An unpleasant little story from India.

…a 12-year-old boy was allegedly chained by authorities of a local madrassa to prevent him from escaping from the school.

According to Medak town police, the boy has been studying in ‘Minhaj-ul-uloom’ religious school for the past three years and had earlier made several attempts to run away from the madrassa, as he was not a quick learner and had a stammering problem.

The police said that the madrassa management had chained the boy a few days ago to prevent him from escaping.

To prevent him from “escaping” – as if he were somehow legally obliged to be there.

“There is no compulsion in religion.” Oh really?

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

It’s interesting to see the Washington Post columnist Sally Quinn unabashedly announcing that theism is part of citizenship in the US.

This is a religious country. Part of claiming your citizenship is claiming a belief in God, even if you are not Christian. We’ve got the Creator in our Declaration of Independence. We’ve got “In God We Trust” on our coins. We’ve got “one nation under God” in our Pledge of Allegiance. And we say prayers in the Senate and the House of Representatives to God.

Excuse me. I am a citizen. I don’t have to claim anything (and neither does any other citizen), and I certainly don’t have to claim a belief in god. Nobody has to. Nor does anyone have to claim a disbelief in god.

Up until now, the idea of being American and believing in God were synonymous.

No, they were not.

It’s slightly shocking to see a political columnist betray such ignorance of political basics. A majority opinion is not at all the same thing as being any particular nationality. The claim is both absurd and bossy.

Fortunately there are many comments pointing out how wrong that column is, along with some predictable sexist dreck.

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

Have you read the Leiter and Weisberg review of Thomas Nagel’s book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False? It’s pretty entertaining.

First there’s theoretical reductionism: it’s all physics. Nobody thinks that, so it’s silly to bother with it. Second there’s naturalism: what there is is what there is. (That’s my version. Theirs is the proper one.) Lots think that, so what’s Nagel’s problem with it? Well he reads “widely in the literature that explains contemporary science to the nonspecialist” and he notices that science often contradicts common sense.

This style of argument does not, alas, have a promising history. After all, what could be more common-sensical, obvious or evident than the notion that the earth is flat and the sun revolves around the earth?…Happily, Nagel does not attempt to repudiate the Copernican revolution in astronomy, despite its hostility to common sense. But he displays none of the same humility when it comes to his preferred claims of common sense—the kind of humility that nearly 400 years of nonevident yet true scientific discoveries should engender. Are we really supposed to abandon a massively successful scientific research program because Nagel finds some scientific claims hard to square with what he thinks is obvious and “undeniable,” such as his confidence that his “clearest moral…reasonings are objectively valid”?

In support of his skepticism, Nagel writes: “The world is an astonishing place, and the idea that we have in our possession the basic tools needed to understand it is no more credible now than it was in Aristotle’s day.” This seems to us perhaps the most startling sentence in all of Mind and Cosmos. Epistemic humility—the recognition that we could be wrong—is a virtue in science as it is in daily life, but surely we have some reason for thinking, some four centuries after the start of the scientific revolution, that Aristotle was on the wrong track and that we are not, or at least not yet.

See what I mean? Entertaining.

And then, Nagel thinks there are objective moral truths, and that that fact shows that naturalism is wrong.

 there is nothing remotely common-sensical about Nagel’s confidence in the objectivity of moral truth. While Nagel and his compatriots apparently take very seriously their moral opinions—so seriously that they find it incredible to suggest that their “confidence in the objective truth of [their] moral beliefs” might, in fact, be “completely illusory”—this can hardly claim the mantle of “the common sense view.” Ordinary opinion sometimes tends toward objectivism, to be sure—often by relying on religious assumptions that Nagel explicitly rejects—but it also often veers toward social or cultural relativism about morality. Whether morality is truly objective is a philosopher’s claim (and a controversial one even among philosophers) about which “common sense” is either agnostic or mixed.

Sam Harris notwithstanding.

And then Nagel argues for teleology. I’m beginning to be tempted to read the book now.

Or perhaps not.

