Well for the last talk before lunch I could see Bill Nye in profile a couple of tables away listening seriously.

In the afternoon Leonard Mlodinow talked about the unconscious mind. One item I can’t make any sense of, which is that touch increases trust, even (and especially) very slight unobtrusive touch. There was a study in France that involved (of course) a guy going up to a woman and saying “You’re very pretty and I have to go to work now but can I call you later?” The study found that if the guy touched the woman on the shoulder very lightly- he did better. Syd and I looked at each other and shook our heads. Mlodinow said the study had been replicated in other countries. (Which answered my first question.)

I seriously don’t get that. I could see it in an emergency situation, but a “yer hawt gimme your phone number” conversation? More trust because touching by a stranger?

I don’t understand that.

So that’s interesting. It’s interesting to be puzzled.

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

Here I am. The panel I was on was this morning, and it was good fun. I went last so I thought I might as well tease everyone by preaching on the sermon “Reason isn’t everything.” Surprisingly, though, no one objected (that I heard, anyway).

Ron Lindsay just did an excellent talk on the 10 Commandments. He said just what I think, so naturally it was excellent.

Michael DeDora and I had a chat about movements and allies and rifts and working together.

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

And another item, from the ever-valuable David Robert Grimes: Climate change is real, ignore the denialists in the Irish Times.

…climate change has been scientifically beyond doubt for a long time. Yet despite virtually all climatologists and researchers confirming this with vast swathes of supporting evidence, there are still loud voices doing their utmost to persuade us that the issue is still somehow open for debate.

In the US roughly half of media reports on climate change have doubted its existence. Publications like the Daily Mail, the Wall Street Journal and numerous Murdoch press give editorial support to these views.

Cynical and insulting

Such contrarian writers and broadcasters paint themselves as climate “sceptics”, but this is a calculated misnomer. Scepticism is an essential part of scientific endeavour. It demands all claims are treated as unproven until evidence and experience either confirm or falsify them. Denialism, by contrast, is the stubborn and persistent refusal to acknowledge what the evidence shows beyond all reasonable doubt.

Evidence for climate change is overwhelming, confirmed by measurement, theory and experiment. Self-proclaimed climate “sceptics” are nothing of the sort; they are rank denialists, deliberately refusing to accept the incontrovertible evidence that their position is untenable.

There’s a lot of that around, on a number of subjects.

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

I have to leave for Tacoma and the CFI Summit soon, so I’ll just point to an item or two for your reading pleasure, and possible discussion later.

There’s Jaclyn Friedman in The American Prospect on the “Men’s Rights” movement.

What makes the MRAs particularly insidious is their canny co-optation of social-justice lingo. While Pick Up Artists are perfectly plain that all they care about is using women for sex, MRAs claim to be a movement for positive change, with the stated aim of getting men recognized as an oppressed class—and women, especially but not exclusively feminists, as men’s oppressors. It’s a narrative effective enough to snow the mainstream media: Just this past weekend, The Daily Beast ran a profile of MRAs that painted them as a legitimate movement overshadowed by a few extremists. Trouble is, even the man writer R. Todd Kelly singled out as the great “moderate” hope that other MRAs should emulate—W.F. Price, of the blog “The Spearhead”—is anything but. According to Futrelle, “This is a guy who … blames the epidemic of rape in the armed forces on women, who celebrated one Mothers Day with a vicious transphobic rant, and who once used the tragic death of a woman who’d just graduated from college to argue that ‘after 25, women are just wasting time.’ He published posts on why women’s suffrage is a bad idea. Plus, have you met his commenters?”

And Dawn Foster in Eurozine on (the dearth of) women in journalism.

If there are plenty of women working as correspondents and reporters, but relatively few female opinion writers and editors, then this indicates a problem in the industry. Women may be blogging more, make up more than 50 per cent of Twitter users^[3], and piling into varieties of journalism, but the biggest newspapers in the United States, Britain and Europe still reserve pages of the most serious political and foreign policy analysis for older men, and unsurprisingly, they’re usually white.

A study by Women in Journalism earlier this year found that across national newspapers, 78 per cent of bylined front page stories were written by men, and of those quoted as experts or sources in lead stories, 84 per cent were men.^[4]The Women’s Media Centre in the United States, on conducting similar research reported that during the 2012 presidential election, 75 per cent of front page bylined articles at top newspapers were written by men and that women made up a mere 14 per cent of Sunday TV talk show interviewees, and 29 per cent of “roundtable” guests.^[5] Women in Journalism were quick to highlight one of the most worrying aspects of this imbalance: most stories involving women in the four week period surveyed, portrayed them as either victims or celebrities.

