Paul Fidalgo has a very cogent note to anonymous sneery opponents of the Women in Secularism conference on his (highly recommended) Morning Heresy CFI blog:

Look, people, and yes guys, I’m talking to you specifically. This conference is not about “separating” women from men, it’s about having the spine as a movement to say that women deal with prejudices and oppression that are unique to them, thanks to religion, and at the same time recognizing that our own community has a LOT of work to do in how we treat, acknowledge, and highlight our female half. It’s not a conference exclusively FOR women, but yes, about them. Our boss Ron Lindsay says men absolutely should attend. PZ Myers says men should attend. And I’m telling you, too. If you think it’s a problem to have a conference like this, I challenge you to buy a ticket, show your face, and talk about it like a grownup. No more nameless Internet thuggery.

Well quite. If you have something to say, show your face and talk about it like a grownup. You’re safe. We don’t deliver fatwas. We don’t throw acid. We don’t poison the water supply.

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

In Afghanistan, of course.

About 150 Afghan schoolgirls were poisoned on Tuesday after drinking contaminated water at a high school in the country’s north, officials said, blaming it on conservative radicals opposed to female education.

…

Some of the 150 girls, who suffered from headaches and vomiting, were in critical condition, while others were able to go home after treatment in hospital, the officials said.

They said they knew the water had been poisoned because a larger tank used to fill the affected water jugs was not contaminated.

“This is not a natural illness. It’s an intentional act to poison schoolgirls,” said Haffizullah Safi, head of Takhar’s public health department.

None of the officials blamed any particular group for the attack, fearing retribution from anyone named.

I’ve said this before, but it remains cogent – what a disgusting god these guys imagine. It not only wants girls to remain ignorant, it wants them to be poisoned if they try to learn.

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

RDF has a plug for the Women in Secularism conference. Elisabeth Cornwell of RDF is one of the speakers.

Naturally the page has filled up with jeering comments from an anonymous bully. Of course it has. It wouldn’t do to miss such an opportunity to express hostility and contempt for women and feminism.

Ho hum.

It’s too bad for him that not all organizations and groups and even conferences are like that. If they were we really might shut up, just to escape the thugs. But they’re not, so we don’t.

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

Oh noes! Trusted Vatican janitor has been raping popes for decades.

The widely publicized trial revealed that Falduto, well regarded and affectionately referred to as “Beppe” by Vatican City residents, had over a period of six decades frequently exploited his position to compel Pope Paul VI, Pope John Paul I, Pope John Paul II, and Pope Benedict XVI to engage in unwanted sexual activity.

“The crimes committed by Mr. Falduto are of course shocking and deplorable,” said Dean of the College of Cardinals Angelo Sodano, adding that he had never previously suspected “kindly old Beppe” of any wrongdoing. “But perhaps most upsetting is the fact that this man gained the trust of high-ranking church authorities and then betrayed that trust by secretly defiling innocent popes.”

“These appalling acts caused tremendous psychological trauma for his victims, and we are currently reexamining our internal policies to safeguard the current and future papacy,” Sodano continued. “Even one pope molested is one too many.”

H/t The Onion.

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

More on Sadakat Kadri on sharia, this time in the New York Times.

Today the confusion, Mr. Kadri makes plain in “Heaven on Earth,” is how to interpret this wide-ranging series of edicts, some from the Koran and many others based on hadiths, which are reports about the Prophet Muhammad written more than a century after his death. Scholars have sets of interpretations; increasingly freelance jihadists have their own.

Of course they do, and that’s why questions about ”how to interpret this wide-ranging series of edicts” are otiose. That was then, this is now, we have to come up with our own “edicts” based on reasons and subject to review and reform.

In his reading of the Shariah, he finds rationality and flexibility. His argument is with recent hard-liners who, he writes, “have turned Islamic penal history on its head.”

He is furious that fundamentalists “have associated the Shariah in many people’s minds with some of the deadliest legal systems on the planet.” He calls them traditionalists who ignore tradition. He is disgusted that warped opinions “are mouthed today to validate murder after murder in Islam’s name.”

