Catholic Herald report– Egyptian charity Coptic Orphans has launched a crowdsourcing fund to support the children of the Coptic martyrs killed in Libya.

The charity, which was founded in 1988 by Copts in the United States, says it has identified 12 children left fatherless when ISIS murdered the 21 men in Libya on February 15.

The Christians, believed to be 20 Egyptians and a Ghanaian, had been kidnapped by the terrorist group weeks earlier as the Islamists took over large swathes of the north African country.

The men came from poor backgrounds and had travelled to Egypt’s dangerous neighbour in order to help their families. The charity aims to support their children’s education in order to give them a chance to escape from poverty.

Last week Coptic Pope Tawadros II announced the inclusion of the 21 Coptic New Martyrs of Libya in the Synaxarium of the Coptic Orthodox Church, the equivalent of canonization in the Church of Alexandria.

Source: Catholic Herald

Christian Post report– An American blogger has been hacked to death by a “knife-wielding mob” in Dhaka, Bangladesh, police have said. Avijit Roy, an atheist, is believed to have been attacked for promoting secularism and criticizing religious extremism online, which has angered hardline Islamic groups.

“Avijit Roy has been killed the way other free thinker writers were killed in Bangladesh. No freethinker is safe in Bangladesh,” blogger Taslima Nasreen, who left Bangladesh in the mid-1990s after receiving death threats from extremists, said about the killing.

“Islamic terrorists can do whatever they like. They can kill people with no qualms whatsoever.”

BBC News reported that while police have not yet identified the people who carried out the deadly attack, a local Islamist group that praised the killing has been placed under investigation. At least two of the attackers used meat cleavers, police said.

The Associated Press noted that Roy is a Bangladesh-born American citizen.

Roy’s wife, Rafida Ahmed, was also seriously injured in the attack, which occurred when the couple was walking back from a book fair at Dhaka University.

The blogger had published numerous articles promoting secular views on science and social issues on his website, Mukto-mona, or “Free Mind.” He had called atheism “a rational concept to oppose any unscientific and irrational belief,” for which he received death threats.

Atheists, along with other religious minorities in Bangladesh, have often faced threats and attacks by hardline Islamists. In 2013, blogger Ahmed Rajib Haider was killed near his home in Dhaka for speaking out against religious extremism. Yet another popular atheist blogger, Asif Mohiuddin, was stabbed repeatedly by three suspected Islamist fundamentalists also in 2013, but survived the attack.

Anujit Roy, the younger brother of the slain blogger, revealed that Avijit Roy had been planning to go back to the U.S. in March.

Fellow blogger Baki Billah told Independent TV that Roy was both a “free thinker” and a Hindu, and had spoken out against Islamic and other religious fanatics.

“We are saddened. We don’t know what the government will do to find the killers. We want justice,” Billah said.

Source: Christian Post

Christian Today report–  Prominent atheist Richard Dawkins has called for children with religious parents to be protected from “indoctrination”.

Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist and bestselling author of The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion, said in a blog for Time.com that children are being saddled with “religious labels” in a way they never would be with political or other opinions.

Referring to Islington borough council’s decision not to serve pork in any primary schools, Dawkins admitted the council had denied there was an outright ban. The council has promised to work with any school that wishes to serve pork.

But Dawkins said that the wish to respect the “beliefs” of four-year-old children, as one council spokesman had implied was the case, was inappropriate.

“Religion is the one exception we all make to the rule: don’t label children with the opinions of their parents,” he said.

“Unlike national labels, religious labels carry a baggage of personal opinion. Catholics believe Jesus was born of a virgin mother who never died but was ‘assumed’ bodily into heaven. Mormons believe Jesus visited America and that Native Americans migrated from Israel.”

At the very least it negates the ideal, held dear by all decent educationists, that children should be taught to think for themselves, he added.

He admitted that many of his Jewish friends, almost all atheists, see no harm in celebrating traditional festivals, and he himself enjoys cathedral carol services and harvest festivals in country churches.

“Tradition is fine where it amounts to songs or literature, styles of dress or architecture. But tradition is a terrible basis for ethics, or beliefs about the origin of the universe or the evolution of life,” he added.

Later, backing a campaign by Atheist Ireland to overhaul the country’s education system, he told The Irish Times: “There is a balancing act and you have to balance the rights of parents and the rights of children and I think the balance has swung too far towards parents… Children do need to be protected so that they can have a proper education and not be indoctrinated in whatever religion their parents happen to have been brought up in.”

Source: Christian Today