This time it’s former UK attorney general Dominic Grieve, in the Telegraph, with a candlestick.

Britain is at risk of being “sanitised” of faith because an “aggressive form of secularism” in workplaces and public bodies is forcing Christians to hide their beliefs, a former attorney general has warned.

What an arrestingly fresh and novel thought!

Dominic Grieve said he found it “quite extraordinary” that people were being sacked or disciplined for expressing their beliefs at work.

So do I! But they aren’t. So I don’t. I find it “quite extraordinary” that political talkers keep telling whoppers about this. People don’t get sacked just for “expressing their beliefs at work.” They get sacked for, for instance, refusing to do the work at work. They get disciplined for insisting on wearing dangling jewelry when there are safety rules forbidding it.

He described Christianity as a “powerful force for good” in modern Britain and warned that Christians should not be “intimidated” and “excluded” for their beliefs.

Quite right! They shouldn’t. And they’re not.

On the other hand people who don’t share their beliefs shouldn’t be intimidated and excluded either. That includes atheists, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs – shall I go on?

He said that politicians and public figures should not be afraid of “doing God” and that they have a duty to explain how their beliefs inform their decisions.

The “appalling” scenes in Iraq, which have seen Islamic extremists behead and crucify religious minorities including Christians, showed that it was “more important than ever” for people to express their religious beliefs, he said.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

You know: the comma before “and” in a list of three or more items.

Have some paradigms:

The two main rationales for choosing one style over the other are clarity and economy. Each side has invoked both rationales in its favor. Here are some quotes that have served as shots exchanged in the Oxford comma wars.

Pro: “She took a photograph of her parents, the president, and the vice president.”

This example from the Chicago Manual of Style shows how the comma is necessary for clarity. Without it, she is taking a picture of two people, her mother and father, who are the president and vice president. With it, she is taking a picture of four people.

Quite. The “Oxford” comma is necessary there; it simply does one of the jobs a comma is supposed to do.

Con: “Those at the ceremony were the commodore, the fleet captain, the donor of the cup, Mr. Smith, and Mr. Jones.”

This example from the 1934 style book of the New York Herald Tribune shows how a comma before “and” can result in a lack of clarity. With the comma, it reads as if Mr. Smith was the donor of the cup, which he was not.

Ok well I tell you what, that’s not a good sentence, with or without the comma. Just re-do the sentence. That’s the other way to fix these little problems – just re-do the damn sentence.

The commodore and the fleet captain were at the ceremony, along with the donor of the cup (Susan Milligram) and Steve Jones and Bob Smith.

Still not elegant, but at least you can figure it out without getting a crick in your neck.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

So now I’m going to have to allow more cuteness into my aesthetic range than I usually do, so that I can say yes to Mary Engelbreit and no to the people who said no to her.

St. Louis artist Mary Engelbreit‘s work typically epitomizes “non-controversial” art: She makes comforting cartoon illustrations of apple-cheeked children, often accompanied by cheerful slogans about friendship and family. She has a large and devoted following, both for her art and for Engelbreit-branded products of various types, and she is an official inductee in the St. Louis Walk of Fame. These are not normal times, however, and when Engelbreit posted an image on her Facebook page on Tuesday in response to the current unrest rocking the St. Louis-area town of Ferguson, a section of her fan-base turned on her.

The print in question, called In the USA, depicts an African-American mother and child, in Engelbreit’s signature orbicular style, contemplating a newspaper that reads “Hands Up! Don’t Shoot.” Floating text reads, “No One Should Have to Teach Their Children This In The USA.” The print was priced at $49.99, with all proceeds going to the Michael Brown Jr. Memorial Fund, which supports the family of Michael Brown, the Missouri teenager who was gunned down by police two weeks ago. “[T]hese events unfolding now in my hometown and across the country, shining a light on the ugly racism that still runs rampant in our country, made me think that maybe this drawing could help in some small way,” wrote Engelbreit in her post.

But what happened? A lot of malevolent people left malevolent comments, and Facebook took down her post. Fortunately it has now restored it.

