Christian Jago (potentilla) died this morning. I’ve been missing her steadily since she got too ill to talk with us any more. Her brisk clarity and bluntness were a regular tonic (as the saying goes). Jean has a post at Talking Philosophy with several quotes. Here’s one that I found over here. (The database has 139, which seems like a kind of wealth.)

Connections between Rod Liddle’s opinions and logically defensible positions are largely random, IMHO. So saying he got this one right is very charitable of you, Ophelia! As TG points out above, he is a kind of auto-contrarian. (Also a churchgoer, if that’s relevant).

And here’s another…which is very apt. I did an uncharacteristic (soppy) post when Hansa, … Read the rest

The Vatican is a nasty piece of work. Let’s not ever lose sight of that fact.

A senior member of the Vatican has drawn up a new list of mortal sins…Along with drug use and social injustice he listed genetic manipulation and experiments on humans.

First of all, how does he know? How do they know? How does anyone know? Do they have a private phone line to the deity so that they can get updates on what sins are mortal and what are venial? Who the hell are they to decide which ‘sins’ are relatively minor and which ones deserve eternal torture by way of punishment? But second, what hateful sadistic shits they are, threatening people with eternal … Read the rest

I have a question for you, basically about terminology. Here is a quoted passage, which I have never understood.

Should religious organizations and their members be treated as unequal under the law for certain purposes connected with gender? US constitutional law has standardly granted special latitude to religion, by contrast with other forms of commitment and affiliation. Religious reasons for exemption from military service, or for refusing to work on a particular day, are granted a latitude that is not granted to other forms of conscientious commitment, such as the familial or the artistic or even the ethical. This remains controversial for the way it appears to privilege religion over nonreligion and thus, it might seem, to violate the Establishment

Anthony Appiah notes in The Ethics of Identity p. 86:

Many accomodationists are also concerned that courts often fail to respect religious beliefs – fail to respect what [Stephen] Carter terms the ‘alternative epistemology’ of the church. What we haven’t understood, we’re told, is that religion demands an ‘epistemology of its own’ – that it is ‘really an alien way of knowing the world – alien, at least, in a political and legal culture in which reason supposedly rules.’

There is a note on page 301:

In this spirit, Carter advises that ‘[g]iven its starting point and its methodology, creationism is as rational an explanation as any other.’ It runs into trouble only because its starting point and methodology ‘reflect

From the Lords debate on the abolition of the blasphemy law. The Archbishop of York.

It is more difficult to reach for an understanding that replaces the common law of blasphemy with a law that essentially provides for a protection not exclusively of the Christian faith but of the fabric of society, as the case in December decided.

So the idea here is that the fabric of society needs to be protected from blasphemy or something like blasphemy. So the idea is that blasphemy, or something like blasphemy, is dangerous or destructive to the fabric of society. Why? Because it pisses people off? But lots of things do that; it’s impractical and illiberal to make laws against all of … Read the rest