The eight young people who gathered recently at a popular restaurant in central Lahore looked like any others, laughing over samosas with tangy chutney sauce as a table of older ladies in hijab looked on from a nearby table. But the jokes the boisterous twenty-somethings were sharing were about the absurdities of religion, and they weren’t social friends.
Rather, they were members of Pakistani Atheists and Agnostics, a five-year-old group that advertises itself on Twitter as “a social organization for freethinkers of Pakistan.” Two or three times a month they gather to talk about religion—or rather, about rejecting religion—and about politics. On this day, they focused on how Islam rejects the idea of evolution and shared memories of being taught in school that evolution is merely a Western concept.
Read Full Article »