Here’s a public Facebook post she did an hour ago:

So far, we’ve raised almost $25k for the Michael Brown Jr. Memorial Fund!! I can’t thank you guys enough for your support and for sharing the image on your pages and in your profile pictures– I could not have done this without you!

Let’s keep it going! You can order the print online at: http://www.maryengelbreit.com/store/In-The-USA-Fine-Print.html

And if this print isn’t really your cup of tea, you can always send your contributions directly to:

The Michael Brown Jr. Memorial Fund
c/o Lesley McSpadden
P.O. Box 52011
St. Louis, MO 63160

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Brilliant move. Have a panel to discuss expanding leadership opportunities for Buddhist women and…well, take a look.

Featured panelists – James Coleman, Gary Gach, Charles Prebish, Christopher Queen, Paul David Numrich, Justin Whitaker, Eisel Mazard. Photos go: man, man, man, man, man, man, man.

Hmm.

Rita Gross, an author and dharma teacher, wonders what they were thinking.

Earlier this week the website Patheos published a panel on the topic “2014 Religious Trends: Expanding Leadership Opportunities for Buddhist Women—Which Way Forward?” The panel introduction ended with this question: “What are the risks and benefits of opening Buddhist leadership to women?” As a Buddhist-feminist scholar who has watched and participated in the rise of female leadership in the Buddhist world for the past four decades, I have my own question to ask in response: Risks? What risks? What could possibly be dangerous about women taking leadership roles in Buddhism? We have been doing so in large numbers for quite some time and nothing untoward has happened to Buddhism or to Buddhists as a result. 

Oh come now. To talk about it only in terms of benefits would be unbalanced and extreme. You can’t expect them to just say “it’s time to do much more to expand leadership opportunities for Buddhist women” and then go on to do just that. They have to fret and consider and wring their masculine hands over it first. Changing the status quo without considering the benefits and the risks is never ever permissible.

Far more serious and problematic, however, is the fact that this panel discussion on Buddhist women includes no women! Seven men—but no women—were called upon to discuss the “risks and benefits” of opening Buddhist leadership . . . to women! Rather than solving any of the centuries-old problems of Buddhist male dominance and patriarchy, such a panel only perpetuates it. Someone who didn’t know better but encountered this panel might draw the conclusion that Buddhist women are too passive to speak for themselves and lack the knowledge to do so. 

Maybe, but on the other hand if you had women on the panel someone would be sure to pop up and say the women were there only because they had the right genitalia.

I do not fault the seven men who wrote short essays for this panel, in part because I suspect that they were not informed ahead of time that only men had been invited to contribute. I know some of these men and know that they themselves are supportive of expanding leadership opportunities for Buddhist women. But I most definitely do fault whoever put this panel together for unbelievable levels of ignorance and arrogance. If this were 1970, not 2014, such an all-male panel might be explicable, even relevant. But in 2014, it is too late to speak and act as if men alone are still in charge of everything and can creditably speak for and about women, as if no women were confident and competent enough to speak for themselves, and hadn’t already begun to transform Buddhism into its post-patriarchal future.

I suppose whoever it was just figured it was more of a guy thing.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

One of those zany Islamic “scholars” in Egypt has issued a very useful bit of advice in a video. (Is it still called a fatwa if it’s on a video? Is there some different word for it if it partakes of the novel technology? Is there a fatwa for that?)

Men can spy on women in the shower, an extremist cleric has argued in Egypt, prompting outrage from other Islamic scholars.

According to Osama al-Qusi, a Salafist or ultraorthodox preacher, peeping toms can watch a woman wash as long as they are interested in marrying her.

“If you were really honest and wanted to marry that woman, and you were able to hide and watch her in secret, and see the things that she wouldn’t usually let you see before marrying her, then it is acceptable as long as your intentions are pure,” Qusi said in an online video translated by the al-Arabiya news network.

