Author: Bill Flavell
Happy Birthday, My Brother, Mubarak Bala!
Mubarak, today is your birthday but I cannot talk to you. I don’t even know where you are and nor does your wife or your children or any of the people who love you and respect you. But we are thinking about you. We think about you every day and every hour. If you feel very alone on your special day, you shouldn’t. You should know that tens of thousands of people know you were arrested on April 28 ...
Mubarak—45 Days in Custody
It is now 45 days since Mubarak Bala was arrested on suspicion of blasphemy in Kaduna, Nigeria. Apart from a brief ‘phone call with his lawyer on April 29, and contrary to Mubarak’s guaranteed rights, police authorities have refused to divulge his whereabouts and have denied him access to his lawyers. Furthermore, police in Nigeria have a legal duty either to charge a suspect within 48...
Mubarak Bala Detention: 14-Day Update
Mubarak Bala, President of the Humanist Association of Nigeria, was arrested on April 28 in Kaduna, Northern Nigeria on blasphemy charges. He was in contact with his family and friends until he was passed to the custody of Kano State police the following day. Since then, he has been denied access to his lawyer and Kano Police have refused to divulge his whereabouts. This denies Mubarak’s fun...
Are You Embarrassed to be a Christian?
It boggles the mind. Christianity relies upon two bodies of scripture. The Old and New Testaments. Look at the Old Testament and you find God orders raped virgin girls to marry their rapists. And God demands that unruly children, gay people, and brides who do not bleed on their wedding night should be stoned to death. Move on to the New Testament and you find God promising that believers can drink...
Where the sun goes at night (according to the Qur’an)
There are some verses in the Qur’an that are horribly problematic for Muslims. These are verses that are so clearly wrong that an average 10-year-old could spot the errors. The question is, why don’t grown-up Muslims spot them? An example is Surah 18. Verse 83 onwards describes Dhul-Qarnayn’s journey to the setting place of the sun. Verse 86 reads: “Until, when he reached t...
Dying As An Atheist
Christians and Muslims often smugly pronounce that they have a huge advantage over atheists. When we atheists die we expect to become slush — we expect the lights to go out forever. For us, death is the end. But not for religious people. They believe they will be resurrected and then live forever. But is that belief really an advantage? The problem for religious people is they cannot be certain wh...
What Islamic Paradise Tells Us About Islam
A close look at Islamic Paradise reveals much about the religion. Islamic Paradise was designed to appeal to poor men living in the harsh conditions of Arabia—sweltering heat, limited choice of food and scarce water, sometimes with only a tent to live in. Paradise offers these men the things they would have dreamed about. Unlimited sex: A man has his own harem of ever-willing, dark-eyed virgins (7...
Give Yourself a Holiday Present
Atheist Alliance International works to keep atheists safe. In many parts of the world, having no religious belief makes you a criminal. You could lose your civil rights, your liberty, your job, and your family. You could be flogged, imprisoned, or even executed. The mistreatment of atheists is one of the most widespread and egregious human rights abuses in the world today. At AAI, we work to have...
Atheist Society of Nigeria Lodges Appeal
On July 26, 2019 Chief Justice Godwin Abraham, dismissed the Atheist Society of Nigeria’s (ASN’s) lawsuit which complained state funding of a Christian Worship Centre in Akwa Ibom state is unconstitutional and promotion of the worship Centre by the state Governor, Udom Emmanuel in his official capacity, was ultra vires and an abuse of his powers. After consultation with their lawyers, ...
God Is Not Special
I never assume religious people are unintelligent when I begin talking to them, they are often very intelligent, but I do expect them to use broken, fallacious and thoroughly debunked arguments. No one has ever disappointed me. It’s not surprising. Extremely smart people have been struggling to find a valid argument for the existence of God for at least a couple of thousand years and all hav...
Intuition Blindness
Sometimes looking back can give us insight into the future. There are things we intuitively understand today that would have been incomprehensible, even absurd, to people in the past. The Spherical Earth The idea that the Earth could be spherical was once totally counter-intuitive—surely people on the underside of the Earth would fall off? It made no sense. Another such idea is that the Earth is n...
Is Islam Too Big to Fail?
Lehman Brothers, General Motors, Texaco, Global Crossing, and United Airlines are companies with two things in common; they were huge and successful, and they became bankrupt. From the inside, it must have seemed these businesses were invincible—too large and too good to fail but a couple of bad decisions, a changing business environment, a legal squabble, and they were gone. In some cases, such a...