It can be dangerous work for journalists and scholars to single out aspects of Islam for criticism. At times in this book you sense the author going well out of his way to lay down extravagant praise, like palm fronds, before proceeding with mild cavils.

Well you know what? If he’s afraid of the danger, he should have left the subject alone. It’s dangerous work for Maryam and Anne-Marie, too, but they do it anyway, without handing out any palm fronds of praise. If the only way Kadri felt he could do the book was by offering lots of flattery to protect himself, he should have chosen a different subject.

He was inspired to write this book, he says, by Sept. 11 and by the London bombings of July 7, 2005. (He was a commuter in London that morning.)

In the aftermaths he longed for answers to simple questions: “Where was the Shariah written down? To what extent was it accepted that its rules had been crafted by human beings? And what gave the men who were so loudly invoking it the right to speak in God’s name?”

Nothing. Nothing gives anyone that right. It’s a form of blackmail, and it’s bad. Turn your back on it.

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

A lawyer called Sadakat Kadri was on Fresh Air yesterday to talk about his new book on the history of sharia. He’s very critical of the idea that sharia courts are a bad thing. He’s of the “it’s all a matter of interpretation” school, as if that by itself solves the problem of goddy law.

“It’s a huge oral tradition, which was set down in the 9th century and which was then, by some people, transformed into compulsion and rules,” Kadri tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross. “It would be literally impossible to follow all of them, because plenty of them directly contradict each other. So you have to make choices, and Muslims have been making choices for … the last 1,400 years. And what’s happened over the past 40 years is that in certain places, the hard-liners have come to the forefront.”

No, you don’t “have to” make choices. You don’t “have to” pay any attention to it at all. Who cares what people “set down” in the 9th century? This isn’t the 9th century.

We may find wisdom and insight in writing from previous centuries, but we don’t “have to” and we shouldn’t treat any of it as mandatory, much less as orders from god. (If god really wanted to give us instructions it ought to find a more reliable method of saying so. Then we could still decide whether to obey or not.) There is simply no good reason to treat one particular book or collection of sayings from the distant past as any more binding than any other such book or collection of sayings. We should treat them all as what they are: things that human beings have said and written.

If we’re making choices, then we’re making them according to our own secular values. (If we make no choices but obey everything blindly, including when they’re contradictory, we’re making a huge mistake.) Forget the holy books and do your best with secular reasoning.

But of course people don’t, so they’re at the mercy of those hard-liners that Kadri mentions.

People just seemed to be arguing about Islam, Islamic law, the Shariah, without actually getting to the substance of what it was all about. So because I come from a Muslim background, I certainly had plenty of people I could ask. I started with my father. My father’s also a lawyer. I asked him, ‘So what is the Shariah? What does it say? Where is it written down?’ And he didn’t really have an adequate answer, as far as I am concerned. He said, ‘It’s what’s regarded as God’s law.’ And I knew that. I didn’t need to be told that. And the more I asked, the more I realized people just seemed to be ignorant. Muslims seemed to be ignorant, let alone the people who were attacking it without knowing what they were talking about.

But why try to defend sharia then? Why try to defend goddy law at all? It’s not defensible, because the whole idea of “God’s law” is indefensible, because God is not around for appeals.

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

Another episode of human inhumanity to other humans.

Kuala Lumpur. Malaysian police have detained a couple over the alleged murder of a Cambodian maid after the 24-year-old woman died of possible prolonged starvation, police said on Thursday.

Mey Sichan’s employers telephoned for an ambulance on March 31 but paramedics found her dead on arrival, Nasir Salleh, police chief of the northern state of Penang, told AFP. She also had bruises to her body.

A post-mortem revealed that she died from acute gastritis and ulcers likely due to lack of food over a long period, he said. The maid had been working for the family, who manage a hardware shop, for eight months.

“Definitely what happened to Sichan is inhumane. It is a shock to us,” the police chief said.

Sichan’s body weight had shrunk to 26 kilos, almost half that of a healthy woman, he said.

It took eight months.

