The reader is not left with a feeling of inspiration, but rather with an urge to take a shower. … Read the rest
All entries by this author
Martha Nussbaum on the Gujarat Massacre
May 25th, 2007 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
What has been happening in India is a serious threat to the future of democracy in the world.… Read the rest
The Traveler’s Dilemma
May 25th, 2007 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
When playing this game, people reject the rational choice; by acting illogically, they reap a larger reward.… Read the rest
Steal From The Simpsons, not Henry James
May 25th, 2007 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
What is wrong with the modern literary novel? ‘Why is it so anxious? Why is it so bloody boring?’… Read the rest
Murdered journalists
May 24th, 2007 1:27 pm | By Ophelia BensonThis is hard to read. Painful.
… Read the restThe killers struck along a lonely road south of Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, on a Sunday in December 1998, spraying automatic rifle fire into a jeep carrying Norbert Zongo, his brother, and two companions. The gunmen set the vehicle ablaze in a bid to obscure their crime, but they could not erase Zongo’s reputation in the West African nation as the uncompromising editor of the weekly L’Independant. Neither, to many people’s eyes, could they conceal whose hands were stained with the killings—officials in President Blaise Compaoré’s government whom Zongo had investigated relentlessly for alleged torture and murder…Deputy editor of La Patria in Manizales, Colombia, Sierra was shot twice on a
God is a walnut, a mouse, a sunny day, a gleam in your eye
May 24th, 2007 12:27 pm | By Ophelia BensonSo if God, in Humpty Dumpty fashion, just means whatever any word-spinner says it means, then – why are we expected to heed it or obey it or respect it or not do stem-cell research because of it?
There is a ‘childish notion of an anthropomorphic God that is characteristic of the tribe, of the closed society’ and then there is the non-childish notion of a non-anthropomorphic God.
… Read the restGod exists in the word and through the word…God is a human concept. God is the name we give to our belief that life has meaning, one that transcends the world’s chaos, randomness and cruelty…God is that mysterious force—and you can give it many names as other religions do—which works upon
Eve, Adam, and Dinosaurs Together at Last
May 24th, 2007 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Fossils, the museum ‘teaches,’ are no older than ‘Noah’s flood’; in fact dinosaurs were on ‘the ark.’… Read the rest
Creation ‘Museum’ ‘Challenging’ Science
May 24th, 2007 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
‘A new museum in Northern Kentucky promotes a religious perspective on geology.’… Read the rest
CPJ Special Report on Anna Politkovskaya
May 24th, 2007 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Novaya’s coverage of social and political issues has won it devoted readers and passionate enemies.… Read the rest
Is RE Education or Evangelism?
May 24th, 2007 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Parents are alarmed at the increasingly evangelical nature of RE in some schools. … Read the rest
Isaacson Keeps Repeating Einstein’s Wife Error
May 24th, 2007 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
‘She served as a sounding board for his scientific ideas and helped to check the math in his papers.’… Read the rest
The Theist Fandango
May 24th, 2007 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Redefine god as anything and everything, then wonder how atheists can fail to have ‘faith.’… Read the rest
Inquiry wants to be free
May 23rd, 2007 1:22 pm | By Ophelia BensonHitchens has a piece in that current Free Inquiry that I mentioned. It’s about the ‘fundamentalist atheist’ bromide that is making the rounds. He doesn’t find it altogether impressive. He doesn’t find it overwhelmingly persuasive, either.
… Read the restAll you need is to ignore the difference between someone who believes in, say, heaven and hell and someone who doesn’t. The first has a lot of work to do by way of providing anything that even looks like evidence. The second rests his case on the extreme improbability of any such evidence being adduced. Are these positions really describable as morally or intellectually equivalent? Or take the case of someone who believes in punishment for blasphemy or in prior restraint on those who
New Play Exposes Domestic Violence
May 23rd, 2007 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
‘We have a platform to bring these issues into the open. It’s our responsibility to do so,’ says Inayet.… Read the rest
Female Afghan and Pakistani Pols Forced Out
May 23rd, 2007 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Conservative men accuse them of indecency and being too outspoken, and out they go.… Read the rest
Full Text of Homeopathy Letter
May 23rd, 2007 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Professor Gustav Born urges NHS managers to cut down on alternative and homeopathic medicine.… Read the rest
Campaign Against Homeopathy on the NHS
May 23rd, 2007 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Group of senior doctors and scientists renews campaign against NHS funding of homeopathic treatment. … Read the rest
Descartes’ Meditations (Digested)
May 23rd, 2007 | By Julian BagginiContinuing what, improbably, could turn out to be a series, in which philosophical classics are reduced to their elements as a service to students and scholars.
Descartes’ Meditations
Monday
Realised that I’ve never examined the foundations of my beliefs and so I could be wrong about everything. To be honest, I don’t seriously believe I am wrong about anything, but I thought it might be fun to prove it. So, I asked myself, how might I be really, really wrong? Only if something totally far-fetched has happened, such as that I’m actually dreaming, mad or deceived by an evil demon. Still, that’s technically possible so I went to bed feeling progress had been made.
Tuesday
Woke up and realised one … Read the rest
The theist four-step
May 22nd, 2007 12:21 pm | By Ophelia BensonThere’s something called the atheist two-step. Maybe so, but there is also a theist four-step.
1) There is a god. 2) It is good. 3) It wants us to be good in a particular way. 4) We have reliable knowledge of 1-3.
In a way 4) can be seen as the clincher – the least likely of all and the most dangerous of all. It’s 4) that produces these bastards dropping cement blocks on the faces of teenage girls and shooting women government ministers in the head and executing ‘apostates’ and ‘blasphemers.’ If only people could be content to believe 1-3 and realize that 4) is just out of the question, and deadly as well as presumptuous – the … Read the rest
Community v community
May 22nd, 2007 12:06 pm | By Ophelia BensonThe ‘community’ trope turns up yet again and confuses the issue yet again.
Cities and towns across the northern Indian state of Punjab are shut in response to a general strike called by the Sikh community…Sikhs are demanding an apology from the leader of a religious sect who appeared in an advert dressed like one of the Sikh religion’s most important figures. Sikh community leaders say it is an insult to their religion. Last week, thousands took to the streets. One man was shot dead in clashes that followed.
How can a general strike have been called by the Sikh community? What does that mean? What are we meant to understand by it? It’s annoying because it makes the report … Read the rest