It’s always interesting, unsettling, and difficult to try to figure out if we can ground our moral and political commitments. I read a sentence about James Fitzjames Stephen’s criticism of Mill’s On the Subjection of Women this morning that caught my attention – ‘His [Stephen’s] own position was that equality was like liberty: it was not an absolute good but sometimes good and sometimes not.’ Not that that’s a startling idea, of course. It’s not a news flash that equality has not always been thought an absolute good or even a good at all, and that for instance the famous phrase in the Declaration of Independence struck most contemporary observers as downright absurd rather than self-evident. And Leslie Stephen’s brother … Read the rest

And then there’s Nick Cohen on Ken Livingstone and his loyalty to another example of religious wisdom, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi.

The useful label ‘the pseudo-left’ has been knocking around the internet political blogs since 11 September, and it is high time it was brought into the mainstream media. It’s a shorthand description of the spectacle of left moving to the right, often to the far-right, and embracing obscurantists, theocrats and, in the case of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and its Baathist ‘insurgents’, classic fascists…All that the left has opposed since the Enlightenment become acceptable, as long as the obscurantists, theocrats and fascists are anti-Americans and as long as their victims aren’t Western liberals.

Which is intensely depressing, because their victims are … Read the rest

And speaking of religion and the religiously-inclined and the contortions they can make to save the phenomena…There is this CBC documentary about two Iranian women who survive via prostitution. Homa Arjomand sent me the link. Homa gets busier all the time, with media and speaking engagements. Let’s hope there will soon be more and more women sharing the workload.

For over a year, director Nahid Persson filmed the everyday lives of two young female prostitutes as they eked out a living in a country where the profession is banned. The filmmaker often took great risks to follow Minna and Fariba as they sought out customers-men who would often marry them briefly, so as not to violate the laws of the

Here’s a funny one. Hilarious, in fact.

Even within the Church of England, the idea of possession raises eyebrows. “The number of metaphysical assumptions it makes is quite incredible. It means there are such things as non-human evil spirits that can take possession of a human being and require to be told to go somewhere else by a greater power,” says Canon Michael Perry, who holds a doctorate in deliverance and edits the Christian Parapsychologist.

“Some Christians believe it happens frequently – they see demons under every rug and will perform exorcisms at the drop of a hat. My view is possession is very rare.”

You have to admit. That’s not bad. ‘The number of metaphysical assumptions it makes … Read the rest