Well sure. That makes sense. For one thing of course “you” are a man. “You” are never a woman, because women don’t count. It’s only men who do things and need fatwas so they know what they can do. Women are just things, for men to watch in the shower or not, depending on the fatwa. For another thing obviously mean need to know how good the tits and ass are before they buy. (It’s hard to see the genitals even in the shower, unless you’re peering from underneath through some clear glass, but in that case she might possibly notice you.)

Egypt’s minister for religious affairs, Mohamed Mokhtar, condemned the cleric “and his ilk”, saying: “Where is the glory and masculinity in watching a woman shower? Would you allow this to happen to your daughter?”

Mokhtar stressed that fatwas, or Islamic edicts, should only be issued by qualified clerics, and denounced Qusi’s claims as anathema toIslam.

The minister also confirmed plans to launch a grassroots campaign against both atheists and Islamic extremists. He has already banned tens of thousands of unlicensed preachers, accused of extremist teachings, from working in Egyptian mosques.

Maybe the “extremists” are there to make people like the minister look good, with his campaign against atheists.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

“It’s simply subsidized self-indulgence.”

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgDxvaCsZMI

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Originally a comment by Eric MacDonald on Guest post on Sam Harris and the duties of public intellectuals. (So yes, a meta-guest post.)

I think there are two sides to this story, and Atran’s claims cannot be taken as scientifically confirmed. For example, in the article Ophelia links entitled: “Here He Goes Again: Sam Harris’s Falsehoods,” Atran makes claims which, while true in terms of his own research, do not necessarily subvert some (at least) of Harris’s conclusions.

For example, Atran says: “Harris’s generalizations of his own fMRIs on belief change among a few dozen college students as supportive of his views of religion as simply false beliefs are underwhelming.” This is unquestionably true, as I have said before in connexion with Boghossian’s claims in his book “How to make atheists.” Specific beliefs, as such, are very often either very poorly understood or provide simply the background of religious action. But it does not follow that explicit beliefs do not underlie the actions of many religious people.

For example, jihadists may not consciously be following the classical interpretations of Islamic texts regarding jihad, but the motivation of whole groups may be based on such interpretations. Atran seems to think that questionnaires provide accurate answers to the question Atran puts to religious people: “Why are you acting this way?” But religious people generally act from within a social context the theological meaning of which many of them do not understand and accept on trust. Asked to give reasons for “the hope that is in you,” (to quote First Peter) people may not give standard theological answers, but those may nevertheless be the reasons underlying their actions. Asked whether they support abortion, most orthodox Roman Catholics would say no, but very few of them could give detailed answers as to why it is believed by the Roman Catholic Church’s moral theology that abortion is wrong. I find Atran’s analyses of the reasons why religious people do things very inadequate and shallow. Most religious people, when push comes to shove, do things because their religion demands it, even though they do not know why. Asked to give their own reasons, they will give the first answer that occurs to them, without adverting to the theological framework within which they are acting, so they will give the kinds of answers that Atran’s studies attract. But this does not mean that underlying the actions of (to take but one example) jihadists are not very complex arguments concerning the Qur’an and the Sunna. It just means that they have accepted these argumentations on authority. Their personal reasons may even be orthogonal to the arguments from authority, but do not in the slightest change the fact that theological authority at some point underlies their actions.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

The Deputy Director of the Committee to Protect Journalists remembers James Foley.

He was already well known to CPJ staff, who along with many other groups and individuals had advocated for his release when he was captured by pro-Qadaffi forces in Libya in 2011 and held for six weeks.

Foley had been with three other journalists when they came under fire near Brega. One, Anton Hammerl, a freelance South African photographer, was killed.

Captivity in Libya, and the death of a colleague who was working on a shoestring budget, seem to have intensified Foley’s passion to help fellow journalists, particularly those risking their lives in conflict zones without the training, equipment, and finances afforded by major news organizations.