Later.

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

Amanda Marcotte is just a little surprised to find Fox News pundits saying “You can’t legislate behavior.” Huh, yeah, I’m surprised by that too. You can’t legislate behavior? So there are no laws against murder, theft, assault, fraud, rape, kidnapping, extortion? Or are we to understand that murder, theft, assault, fraud, rape, kidnapping, extortion are something other than behavior?

And whatever happened to the old law&order brand of conservatism? Did it get washed away in the flood of tea, or what?

Anyone who has ever subjected herself to right-wing talk radio or Bill O’Reilly’s show knows that conservatives have an affinity for a good, old-fashioned bully. Even so, it was a bit surprising to see Shannon Bream on Fox News host a segment worrying that anti-bullying rules at schools violate “free speech.” Bream was deeply concerned that homophobes and anti-choicers wouldn’t be able to express their “political views” at school.

Maybe Bream really does think that people of her political persuasion really can’t make their case without bullying. That would be a bit…incriminating.

“But we see in some of these cases in some of these schools that kids who want to put on pro-life displays, who are pro-Second Amendment, those kinds of things, things that are viewed as a more conservative viewpoint, in some cases the bullying stuff is being used against them so they can’t speak their positions,” Bream argued, declining to offer any examples. Does “speak their positions” mean arguing for an abortion ban in debate class, or is it more a situation where kids are “speaking their positions” by targeting individual students for harassment because they believe those kids are gay? I guess we’ll just have to assume the worst!

Exactly. Bream herself said it! It wasn’t those pesky liberals!

“You can’t legislate behavior,” David Webb, Fox News contributor, said, causing one to wonder when it was that conservatives decided that having school rules is fascism, man. Where was Webb when kids needed him after getting detention for cutting class or speaking out of turn?

He actually said that. Well at least there’s no law against laughing at Fox News contributors.

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

Guest post by Stacy Kennedy.

The Men’s Rights Movement emerged in the early 1970s. If we set the beginning of American Second Wave feminism at the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1963, the two movements are approximately ten years apart.

Inspired by the recent mini-surge of interest in the MRM from 20/20 and The Daily Beast, I decided to compare and contrast the two.

CULTURAL PRESENCE/VISIBILITY

WOMEN’S MOVEMENT

•  By 1971, eight years after The Feminine Mystique, everybody in the United States had heard of the Women’s Movement (aka “Women’s Lib”). Everybody was talking about it. Everybody was arguing about it. Numerous books on the subject had been published. Movies, television, theater, fiction, and magazines reflected the movement and its impact.

MEN’S MOVEMENT

•  In 2013, after approximately forty years, mention the Men’s Rights Movement and most people will give you a quizzical look and ask, “The wutnow?”

THEORY

WOMEN’S MOVEMENT

•  Large body of feminist theory (more accurately, theories.) Vigorous intramural and extramural debate with general intramural agreement that obligatory conformity to gender roles oppresses men, women, and the genderqueer. General intramural agreement that there are internalized and unexamined biases that work against women’s equality and that these biases are at least mostly cultural in origin.

MEN’S MOVEMENT

• MRAs think traditional gender roles are just fine, and they resent women’s incursions into “men’s spheres.” At the same time, they complain a great deal about the ways in which the traditional masculine role harms men. An incoherent framework exists in which traditional masculinity is simultaneously held up as praiseworthy and natural AND as evidence that men qua men are, and always have been, oppressed.
•  Women have all the power because pussy.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

WOMEN’S MOVEMENT

(partial list)

