Reading Time: 3 minutes The Koran instructs Muslim women to be modest in their dress partly to publicly identify with Islam and partly to avoid sexual assault. Since 630 CE, we have come to understand that the sexual assault of women is not caused by how sexy they look but by male control issues. Human rights groups and feminists universally advise that […]
India
Posted inCulture
The road to hell: How a Christian missionary lost his life for nothing
Reading Time: 2 minutes In 2018, a missionary named John Allen Chau was killed by residents of North Sentinel Island, owned by India and home to the Sentinelese, one of the Andaman tribal people. After the decimation of the Amazon rainforest, they may be the only remaining Stone-Age-adjacent tribe on the planet. Chau was a Christian who felt it was […]
Posted inLaw
A 2002 gang rape in India is still revealing worlds of injustice
Reading Time: 8 minutes Christopher Hitchens was once asked to defend atheism from the charge of hopelessness, by a Christian who found comfort in the idea of a god who would remedy all earthly injustice after death. In answer, Hitchens spoke of Elisabeth Fritzl, who spent 24 years as her father’s captive, sexually abused and birthing children also trapped […]
Posted inHuman Story
How an Indian film changed my son’s life | Jennifer Hancock
Learning that she didn’t know the name or work of the most famous actor in the world sent lifelong movie enthusiast Jennifer Hancock down a rabbit hole into the massive film industry of India. In the process, she found insights about love that are rarely touched in Western cinema—and solved a puzzle about her own […]
Posted inPolitics
Fascism in India: The global turn toward nationalist politics
Reading Time: 9 minutes Although I never needed to “deconvert” from a religious tradition, I was fascinated by New Atheism’s debate circuits at the turn of the century: The eloquence of its speeches. All those witty rejoinders. The rallying of knowledge from a range of disciplines to out-fact an opponent. It was easy to fall prey to the idea […]
Posted inHistory
Fascism in India: The role of Nazis in Hindu nationalism
Reading Time: 8 minutes When writing on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s role in Hindu extremism, I committed the cardinal sin of not defining a key term: fascism. This was a conscious choice, because I’ve written before on how quickly we mire ourselves in political word games. Better to start with the government figure that Western media keeps centering, as […]
Posted inHistory
Fascism in India: Who’s ‘in charge’ of 1.4 billion?
Reading Time: 9 minutes There’s something fascinating, if also disturbing, about Western incuriosity around the world’s largest democracy. 1.4 billion of our world’s 7.8 live in India, a country a third the size of the US, which has under a quarter of India’s population. How can the fortunes of so many mean so little? Nevertheless, India exists in the […]
Posted inReligion
John Allen Chau and the Priorities of a Soulwinner
Reading Time: 11 minutes Already, Christians herald John Allen Chau as a martyr to their holy cause. And he is, just not quite in the way they believe. His story drives home exactly why his religion is declining–and why it deserves to decline.
Posted inUncategorized
Indian court rejects abortion for 10-year-old rape victim
Reading Time: 2 minutes Oh completely dear. Thi is what happens when you stick to strict rules without seeing the common sense in reality. A change in law is desperately needed here, methinks. The BBC: India’s Supreme Court has refused to allow an abortion for a 10-year-old girl, allegedly raped by her uncle, on the grounds that she is […]
Posted inReligion
Naturalism: Not Gross. Not Crass. And Not Negotiable
Reading Time: 9 minutes Wow, do Christians tend to hate the idea of naturalism. One apologetics site even calls it, without a hint of irony or self-awareness, “a belief-system opposed to our god.” Notice their flowchart, by the way. It’s actually not too bad. “The natural world is all that exists, so if something falls outside the natural world, it is excluded from reality.” One almost wants to say in response “Yes, and…?”