A British teacher was found guilty of insulting religion and sentenced to 15 days in prison and deportation on November 29, 2007 for allowing a teddy bear to be named “Mohammed.” Fortunately, the teacher was not convicted of two other charges brought against her–inciting hatred and showing contempt for religious beliefs–her lawyer said. Her lawyer said he was “very disappointed” with the verdict. Considering that his client escaped being lashed forty times or up to a year in prison, I wouldn’t be completely disappointed with the result.

Gillian Gibbons’ crime was allowing her students to vote on the name of a teddy bear, “a class mascot” and they selected “Mohammad.” Gibbons claims it was an innocent misunderstanding and she meant no offense. I’m sure if the situation were reversed anywhere in the world, parents would be equally unhappy with a teddy bear named Jesus by a Muslim teacher. But genuine misunderstandings do happen and Ms. Gibbons does seem to be honest.

In a vaguely related story, A cartoonist in Bangladesh who drew a mildly cute cartoon about a boy misunderstanding how one should use the name Mohammad cost the cartoonist one month in jail and the magazine that carried it has been suspended.

I want to respect the right of people to practice their religion, but I’m deeply troubled by the extreme reactions to innocent or very, very mild offenses. I think we Humanists must take a stand on these types of controversies, especially if we are to tackle even bigger issues such as the treatment of women and other human rights abuses. If we can’t even begin to have discussions about the accidental naming of a teddy bear in a classroom, how can we possibly hope to address these larger issues?

Oh Bill, why haven’t you called? Last year at this time – and two years ago as well – you welcomed me onto the O’Reilly Factor to discuss your all-important Earth-shattering “war.” That’s right, I used to be your worthy opponent as you fought a culture war over whether store clerks should enforce a “Merry Christmas!” message on customers, and whether evergreen trees should be called Christmas trees (as opposed to holiday trees, Hanukkah bushes, or in the style of Monty Python – shrubbery.)

But alas, November has come and gone with nary a call from you, Bill. For a while I suspected that you had decided to call a ceasefire in your war. After all, it had given an immense amount of fodder to comics throughout the land, and made you look even more foolish than you generally seem. Then, a couple of weeks ago, I read that you had taken up verbal arms again in the Christmas war … only this time your focus was on what color lights would be used in decorating government buildings. I had no idea, but you informed the public that white lights were SEC - YOU - LER (with an emphasis on the “sec”). And the true symbol of Christmas is colored lights.

Well, OK. I’ll assume that the reason I missed the part of the Christmas story in which the three wise men bring the gifts of red and green electric lights to the baby Jesus, is because I’m Jewish. I’m certain that my Christian friends and family members learned about the sacred colored lights. But I’m offended that you denigrated decorations consisting of snowflakes and penguins. I love snow. And I especially love penguins. In fact, this year, I’m hoping for a “white Christmas.” Bill, if you’d take a walk with me through freshly fallen snow under the evening street lamps in our nation’s capitol, you might notice how beautiful and perhaps dare I say it – sacred – the quiet of a snowy celebration of this beautiful solstice season can be.

Happy Humanlight to all.

It just wouldn’t be the holiday season without Bill O’Reilly and his contrived ‘War on Christmas,’ would it?

The Fox News pundit is back again to yabber on and on about our attempts to “diminish Christmas for secular progressive reasons.” Apparently, the city of Fort Collins, Colorado, and their decision to choose white lights over the “more Christmas-y” colored lights has really gotten Bill all riled up (a video of the segment posted on the blog Think Progress can be seen here).

Despite what O’Reilly would have you believe, we Humanists do respect Christmas, as we respect Hanukkah, Kwaanza, Eid, and other December holidays (we even have our own in HumanLight). Every religious and nonreligious holiday in the month of December celebrate similar themes: happiness, peace, love, joy. However you want to celebrate is up to you.

O’Reilly is the only one fighting in this so-called ‘war.’ For someone who cherishes this time of year so much, his hate-filled mongering is about as un-Christmas as you can get.

The Reverend Ken Hutcherson, a black conservative Christian pastor of an evangelical megachurch has vowed to take over Microsoft. He plans to pack it with new shareholders who will vote against the company’s policy of championing gay rights. As an advocate of a “biblical stance” against divorce and homosexuality, Hutcherson, a former linebacker for the Dallas Cowboys, is asking millions of evangelical activists, Orthodox Jews and other allies to buy up Microsoft shares and demand a return to traditional values. This supposes Microsoft had traditional values at some point, but so it goes.