The surprise move came after activists highlighted dozens of cases of sexual abuse, overwork and exploitation among the estimated 50,000 Cambodian women employed as domestic helpers in Malaysia.

Reports of abuse in Malaysia have frequently surfaced in recent years and led Indonesia to stop sending domestic helpers to the country in 2009, prompting a rise in demand for Cambodians.

Last August a Malaysian was sentenced to eight years in prison for abusing his Indonesian maid, three months after his wife was jailed for scalding the woman with a hot iron.

About 170,000 women, mostly from poor neighboring Southeast Asian countries, work as maids in Malaysia.

And this isn’t unusual.

Orn Eak’s body is covered in scars from beatings by a Kuala Lumpur woman who employed her through a Cambodia employment agency in early 2010. Single with a  five-year-old son, Orn Eak says she joined 30,000 other young Cambodian women and girls working as maids in Malaysia because her mother was struggling to survive in their village in  Kompong Thom province.

In Kuala Lumpur, Orn Eak had no days off and worked from dawn into the early  hours of the next morning caring for her employer’s disabled mother.  She  says she was frequently beaten  and often hungry.

…

Social workers have verified her claims of abuse. Nine Cambodian domestic workers died in Malaysia in 2011, according to human rights organisations.

Malaysian opposition MP Charles Santiago has accused the Malaysian government and police of ”totally disrespecting” laws by conducting only cursory investigations into the deaths.

Human Rights Watch says common abuses include excessive work hours with no rest days, lack of food and irregular or non-payment of salaries.

Many have reported sexual abuse, restrictions of movements and bans on contact with other maids.

A long way from the sentimental fairy tale of Downton Abbey, where the aristos just dote on the servants and treat them like favorite guests.

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

Don’t be in too much of a hurry to point and laugh. This could be a brilliant idea: Cornwall Council has told its schools

that pagan beliefs, which include witchcraft, druidism and the worship of ancient gods such as Thor, should be taught alongside Christianity, Islam and Judaism.

…

And an accompanying guide says that pupils should ‘understand  the basic beliefs’ of paganism and suggests children could discuss the difficulties a practising pagan pupil might face in school.

But the council’s initiative has dismayed some Christian campaigners, who are alarmed that a religion once regarded as a fringe eccentricity is increasingly gaining official recognition.

While at the same time a religion once regarded as entirely mainstream and Normal and right is increasingly questioned and disputed by people who thinks it makes just as much sense as the worship of Thor.

Go for it!

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

The BBC does some investigating in Uzbekistan. It finds a nasty habit of sterilizing women without their knowledge or consent.

Sterilisation is not, officially, the law in Uzbekistan.

But evidence gathered by the BBC suggests that the Uzbek authorities have run a programme over the last two years to sterilise women across the country, often without their knowledge.

Foreign journalists are not welcome in Uzbekistan, and in late February of this year the authorities deported me from the country. I met Adolat and many other Uzbek women in the relative safety of neighbouring Kazakhstan. I also gathered testimony by telephone and email, and in recordings brought out of the country by courier.

None of the women wanted to give their real names but they come from different parts of Uzbekistan and their stories are consistent with those of doctors and medical professionals inside the country.

“Every year we are presented with a plan. Every doctor is told how many women we are expected to give contraception to; how many women are to be sterilised,” says a gynaecologist from the Uzbek capital, Tashkent.

One suggested reason is flabbergasting – it’s a way to improve the maternal/infant mortality stats.

Several doctors and medical professionals said forced sterilisation is not only a means of population control but also a bizarre short-cut to lowering maternal and infant mortality rates.

“It’s a simple formula – less women give birth, less of them die,” said one surgeon.

The result is that this helps the country to improve its ranking in international league tables for maternal and infant mortality.

“Uzbekistan seems to be obsessed with numbers and international rankings,” says Steve Swerdlow, Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch.

“I think it’s typical of dictatorships that need to construct a narrative built on something other than the truth.”

And, of course, it’s only women, so…

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

The Economist paints a grim picture of the outlook for non-alternative aka sane medicine.

