Terry Eagleton is getting to be embarrassing. He reviewed a collection of essays on secularism last week, with his familiar combination of malice, inaccuracy and laziness. That’s not a good combination for a reviewer.

Most recent defences of secularism, not least those produced by “Ditchkins”
(Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens), have been irate, polemical affairs, powered by a crude species of off-the-peg, reach-me-down Enlightenment.

There’s the laziness and the malice – recycling his own stupid joke, which was never funny in the first place, not least because Dawkins and Hitchens are really not interchangeable. And there’s the inaccuracy too, in the meaningless sneer at the end.

It is scarcely a caricature of Dawkins’s work to suggest we are all getting nicer and nicer and that if it wasn’t for religious illusion, we would collectively outdo Kenneth Clark in sheer civility.

Scarcely a caricature! Scarcely a caricature!! This from a literary critic, for christ’s sake. A caricature is exactly what it is, and a broad, stupid, vulgar one at that.

Adam Phillips, a superb writer whose outlook on the world is that of Islington Man…

What, exactly, is it that Terry Eagleton thinks separates his outlook from that of “Islington Man”? What exactly is it that makes Eagleton’s outlook superior in its humility and authenticity and austerity? He’s a prosperous academic; he has been and perhaps still is trendy; he has acolytes; he has international gigs; he writes for the New Statesman and the Guardian. How is he not “Islington Man” himself? Whence comes the great height from which he looks down on other prosperous academics?

Christianity is certainly other-worldly, and so is any reasonably sensitive soul who has been reading the newspapers. The Christian gospel looks to a future transformation of the appalling mess we see around us into a community of justice and friendship, a change so deep-seated and indescribable as to make Lenin look like a Lib Dem.

Big woop. “The Christian gospel” can afford to do that, can’t it, because it’s just making it up. “Looking forward” to things is dead easy; making things happen is another kind of activity altogether, so naturally the latter is much tamer than the former. People who make things happen have to work within real limits; people who just make things up don’t. You’d think a lit crit would know that.

There are some predictable misunderstandings in these essays. No theologian worth his or her salt would see God as an “entity” as Philip Kitcher does.

Why’s that then? (If it’s even true, which I doubt.) See above – because making things up is a lot easier than working within the limits of the real world.

A message for quasi-Islington Man.

Pious Saudi Arabia, famed the world over for its vast compassion.

Indonesia is stopping all maids from going to work in Saudi Arabia after the
beheading of a maid last week for murdering her allegedly abusive employer.

The execution of 54-year-old Ruhati Binti Sapahi caused public outrage in
Indonesia, prompting the government to call for the ban.

Saudi Arabia’s compassionate concern for foreign domestic workers is an old story.

Sumiati Binti Salan Mustapa, 23, remains  hospitalized after suffering injuries by her employer who allegedly  beat, mutilated and scalded her…The news of Sumiati’s horrendous abuse came just as  another domestic worker’s body was found in a trash bin. The victim,  Kikim Moalasari, another Indonesian maid, was allegedly tortured by her  employer. The culprits in both cases have since been arrested.

So much for the ummah.

I’m reading The Pregnant Widow. I’ve heard some good things about it, and I thought The Information was intermittently brilliant, albeit irritating in places, and boring in places, so I’m reading it. The first few pages were electrifying, and I was all excited, thinking I’d struck gold. But then it turned out the first few pages were different from the next pages.

I’m pushing. Hard. I’m trying and failing to resist boredom and the resulting feeling of exasperation – the “why are you telling me all this?” feeling.

Anybody read it? Anybody love it?

Hitchens asks a necessary question about Michele Bachmann and her presentation of self.

Where does it come from, this silly and feigned idea that it’s good to be able
to claim a small-town background?…Overall demographic impulses to one side, there is nothing about a bucolic upbringing that breeds the skills necessary to govern a complex society in an age of globalization and violent unease. We need candidates who know about laboratories, drones, trade cycles, and polychrome conurbations both here and overseas. Yet the media make us complicit in the myth—all politics is yokel?—that the fast-vanishing small-town life is the key to ancient virtues. Wasilla, Alaska, is only the most vivid recent demonstration of the severe limitations of this worldview.

Not as vivid as Crawford, Texas, given that Palin hasn’t actually been president yet. But no matter, the point is the same. Small-town life is the key to nothing in particular, except maybe boredom. “Vote for me, I was bored while growing up.” Tempting, but no.