Hutcherson believes,”There are 256 Fortune 500 companies alone pouring millions upon millions of dollars into pushing the homosexual agenda,” as he told the Daily Telegraph, “I consider myself a warrior for Christ. Microsoft don’t scare me. I got God with me. I told them that you need to work with me or we will put a firestorm on you like you have never seen in you life because I am your worst nightmare. I am a black man with a righteous cause with a whole host of powerful white people behind me.”

Brad Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel, stated at the shareholders’ meeting that it was up to shareholders to continue their longstanding support of Microsoft’s diversity policy, which includes an internal “affinity employee group” called the Gay and Lesbian Employees At Microsoft (GLEAM). It will truly be interesting to see how this plays out. The attempt to change a company’s diversity policies via the stockholder route will be a more powerful ploy than boycotts and pickets. As Humanists, we must remain ready to counter such ploys if they prove successful, especially if the company has shown a history of Humanistic or progressive choices prior to such a takeover. Humanists may have to become business champions in a way we never anticipated.

It was a spontaneous gesture, “a moment of levity” during the national anthem at the awards banquet when the American Bridge champions held up the cup and one of the players also held up a quickly scribbled sign on the back of a menu that read “We did not vote for Bush.”

By e-mail, angry bridge players have accused the women of “treason” and “sedition.” The United States Bridge Federation is angry and worried about losing sponsors and upsetting people. The players we’re stunned by the fierceness of the reaction.

“What we were trying to say, not to Americans but to our friends from other countries, was that we understand that they are questioning and critical of what our country is doing these days, and we want you to know that we, too, are critical,” Ms. Greenberg said, stressing that she was speaking for herself and not her six teammates.

The league wants apologies, bans from play for a year and 200 hours of community service. These are professional players so this is basically cutting their income off for a year. I’m comparing this in my mind to football and baseball players’ punishments that have recently made the news for using drugs and dogfighting. I think we’ve got our priorities wrong.

I think most people were as surprised as I was by Pat Robertson’s endorsement of Rudy Giuliani. We all scratched are heads and tried to figure out why we cared or if it helped Giuliani or hurt him. Then I read “The Robertson Effect?” by Hugh Hewitt and really started caring.

He gave three possible reasons for the endorsement, but number three made me stop and think:

Robertson really, really, really wants to win to keep the Supreme Court safe from Hillary.

We were worried about the court before George W. Bush came into office but the court is still in a vulnerable state: Stevens is 87; Ginsberg, 74; Scalia and Kennedy, 71; Breyer, 69 and Souter, 68.

Election 2008 just got a lot more important than I thought it was going to be, and I already thought it might be the most important election in my lifetime.

There’s been much talk in the blogosphere about the upcoming release of The Golden Compass, a new film based on the children’s trilogy His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman–a known atheist. A chain email is rumored to have been passed around to thousands of parents encouraging them to not let their children see the movie’s supposed anti-religious themes. And the Catholic League will be conducting a two-month protest of the movie, claiming the book is “overt in its hatred of Catholicism.”

So what does Pullman have to say about his attempt to indoctrinate little children to the evilness that is atheism? Quite the opposite, actually. When asked if there was an underlying message promoting atheism in his books, Pullman stated:

As for the atheism, it doesn’t matter to me whether people believe in God or not, so I’m not promoting anything of that sort. What I do care about is whether people are cruel or whether they’re kind, whether they act for democracy or for tyranny, whether they believe in open-minded inquiry or in shutting the freedom of thought and expression. Good things have been done in the name of religion, and so have bad things; and both good things and bad things have been done with no religion at all. What I care about is the good, wherever it comes from.

Sure, Pullman has also stated in a 2003 interview with the Sydney Morning Herald that, “My books are about killing God.” While not the most ideal choice of words, there’s nothing wrong with what Pullman is doing. C.S. Lewis did the exact same thing in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe on behalf of Christianity (and you didn’t see atheists collectively protesting that movie when it came out two years ago).

What the Catholic League is attempting to do through its protest is equate atheism with immorality. (I find that funny, in light of the hundreds of Catholic clergy abuse cases going on in the world.) But I’m more offended that the Catholic League implies that atheism is dangerous to children. Pullman’s books, as the author has stated himself, promote intellectual curiosity. Let the kids decide for themselves.