By one recent count four in ten American adults use some form of alternative therapy. If Dr Weil’s flourishing business and other programmes are any indication, these will grow even further. For six decades double-blind, randomised, placebo-controlled trials have helped doctors to sort science from opinion and to sift evidence from anecdote. Now those lines are blurring.

…

Powerful supporters have helped the cause. King George VI helped to ensure that homeopathy would be part of Britain’s newly created National Health Service (his grandson, Prince Charles, is also a fan). Royal Copeland, an American senator and homeopath, saw to it that the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act of 1938 authorised homeopathic products. Sixty years on another senator, Tom Harkin, helped to set up the National Centre for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) at the world’s leading medical-research outfit, the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The $1.5 billion that taxpayers have devoted to NCCAM has brought meagre returns. In 2009 Mr Harkin said it had “fallen short” and bemoaned its focus on “disproving things” rather than approving them. But it has spawned a new generation of research outfits. The University of Maryland’s Centre for Integrative Medicine has received $25m from the NIH for research. Separately it offers treatments such as reiki, in which a healer floats his hands over the patient’s body.

In 2003, with NIH funding, Georgetown University created a master’s degree in alternative therapies. The University of Arizona offers training in them for medical students and a two-year distance-learning course for doctors and nurses. The Consortium of Academic Health Centres for Integrative Medicine now has 50 members.

It reminds me of the Templeton Foundation – a matter of creeping legitimation.

The future for the alternative-therapy industry looks particularly bright in America. NCCAM continues to pay for research. Josephine Briggs, its director, says she is neither for nor against alternative treatments; she just wants to test which ones work and which do not (she is also interested in the effect of medical rituals). But Steven Novella, a vocal critic at Yale University, argues that the centre’s very existence fuels the cause. “People say, ‘The government is researching that, so it has got to be legitimate’,” he complains.

See? Templeton, exactly. “People say, ‘Serious academics are researching that, so it has got to be legitimate’.” Creeping legitimation.

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

A guest post by Bruce Everett

Day two – Friday: Canapés and Entrées…

The official story was, I’m told, that the canapés were a part of some kind of standard package. This apparently counted against all the forms filled out by ticket holders, marking ‘vegetarian’ or ‘vegan’ (or whatnot).

I wasn’t around at the Global Atheist Convention in 2010 to compare, but I’m told there were similar issues then with vegetarian food. I can’t honestly say I was irked, myself, but there were grumbling veggies with grumbling tummies in earshot, that made their views apparent.

(Please note, I absolutely do not attribute the cause of this gastronomic mishap to any of the volunteers from the Atheist Foundation of Australia – I know full well some of the effort from behind the scenes, put into accommodating vegetarians. Nor incidentally, was the catering staff at the public end responsible.)

David Nicholls gave a decent opening address to the convention.

Things are changing, inevitably, with young faces like Jason Ball’s all over the place, but it’s worth noting where all of this came from. A reflection on the history of the Atheist Foundation of Australia, delivered from our bemulleted, rural, South Australian Prez, breathed life into the legacy of the older generation. I swear I could smell home brew, pottery, Brut 33, and old letters to the editor.

(I’m originally from rural South Australia, and I once also sported a mullet, so I’m allowed to stir; the Prez is one of my own people.)

Kylie Sturgess and Lawrence Leung took to the stage to MC the event, demonstrating the perfect mix of joviality and professionalism. A cocktail should be named after these two (a task that would have been satisfying, to have been able to see being put past The Hitch).

Mikey Robbins started strong, and I was glad to see him, 1990s throwback that I am, but I can’t help but think his stride was interrupted, somewhat, by what, I don’t know.

Ben Elton… Oh, Ben. Poor sexually repressed Ben.

Apparently, the idea of people with shaved nether-regions having oral sex offends the man’s sensibilities. I know Dawkins has been nominated the atheist pope, but he’s just too liberal about respecting other people’s sex lives – since when has he issued edicts about what consenting adults are and aren’t supposed to do with their tender bits?

Ben Elton; pope of atheists, or pope aspirant?

