A reader
In sharp contrast to Our Terry, here’s a nice thing – a former MP (Labour) for Reading East who is reading Why Truth Matters and thinks it’s worth reading.
If you go to the Butterflies and Wheels site, you will find a fascinating thread prompted by a piece by Nick Cohen in the Observer yesterday; the piece was largely about the jailed Egyptian blogger Abdel Kareem Suleiman, but also mentioned Chinese government attempts to police the internet – but as so often it is the comment thread which proves the more illuminating. It is a fact that hardly any bloggers posting in English have had anything to say about Kareem. It is a fact, for instance, that when I posted on this subject a few days ago there were no comments. Not one at the time of posting now. I can only suppose that is because nobody is interested – otherwise they’d comment, wouldn’t they?…I wonder though, and I hope this is not true, whether the silence on this subject is illustrative of a more general view, perhaps on the Guardian-reading so-called Left?
I’ll have to comment. But I did post several news links here, so I’m interested. But I wonder too about that more general view.
I went to the butterfliesandwheels site because I am reading a book by Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom called “Why Truth Matters” . It’s worth reading, and is a challenge to a non-intellectual like me. It is about scepticism, relativism and doubt. If you want to give it a go Mr Amazon will come round on his bike and deliver it to you. It has made me look up all sorts of things I never did when I was in politics full time – like Manichaeism for instance…As far as I can understand Manichaeism as it is thought of today, it means to refer to the view that some things are just wrong. No relativism, no ifs or buts, just wrong. This is really the core of my own disillusion with the Guardian-reading tendency in British (more properly English) thought and society. Female genital mutilation, for instance, is wrong. Not culturally specific, wrong. Women often have it done to them by their own grandmothers. That doesn’t make it right.
Yep. You betcha. That’s why we’re writing a book about that – all the wrongs that are done to women that are just wrong, and not any less wrong if their grandmothers do it to them. We’ll all join hands and fight back – Jane Griffiths and B&W readers and writers and Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Maryam Namazie and Marie-Therese O’Loughlin and Gina Khan; we’ll all resist. You’ll see.
Another reader is our friend Richard Dawkins (or perhaps Josh, but I assume Dawkins does at least some of the choosing). I have to admit I’ve kind of longed to see something from B&W there, so I’m chuffed about that. Laugh if you like.
What’s to laugh at? It’s great. The big atheist drawback, not suffered by any of the religions, is independent-mindedness. It’s what makes us what we are, but it’s a double-edged sword; it makes it more difficult to function as a group, have political clout, etc. I applaud every step in the networking between natural allies (on this side of the divide). To put my foot in it symbolically, this is the one thing that the stupid-faced have no trouble doing; call “come all ye faithful” and they bloody well do. We think about where we’re going first.
But SO MANY of the religious will persist in saying and thinking that atheists have either no moral values, or have only relative moral values.
If you can stomach it look at the comments in here:
http://voxday.blogspot.com/
They just WON’T get the message …
Even when I talk about the “golden rule”, they just say you pinched it from the christians ……
They are obviously not lying, but equally obviously they are seriously deluded.
I’m reminded of the (Paxman?) interview shown on YouTube with Ann Coulter, where she calmly stated that she thought that all the scientists in the world were in some of conspiracy about “Darwinism”.
This sort of insanity and mindset is frighteningly reminascent of that shown by the Taliban.
Reason just does NOT penetrate.
Scary.
There’s fans and fans – some fans you might not want. Griffiths is a bit, um, controversial.
GT, although I have read quite a few posts by ‘Mercans here and elsewhere that Coulter is hardly a representative US Christian. Thank Jebis.
Nick,
Let’s assume (hopefully) she’s not representative. The question remains whether it’s only people unsympathetic to her views or who think the content of her books unreflective of reality who are making her a best-selling author. Can we afford (big emphasis on that word) to regard her as a buffoon if many others don’t?
Yes but Stewart, popular seller as she is, I get the feeling she’s really just a poster girl for the Republican far-right. A lot of people bought PJ O’Rourke’s books in the 80s and 90s (myself included) who didn’t like his politics, partly out of curiosity, partly out of entertainment. Publishers and broadcast networks just seem to have just really cranked up the N2O injection since 9/11…. She is still pretty creepy nonetheless, and Paxman seemed genuinely surprised to have such a militant loonster on Newsnight, purported as had been by both her agents and his editors, to want to engage in a serious interview. I wonder if she’s met George Galloway ? Must check YouTube…
>”no ifs or buts, just wrong”< Relativism is not a single doctrine but a family of views whose common theme is that some central aspect of experience, thought, evaluation, or even reality is somehow relative to something else. Yes, something else indeed - like denial, for example being relative to wrongdoing, coming from the "home from home" Goldenbridge Sisters of Mercy "family" of views - There are rather, no ifs or buts, just wrongdoing. Yes, plain and simple wrongdoing Period!
Coulter is definately not typical of the U.S.christian right,I visit several of the main stream c.r. sites and aceptance of Darwin tends to be the norm or that Darwin and creationism can co-exist.I also think comparing the rather wacky Coulter with the taliban is a stretch after all she dosent shoot women in a football stadium for dressing imodestly or blow up centuries old budist statues?
“I also think comparing the rather wacky Coulter with the taliban is a stretch after all she dosent shoot women in a football stadium for dressing imodestly or blow up centuries old budist statues?”
No, but only because she hasn’t got the power. In her dark dreams she commands that statues of Joe McCarthy be erected and that evolutionary biologists be burned to death on heaped up copies of The God Delusion.