In addition to the normal band of war-hardened reporters, the Libya conflict attracted many less experienced freelancers and newcomers. Journalists had to help one another. Even so, some were unlucky. Acclaimed freelance photographer Tim Hetherington bled to death after taking shrapnel in the leg in Misrata; none of his colleagues knew how to save him. This prompted his friend Sebastian Junger to set up an organization to teach reporters basic first aid–Reporters Instructed in Saving Colleagues, or RISC.

James Foley attended the first-ever RISC course at the Bronx Documentary Center in April 2012. During that course, we sponsored the screening of a filmtitled “Bearing Witness” about five intrepid women journalists, including another victim of the Syrian war, Marie Colvin. When we spoke after the screening I wanted to hear about his experience, but Foley would have none of it. He wanted to talk about raising money for Anton Hammerl’s family. And he did more than talk.

He also helped to raise a bunch of money for Hammerl’s children.

Foley said he kept returning to the frontlines to follow Colvin’s exhortation to bear witness, but he went beyond observing. He helped. After documenting the toll taken on civilians, particularly children, by the fighting in Aleppo in a piecefor GlobalPost, Foley launched a campaign to raise money for the hospital he had filmed.

That’s the kind of person Islamic State thinks it good to murder by cutting off his head with a knife.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

What can cure Ebola? Apparently if it’s prompt enough and intensive enough, aggressive supportive care has a good chance of curing it. The better the hospital, the better the cure rate. Poverty is key here.

The two American Ebola patients, medical missionaries Nancy Writebol and Dr. Kent Brantly, have walked out of Emory University Hospital in Atlanta infection-free.

They were the first human beings to receive an experimental drug called ZMapp. But they are not the first people to have recovered from Ebola, and good hospital care is likely more responsible for their recovery than any mysterious “serum,” as the charities they work for termed it.

“They are the very first individuals to have ever received this agent,” Dr. Bruce Ribner, director of Emory’s Infectious Disease Unit, told a news conference. “There is no prior experience with it, and frankly, we do not know whether it helped them, whether it made no difference, or even, theoretically, if it delayed their recovery.”

But there is plenty of prior experience with dehydration and rehydration and electrolytes.

There’s no specific cure for Ebola, but doctors with experience treating it say they have found that if people get early supportive care, including saline solution and fever reducers, they are far more likely to recover.

Ribner says three weeks of treating Writebol and Brantly have shown them something else: Just like with cholera, patients have severe diarrhea and they lose important chemicals called electrolytes. Replacing these minerals — notably potassium, magnesium and sodium — helps patients recover better, he said.

“The key to resolving Ebola virus infection was aggressive supportive care,” he said. This level of care just isn’t available in most parts of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, where clinics struggle to even provide clean water and beds for patients.

“We knew certainly we could do that at a better level than the facility that they were in in Liberia,” Ribner added. The equivalent, he said, would be if “we took all of our patients in the intensive care unit here and sent them home and see how well they survived.”

Heartbreaking, isn’t it. I suspected it and wondered about it, as I’m sure everyone did – was the sky-high death rate partly to do with the poverty of the medical infrastructure? The answer seems to be yes, it is.

The World Health Organization, the relief group Doctors Without Borders and other experts in Africa have all called on rich nations to help poorer countries, especially those hit by Ebola in Africa, to develop their health systems so they can provide better care to patients.

Brantly, who walked out of an ambulance into Emory three weeks ago and Writebol, who remains weak, according to her husband David, both started out in better physical condition than the patients they were working to help.

“And clearly for any acutely ill patient, nutritional status is extremely important,” Ribner said. “If you have somebody who’s well-nourished and somebody who is poorly nourished and they suffer the same illness, infectious or otherwise, the person with better nutrition has better survival outlook.”

Poverty kills, just as we’ve always known.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Guest post by Simon Frankel Pratt.

I think that Harris is good at presenting a kind of naive though not completely stupid position that many thoughtful but poorly informed secular Western liberals are likely to arrive at. In a sense, his positions should be the challenge or the foil against which informed experts and public intellectuals frame their answers. For example, Harris’s views on the links between religion and violence are almost entirely wrong, as scholars such as Atran have shown, but they are understandable.