Aside from that, and a journey through what seemed like recycled material from 1999 (‘hey kids, how about those spam emails?’), Elton still seemed funnier than I can remember, since his appearance in a Comic Relief in the 1980s. The whole genital jeremiad was tied together into something approaching religious satire near the end of the act, but I would have liked more religious material, if only to reduce the appearance of old filler.

Stella Young, I didn’t know you, and I didn’t know I loved you; you were awesome.

Somehow, tying things together in a religious context towards the end of Stella’s act didn’t raise the issues I had with Elton’s performance. Getting to know how Stella views the world, prior to the introduction of religion, was a bit like getting to know the cast of Alien before introducing the eponymous monster – you were made to care when the proverbial hit the fan.

And not in some patronising, wishy-washy way, either. That was half the point, the way people pretend to be enlightened in their treatment of ‘the other’ – instead treating them like children or fashion accessories. I pity the wanker who tries to talk down to Stella.

I think I’m going to be dragging the concept of use-mention distinctions into my critique of performance art, where gender epithets rear their heads. Stella dropped the c-bomb; she used the term ‘cripple’. She mentioned ‘c**t’ when telling a crowd member they looked like they’d have preferred that term instead.

I’m not sure I’m entirely comfortable with this either, but at the very least she wasn’t calling anyone, one, or using the term insincerely or in a cowardly way (which would be bad art). I’m not going to fault it.

(I suspect use-mention error may be the perfect rebuttal of choice to those Internet misogynists claiming that a feminist mentioning the word ‘cunt’ in any analysis, is morally equivalent to when a misogynist uses the term by calling someone ‘cunt’. It isn’t equivalent, and I’d like to nominate use-mention as a technical distinction worthy of greater use in these discussions.)

I was told, when asking some local comedy fans, that aside from the c-bomb being a common staple of Melbournian comedy, that recently, there’d been local controversy over the use of the word – and subsequent pushback from comedians. Apparently they need to stand up to the oppression of being criticised, or something, the poor souls.

I’m not entirely sure of where I stand on the use of gender epithets in the arts, across the breadth of contexts that is. Was it in-character? Was it satirical? Was it pure gender hatred? What does this say about the sincerity of the artwork/artist?

However, as far as healthy scepticism permits, I’m quite sure where it is that I stand on Jim Jefferies’ use of the term. I loathe watching people calling other people ‘cunt’.

Yeah, Jim, you’re edgy. You shock. You push envelopes – the same envelopes, over and over and over again. Aside from becoming very predictable, very quickly, losing whatever shock value it had like some cheap chewing gum rapidly losing an initially strong flavour, what the audience was left with, ultimately, was a jerk who treats domestic violence like suitable trolling material.

‘…remember not to punch women…’

‘…saw off my mum’s breast…’

(I paraphrase).

Dude started edgy (aka cutting-edge misogynist), but by the end of the gig, sheer repetition degenerated Jeffries’ material into misogynistic Dad jokes. He should swap that Prisoner style jacket for a cardigan and a copy of the Herald Sun.

I’d hate to think that Jim Jeffries has to burn up audiences like a starving beard-neck at an all-you-can-eat, just to maintain the appearance of his material being fresh. I say this because the guy’s not talentless at all. When you stripped back the shock-misogyny, what you were left with is possibly the most talented comic of the night – easily beating out Ben Elton.

Marion Maddox (the believer on the next day’s politics panel) would call this out the following morning; atheists don’t get to criticise religious misogyny from the same platform they spew misogyny from themselves. While I wouldn’t say there’s grounds to say Jeffries was representative (and I’d call false moral equivalence on comparing a misogynist comedian to the women-hating antics of most religions), Jeffries as a choice of entertainer is more than wide-open to criticism.

The GAC started with the explicit mention of how feminism was aligning more closely with atheistic objectives, something that this convention’s line-up was supposed to demonstrate. I’m not saying Jeffries should be censored. What I am saying is that his trade should have been plied elsewhere, perhaps off with the rest of the comedy wankers in Melbourne– he didn’t belong on this stage, and I didn’t enjoy paying for a gold ticket to see him.