•  Increased presence of women in workforce, including professional, blue collar, academic, STEM, and military spheres.
•  Abortion and women’s access to contraception legalized. (Defense of legal abortion and access to it is ongoing.)
•  Laws regarding domestic violence have been transformed. Greater awareness of domestic violence. Creation of domestic violence shelters and hotlines..
•  Greater awareness of rape. Fight to change public and law enforcement attitudes toward rape ongoing. Existence of rape hotlines and victim’s advocates.
•  Creation of laws regarding sexual harassment. Anti-sexual harassment policies and training now commonplace.
•  New perspectives have led to scientific findings, including evidence for the existence of unconscious sexist biases, and corrections to previous stereotyped views of human and animal behavior.
•  Stigma against unmarried mothers significantly decreased.
• Ongoing fight against sexual double standard.
•  Women admitted to military academies. Fight to allow women in military combat positions all but won.
•  All the “Firsts”—first female astronaut, first female Vice Presidential candidate on a major-party ticket, first female Presidential candidate on a major-party ticket, etc.
•  Widespread recognition of the many problems inherent in societal insistence that people conform to gender roles.
•  Stereotypes regarding women, and gender roles generally, no longer sure to go unchallenged.
•  Countless little girls have grown up hearing the message “You can be anything you want to be.”

MEN’S MOVEMENT

…

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

The first duty of a desperately impoverished nation most of which is under water is to find somebody or something that is unIslamic and pitch a fit.

After being accused of “sucking blood” from the poor, Bangladesh’s only Nobel prize winner Muhammad Yunus faces a new state-backed hate campaign seeking to paint him as un-Islamic and a spreader of homosexuality.

Following years of attempts to discredit his legacy as a pioneer of micro-finance – since copied the world over as a development tool – the hounding has turned more personal and dangerous.

The perceived crime of the 73-year-old was to sign a joint statement along with three other Nobel laureates in April 2012 criticising the prosecution of gay people in Uganda.

Little remarked at the time, it has since been seized on by the Islamic Foundation, a government religious body, and amplified through tens of thousands of imams on its payrolls.

Protests have been held, leaflets calling him “an accomplice of Jews and Christians” have been distributed, and a “grand rally” has been called for October 31 in the capital Dhaka to denounce him.

What a disgusting conglomeration of bad reasons and bad actions and bad thinking, not to mention bad governance. When in doubt, whip up hatred at somebody who objects to the whipping up of hatred. The first duty is to hate some people for no good reason.

The hate-object used to be my friend Taslima.

“How can a state-run organisation run a campaign of criminal intimidation? It’ll instigate violence against professor Yunus,” Sara Hossain, a top lawyer and rights activist, warned in an interview with AFP.

The harassment has echoes of another movement against feminist writer and religious critic Taslima Nasreen who was forced to flee the country after being denounced like Yunus.

“It’s unfortunate that he’s facing the kind of campaign that I faced in 1994,” Nasreen told AFP. “I was forced to leave the country because of the campaign by the fundamentalists, which the then government actively supported.”

Don’t do this, Bangladesh.

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

A horror I didn’t manage to catch up with last week -

Glenda Xiomara Cruz was crippled by abdominal pain and heavy bleeding in the early hours of 30 October 2012. The 19-year-old from Puerto El Triunfo, eastern El Salvador, went to the nearest public hospital where doctors said she had lost her baby.

It was the first she knew about the pregnancy as her menstrual cycle was unbroken, her weight practically unchanged, and a pregnancy test in May 2012 had been negative.

Four days later she was charged with aggravated murder – intentionally murdering the 38-to-42 week foetus – at a court hearing she was too sick to attend. The hospital had reported her to the police for a suspected abortion.

After two emergency operations and three weeks in hospital she was moved to Ilopango women’s prison on the outskirts of the capital San Salvador. Then last month she was sentenced to 10 years in jail, the judge ruling that she should have saved the baby’s life.

Ten years in prison.

That’s appalling.

Xiomara’s father describes the conviction as a “terrible injustice”.

He testified in court that his daughter had endured years of domestic violence at the hands of her partner. And yet the prosecution – which sought a 50-year jail term – relied heavily on this man’s allegation that she had intentionally killed the foetus.

Xiomara has not seen her four-year-old daughter since the miscarriage.

El Salvador is one of five countries with a total ban on abortion, along with Nicaragua, Chile, Honduras and Dominican Republic. Since 1998, the law has allowed no exceptions – even if a woman is raped, her life is at risk or the foetus is severely deformed.

That’s just outright, frank, unabashed hatred of women.

More than 200 women were reported to the police between 2000 and 2011, of whom 129 were prosecuted and 49 convicted – 26 for murder (with sentences of 12 to 35 years) and 23 for abortion, according to research by Citizens’ Group for the Decriminalization of Abortion. Seven more have been convicted since 2012.

The study underlines that these women are overwhelmingly poor, unmarried and poorly educated – and they are usually denounced by public hospital staff. Not a single criminal case originated from the private health sector where thousands of abortions are believed to take place annually.