I just had a very weird experience, or maybe not all that weird in one way, but pretty damn weird in any other way. Not weird given that some people are bat-loony, but weird given that some people ought to know better. (Is it possible for people who are bat-loony to know better? Is that a ridiculous incoherent idea, on a level with belief in free will? Probably no and probably yes…but then the question becomes “exactly how bat-loony are we talking about here?”)

I was walking along a residential street a few blocks from where I live (so I don’t know anyone there, I don’t recognize faces), mind elsewhere (though nowhere in particular) as usual, and suddenly some grizzled auld fella who was pottering in his garden snarled* at me as he crossed the sidewalk toward the parking strip, “What would it take to make you smile?”

I jerked to a stop and turned to stare at him in astonishment, and after mulling it for a few seconds demanded why on earth he would ask me that.

We had a nice little shouty war there on the sidewalk, for three or four or five minutes.

He was of course surprised to be answered, and did a lot of angry shouting about seeing me walking past here all the time, and I never smile, I never wave, I never say hello. I did a lot of return shouting about being allowed to walk here, and not having even been aware of him until he challenged me, and why would he expect me to be smiling as I walked up the street. He did more angry shouting about there are two sides to the street, and oh fuck off, and I never say hello. I did more repeat shouting about why would he expect me to be smiling as I walked up the street and why would he think he gets to tell me how to arrange my face. He started telling me to go away, and I kept pointing out that he had challenged me. He did more angry shouting about always seeing me walking past, and he’s sick of seeing my horrible face “like this” and he did an exaggerated sad-clown face with the mouth dragged down like Emmett Kelly. Gee I love it when people do that. He wasn’t the first. I told him that’s how my face is. He tripped up then and apologized, but quickly thought better of it and went back to angry shouting.

Here’s the thing: I’m extremely ugly, especially now that I’m 153 years old. I do have one of those downturned mouths that some people have, so I do look very grumpy when my face is in neutral position. I’ve had acquaintances helpfully point this out to me, in case I wasn’t aware of it – “Gee, you’re a lot less ugly when you smile.” Oh thanks.

So yes, I’m ugly and I look grumpy when I walk down the street. But I have this core idea that I’m allowed to do that, and that people who live along that street ought not to come running out to tell me I’m uglying up their street. I also have a core idea that I don’t have an obligation to try to look less ugly for any random gardening men who might be pottering about when I pass.

I eventually got around to asking my antagonist about this – “Do you say that to men who walk by? Do you tell men to smile as they walk past your house?” He swelled up with more outrage, and started telling me he’d been in combat, I wasn’t a woman, get away from here with my lesbian bullshit, he wasn’t afraid of any men, he was afraid of women if they really were women. After lots of shouting back and forth along these lines, he slipped up again and said “But it’s none of my business.” “Exactly!” I said. “Bye!” That was my exit line, but he shouted after me “Have a wonderful day” so I shouted back “You too” so he shouted back “That’s the first nice thing you’ve said this whole time” and I shouted back “Gee I wonder why!” and after that all I heard was muttering, so I won.

I did you know. He thought he was just going to throw a little male weight around, with no repercussions. He wasn’t expecting a Spanish Inquisition I mean an aggressive ugly ol’ broad shouting at him for five minutes.

Now here’s what I want to know. Lots of guys here. What do you think? I don’t believe for one second that he ever, ever, ever says that to men. Ever. I don’t think for a second that he thinks it’s any of his business what expression a man has on his face when walking past his house. What do you think? Would a (straight) man ever say that to a man? And has any man ever said anything like that to you?

*Update: note that he snarled. This was not a friendly or flirtatious or neighborly overture; it was angry and hostile in the opening question, and it got much more so when I replied. When I asked him why he would ask me such a question, he approached me aggressively, demanding “do you know how to smile?” There was no ambiguity about this; it was not borderline; the guy was pissed off, and nasty, and in my face. He also got very rude, very quickly, while I limited myself to insisting that he had no business telling me how to look.

Let’s play “Let’s make up some statistics.”

An interlocutor told me about an hour ago that “most academics everywhere are atheists.” Eh what? I thought. In the UK and Sweden and fortunate places like that, no doubt, but in the US? Which is what we were talking about (via my post on that Catholofascist article in Crisis yesterday). Most academics in the US are atheists? Yeah I don’t think so. Given that most colleges and “universities” in the US are, shall we say, non-elite, and that most teaching is in vocational subjects (most degrees are in Business), I don’t think so.