We conclude with a comment about truth in advertising. Nagel’s arguments against reductionism are quixotic, and his arguments against naturalism are unconvincing. He aspires to develop “rival alternative conceptions” to what he calls the materialist neo-Darwinian worldview, yet he never clearly articulates this rival conception, nor does he give us any reason to think that “the present right-thinking consensus will come to seem laughable in a generation or two.” Mind and Cosmos is certainly an apt title for Nagel’s philosophical meditations, but his subtitle—”Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False”—is highly misleading. Nagel, by his own admission, relies only on popular science writing and brings to bear idiosyncratic and often outdated views about a whole host of issues, from the objectivity of moral truth to the nature of explanation. No one could possibly think he has shown that a massively successful scientific research program like the one inspired by Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection “is almost certainly false.” The subtitle seems intended to market the book to evolution deniers, intelligent-design acolytes, religious fanatics and others who are not really interested in the substantive scientific and philosophical issues. Even a philosopher sympathetic to Nagel’s worries about the naturalistic worldview would not claim this volume comes close to living up to that subtitle. Its only effect will be to make the book an instrument of mischief.

That’s unfortunate.

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

Adam Lee has an article in Salon about Divisiveness Among Teh Atheists and what a good thing it is. (No, he doesn’t say anything about “bitchy infighting” or the Judean People’s Front.)

The animating idea behind Atheism+ is that atheism isn’t a stopping point, but a beginning. We’re atheists not because we want to gather and engage in collective back-slapping, not because we want to chortle at the foolishness of benighted believers, but because we care about creating a world that’s more just, more peaceful, more enlightened, and we see organized religion as standing in the way of this goal. We consider politically engaged atheism an effective way to demolish this obstacle, to refute the beliefs that have so often throughout human history been used to excuse cruelty, inequality, ignorance, oppression and violence.

Is that bitchy of us? No, it isn’t. Joking aside, it isn’t. It’s what freethought has always been about. I bet nobody ever called G W Foote bitchy.

While Atheism+ has already seen allies flock to its banner, it has its detractors as well. The most common complaint heard from some quarters is that A+ is “divisive,” that it causes us to waste valuable time and energy on infighting rather than accomplishing the goals we all have in common. However, this is a classic example of how privilege makes it easy for people to overlook barriers that don’t personally affect them. The truth is that the atheist movement is already divided, and has been for a while: Surveys show that there’s a significant imbalance of men over women. Some of this may be due to outside cultural factors, but some of it is surely owing to the experiences that many women have spoken out about: belittling language and condescension, unwanted sexual advances, outright harassment, and sometimes violent abuse and threats when they speak up about the other things that make them feel unwelcome.

It is now. I don’t know that it was a couple of years ago (at the time I thought it was mostly just a matter of forgetfulness – conference organizers forgetting to ask women to speak and forgetting how to look for them when PZ and others told them to ask), but it sure as hell is now. There are places I won’t go near, for the simple reason that I don’t want buckets of ordure dumped over my head.

Atheism+ isn’t creating division, it’s an effort to fix an already existing division by lowering the barriers to women’s participation in the atheist movement. The widespread adoption of anti-harassment policies at most major atheist conferences, as well as the series of atheist leaders speaking out against hate directed at women, are a good start, but there’s much more progress to be made.

Like…people stopping. People stopping things like this disgusting podcast, in which Reap Paden calls Stephanie Zvan a fucking bitch over and over again in a shouting enraged rant, and later joins with some other dudes to call Rebecca Watson a stupid cunt. Just not doing that, would be progress. I don’t see Reap Paden doing a racist version of that, so progress would be not doing a sexist one either.

For many atheists, the events leading up to the formation of Atheism+ have been one dispiriting experience after another, as the depths of hate that have been festering among us have emerged into public view. It’s clear there’s a small subset of people within the atheist community, mostly but not exclusively male, who are driven into a raving fury by the idea that there should be any limitations on people’s behavior or that we should undertake to make our movement more diverse. It’s unlikely that we can rid ourselves of these people entirely; but at the very least, we hope to ensure that the larger community won’t sanction their behavior, regard it as acceptable or tacitly condone it by saying and doing nothing.

Or somewhat more than tacitly condone it by saying and doing nothing about that while pitching daily fits about “FTBullies” and their friends and allies.