That sounds like Ireland, where poor women were locked up in the Magdalene laundries and poor children were locked up in industrial not-schools.

Munoz has worked with 29 of the incarcerated women, helping secure the early release of eight. “Only one intentionally induced an abortion, the other 28 suffered natural obstetric complications but were jailed for murder without any direct evidence,” he says.

Last year when Maria Teresa Rivera suffered a miscarriage, she was sentenced to 40 years in jail for aggravated murder.

Like Xiomara, Teresa, 28, had no pregnancy symptoms before sudden severe pain and bleeding, and was reported to police by the public hospital where she had sought emergency help.

The scientific evidence was flimsy, according to Munoz who will soon lodge an appeal, and the prosecution relied heavily on a colleague of hers, who testified that Rivera had said she “might be” pregnant a full 11 months before the miscarriage.

A textile factory worker, she was the family’s only breadwinner and her eight-year-old son is now living in dire poverty with his grandmother.

There’s much more. Read the whole thing. The BBC does do a good job of reporting on subjects like this. Outrages like this.

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

There’s a Facebook group called Misogyny Overheard at Oxford University. It’s an open group, so its content is public. (Our Alex is a member, because he’s been an Oxford student.)

It has this poster, which has appeared at university poster sales.

First things first, eh?

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

A UN Human Rights Council resolution against child marriage is only that, but it is a start. But not everyone even agreed to that much. Want to know one country that refused? India. Yes, the world’s largest secular democracy said No.

India, the world’s child marriage capital, has once again failed its under-age brides.

The country has refused to sign the first-ever global resolution on early and forced marriage of children led by the UN.

The resolution was supported by a cross-regional group of over 107 countries, including almost all countries with high rates of child marriage—Ethiopia, South Sudan, Sierra Leone, Chad, Guatemala, Honduras and Yemen.

Almost all? That doesn’t look like almost all to me. Nowhere near almost all.

Brides Not Wives provided the list:

The States presenting the resolution were: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Armenia, Albania, Algeria, Andorra, Angola, Belgium, Benin, Bolivia, Bosnia, Botswana, Brazil, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Chad, Congo, Cuba, Czech Republic, Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cyprus, Denmark, Djibouti, DRC, Egypt, El Salvador, Eritrea, Estonia, Ecuador, Ethiopia, Equatorial Guinea, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Guatemala, Ghana, Guinea, Haiti, Hungary, Honduras, Iceland, Italy, Ireland, Ivory Coast, Jamaica, Japan, Jordan, Kenya, Korea, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lebanon, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Madagascar, Malta, Moldova, Monaco, Morocco, Mozambique, Maldives, Montenegro, Namibia, Netherlands, Norway, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Palestine, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Rwanda, Senegal, Serbia, Singapore, South Sudan, Sierra Leone, Slovakia, Slovenia, Somalia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Tajikistan, Timor Leste, Togo, Tunisia, Thailand, Turkey, United Kingdom, Uganda, United States of America, Uruguay, Venezuela, Yemen, Zambia. 

Missing? Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Mali, Algeria to name a few.

The Centre for Reproductive Rights says governments in the South Asia region have failed to enact and enforce adequate laws that prohibit child marriage.

“The practice persists with impunity. In South Asia, 46% of women between ages 20-24 report having been married before age 18 in 2010. This translated to 24.4 million women in the region. Estimates project that from 2010 to 2030, 130 million more girls in the region will be married.”

“Child marriage does not constitute a single rights violation – rather, every instance of child marriage triggers a continuum of violations that continues throughout a girl’s life. Child marriage endangers the survival and well-being of women and girls by exposing them to forced initiation into sex and sexual violence as well as to early, unplanned and frequent pregnancies. Further, women and girls married as children are often denied educational opportunities, are isolated from society and face a lifetime of economic dependence,” the Centre said.

And so far there’s not even official government-level agreement that that’s a bad thing.

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

Last month the UN Human Rights Council adopted a resolution calling for the elimination of child, early and forced marriage to be considered in the post-2015 development agenda. This is a first.

Girls Not Brides reports:

The Ambassador of Sierra Leone, Yvette Stevenes, introduced the resolution to the Human Rights Council, stating that “efforts [to end child marriage] need to be strengthened to address this breach of human rights of some of the most vulnerable groups in society”. According to UNICEF, 44% of girls are married before the age of 18 in Sierra Leone; 18% before the age of 15.

