Is there something in the water in Cambridge, or what? Is everybody crazy there? Crazy as in stark raving mad?

A Cambridge University student who sparked a huge row when he published anti- Islamic material has issued a grovelling apology. The 19-year-old second-year Clare College student went into hiding after he printed a cartoon and material satirising religion in college magazine Clareification…A Clare College spokesman said: “Because of the gravity of the situation and the diversity of views expressed about the best way of handling it, the Dean of Students set in train procedures for convening the Court of Discipline. As events unfolded, however, a collective decision was taken to pursue instead a course of restorative justice and reconciliation. The

We’ve been puzzling over some apparently sweeping language of Martha Nussbaum’s, especially her claim that ‘the type of mutual respect that is required in a pluralistic society…requires (in the public sphere at least) not showing up the claims of religion as damaging, and not adopting a public conception of truth and objectivity according to which such claims are false.’ What does she mean by ‘not adopting a public conception’? Does she mean, narrowly, a public conception for purposes of political deliberation? Or does she mean, broadly, a public conception in the sense of any public statement or writing? It would be charitable to think she meant the former, but on the other hand, it seems to me, if she meant … Read the rest

Oh – so if the victims are all morally corrupt, then murder is not murder, or perhaps it is murder but the murderers are not guilty. Interesting jurisprudence.

Iran’s Supreme Court has acquitted a group of men charged over a series of gruesome killings in 2002…The vigilantes were not guilty because their victims were involved in un-Islamic activities, the court found. The killers said they believed Islam let them spill the blood of anyone engaged in illicit activities if they issued two warnings to the victims.

Illicit according to whom? Illicit under what and whose definition?

According to their confessions, the killers put some of their victims in pits and stoned them to death. Others were suffocated. One man

I’ve just re-read W K Clifford’s ‘The Ethics of Belief’. The first paragraph is well known.

A shipowner was about to send to sea an emigrant-ship. He knew that she was old, and not overwell built at the first…Doubts had been suggested to him that possibly she was not seaworthy. These doubts preyed upon his mind, and made him unhappy; he thought that perhaps he ought to have her thoroughly overhauled and and refitted, even though this should put him at great expense. Before the ship sailed, however, he succeeded in overcoming these melancholy reflections.

He rationalized them away, and was content. In reading that paragraph again, I was struck by a parallel – a very strong parallel. Feynman … Read the rest

Honour is a beautiful thing; so is devoutness; right? Seven or eight men knocking a woman down and then kicking her and breaking several of her ribs – what could be more beautiful and holy than that? Few things I can think of, for sure.

Norwegian-Somalian Kadra, who became famous in Norway for exposing imam support of female circumcision, was beaten unconscious on Thursday…”I was terrified. While I lay on the pavement they kicked me and screamed that I had trampled on the Koran. Several shouted Allah-o-akbar (God is great) and also recited from the Koran,” Kadra told VG. Kadra linked the attack to recent remarks in VG where she said that the Koran’s views on women needed to be