Most important, we want to be clear that this isn’t a problem unique to atheism. On the contrary, it’s something that’s happened over and over through history as once-fringe ideas move into the mainstream and become more diverse. As this article on io9 notes, other conferences are having these same fights, which may well mean that feminism and social justice are ideas whose time has come.

Oh god that last part makes me want to bang my head against the wall. We thought feminism’s time had come forty years ago. Forty fucking years ago, children. It’s so sad that we’re forlornly hoping that maybe now…

You youngsters will be saying the same thing in forty years. I’m sorry to tell you that, but you will.

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

Well great. No need to worry about all the poor sad tragic parents in Germany frustrated in their desire to snip off the end of their infant boy’s penis. They can haz circumcision. Yay!

The Cologne court ruling in June outraged Germany’s Muslims and Jews, and triggered an anguished national debate, by stating that ritual circumcision of under-aged boys amounted to “bodily harm” and parents should wait for their son to make his own decision.

Omigod I know, right? Wait for their son to make his own decision! How crazy is that?! If they wait, he’ll decide no! And that won’t do, because. So obviously they absolutely have to do it when he’s too small and altricial to refuse. That’s absolutely the only fair thing! If you know it’s something a person with a mature-ish brain would refuse to do, you totally have to do it to them when they are infants. This is God’s wish. God could have just issued the infants without the foreskin, but that would be too easy.

Jewish and Muslim groups branded the court order an attack on their religious freedom and an embarrassed German government — particularly sensitive to charges of intolerance because of the Nazi past — vowed to bring in legislation swiftly to protect ritual circumcisions.

Germany is home to about 4 million Muslims, mostly of Turkish origin, and 120,000 Jews. Chancellor Angela Merkel said if it failed to take action it risked becoming a laughing stock.

And there was just absolutely no need to think about the competing rights of the infants to keep their bodies intact until they were old enough to make their own decisions. Hell no! Fall all over yourselves to appease religious ”groups” as if nothing else mattered.

The Justice Ministry has now issued the outlines of the new legislation that will protect a family’s right to circumcise their child, provided they have been fully informed about the procedure and use the “most effective pain relief possible.”

Completion and approval of the new law, which gives any family the right to have their child circumcised, regardless of religion, may be just weeks away. Some lawmakers are pressing for a vote of conscience freed from party discipline.

The right, the right, the right – as if the only right that mattered were the right of parents to have something done to their child. As if the right of the child – the infant - not to have a bit snipped off for no real reason had never even been thought of.

Muslim and Jewish groups have cautiously welcomed the outline proposal, but the months of uncertainty and debate that followed the Cologne ruling — which triggered rare joint demonstrations — have shaken the communities.

“This whole row has been very damaging to the integration process,” said Cologne doctor Omar Kezze.

Kezze, originally from Aleppo in Syria, is the doctor whose trial sparked the Cologne court ruling. A boy he circumcised was taken to hospital after his wounds continued to bleed and the hospital informed the police and local prosecutors. The court cleared Kezze of all charges but created a legal minefield when it classified circumcision as “bodily harm”.

“We have a financial crisis, we have extremists on the left and the right, many, many attacks,” Kezze said, speaking in his busy surgery where pictures of his native city adorn the wall.

“There are many things for our prosecutors to fight; they really shouldn’t be questioning a tradition dating back to Abraham.”

Bollocks. Evil bollocks. A tradition dating back to Abraham is just the kind of thing that everyone should be questioning.

Not all in Germany want to allow religious circumcisions. An opinion poll by TNS Emnid shortly after the Cologne ruling found 56% opposed to the practice.

Some doctors and children’s rights associations submitted a petition in September calling for a two-year moratorium and a round-table of medical, religious and legal experts to study circumcision fully.

“In the clear opinion of experts, the amputation of the foreskin is a grave interference in the bodily integrity of a child,” Georg Ehrmann, chairman of the child protection group Deutsche Kinderhilfe, told a news conference.

Oh well who cares what they think. It’s only what “the communities” think that counts.

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

An Egyptian women’s rights activist, Dalia Ziada, gave a talk at Tufts a couple of days ago and said what we already know: that the revolution is not an egalitarian revolution, and is taking away women’s rights as opposed to expanding them.