…

The resolution also stresses the value of empowering and investing in women and girls for “breaking the cycle of gender inequality and discrimination, violence and poverty” and for bringing about “sustainable development and economic growth.”

It acknowledges the multi-faceted impact of child, early and forced marriage on the “economic, legal, health and social status of women and girls” as well as “the development of the community as a whole”.

The Human Rights Council is the leading UN body responsible for the promotion and protection of human rights around the world. The resolution calls for a panel discussion on the issue of child, early and forced marriage at an upcoming session of the Human Rights Council in 2014.

A resolution is only that, but it’s a step.

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

Good news for the people of Turkey: they now have access to a halal online sex shop. W00t!

Yes that’s right, a halal sex shop. A shop where the sex products are halal as opposed to haram. Good eh? Reassuring. If only everything in life were halal as opposed to haram. How much more tidy everything would be.

The website describes its products as completely safe and halal according to Islamic rules.

When Internet users enter the online shopping site, there are two different links for men and women that lead visitors to separate sections for male and female products.

Well all right! That makes it halal right there all by itself – strict separation of women and men. That’s the only kind of halal sex there is: the kind where women and men are kept strictly separate. Women and men are halal when they’re separate, but put them in proximity and oh no, they get more and more haram the closer together they get. Quick, somebody fetch the walls and the body-tents!

That’s a beautiful graphic, don’t you think? The man looking kind of gloomy and limp, wondering where his next halal shag is going to come from, and the woman looking not there at all, but merely represented by an empty hood.

There are also other sections on the website that discuss sexual intercourse in terms of Islam.

Oh, I know this one! It goes like this:

1. ——->
2. <——

Repeat if necessary.

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

Yes that’s right – it’s not some horrible joke.

The Sultan of Brunei introduced tough Sharia-law punishments on Tuesday including death by stoning for crimes such as adultery, hailing what he called a “historic” step toward Islamic orthodoxy for his country.

Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah — one of the world’s wealthiest men — said a new Sharia Penal Code in the works for years was officially introduced on Tuesday in the tiny, oil-flush sultanate and would be phased in beginning in six months.

Based on individual cases, punishments could include stoning to death for adultery, severing of limbs for theft, and flogging for violations ranging from abortion to alcohol consumption, according to a copy of the code.

The code applies only to Muslims.

“By the grace of Allah, with the coming into effect of this legislation, our duty to Allah is therefore being fulfilled,” the sultan, 67, said in a speech.

Fuck Allah. Fuck you. Fuck everyone who perpetrates this evil punitive murderous vengeful shit.

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

Just in case you were thinking Boko Haram was taking a break…it’s not.

Two days ago:

Militants wearing army uniforms have killed 19 people at checkpoints on a road in Nigeria’s Borno state.

The armed men reportedly stopped motorists on the road and ordered them out of their cars before shooting them or hacking them to death.

…

The latest attack happened early on Sunday morning near the town of Logumani, not far from the Cameroon border.

Survivors said the gunmen were dressed as soldiers and were riding motorcycles before they ambushed their victims.

“We were asked to get out of our vehicles and lie face down by nine men dressed as soldiers who blocked the road,” one man, who gave his name as Buba, told the AFP news agency.

“They shot dead five people and went about slaughtering 14 others before someone called them on the phone that soldiers were heading their way,” he said.

God is great.

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

Via Imad Iddine Habib, who translated.

The Jihadist: “it’s Haram to eat UN Food, it’s from the Kuffars.”
The woman: “what about the bomb you’re holding?! Isn’t it made by the Kuffars, too?!”

Heartbreaking.

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

Eve Garrard wrote about Norm Geras for the Guardian last Sunday. She’s a colleague and friend of his, and one of the editors of Thinking Towards Humanity.

His interests were rich and varied, but his thought and writings form an integrated whole. He was centrally and always a man of the left, but one who became a scourge of those parts of left/liberal opinion which, in his view, had slid away from commitment to the values of equality, justice and universal rights, and in so doing ended up by excusing or condoning racism and terrorism.

And sexism – the most godawful sexism on the planet.