Rilly? I said. Do you know that? Any stats?

She gave the stats for philosophers. Not going to fall for that, was I! I knew about those stats; I wrote them up for an issue of TPM whenever it was. I wasn’t asking about philosophers, I was asking about academics. My interlocutor said as far as she knew “in every discipline religious believers are in a minority.” So I looked it up.

Riiiight.

…researchers at the Harvard Divinity School recently implemented a study to determine the religiosity of college and university professors around the country.The study, entitled “How religious are America’s college and university professors?,” has been circulating throughout academia since last year…

The study found that 23.4 percent of college and university professors describe themselves as either atheists or agnostics, with the remainder reporting some level of belief in God or another higher power.

23.4%, including agnostics as well as atheists. Not quite “most are atheists.”

I didn’t just fall off the potato truck this morning, you know.

Patrick J. Reilly has written an article about the heterodoxy of ethics and law professors at several Jesuit universities. Who is he?

Patrick J. Reilly is founder and president of the Cardinal Newman Society, a national organization to advocate and support the renewal of genuine Catholic higher education.

Ah. So he’s someone with a clear agenda, and one that is a contradiction in terms. “Genuine Catholic higher education” clearly means orthodox Catholic “education” that adheres to established dogma, which means it is fundamentally opposed to genuine education. What he means by “education” should better be called information-stuffing, or just memorization.

Here’s his beef. The US Conference of Catholic Bishops – the one that subscribes to the bishop of Phoenix’s policy that preganant women’s lives must not be saved if it takes an abortion to do so, no matter what, including even no matter if the fetus won’t survive in any case – has a position on assisted suicide, which of course is that it’s evil.

…as with so many moral issues, the bishops need look no further than our Catholic institutions to find that the “nationwide campaign” in opposition to Church teaching has been ongoing for many years.

Suicide’s legalization has been advocated by prominent professors in Catholic universities including Georgetown, Marquette, Santa Clara, and Boston College.

In other words, faculty in “our” Catholic institutions are being disobedient. They are defying authority. They are using their own judgement. This is scandalous.

As reported in “Teaching Euthanasia,” an exclusive report in the June 2005 issue of Crisis, multiple professors at Catholic universities had taken positions on end-of-life issues that seemed to conflict with Vatican teaching.Today, some of those professors are no longer teaching at Catholic universities, but others remain perched in Jesuit law schools and theology and philosophy departments.

Which is an outrage, because they are Catholic universities, therefore the Vatican owns them, therefore the professors are forbidden to take positions that conflict with Vatican teaching. Yet there they still are.

Catholic universities are partly responsible for such professors’ influence by virtue of their employment. Academic freedom protects professors’ rights to seek truth according to the methods of their discipline. But when professors deny the truths of faith and disregard the common good — especially of those whose lives are snuffed out prematurely — they violate the mission of a Catholic university.

When professors deny the truths of faith they violate the mission of a Catholic university.

That’s on the record. Helpful of him to make it so very unambiguous.

Emily Manuel at Religion Dispatches talks to Adam Kotsko about his new book, which is about atonement. She mentions someone posting on his blog that “we haven’t really thought through a proper atheism yet.”

Right. I think that you can see this with the New Atheists. Dawkins’ and Hitchens’ and Dennett’s books are a kind of simplistic critique of religion that’s basically not going to change anyone’s mind. I think there has to be more to say about religion other than the fact that it makes no sense as an empirical claim. That’s just too obvious to be interesting. I think that we as a society deserve a better form of atheism.

The claim that the simplistic critique of religion is not going to change anyone’s mind is, frankly, simply ridiculous. He hedges it with “basically” but it’s not clear exactly what the hedge is – the simplistic critique will superficially change anyone’s mind but just not basically? I have no idea what that means.

The claim is ridiculous because it’s not true, and it’s easy to find out that it’s not true.

It’s also not even plausible. Why would the simplistic critique of religion not change anyone’s mind? Is everyone’s mind changeable only by complicated critiques? Certainly not. Most of the time it’s the other way around, surely – a clear easily-grapsed critique with few moving parts is the best way to change someone’s mind. That’s true even for clever people. “I’m going to take Lilac Road.” “Lilac Road is closed for repairs.” “Ah – I’ll go via Pepperville Drive then.”