The pro-democracy figure warns that the heady optimism that infused Cairo’s Tahrir Square last year is being slowly replaced by fear that the very political forces that helped sweep long-serving Hosni Mubarak from power are remaking Egyptian society into a rigid, religiously intolerant, patriarchal system.

“What’s happening now is the Muslim Brotherhood is coercing everything,” she said, referring to the once-banned conservative Islamic political group that now dominates Egypt’s parliament and the presidency. “What I fear is that we will be facing the Muslim Brotherhood’s theocracy with Mubarak’s autocracy.”

…

“I don’t believe our revolution will succeed until one day we will have a woman president. I don’t believe there can be a democracy unless women are properly in power,” she said in a speech at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in Medford, Mass., yesterday.

Indeed there can’t, since women are half of the demos.

…the Muslim Brotherhood and its Freedom and Justice Party agitate for policies and legislation – such as child marriage and female genital circumcision – that, Ms. Ziada argues, are contrary to the ideals of last year’s protesters…

But Egypt’s political life also mirrors traditional social norms, she acknowledged, particularly when it comes to attitudes toward women in public life. She said her organization helped run a public opinion survey not long ago in Cairo, and of the roughly 1,000 people surveyed, every one of them said they did not want a woman to be president.

“Men are telling women, ‘Go back home, it’s not your time now, we want to build democracy, you should be home,’” she said, wearing one of her distinctive brightly-colored head scarfs. “It’s not proper that the people who led the revolution are now completely out of the scene now,” she said.

No it’s not, but the outlook is grim.

I should end on a more hopeful note. I got nothin.

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

What one can expect when right-wing theocrats get power – arrests and prosecutions for “blasphemy” because of a Facebook page. Yes really – a Facebook page.

A man was arrested last week in Evia, Greece, on charges of posting “malicious blasphemy and religious insult on the known social networking site, Facebook” according to a press release by the Greek police.

The accused, whose identity has not been made public, had created and managed the Facebook page Elder Pastitsios the Pastafarian…

Paisios, who died in 1994, is well-known in Greece for his spiritual teachings. There have been dozens of books published about him and his prophecies, including such topics as the end of the world, the upbringing of children, couples’ relationships, even the diet Paisios supposedly followed. Some high-ranking priests have proposed that the Orthodox Church sanctify him – a kind of elevation to sainthood.

“Pastitsios was pure satire and without any vulgar language or insults,” the accused said in an interview with the Greek website Pandoras Box, where he explained how he wanted to criticize the commercialization of Paisios. “I take the books and criticize them. I use satire.”

Yes well that’s blasphemy, so you’re busted.

The issue of the Pastitsios page was brought to the attention of the minister of public order by a member of parliament belonging to Golden Dawn, the neo-fascist party that entered the Greek legislature for the first time in May. Golden Dawn’s popularity has been rising, and as a result it is able to influence the public agenda, with the help of the populist Greek media and the government’s fear of losing its more conservative voters.

“Obviously, the law is irrational since God doesn’t need to be protected by any criminal code,” says Professor Katrougalos. “What the young man did was express himself. For some, it may have been in a distasteful manner but you can’t prosecute taste.”

Or rather, you can.

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

There’s a new Jesus and Mo book!

And it has a foreword by Richard Dawkins, which RD has posted at RDF.

…if I had to award the Palme d’Orfor the most original and wittiest of all (amid stiff competition from such gems as Brian Dalton’s Mr Deity and the songs of Roy Zimmerman) I would have to nominate an unassuming strip cartoon from my home country: Jesus and Mo.

Folie à Dieu is the latest in a marvellous series of collections of Jesus and Mo cartoons. Every intelligent observer of contemporary disputation will enjoy it. The central protagonists, Jesus and Mo themselves, are drawn with such disarming affection, it would be hard to take offence – even given the voracious appetite for offence that the faithful uniquely indulge. Smile your way through this book, and you end up with a real liking for Jesus and Mo, a sympathy for their touchingly insecure tussles with each other, an empathy with their endearingly naïve struggle to justify their respective faiths in the teeth of harsh reality: the reality of science and critical reason, often given voice by the never seen character of the friendly but no-nonsense barmaid.

Barmaid rumored to be none other than your humble servant. I couldn’t possibly comment.

