The BBC reports that what it calls the ‘next UN investigator into Israeli conduct in the occupied territories’ has defended his comparison of Israeli actions in Gaza to those of the Nazis. But a couple of paragraphs down it adds something that should be (but isn’t) decorated with little red warning flags.

Professor Falk is scheduled to take up his post for the UN Human Rights Council later in the year.

Ah – the UN Human Rights Council. How depressing it is that that sounds like a good thing and is in fact a very bad thing. The IHEU explains why.

By 2005, the Commission for Human Rights had become widely discredited…The Commission was abolished by vote of the

From David Littman’s article.

In an 18 February 1994 letter addressed to all delegates at the Commission on Human Rights, the Sudanese ambassador requested an immediate withdrawal of any reference – from the report of the UN Special Rapporteur on Sudan – in which certain inconsistences were indicated between the international human rights conventions and the provisions of Sudan’s Criminal Act of 1991. The ambassador alleged that the report “contained abusive, inconsiderate, blasphemous and offensive remarks about the Islamic faith.” A further Sudanese circular, entitled, “Attack on Islam,” claimed that portions of the report “represent a vicious attack on the religion of Islam and contain a call for the abolition of its Islamic Penal Legislation.”

The Rapporteur’s report indicated tensions … Read the rest

I mentioned that believers can resort to a quick and easy way with difficult questions that secular thinkers and atheists can’t, and that this lack is perhaps one reason students are always moral relativists. We can offer reasons for thinking X is better than Y, or for thinking Z is entirely unacceptable in any moral universe we can think of (executing gays for being gay, genocide, murdering women for talking to an unrelated man), but we can’t hand out anything as brisk and simple and conversation-stopping as ‘God said so.’ Believers* have a short cut which unbelievers don’t have. Believers have an answer that is both quick and easy, while unbelievers have to spend time and effort if … Read the rest

Oh dear, the poor psychics are worried.

[N]ow psychics must add a few riders before they invoke the voices of the dead, thanks to new consumer laws due to come into force…Promises to raise the dead, secure good fortune or heal through the laying on of hands are all at risk of legal action from disgruntled customers. Spiritualists say they will be forced to issue disclaimers, such as ‘this is a scientific experiment, the results of which cannot be guaranteed’. They claim the new regulations will leave them open to malicious civil action by sceptics.

Uh…yeah; and? If you promise to raise the dead or secure good fortune or heal via magic, why shouldn’t you be at risk of … Read the rest

I went to a talk by Austin Dacey yesterday to the Secular Students’ Union at the University of Washington. He’s a philosopher, he has a new book out, The Secular Conscience, and he’s a United Nations representative for the Center for Inquiry. It seems quite a good thing that CFI should have a UN representative, especially now. I’m looking forward to reading The Secular Conscience. Austin mentioned during his talk how reliably predictable it was that new students would be moral relativists, and the secular students lived up to the advance billing: all their questions were about how to ground morality. After about the fifth or sixth such question Austin wondered why people expect the answers to such … Read the rest

What’s Blair talking about?

“For religion to be a force for good, it must be rescued not simply from extremism, faith as a means of exclusion; but also from irrelevance, an interesting part of our history but not of our future.” Too many people saw religious faith as stark dogmatism and empty ritual, he added. “Faith is reduced to a system of strange convictions and actions that, to some, can appear far removed from the necessities and anxieties of ordinary life,” Blair said. “It is this face that gives militant secularism an easy target.”

Militant secularism yourself. We’re not the ones who resort to violence when people don’t agree with us, so don’t be so free with your adjectives, not … Read the rest