grahambinns.com

From BBC news (link):

A British teacher has been found guilty in Sudan of insulting religion after she allowed her primary school class to name a teddy bear Muhammad.

Gillian Gibbons, 54, from Liverpool, has been sentenced to 15 days in prison and will then be deported.

Which is bad enough. I mean it's a teddy bear for heaven's sake. And it was named by children. But oh no, no, this woman deserves to go to jail.

That's not the best bit though. Read on and you'll find:

But Sudan's top clerics had called for the full measure of the law to be used against Mrs Gibbons and labelled her actions part of a Western plot against Islam.

Now, before someone starts telling me how I'm being anti Islamic or failing to understand the religion or some other such nonsense, I'll point out that (again according to the BBC) Sudanese bloggers have roundly condemned the whole business:

Other comments on the site (sudanesethinker.com) criticised Sudanese Islamists: "Once more, Islamic hard-liners are making their religion look ridiculous. How sad."

"Astonishing backwardness, oh people!" said another posting, in Arabic.

"I hate the stupidity of this," one entry on the forum said. "More attention will hopefully mean the release of Ms Gibbons without getting jailed or lashed so bring it please!"

Pretty much everyone who reads this will know that I have little truck with religion, though I've often expressed my envy of those who do believe in supernatural things. But tolerant as I'd like to think I am I have nothing but contempt for people who use their religion as an excuse to mete out unnecessary punishments for crimes that nobody apart from them - and by that I mean nobody in their own religious group, never mind us Godless heathens - recognises as a crime in the first place.

Stephen Law made a good point the other day when he said:

Religion, it seems to me, is a bit like nuclear power. Immensely powerful and (arguably) useful. And, perhaps most of the time, it runs quite happily, doing not much harm.

But unless it is extremely carefully controlled and monitored, it can very quickly run out of control. Indeed, just as with nuclear power, you can predict the unpredicted. Somewhere along the line, something probably will go wrong, and when it does, you have an extremely toxic situation on your hands. A religious Chernobyl.

This isn't quite that bad. Maybe it's more of a religious-fire-at-Buncefield than a Chernobyl, but even so.

Religion can be a wonderful thing and for a lot of people can bring meaning and hope to their lives that they may have struggled to find elsewhere, I'm not denying that. But wherever you find a religion you find someone willing to twist it, even if they're just twisting it into something ludicrous (as in this case) rather than something terrifying (like, say, 7/7 or 9/11).

People, as always, are a problem. 

Whilst I feel his pain, it's good to know in some ways that Neil Gaiman suffers the same problems of the rest of us, even the massively inexperienced and by comparison untalented ones (Link):

... I am still somewhere in the hell that's either Chapter 5 or Chapter 6 of THIS DAMNED BOOK which seems determined to be longer than it was meant to be. (You're not a novel, I tell it. You're not even a novella. You're a novelette. And you're due in on Monday. But the story merely laughs and stretches ominously and I have no idea what this bloody pool is doing in the middle of the forest.)

 Here's an xkcd strip after my own heart. Awesome.

From BBC News: Feuding nuns force convent demise:

A convent in Italy is being shut down after a fight between its last three remaining nuns.

So badly did relations deteriorate between the sisters of Santa Clara in Bari that the Mother Superior ended up in hospital with scratches to her face.

The best bit is at the end though, where the article talks about the remaining nun's (the Mother Superior) intransigence on the subject of leaving:

But Sister Liliana is not going without a fight.

She has not once left the nunnery in 44 years and she is not about to be pushed about now.

She has written to the Pope telling him she will only leave when God decides it is time to go.

And since she is devoted to her vow of silence it is not that easy to reason with her.

Someone had fun writing that bit, let me tell you.

BBC News: Carvings riddle stumps villagers:

The sculptures feature the same carved symbol and come with a riddle attached.

Each of the heads, which are up to a foot tall, looks different but all feature the same carving - which appears to spell out the word "paradox" - and a note bearing the riddle: "Twinkle twinkle like a star does love blaze less from afar?"