding on a motorcycle, have not been identified. They escaped while praising Allah, according to the news service.
Samad was an outspoken atheist who criticized radical Islam and promoted secularism on his Facebook page, the AP writes. It adds:
“A supporter of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s secular Awami League party, Samad also took part in the movement that successfully pushed for prosecutors to have more scope for going after suspected war criminals.”
The Dhaka Tribune describes him as an activist with that movement, which is called Ganajagaran Mancha.
The perpetrators and the motive haven’t been identified by police, the BBC reports.
Last year, at least four secular bloggers were hacked to death in Bangladesh and a publisher who worked with one of those bloggers was stabbed to death.
After one of those murders, the editor of the Dhaka Tribune, Zafar Sobhan,spoke to NPR’s Robert Siegel about the rising tensions between secularists and Islamists in Bangladesh.
Zafar Sobhan on All Things Considered
“Recently, over the last couple of years, we have had war crimes trials in Bangladesh. This is to do with our War of Independence in 1971,” Sobhan said, referring to the trials that Ganajagaran Mancha had successfully advocated for.
“Most of the people who have been put on trial are Islamists … who were collaborating with the Pakistan occupation army back in 1971. Now, war crimes trials are very important. However, I think the downside is that they have been painted as a movement against religious people, against Islamists.
“So I think as a result, those who are of a religious bent feel targeted. I think they feel as though they are on the defensive. And so they have decided to step up their opposition and step up their campaign of terror and violence.”
Last May, Rafida Ahmed, the widow of one of the bloggers, spoke to NPR’s Rachel Martin about the attack. Ahmed was injured in the attack that killed her husband.
Rafida Ahmed On WeekendEdition Sunday
“You can do very little when your elected government doesn’t give you any support, especially when these kind of brutal murders are happening,” she said. “The government has stayed completely quiet about this. The prime minister called my father-in-law privately and tried their best to keep it a secret so that nobody knows that they have sympathized with us at all.
“The prime minister’s son … gave an interview to [the press]. Pretty much said that they are walking a fine line, and they’re scared. They don’t want to side with the atheists,” Ahmed said.
After the attack on Samad, the director of public policy at the Center for Inquiry, a U.S.-based secular advocacy group, called the murder “heartbreaking and maddening.”
“The government of Bangladesh must do much more to protect its own people from marauding Islamist killers,” CFI’s Michael De Dora said in a statement. “These murders keep happening because they are allowed to happen.”
Lubna Yaseen was a student in Baghdad when death threats forced her into exile. Her crime was to think the unthinkable and question the unquestionable—to state, openly, that she was an atheist.
Growing up in Hillah, a city in central Iraq, she developed an independent mind at a young age. “My mother is an atheist intellectual person, and she brought up me and my siblings to think for ourselves and to be open to anything,” she told me. Yaseen was particularly concerned about her teachers’ attitudes toward women. “I always asked why girls should wear a hijab and boys are not obligated to do so,” she said. Why would “God” treat the two sexes differently? She quickly learned the dangers of expressing these views: Her teachers often threw her out of their classes, and sometimes beat her.
In 2006, when Yaseen and her mother were driving home one day, al-Qaeda militants pulled them over and threatened to kill them for not wearing the hijab. Still, Yaseen’s desire to explore secular thinking grew at university. “I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. Whenever there was a conversation, I talked.” She started handing out leaflets on Mutanabbi Street, the heart of Baghdad’s intellectual life, and wrote about her atheist beliefs on Facebook. Her activism attracted further threats from fellow students and local Islamist militia groups, but she was determined to continue. “I believed in my rights to be who I am,” she said.
The tipping point came when Yaseen’s story caught the attention of the American TV host Dave Rubin, who featured her on his show The Rubin Report in early 2016. After the clip was released online, she faced a torrent of death threats and finally went into hiding. “I disappeared—I left everything. I had to be always on the run, changing places and disguises,” she said. “I couldn’t feel anything except that I would end up being killed.”