Yes, I do know this is a freethinking community. I do know that there will be differences. But is it worth having a central theme of the convention crossed so thoughtlessly by someone who’s there as a crowd warmer?

What’s next? George Pell giving us the comedic stylings of why child abuse is funny?

Stage-time is a finite resource where John Stuart Mill’s opportunity cost comes in to play, unavoidably restricting the range of views that can expressed. It’s not wrong for freethinkers to prioritise in these circumstances

Is it such a crime against freethought, and so out of line with our cause, to have ‘haw haw, violence against women is funny’, off the agenda?

~ Bruce

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

The Indian skeptic Sanal Edamaruku explained a “miracle” Jesus statuette that was dripping water: it was located near a drain, and attracting the water via capillary action. This was annoying to the people who had planned to sell the “holy water” in little bottles.

Some hours later, in a live program on TV-9, Sanal explained his findings and accused the Catholic Church of miracle mongering, as they were beating the big drum for the dripping Jesus statue with aggressive PR measures and by distributing photographs certifying the “miracle”. A heated debate began, in which the five church people, among them Fr. Augustine Palett, the priest of Our Lady of Velankanni church, and representatives of the Association of Concerned Catholics (AOCC) demanded that Sanal apologize.

But he refused. So they accused him of “blasphemy,” and he could be arrested at any moment.

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

Gonzaga University, a Catholic school, has invited Desmond Tutu to give the commencement address next month to Gonzaga’s graduating class. It also plans to give him an honorary Doctor of Laws degree. But that doesn’t sit well with some graduates. They think he’s not good enough and not Catholic enough (the latter not all that surprising since he’s not a Catholic at all).

Patrick Kirby, a 1993 Gonzaga graduate, said Tutu is pro-abortion rights, has made offensive statements toward Jews and supports contraception and the ordination of gay clergy and shouldn’t be honored by a Catholic institution.

…

“I don’t have any realistic expectations that they’ll do that (cancel Tutu’s invitation). The goal for me is to bring attention to it and hopefully remind administrators at Gonzaga about their Catholic identity and how far they’ve wandered away from it,” Kirby said.

He said Catholic institutions all across the U.S. are choosing popularity over morality by honoring and hiring people who do not represent Catholic values, which he said sends an unclear message to students.

Actually they’re choosing better morality over worse morality, or morality over authoritarian control-freakery. Catholic “values” are not identical to morality, and often they’re its opposite. (Trying to prevent people from using contraception, for instance – that’s staggeringly immoral.)

I suppose we should rejoice. They’ll do themselves in if they go on this way; no bums on the seats, no coin in the plate, no more bubble car.

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

Or you can have Alister McGrath (yes, really, again) recycling his jeers and fleers. He says about the (terrible) idea of rebranding atheists as “Brights”

Dawkins’s advocacy in the United Kingdom proved especially successful, persuading many in the media that a new force was emerging in western culture. “The future looks Bright,” they declared.

No they didn’t. McGrath is quoting a ”they” who never existed. No one in the UK media was persuaded, and “they” certainly never “declared” that the future looks Bright. I think one editor once used that as a title. Editors do silly things with titles; that means nothing.

He goes on to make the obvious point that there are lots more theists going to church than there are atheists going to “Brights” meetings – which is true, but then one reason not to be a theist is so that one won’t feel obliged to go to church every week. (“Oh but community!” comes the cry. Yes yes, but all the same, Sunday morning staring at the hummingbirds instead.)

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

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation, like the British one (are the two related? or is the ABC just a slavish imitator?), has a Religion and Ethics page, as if the two were a natural pair, as if secular ethics didn’t and couldn’t exist, as if religion had a lock on the subject.

The page is (apparently) reacting to the Global Atheism Convention with an orgy of atheism-bashing.