…of all the victims of this splendid mockery, perhaps the most deeply wounded will be “sophisticated theologians”, those paragons of puffed-up vacuity, puffing out their soggy, infinitely yielding clouds of self-deceiving, apophatic obscurity. “Sophisticated theology” is oxymoronic because, in truth, there is nothing in theology to be sophisticated about, but it has pretensions that are interminably spun out in verbiage whose very length contrasts with the devastating economy with which the Jesus and Mo author slices it up. To do this so effectively requires a firm grasp not just of “theology” but of philosophy too. The laconic elegance with which our Author takes out the “theologians” could only be achieved by somebody who has taken the trouble to immerse himself thoroughly in their self-deluding claptrap. Where a professional philosopher might take 1000 words to puncture the balloon of apophatuous obscurantism, the J & M strip achieves the same result at a fraction of the length and no diminution of critical effect.

Well he has to, dunne. There’s only so much room in those boxes.

But seriously. It’s a very pleasing foreword.

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

I’ve seen some strange exclamations about the “hunting down” of Justin Vacula, from a couple of people not…what shall I call it…not paid-up members of the Slime Institute. Exclamations that “vengeance is haunting Salem” and it really really was “a witch hunt” and the hunters (or is it witches?) are “vicious, hateful ideologues.”

But there’s a problem there, given the non-membership. The problem is that the people in question have never said a word about the much more sustained, much more vengeful, much more vicious, much more hateful, much more ideological “hunting down” of for instance Rebecca Watson. Or Surly Amy. Or (not to put too fine a point on it) me. Not a word. On the contrary, they have supported some of it, by praising the hunters, by circulating their photoshopped caricatures of us, by echoing many of their stupider accusations.

Has anybody called Vacula any sexist names? Has anybody been monitoring every single thing he says for a year and a half in order to jump all over it? Has anybody circulated malicious caricatures of him? Not that I’ve seen.

So no. I call bullshit.

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

And on the same day, in another part of the forest…

…another busy representative of another university Student Union meddled with another Atheist, Humanist, and Secularist Society. Reading University this time, and RUSU and RAHS. This time not a Jesus and Mo toon on a Facebook page, but a pineapple named Mohammed.

The NSS quotes a statement by Tim Rouse of the Atheist, Humanist and Secularist Society:

Among the material displayed on our stall was a pineapple. We labelled this pineapple “Mohammed”, to encourage discussion about blasphemy, religion, and liberty, as well as to celebrate the fact that we live in a country in which free speech is protected, and where it is lawful to call a pineapple by whatever name one chooses.

Towards the end of the afternoon, we were informed by a member of RUSU staff that there had been complaints about the pineapple, despite the fact that no complaints had been made at any point to anybody on the stall. Our commitment to freedom of expression meant that we refused to remove the pineapple from our stall. After a few minutes, we were told by another member of RUSU staff that “Either the pineapple goes, or you do”, whereupon they seized the pineapple and tried to leave. However, the pineapple was swiftly returned, and shortly was displayed again, with the name Mohammed changed to that of Jesus.

Shortly afterwards, the second RUSU staff member returned and ordered RAHS to leave the Freshers’ Fayre. At this point, a group of around five students, some of whom self-identified as Muslim, approached the stall and began to criticise us, asking and telling us to remove the pineapple. Though these students mainly engaged in discussion, one removed the label from the pineapple without our permission.

And on it went, wrangle wrangle, until they felt forced to leave, although they continued to hand out leaflets outside the event.

One fire is put out while another is set ablaze.

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

A good outcome. Not the best outcome, but a good one. LSE has ruled that its Student Union Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society does not have to remove any Jesus and Mo cartoons from its Facebook page, nor does it have to remove the prefix LSESU from its name. It has also ruled that the crappy things the LSESU said about LSESU ASH were crappy things to say (or rather, in bureaucratic language, that they were inappropriate).