From his perspective, the response to the events of 11 September 2001 was appalling. He found the readiness of many to blame the US for bringing the terrorist attack down on its own head to be intellectually feeble and morally contemptible. He argued that this section of the left was betraying its own values by offering warm understanding to terrorists and cold neglect to their victims. He detested the drawing of an unsupported and insupportable moral equivalence between western democracies and real or proposed theocratic tyrannies in which liberty of thought and speech, and the protection of human rights, would play no part. Norm wanted to engage in this debate and not just with academics. So he went online, to provide himself with a space in which he could express these and other views, and Normblog was born.

It was a runaway success. Thousands of readers all over the world were drawn by Norm’s mixture of serious political and philosophical reasoning, and more lighthearted pieces on cricket, Manchester United, country music, films, books – whatever he was currently interested in. The most striking feature of the blog was Norm’s distinctive arguing style: independent, rigorous, fair to adversaries, exceptionally clear, always (well, almost always) civil – and that in a blogosphere noted for widespread vituperation and insult.

I was one of those thousands, right from the beginning.

Norm’s original area of research was Marxist political theory and he produced some highly influential books in this area, including The Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg (1976) and Marx and Human Nature (1983), in which he argued, rather against the progressive orthodoxy of the time, that there is such a thing as a determinate human nature, and that Marx himself had recognised this. His work inspired a generation of Marxist scholars. His concern about human nature, especially its darker elements, led him to explore the Holocaust: he was among the first to examine this terrible event from within the discipline of political theory.

Out of this research came his book The Contract of Mutual Indifference (1998), in which he argued that we owe a duty of help to those who are suffering under terrible oppression. He contrasted this duty with the practice of so many who observed the Nazis’ genocidal activities and did nothing, suggesting that what we actually believe in is something like a contract of mutual non-assistance: I won’t help you in your desperate straits, and I won’t expect any help from you either. This, as Norm argued, is morally intolerable: our common humanity makes claims on us, to protect each other from catastrophe, if we can.

Yes. That is what I think too.

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

Russell D Moore, President of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, tells us that government prayer-fests aren’t sectarian at all because they’re all over the place.

Conservative evangelicals don’t want government support for our faith, because we believe God created all consciences free and a state-coerced act of worship isn’t acceptable to God.  Moreover, we believe the gospel isn’t in need of state endorsement or assistance. Wall Street may need government bailouts but the Damascus Road never does.

In fact, most of us support voluntary public prayer not because we oppose the separation of church and state but because we support it.

After all, at issue in this dispute, is the supposed “sectarian” nature of these public prayers. Few suggest that any invocation at all is unconstitutional — especially since invocations have been going on in such forums since the Founding Era. The problem is that these prayers are specifically Christian or specifically Jewish or specifically Jewish or specifically Wiccan, or what have you.

Notice the calm majoritarian confidence of that dismissal of people who do suggest that any invocation at all is unconstitutional, and the breezy citation of longstanding practice as if it justified anything (hello slavery, hello footbinding, hello genital mutilation).

When we allow evangelicals to pray as evangelicals, Catholics to pray as Catholics, Muslims to pray as Muslims, Jews to pray as Jews, we are not undermining political pluralism in our democracy, we’re upholding it.

That’s why these prayers are not an establishment of religion. The clergyperson offering the invocation isn’t an extension of the government. His or her prayers aren’t state-written or state-approved.

If this is the case, why even bother with invocations, from multiple religious voices, in an increasingly diverse American public square? Such invocations serve to remind us that we are more than extensions of the state. Our consciences are accountable to a higher tribunal than any government. It’s that sense of conscience and human integrity that has led this country to support minority rights, respect for opposing viewpoints, and a limit on the power of government.

He’s claiming that reminding us of “a higher tribunal” is not an establishment of religion. He’s wrong; that’s exactly what it is.

If a belief in a “higher tribunal” were what’s required, why would slavery have lasted so long, or gotten started at all? Why would minority rights have been so very unsupported for so very long? What does Russell Moore think he’s talking about?

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

Kimberly Winston looks at why atheists got so het up about Oprah’s casual aspersions on atheists. (Well one reason is just that it’s something to do. If someone mentions us, we talk about it. If someone mentions it – atheism – we talk about it. But besides that.)

Why has this struck such a deep chord? Ryan Cragun, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Tampa who studies atheists, said it may be because atheists are beginning to be more public about their lack of belief, seeing this as an opportunity to express their difference, their presence and their rights — much like the gay community has done before.”

Well yeah. That’s what I said – we talk about it. Mention us or it, and we’ll talk about it.