There is for instance a numbingly self-important and over-written jeremiad by someone called Scott Stephens. I don’t know who he is; I hope my Oz readers will clue us in. Have a sample of the jerry:

But what is most pronounced and historically novel about this form of “agonistic hyperpluralism” is that it is dispersed among individuals themselves, and not simply bound up in adjacent communities. This reflects, does it not, the great cultural revolution that has taken place over the last four decades, a revolution every bit as thoroughgoing and perfidious as those that ravaged the East in the first half of the twentieth century.

Unlike socialism – which invariably took the form of the radical assertion of the state over the economy, culture and indeed the bodies of the people themselves – the revolution that has defined our time and continues to hold sway within western liberal democracy is the assertion of the freedom, the rights and the pleasure of the body over every other person or institution that might stake some claim over it, whether it be nation, tradition, community, marriage, children or religion. Or, as Herve Juvin has nicely put it, the western body is “a body without origin, character, country or determination.”

Interesting, isn’t it. Sophisticated in language, while the idea expressed is deeply sinister.

One could point, he says, to

 the widespread abrogation of our morally symmetrical responsibilities to the unwanted elderly and the inconvenient unborn: one group shovelled away behind the walls of third party care and the other sentenced to death; both in the name of choice and out of fear that our lives might be dragged down into their servitude.

Or to the increasing desperation with which voluntary euthanasia is being legislatively pursued in the West, where the fear of the slow loss of autonomy in old age has usurped the fear of death itself, and where the choice of one’s own death is deemed the ultimate assertion of freedom.

And there the Catholic bullshitter comes out from behind the sophisticated mask. That’s such crap. Nobody thinks the choice of one’s death is the ultimate assertion of freedom; people (in large numbers) think it’s sometimes the best option for people who want it.

It’s interesting that this ABC page is deluging Richard Dawkins with scorn and loathing while promoting good old-fashioned authoritarianism and Your Body Is Ours thinking.

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

A guest series by Bruce Everett

Day one – Thursday: It begins…

… or the fringe events begin, at any rate.

I’ve arrived in Melbourne, being greeted by more than a few pubs with closed doors and ‘For Sale’ signs, and hijab or ten. The voice of an invisible, satirical yokel cries in my mind ‘Sharia law! This was a Christian nation’.

We don’t have the same presence of far-right, totalitarian, Islamic groups here in Australia that Europe has. Our yokels object to Muslims, not Islam (which they don’t know anything about – ask them what they think of Wahhabism, and they’ll probably tell you they don’t like sushi), while our political left remains somewhat oblivious to the ways far-right political Islam can manifest, and don’t seem to understand why others on the left may have concerns.

(Indeed, given that moderate Muslims in migrant communities are often the first to be pressured/bullied/harassed by Islamic extremists in western nations, being reflexively blind to such extremism makes portions of the left bad friends to Muslims).

However, unless you encounter the yokel, the political RadiCool, or the occasional sanctimonious wonk, discussions of issues of religion and politics are comparatively laid back inAustralia. We don’t have to worry about genuine critics of Islam being marginalized by the media, the way Maryam Namazie has been sidelined by the BBC in the UK, nor do we have to worry too much about secularists being sent death threats the way Jessica Ahlquist has been targeted by cowardly Christian nationalists in the US.

(And no, Andrew Bolt is not a victim of ‘political correctness’.)

***

I’m a vegetarian, in much the same ethical tradition as ethicist Peter Singer, a speaker at the Global Atheist Convention. Finding vegetarian-friendly meals on the fly while travelling can be a little trying, but thankfully I’ve had a little advice in advance, and tried out a local chain of vegetarian fast food: Lord of The Fries.

Lord of the Fries… No piggy served here.

It’s not the kind of place I’ll be eating at too regularly – cost and dietary concerns prohibit that. However, the food was truly wonderful, and worth every cent. I have my doubts anything like this could succeed in my hometown of Adelaide, but it’d be nice.

A cheaper vegetarian meal was sought in the Melbourne suburb of Preston, successfully, although the encounter raised an interesting issue. On shelves and on posters in the bakery sat propaganda for the ‘Supreme Master’ cult – a movement which has been advertising semi-regularly onAustralia’s multicultural, free-to-air television station, SBS.