Yaseen would still be at risk if it weren’t for the actions of Secular Rescue, which helped her escape to California, where she is waiting for her asylum claim to be approved. The initiative, launched in 2016, is run by the Center For Inquiry, a U.S.-based non-profit organization that aims to promote secular values, such as scientific rationality and freedom of speech, with the support of Richard Dawkins and other prominent atheists.
“It’s really an underground railroad of sorts for non-believers in countries where simply expressing doubt about religious belief is a criminal offense or where it may lead to grave physical harm,” Robyn Blumner, the president and CEO of the CFI, told me.
Secular Rescue does not just face challenges abroad in militantly religious countries; due to some unnervingly resilient biases, implicit prejudice against atheists is still prevalent in ostensibly secular Western countries, making it difficult to raise the necessary diplomatic support there for people like Yaseen.
But in many countries across the globe, the danger of expressing non-belief comes directly from the state. According to a comprehensive report by the International Humanist and Ethical Union, a U.K.-based non-profit that aims to promote the rights of non-religious people, there are currently 12 nations in which apostasy (including atheism) can be punished by death: Afghanistan, Iran, Malaysia, Maldives, Mauritania, Nigeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. Pakistan, meanwhile, threatens the death penalty for blasphemy, which may include expressions of atheism.
Even in states that ostensibly protect religious rights, atheists may have to fear repercussions from vigilante groups. In Iraq, for instance, the right to freedom of conscience is enshrined in the constitution, yet Yaseen faced regular death threats from fundamentalists and got little support from the police. “There is a mob mentality that sanctions violence against people who don’t conform on religious grounds,” Blumner said.
Paul Fidalgo, a spokesman for Secular Rescue, told me that government complicity is a particular problem in Bangladesh, which has seen the murder of at least 10 writers who had questioned the religious dogma since 2015. “We know there have been, and may still be, hit lists, issued by those who are trying to keep their hands clean, encouraging young radicals to slaughter secularists of their own volition,” Fidalgo told me. “And one of the worst parts is the callousness of the response from the Bangladeshi government. From the prime minister and other officials, we get several versions of ‘Well, they shouldn’t have been insulting religious beliefs.’ After one student was murdered, officials began to investigate the dead guy to see if he had written anything worth killing him over.”
When faced with these threats, many people are understandably reluctant to admit their religious doubts even to their closest confidants, making it difficult to gauge how widespread atheism actually is around the world. But there are signs that the numbers of atheists are sizable. A 2012 Win/Gallup International Poll, for instance, found that 19 percent of people in Saudi Arabia claimed not to be religious, with 5 percent identifying as convinced atheists—roughly the same proportion as in the U.S. That’s a surprisingly high number given the difficulties of exploring non-religious thought in this country, and the true figure may be greater; even if their responses remain anonymous, many non-believers may still have been reluctant to declare their religious doubts openly.
Mark Aveyard, a social psychologist in the United Arab Emirates, believes that some changing attitudes toward religion (at least in the UAE) may be linked to shifts in the way people are encouraged to think in education and at work. “They study or work in organizations where they’re encouraged to be bold, disruptive, innovative, creative, unconventional—with business, technology, entertainment, academics, etc. They’re rewarded for questioning the received wisdom.” Although many manage to compartmentalize these more critical attitudes, it has caused some to rethink their religion, Aveyard said. “So there are more youth now who question and doubt, but they do so privately.”
For non-believers like Yaseen who are more committed to expressing their opinions, however, the internet now provides a community and forum for the formation of an atheist identity. Arabic Facebook groups promoting atheism can reach tens of thousands of followers before they are targeted by “cyber jihadists.” (One popular tactic is to break into the account and post pornography, leading Facebook’s moderators to shut it down.) Blumner, meanwhile, points out that an Arabic translation of Dawkins’s book The God Delusion has reportedly been downloaded by more than 10 million people, with about 30 percent of downloads (3 million) coming from Saudi Arabia. “It shows you there’s a tremendous appetite for understanding religious doubt, for exploring religious doubt, for affirming religious doubt,” she said.