LSESU ASH President Chris Moos made a statement on behalf of the Society’s committee, saying, ‘We wish that LSESU could have engaged with us originally in order to resolve the situation when it arose and remain disappointed that they have not apologised for their unjustified defamatory remarks against us. However, we are very pleased that no action is being taken to interfere with our right to free expression, nor to remain a society clearly affiliated with our university. The cartoons on our Facebook page criticised religion in a satirical way and we continue to reject any claim that their publications could constitute any sort of harassment or intimidation of Muslims or Christians. ‘

Andrew Copson, BHA Chief Executive, said, ‘It is good that free speech has not been curtailed at the end of this saga, but it is a great shame that non-religious students were let down by their union in this way. The conflation of offence with intimidation, which allowed this situation to escalate as it did, is totally out of place in a university, where the challenging of deeply held believe should be a routine activity.’

Good.

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

Another one. Another medical coughcoughcoughcough threatens to sue Simon Singh to make him stop saying the medical coughcoughcoughcough is full of coughcoughcoughcoughcoughcough. Josephine Jones collects all the links again, and many links there are.

The medical coughcoughcoughcough is a new “alternative health” magazine jauntily called What Doctors Don’t Tell You. Jones has a picture, so you can see what it’s like:

See? Every item looks like coughcoughcoughcough. Doctors don’t know shit but listen to us and we will fix whatever it is, because it’s that simple.

Singh dared to suggest that it could be irresponsible of high street retailers to stock the title and shared his concerns with the distributor, Comag.

They apparently (essentially) told him to shove off and when he suggested he might blog the email exchange, things really went to pieces.

Comag wrote in an email to Singh:

I should inform you that we have sought legal advice in respect of this matter. We would take any attempts to damage our reputation on social media or elsewhere very seriously.

And in a subsequent email, they confirmed that they had instructed legal counsel.

This is somewhat ironic considering that the magazine’s owner, Lynne McTaggart had argued in favour of free speech, even referring to critics such as Singh and Hayley Stevens as ‘bully boys’ and ‘trolls’.

It seems it’s fine to suggest women should lock up their daughters to spare them from the HPV vaccine (page 3 of the October edition) and to assert that researchers say popular sunscreens cause skin cancer (page 9), but wrong to suggest that it might be irresponsible to allow this misleading, alarmist nonsense a high street presence.

If Comag are concerned about their reputation then threatening to sue was perhaps not a wise move.

The British Chiropractic Association may be inclined to agree, as might the Burzynski Clinic.

Can you say Streisand? I thought you could. Can you say Rhys Morgan? Can you say Marc Stephens? Can you say Popehat? I thought you could.

The Nightingale Collaboration sent 26 complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority about ads in the magazine, which they think is a record.

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

The Jerusalem bus company Egged has decided to stop carrying any advertising on its buses – not because it dislikes advertising but because of “Haredi violence and vandalism.”

“This matter has something important to say to Israeli society,” says [the religious freedom movement] Yerushalmim CEO Uri Ayalon. “We can’t abandon the capital city.  Today, there are no pictures of men or women in Jerusalem. Tomorrow,  there won’t be any in Tel Aviv. It’s inconceivable.”

“Egged’s  decision is absurd,” says [Rachel] Azaria, the [Jerusalem] councilwoman [and Yerushalmim activist who successfully petitioned Israel's High Court of Justice to stop Egged's and Cnaan's censorship of women's faces and bodies]. “If Egged buses are  vandalized, then instead of going to the police and demanding  enforcement, they’re making men and women invisible. It’s like not  letting the kids go out to recess if there’s a bully in school, instead  of dealing with the bully.”

Disappearing all women is the new normal.

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

At ur-B&W. Here is a big excerpt.

In the time it takes you to read this article, over 50 young girls will have their clitoris hacked out. What are you going to do about it?

Each girl will be pinned down, with no anaesthetic, whilst 8,000 nerve endings cringe at the touch of an unclean scalpel. Each girl will scream and writhe and howl – but you won’t hear any of them. Each girl will be irreversibly, unbearably, agonisingly mutilated.

“I heard it,” described Ayaan Hirsi Ali, “like a butcher snipping the fat off a piece of meat. A piercing pain shot up between my legs”. Skin rips, blood pours, cries screech. But it wasn’t over for her just yet: next “came the sewing… the long, blunt needle clumsily pushed into my bleeding outer labia,” thread weaving through thread to leave behind only a miniscule opening for urination and menstruation.