Marcia Z. Nelson, author of “The Gospel According to Oprah,” agreed, saying Winfrey may be exhibiting more unawareness than intolerance.

“As I see it, Oprah was being her spiritually and professionally curious self,” Nelson said. “The problem atheists have is partly one of language; the God and religion people have been working on refining their descriptive languages for millennia. Oprah was actually doing atheists a favor by quizzing Nyad. Atheists need to concentrate more on expressing awe and less on taking hyperbolic offense where none is intended.”

ARE YOU CALLING ME EASILY OFFENDED?!?

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

No doubt you’ve heard about the Google search item.

Here’s a simple and powerful campaign idea from UN Women using real suggested search terms from Google’s autocomplete feature. Campaign creator Christopher Hunt, head of art for Ogilvy & Mather Dubai, offers this summary: “This campaign uses the world’s most popular search engine (Google) to show how gender inequality is a worldwide problem. The adverts show the results of genuine searches, highlighting popular opinions across the world wide web.” Each ad’s fine print says “actual Google search on 09/03/13.” While Google users in different countries are likely to get different results, a quick test shows that several of these suggested terms definitely come up in U.S. searches. Since its creation, autocomplete has become a popular device for social debate and even inspired a recent epic visual from xkcd, but these ads do a stellar job driving home the daunting fact that enough people around the world share these vile opinions that Google has come to expect them.

So I tried, and sure enough. Of course some of them will be people like me looking for nasty bullshit, but all the same.

Check out the article for what the campaign did with some. Here are the ones I harvested.

Women should not put up with this crap.

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

Rachael Dunlop wonders why the hell media stories about medicine include bullshit for “balance.”

There’s a term to describe giving more time to opposing view points than the evidence actually supports – false balance.

So okay, my “feelpinions” might get hurt, but does it really matter otherwise? Well yes, it turns out it does.

A recent study reports that stories about vaccines that include false balance are actually more dangerous than those that are purely anti-vaccine. Yes, you read that correctly. Stories that offer both sides of the coin can have a greater negative influence on people’s decision to not vaccinate than those that are purely anti-vaccine.

Why? Perhaps because they give an impression of genuinely divided opinion among experts.

The Australian media, to their credit, have moved away from false balance in vaccine stories over the last few years. I like to think that grassroots campaigning has contributed to that, even if only a little. Certainly, I personally have made an effort to explain why false balance is bad and in some cases I’ve even declined to participate in stories if journalists insist on including anti-vaccine campaigners.

I now know of a couple of mainstream media outlets who have policies of not speaking to anti-vaxers at all when they do science based vaccine stories, which is a fantastic result. Indeed, one prime time magazine-style programme issued this statement on their Facebook page following a complaint from a viewer about an appearance I made on the show to discuss a measles outbreak.

Anti-vaccination is a fringe opinion. For every 5 doctors who oppose vaccination there are 95 who support it. We are not obliged to provide equal time and space to unscientific and dangerous viewpoints.

But not everyone is that level-headed, and it matters.

Recently, WIN television were reported to the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) for including false statements from a prominent anti-vaccine lobbyist in a news story about a measles outbreak. Media Watch’s Jonathan Holmes didn’t mince his words when he said:

There’s evidence and then there’s bulldust. It’s a journalists job to distinguish between them, not to sit on the fence and bleat balance, especially when people’s health is at risk.

Holmes’ last point really highlights the crux of the issue. In recent years in Australia, several babies have died from whooping cough as a result of outbreaks in areas where levels of vaccination are dangerously low. The media was also partly blamed for contributing to another measles epidemic in Swansea, Wales that persisted for eight months, resulting in a total of 1,219 cases and the death of one person.

Large numbers of children in the 10-18 age bracket had not received their scheduled measles, mumps, rubella (MMR) vaccines, partly due to significant, uncritical coverage by the British media of false claims about the safety of MMR in 1998. The vaccine/autism claims were initiated by Andrew Wakefield who was subsequently struck off the medical register, his scientific study scratched from the record, and has gone onto be named by Time magazine as one of the “great science frauds” of modern history.

Whilst no one gets hurt if you ask a flying carpet salesman questions about commercial flight, the consequences of people not vaccinating are real and potentially tragic. With vaccination, there is not debate. The science is in and the benefits far outweigh the risks. No balance required.

Disagreeing over what flavor of ice cream to have for the party? Go for balance. Vaccinations? Do not go for “balance.”

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