The problem is, of course, that Harris does not engage with the experts.

He does not frame his views as naive or as questions in need of answering, but as the obvious answers. He does not consult with experts on his issues, and when experts tell him that he’s wrong, he either dismisses them impatiently (such as he did with Dennett on the matter of free will) or actually resorts to personal attacks and slurs (as he did with Scott Atran). Instead of offering a clear, concise, and well articulated starting position for us to engage in further enquiry and refinement of our views in light of the evidence, he sells his opinions as discussion-ending truths which we are foolish or harmful to ignore.

This bothers me a lot. It bothers me not just because I dislike Harris’s tone and disagree with his views, but because I see Harris’s actions as a violation of the duties and ethical obligations that public intellectual figures have to guide their audiences to more critical, self-aware, and historically/scientifically informed views.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Maajid Nawaz wrote a piece for the Times yesterday. It’s behind a paywall, but even the extract posted by Quilliam contains good stuff.

The Isis man who apparently beheaded James Foley had a British accent. He is likely to be among the one out of every 800 British Sunni Muslim men of fighting age — around 500 of them — to have joined these jihadists in Iraq and Syria. This does not emerge from a vacuum. We in Britain have a deeply entrenched problem. Islamist extremism is poisoning our community relations, hijacking our youth, and we are doing very little to address it.

Throughout the Nineties our communities grew together, apart. This was applauded instead of being seen for what it was: fetishisation of minorities for those bent on romanticising “authentic” Eastern culture.

Foreign policy emerged as the popular cause for extremism, a half-truth at best, and Muslim “community leaders” churned out televised obfuscations in order to avoid addressing the obvious: what responsibility do Iraq’s slaughtered Yazidis bear for any foreign policy grievance? After much lobbying, David Cameron’s 2011 Munich speech finally recognised “Islamist extremism” head-on. But three years later and the Department for Communities and Local Government, which was tasked with challenging non-violent extremism, has yet to publish a counter-extremism strategy. British Muslims going abroad to fight is not new: it happened in Afghanistan. The only difference is that the ideology has been allowed to take root in the UK since then, and we are not doing anything about it.

Now, without a hint of irony, even al-Qaeda uses religious anti-extremism rhetoric to condemn Isis. But it is not good enough for Islamists merely to condemn.

Our collective efforts must focus on encouraging all people towards democratic values, minority and gender rights, equality and reason. This requires a strategy. But engaging on values is exactly what we have not been doing. More British jihadists will feature in Isis decapitation videos. And as our government hears no evil and sees no evil, we are woefully unprepared for when these jihadist fighters return home.

It’s a gruesome, horrible, miserable situation. With the right influences and inspirations and role models, most of these guys could be working to build infrastructure in Bangladesh or to care for Ebola patients in Liberia, but instead they’re dedicated to killing as many people as they can.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

There was a big turnout for a protest over Ireland’s abortion laws on O’Connell Street in Dublin yesterday.

UP TO TWO thousand people have gathered in Dublin’s city centre this evening to protest at Ireland’s abortion laws and call for a repeal of the controversial 8th Amendment of the Constitution.

Protesters held signs saying “Raped, Pregnant, Suicidal, Forced C-Section – Ireland 2014,” and “I’m not a vessel”, in reference to comments made at the UN  Human Rights Committee last month, where its chairman said Ireland’s abortion laws treat women who are raped as a vessel.

The protest was called in response to the case publicised in recent days involving a suicidal  young woman who sought an abortion after being raped.

Ashling O’Brien of Atheist Ireland was there and gave me permission to post her photos.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

PZ also has a post on the abortion and Down syndrome issue. In it he says this:

I recommend reading any of Michael Bérubé’s stories about having a child with Down Syndrome— he doesn’t have any regrets at all. Or you could read about how Bérubé schooled Peter Singer, and Singer did the right thing and changed his mind. He also wrote a book on the subject,reviewed in the NY Times.