This was hardly an interfaith exchange – my buying a vegetarian curry pie and sausage roll for cold hard cash. And it would be safe to say that I’m less than impressed with the way the ‘Supreme Master’ goes about the business of animal welfare and environmentalism. But in as far as we shared values, there was cooperation, differences notwithstanding.

On Monday night I’ll be going to an event hosted by Meredith Doig, and featuring Leslie Cannold, PZ Myers, and Chris Stedman, where the question will be asked, ‘can believers and atheists work together for the common good?’ I suspect my example fromPreston, amongst countless others, confirms a ‘yes’.

Honestly, I can’t think of a good, general secular principle binding me to not cooperate with believers. I guess you’d have to ask believers what their God (or ‘Supreme Master’) thinks, to see if there was an issue on their end.

In passing, I wonder just how much cooperation an infidel like me could expect from the staff of East Preston Islamic College or from the Islamic college at Werribbe – since arriving in Melbourne, I’ve heard rumblings from godless secularists and moderate Muslims alike, of concerns about Wahhabist overtones in the curriculum. This is second-hand anecdote, of course, not rigorous social science; perhaps Melburnian lefties will investigate rather than leaving it up to the Murdoch press.

Believer or not, most Australians don’t want divisiveness…although we argue endlessly about what it is and how to avoid it, with various levels of competence (when we’re not busy being too laid-back, that is.)

***

My Thursday night’s event of choice, which meant missing out on Dan Dennett and Peter Singer, was a discussion of Sean Faircloth’s ‘10 point plan’ on how to push secularism forward, and how a similar approach could be adopted in Australia, held at Embiggen Books. The discussion featured secularist power-houses Russell Blackford, Meredith Doig and Graham Oppy.

Near-consensus seemed to be reached that a series of such points should, at least in an Australian context, represent underlying secular principles from which specific policy points emerge, rather than being a shopping list of policy wants (which is pretty much what Faircloth’s list is). The difficulty in this however, it was suggested, was making such a series of points politically relevant and attractive to Australians. Abstract political concepts aren’t the easiest thing to sell, especially when you’re running up against savvy evangelicals and Australian Rules football.

Retellings of the consequences of sectarian policy, such as the suffering caused by a historically religious prohibition against same-sex marriage (now a wolf-in-secular-sheep’s clothing on account of concocted concerns about child welfare), have had increasing impact over the last twenty years upon Australia’s attitude towards marriage equality. Stories of human experience are necessary, in addition to secular philosophy, and scientific investigation of empirical truths (please consider this and this).

I was handed this flyer on my way to Embiggen Books for the evening’s proceedings…

There were many substantive matters discussed on the night, including the matter of free speech, which unlike as in the US, isn’t a particularly well protected right in Australia, if a right at all. The agreed-upon place for the continuation of the night’s discussion is over at Russell Blackford’s blog, in the comments of a recent post (here).

The evening concluded with Russell and Jenny Blackford and Graham Oppy, leading VIP Debbie Goddard, and a bunch of Adelaidian misfits off to The Moat, under the Wheeler Centre, for drinks and a chin-wag. I must have been getting tired, because some of the details are a little hazy, and I only had one drink (a nice little pinot) – I do recall misplaced apostrophes being found in the menu, and Archbishop George Pell being the butt of a joke.

Maybe I shouldn’t be revealing these kinds of details anyway. Hopefully though, my constitution can withstand the full force of the convention proper!

~ Bruce

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

No voodoo “cure teh gay” ads for London buses after all.

The posters, backed by Anglican Mainstream, read: “Not gay! Post-gay, ex-gay and proud. Get over it!”

The adverts were reportedly booked for two weeks by the Christian group Core Issues to display on vehicles running on five routes in central London, including top tourist destinations such as St Paul’s Cathedral, Oxford Street, Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly Circus.

Strange idea. Imagine posters saying “Not male! Not Canadian! Not tall! Not straight! Post-male, ex-straight and proud. Get over it!”

In other words, it’s strange to think “gay” is something people should be ex-. It’s thinking that they should be getting over.

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