The scars of this torture, butchery on a factory-line scale – and that is the only way to describe it – will never fade. Premenstrual cramps, traumatic periods, an interminable stench of soured blood (caused by menstrual difficulties), problems with pregnancy and childbirth, pain during sexual intercourse, psychological damage and the risk of fistula are but a few of the long, long list of health complications that will haunt every girl’s adulthood. That’s if they survive the immediate blood loss, infection and severe trauma. It’s an experience from which a child may never fully recover.

Conservative estimates suggest that over 100 million women worldwide have been subjected to female genital mutilation (FGM). Article Five of the UN Declaration of Human Rights decrees that no one “shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”. And surely such human rights are universal; or else they are nothing.

Read on.

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

Since Vacula used his resignation as an opportunity to do more hissing and finger-pointing, I’ll give it a bit more attention. Apart from anything else the editor in me is refusing to be silent. He writes really badly, which is another drawback in a director.

Following a lengthy period of self-reflection and deliberation, I am freely resigning from my position…

Bad right out of the gate. Tin ear. “A lengthy period”? “Of self-reflection and deliberation”? Who talks like that? Dude, just say you’ve thought about it carefully. Talk normal. This impulse to inflate the vocabulary is fatal.

Unfortunately, some persons in this community who have been quite vocal in objecting to my appointment – and many who were quick to dismiss me — do not seem to be interested in that.

Same again. “Some persons”?

…a ‘you are with us or against us’ attitude is coupled with personal vendettas and whispering campaigns taking the stage regardless of concerns about the cohesion of the secular movement.

How did the stage get in there? It doesn’t fit. But never mind that. What a joke: Vacula has been relentlessly pursuing personal vendettas himself, and he’s been right in there with the whispering. The pious above-it-all act is just that: an act. (Oh maybe that’s how the stage got in.)

Organizations are attacked, leaders of major organizations are condemned, prominent authors are boycotted, and ‘real-life’ careers are targeted as a result of disagreements or misunderstandings which likely could have been resolved by a simple telephone call…or ignored.

Passive voice, passive voice, passive voice – with no agents. One reason the passive voice is often a bad choice is because it evades the need to provide a subject of the verb.

And then the substance again applies to him at least as much as to anyone else. Vacula targeted me, for one, and I’m not alone in that. He too attacks and condemns and targets.

Almost immediately following my appointment with the Secular Coalition for America, I was the target of a campaign of lies, character attacks, and distortions.

Sounds like your podcast about me, which you never corrected. On the contrary, you did a blogpost complaining about my pointing out that you’d misrepresented me in your podcast. That takes a lot of gall – and very little in the way of “self-reflection and deliberation.”

My detractors did not only brand me as an ‘enemy of the people’ in a similar fashion to the eponymous play written by Henrik Ibsen…

Oh good god. Avoid the self-important note! Plus avoid using big words if you don’t know what they mean.

I have indeed made some mistakes and handled some situations poorly in past months. These mistakes were errors of judgment and were not, by any means, coupled with malicious intent. My detractors have blown these mistakes out of proportion almost never bothering to mention my concessions, never to personally contact me in a constructive manner to address grievances, or correct their own mistakes — and treated me unfairly.

Bullshit. Just outright bullshit. I did “personally contact” him – but maybe by “in a constructive manner” means not actually pointing out a substantive misrepresentation. Maybe treating him unfairly is criticizing him for doing something bad. Heads he wins tails everyone else loses, eh?

I am thus putting my personal wants aside and resigning from my position as co-chair of the Secular Coalition for America’s Pennsylvania chapter in order to end this toxic controversy. I do not wish to see the organization and its staff which I will continue to support – and many individuals who support me — buttressed with attacks.

Ha! Mustn’t rub it in. That wouldn’t be constructive, or fair.

Anyway there you have it. Spiteful, self-regarding, self-important, incapable of recognizing error. That’s Justin the Martyr.

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

And blames his critics.

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

Arvind Iyer has a wonderful post at Nirmukta arguing that tales of shared ancestry or the threat of a common enemy are not the only way to unite people around a cause. Popular culture can also do that.

There was this Japanese tv series in the early ’90s, Oshin, which is affectionately remembered by people all over Asia.