Some religious leaders and politicians are hoping to regulate atheism with increasingly fiery rhetoric and more stringent laws. Egypt, for instance, already criminalizes the act of blasphemy, leading to the recent conviction of a 29-year-old computer scientist for running a Facebook page on atheism. But in late December, the Egyptian government announced plans to extend these laws, so that disbelief itself would be criminalized, even if the person does not actively declare or promote atheism (although it remains unclear how this could be practically enforced).
Although some organizations like Amnesty International have taken up the cause of certain individuals, the CFI’s Secular Rescue was founded to tackle the broader global problem. The support it offers is largely diplomatic, financial, and legal: to pull strings with government agencies, organize the transportation of potential victims, and pay the costs of settling in a new country. Since 2015, it has helped save 30 people, including Ahmedur Rashid Chowdhury (also known as Tutul), who was chosen by Margaret Atwood for the PEN International Writer of Courage Award in 2016. The year before, he had suffered a nearly fatal machete attack by insurgents in Bangladesh, after which Secular Rescue helped his family to Norway. With enough funds, the group would hope to help many more.
Beyond creating these escape routes, Secular Rescue also campaigns for bodies like the UN to protect the rights of atheists to express their freedom of conscience. Blumner, for instance, recently visited the UN Human Rights Council to discuss mounting concerns in Malaysia, after an eruption of atheist persecution in August was sanctioned by the government. She says that the plight of non-believers is overlooked by politicians from ostensibly secular societies, meaning that activists working on behalf of persecuted atheists often struggle to garner the necessary support. “Part of the problem is that people don’t like atheists and it’s hard to protect a group you don’t like.”
This is even the case in the United States, where Blumner’s assertion finds support in a series of studies by the psychologist Will Gervais at the University of Kentucky, who has described atheists as “one of the most hated groups in the U.S.,” even as they face no state-backed persecution. His work has centered on a well-accepted measure of prejudice that tests how much people implicitly associate certain acts with representatives of a particular group.
In one early study from 2011, he found that people assume that atheists are more likely to commit immoral acts such as stealing money from a wallet left on the sidewalk, or failing to give the correct insurance information after a road accident. Indeed, of all the groups he measured—including Christians, Muslims, Jewish people, feminists, and homosexuals—only rapists were considered to be similarly untrustworthy. He has since shown that people are also more likely to implicitly associate atheism with incest, bestiality, animal torture, even murder and mutilation. Opinion polls, meanwhile, reveal that nearly 50 percent of people would rather that their children did not marry an atheist (compared to 34 percent who declared that they would be disappointed if their child married a Muslim).
“People have these strongly negative reactions to atheists,” Gervais told me. Strikingly, these views were not limited to religious participants in his studies. “Even our atheist participants seem to intuitively think that serial killers are atheists.”
He emphasizes that these associations are probably learned, and even if you don’t go to church, you may still be exposed to lingering cues in our culture that encourage that distrust. “We have had millennia of religious influence,” he said. Nor are these biases restricted to the U.S. In 2017, Gervais demonstrated that they are shared across many countries usually assumed to embody secular values, including the U.K., the Netherlands, and the Czech Republic.
It’s worth noting that people turning away from religion in the West may also feel threatened by the people in their community, and given the widespread bias against atheism—among the religious and non-religious alike—it’s not surprising they sometimes fail to report their fears. Maryam Namazie, founder of the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain, has described a “tsunami of atheism” in the U.K., with many living in fear of reprisals from their religious community. “There are many cases where ex-Muslims have gone to the police and not received any support at all because the problems aren’t taken seriously,” she told the Independent.
Increasing the acceptance of atheists in the West—and concern about their plight in the West and elsewhere—may be a battle in itself, one that must be fought in tandem with the battle to sustain an “underground railroad” that rescues atheists from physical harm.
Yaseen, for her part, told me that she is still trying to heal from her experiences, but that they have ultimately made her more determined to share her story and build awareness of the dangers facing atheists in countries like Iraq. “I hope my voice can be heard, so Western communities can open their eyes to what’s going on, and build a safer place for people like me.”
Atheist Militants Rising 
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