I was thinking of Michael and Jamie Bérubé and of Peter Singer during all this, so I was glad to see that link, which is to a piece I read with interest at the time. (The time was December 2008.) Reading it again reminds me what a fiendishly good writer Michael is. Read the whole post, because it’s fiendishly good. I’ll just extract a little, because it’s relevant.

Surely you’ll recall—my post was only two months ago!—that in the passage at issue, Singer wrote, “To have a child with Down syndrome is to have a very different experience from having a normal child. It can still be a warm and loving experience, but we must have lowered expectations of our child’s ability. We cannot expect a child with Down syndrome to play the guitar, to develop an appreciation of science fiction, to learn a foreign language, to chat with us about the latest Woody Allen movie, or to be a respectable athlete, basketballer or tennis player.”

Well, Singer wrote to me to say that my reply to this passage suggests that he is wrong about Down syndrome, whereas in fact it takes more than a couple of exceptional children here and there to challenge the general rule.  After all, the passage speaks of expectations, and although people do win the lottery now and again, it would be unreasonable to buy a lottery ticket and expect to win.  Professor Singer then asked me to direct him to some evidence that would indicate that Jamie is not anomalous—and, he said, this is not an idle challenge: if he is mistaken about Down syndrome, he will correct himself in the future.

They wrote back and forth, and Michael requested and got permission to quote his own replies.

Many thanks for noticing that blog post, and for taking the time to write.  Thanks also for your kind words about Jamie.  I do, in fact, enjoy a handful of Woody Allen movies here and there;Broadway Danny Rose is a wonderful piece of work, and I’m fond of Bullets Over Broadway as well.  But I do think “we cannot expect a child with Down syndrome to chat with us about the latest Woody Allen film” instates a distinctly Upper West Side-y performance criterion, and is worth critiquing on those grounds alone.  More seriously, I note that in the 1920s we were told that people with Down syndrome were incapable of learning to speak; in the 1970s, we were told that people with Down syndrome were incapable of learning how to read.  OK, so now the rationale for seeing these people as somewhat less than human is their likely comprehension of Woody Allen films.  Twenty years from now we’ll be hearing “sure, they get Woody Allen, but only his early comedies—they completely fail to appreciate the breakthrough of Interiors.”  Surely you understand my sense that the goalposts are being moved around here in a rather arbitrary fashion.

I do appreciate the fact that you’re not issuing an idle challenge.  I don’t think you would do that.  I have three responses to it.

Here is the second response:

The larger point of my argument with your claim is that we cannot (I use the term advisedly) know what to expect of children with Down syndrome.  Early-intervention programs have made such dramatic differences in their lives over the past few decades that we simply do not know what the range of functioning looks like, and therefore do not rightly know what to expect. That, Professor Singer, is the real challenge of being a parent of a child with Down syndrome: it’s not just a matter of contesting other people’s low expectations of your child, it’s a matter of recalibrating your own expectations time and time again—and not only for your own child, but for Down syndrome itself.  I’ll never forget the first time I saw a young man with Down syndrome playing the violin—quite competently, at that, with delicacy and a sense of nuance.  I thought I was seeing a griffin.  And who could have imagined, just forty or fifty years ago, that the children we were institutionalizing and leaving to rot could in fact grow up to become actors?  Likewise, this past summer when I remarked to Jamie that time is so strange that nobody really understands it, that we can’t touch it or see it even though we watch the passing of every day, and that it only goes forward like an arrow, and Jamie replied, “except with Hermione’s Time-Turner in Harry Potter,” I was so stunned I nearly crashed the car.  I take issue with your passage, then, not because I’m a sentimental fool or because I believe that one child’s surprising accomplishments suffice to win the argument, but because as we learn more about Down syndrome, we honestly—if paradoxically—don’t know what constitutes a “reasonable expectation” for a person with Down syndrome.

There’s more; it’s all that good.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Oscar Wilde, James McNeill Whistler, George Bernard Shaw, and George V (or is it Edward VII?) discuss eugenics.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxXW6tfl2Y0

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)