There was a time – some years ago – when to profess disbelief in a Supreme Being could be hazardous to one’s health. You could get hacked to pieces with a scimitar or boiled in oil. Neither the public nor the authorities had much tolerance.[..]But though in times past publishing one’s skeptical doubts could be daring, it is so no longer.[...]Today, atheism has taken its comfortable seat by the fire and has its feet up.[...]Atheism has never been so respectable.
He's wrong. Check out these stories:
A court in Saudi Arabia has upheld the decision to sentence the liberal blogger Raif Badawi to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes.[...]He was subjected to the first 50 lashes in a public square in Jeddah in January. The punishment was captured by an onlooker in mobile phone footage which provoked worldwide protests.
A secular blogger has been hacked to death in north-east Bangladesh, the third such deadly attack this year.[...]“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.
Sanal Edamaruku, an Indian skeptic, went to Mumbai and revealed that a "miraculous" weeping cross was really just a bit of statuary located near a leaky drain whose liquid reached it by way of capillary action. The local Catholic Church demanded that he retract his statements, and when he refused, they had him arrested for blasphemy.Now in self-imposed exile in Finland, he fears jail - or even assassination - if he returns.
A student has been sentenced to three years in prison for announcing on Facebook that he was an atheist and thereby “insulting Islam”. Karim Ashraf Mohamed al-Banna, aged 21, was arrested in November 2014 with a group of other people at a cafe in Cairo.
Bangladesh's anti-terrorism unit says it has arrested the main suspect in the murder of a United States blogger who was hacked to death in Dhaka last week in the latest attack on critics of religious extremism in the Muslim-majority nation.http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-03-02/bangladesh
All this, yet Stephen Anderson still claims that,
Atheism has never been so respectable.I'm guessing he is a Christian - because only a Christian could be that obtuse.
Update:
August 7, 2015
A Bangladeshi blogger known for his atheist views has been hacked to death by a gang armed with machetes in the capital Dhaka, police say. Niloy Neel was attacked at his home in the city's Goran area. He is the fourth secularist blogger to have been killed this year...All four men killed were on a list of 84 "atheist bloggers" drawn up by Islamic groups in 2013 and widely circulated. It was originally submitted to the government with the aim of having the bloggers arrested and tried for blasphemy.http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-33819032
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