David Horowitz is rather proud of his Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week held October 22-26. He declares it included the “largest, most successful campus demonstrations by students not associated with the anti-American left in the history of campus protests.” 114 college and university campuses participated in the event, the Terrorism Awareness Project website stated, which highlighted “the threat from the Islamic jihad, and the oppression of Muslim women.”

As their student guide points out:

Of course Islam also oppresses Christians, Jews, gays and atheists. We are focusing on the oppression of women (but not excluding the oppression of others) because this is the largest and most immediately suffering group, and drawing attention to its plight exposes the academic left’s hypocrisy in the most dramatic way possible.

So now we see why they chose to highlight the oppression of Muslim women. 

The whole thing is very disturbing for Humanists.  If we need an Islamo-Fascism Week then don’t we need an Axis of Evil Week or how about a Homophobe Week or a Christian Fanaticism Week?

Using women’s rights as a way to legitimize the hate that is lying underneath this event is really repellent to me. I know that responses will be seen as more of the left just being the left, but how about getting Ann Coulter and Rick Santorum to agree to work next on bringing about changes in how Islam treats atheists and homosexuals?

It seems Jesus is causing controversy in a brand new way. Some Christians are worried that the talking Jesus doll available at Wal-Mart for $14.95 trivializes religion while others think anything that gets the good word to kids is great. Others worry that children will treat the dolls like regular action figures and engage in violent play.

Along with Talking Jesus there are talking David, Noah, Moses, Ester and Mary dolls. All of them are equally buff even though Noah and Moses have grey hair. I have to admit the talking Jesus doll does have some amazing pecs and appears to have a pretty good six pack. It wouldn’t take much to decide to send him into battle against say a transformer of a GI-Joe.

The company making the toys, the Valencia, California-based Beverly Hills Teddy Bear Co. (and more specifically its one2believe unit) has started a campaigned called the Battle for the Toy Box. They encourage you to download a poster of a biblical looking action figure fighting a Roman action figure which it turns out are Samson and Goliath. (A story I don’t remember from the bible, so maybe there is some truth to the claim that these toys trivialize religion.) They’re part of the spirit warriors collection designed to be tough toys that boys will love to play with.

I don’t know if Humanists necessarily need to take issue with these toys but I do think the Battle for the Toybox campaign is a bit cheapening of the whole idea of religion. But then it’s a capitalist world and there are realities to be faced. It’s possible many of the talking biblical characters could end up as Toys for Tots donations, but hopefully this has been worked out in advance since it did happen last year. That would be the only Humanist issue I could for see, but how do others feel about this? Is it just a bit of silliness or something we should be concerned with?

The world is at a very strange place when a letter from 138 senior Islamic clerics and scholars to 25 Christian leaders, most notably Pope Benedict XVI, has seeming made little difference in the world. The 29-page letter was sent on October 11, 2007 from well-known figures from the Sunni, Shiite, Salafi, and Sufi branches of Islam representing more than 40 countries throughout the Middle East and beyond.

The letter states, in part, that “Christianity and Islam are the largest and second largest religions in the world and in history. The relationship between these two religious communities [is] the most important factor in contributing to meaningful peace around the world.”

This is good, maybe even wonderful, but why is no one really cheering? Well, it has been suggested that the Vatican is more attracted to creating diplomatic relations with Muslim governments than in engaging Muslims in theological dialogue.  

In an October 19 interview with the French Catholic daily La Croix (reported on by Reuters), French Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, president of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, called the letter “an eloquent example of a dialogue among spiritualities.” He also noted that Christians would have to discuss curbs on building churches in the Islamic world.

While Tauran seemed to want to discuss important issues between the two religions, he went on to dismiss the possibility since “Muslims do not accept discussion about the Quran, because they say it was written under the dictates of God. With such an absolutist interpretation, it’s difficult to discuss the contents of the faith.” Interreligious dialogue can take place “with some religions,” Tauran continued, “but with Islam, not at this time.” Christians aren’t exactly meeting the group of Islamic clerics halfway if this is the attitude to be taken.

Conservative critics have also jumped on this line from the letter:

As Muslims, we say to Christians that we are not against them and that Islam is not against them—so long as they do not wage war against Muslims on account of their religion, oppress them and drive them out of their homes.

This has struck some as a half-extended olive branch. Perhaps we need to get some humanist or atheist to moderate since we wouldn’t take a stance on the Quran or the Bible or Papal infallibility. Maybe I’m joking, but then maybe not.