What makes people even of warring nations forget their differences while watching this show, is not just a single dialogue like the impassioned imploring of the conscientious army deserter Shunsaku Anchan^2a that “War is not the answer” to resolve differences. The forgetting of differences is thanks to some reminders which suffuse this show’s every episode in both their everyday settings and their unsettling moments, reminders of the essential sameness of the human condition regardless of borders.  This cultural product which people of a divided world together recall with fondness, is an unsung triumph of secular humanism in its own right. This series can be thought of as a resource for the secular humanist project of cultivating ‘educated feeling’³ and complementing Reason with Compassion.

Like the last book of The Iliad, or The Winter’s Tale. The example that occurred to me when Arvind alerted me to the post was Northern Exposure. There are more. You got any?

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The Washington Post blog The Root has an African-American atheist, Mark Hatcher, saying what that’s like.

[One day] I’m walking across campus, and normally don’t have it on, but I had my Atheist t-shirt on. Somebody came up to me and said “Oh my God, I thought I was crazy, I thought I was the only one. Thank you for letting me know I’m not insane.” That’s understandable in our community. You gotta love Jesus. If you don’t love Jesus, you gotta love somebody. My mom’s first question to me was ‘What, so you don’t believe in anything?!” And that’s hard in the black community. You gotta believe in something in order to be a complete person. This person coming up to me, saying that they thought they were insane because of the type of pressure that was on them to believe in something that they just simply couldn’t, I was like, “You know what? We need a community here”…

There are other things you can believe in though. You can believe in a better future for humans. You can believe in hope, in solidarity, in compassion…you can even (though you will get a lot of people yelling at you) believe in progress. You can believe in music, in art, in love, in sex, in nature, in beauty – damn, you can believe in a lot of things. They don’t have to be a person, especially not a magical person.

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

Great. There was a “symposium” in Ireland at which some boffins concluded to their own satisfaction that “abortion is not necessary to save the mother’s life in any circumstance” so PersonhoodUSA naturally gives a yell of triumph. Go right ahead and force Catholic hospitals to let pregnant women die rather than provide an abortion, Catholic church!

According to the Irish organization Youth Defence, “Leading medical experts speaking at a major International Symposium on Excellence in Maternal Healthcare held in Dublin have concluded that ‘direct abortion is not medically necessary to save the life of a mother.’”

Over 140 medical professionals attended the Symposium where new research and extensive clinical experience was presented by experts in obstetrics and gynecology, mental health, and molecular epidemiology. The symposium’s final determinations were published in a declaration titled “Dublin Declaration on Maternal Healthcare” which reads:

“As experienced practitioners and researchers in Obstetrics and Gynaecology, we affirm that direct abortion is not medically necessary to save the life of a woman. We uphold that there is a fundamental difference between abortion, and necessary medical treatments that are carried out to save the life of the mother, even if such treatment results in the loss of life of her unborn child. We confirm that the prohibition of abortion does not affect, in any way, the availability of optimal care to pregnant women.”

Science has spoken! Well, at least medical expertise has spoken. Or some medical expertise has spoken. Or a bit of medical expertise combined with an agenda has spoken.

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

Seen Half the Sky? It’s pretty good, not surprisingly. One thing I liked is that they specifically took on cultural relativism, and said no thank you. Sheryl WuDunn made a point that I often raise, because it illustrates the issue very well – but she could make it even better, because of her grandmother. Her grandmother had bound feet. She simply said that, and that said she’s delighted that that particular “cultural” item is dead and gone.

It took force to make it dead and gone, you know. The commies did it. The commies forced that cultural tradition to die out, by forcing people to stop breaking all the bones in their daughters’ feet. How cruel and coercive of them, yes?

The show was quite graphic about FGM – about how fucking horrible it is for the little girls it’s done to. There’s no anaesthetic – it’s just slice slice slice. Then their legs are tied together and they’re left to lie still for a week, with no food so that they won’t crap on themselves.

And then they die in childbirth, because the whole thing fucks up the process. Obviously. It’s all sewn tightly together with just one tiny hole to let the urine and blood out. This does not aid childbirth. It doesn’t matter, because women are expendable.

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