The thing about the simplistic critique of religion is that lots of people have never been exposed to it. A lot of religious belief is what people have because no one has ever offered them a critique of it, simplistic or otherwise. Sometimes just realizing that there are people who don’t think the magical being exists at all is indeed enough to change anyone’s mind.

That doesn’t mean that’s all there is to it, of course, but it does mean it’s a lot too hasty to announce that it’s not going to change anyone’s mind.

Sure, there’s more to say than that religion makes no sense as an empirical claim, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth saying that religion makes no sense as an empirical claim. By all means say more if you want to, but don’t ignore the value of saying that. It may be too obvious to Adam Kotsko to be interesting, but that doesn’t mean it’s too obvious to everyone to be interesting. If you’ve never thought of it before and then you do, it can be quite interesting.

Brendan O’Neill is a piece of work. You knew that, but I’m saying it anyway. He had himself a good time defending the pope against the evil atheists last year, but I didn’t know he’d recently amused himself by defending Dominique Strauss-Kahn against “the feminists”; but it was so.

I can’t help feeling that his arrest on charges of sexual assault is being turned into a modern-day medieval drama, a kind of reality-show version of the witch trials of old, in which DSK has been assigned the role of all-purpose hate figure rather than suspect in a crime.

Oh, sure you can. Did you try? Really try?

And feminists hate DSK because… well, because he is a man, and even worse than that he’s a man who has reportedly flirted and engaged in saucy dialogue with his female staff in the past.

Oh, yeah – those pesky puritanical prim humorless “feminists” who hate all men because they are men, and especially they hate men who flirt and engage in saucy dialogue with their servants.

What he means, of course, is that feminists are less than keen on men who attempt to rape maids in hotels. He neglects to explain why he finds that distaste so risibly contemptible. What a shit he is.

Yes we just can’t ever hate women enough, there always has to be a new way to hate them even more.

At least 38 of the 50 states across America have introduced foetal homicide laws that were intended to protect pregnant women and their unborn children from violent attacks by third parties – usually abusive male partners – but are increasingly being turned by renegade prosecutors against the women themselves.

South Carolina was one of the first states to introduce such a foetal homicide law. National Advocates for Pregnant Women has found only one case of a South Carolina man who assaulted a pregnant woman having been charged under its terms, and his conviction was eventually overturned. Yet the group estimates there have been up to 300 women arrested for their actions during pregnancy.

That’s some serious hatred.

There’s nothing like a good healthy sense of priorities, is there. What could be more urgent for Irish Catholics than to pitch a huge fit about an art installation that has something to do with “the Virgin Mary”?

In Our Lady and Other Queer Santas, Chicana artist Alma Lopez will exhibit her picture Our Lady, a digital pastiche of Our Lady of Guadeloupe, a 16th-century Peruvian manifestation of the Virgin Mary…The Madonna in a bikini, basically…

On last Friday’s Liveline, one of Ireland’s most popular radio shows, presenter Joe Duffy was flooded with calls from irate Catholics mortified by this “blasphemous” artwork.

You see what I mean. That’s what these irate Catholics are irate about – a picture of something labeled “the Virgin Mary.” Not Magdalen laundries, not child rape by priests, not industrial schools, not the Catholic church’s relentless stranglehold on the people of Ireland for generation after generation – but a picture of a putative “manifestation” of a putative woman who lived (if she lived) two thousand years ago in unblemished obscurity like nearly everyone else in human history.

Cork South Central TD Jerry Buttimer chimed in, saying the university should not be supporting an event that was “overtly blasphemous and blatantly disrespectful” and that “those in charge at UCC should consider whether or not it is appropriate to permit this exhibition to take place on its campus without affording others the opportunity to present an alternative and balanced point of view”.

Point of view? Alternative point of view? Balanced point of view?

………….What would that be? A kitsch “Mary” from a souvenir shop? Our Lady of Guadeloupe in a burqa topped by a full set of sealskins suitable for winter in Barrow? Joseph in a Speedo?

Lopez has been under attack for her artwork since it was first exhibited in California in 2001. The current campaign is headed by America Needs Fatima, a Mariolatrous US group that organises anti-abortion and anti-blasphemy rallies…Ireland, meanwhile, is facing its first blasphemy controversy since the Fianna Fáil/Green government introduced a new blasphemy law. Buckley’s claim that all Irish people revere Mary chimes dangerously with that law’s definition of blasphemy as something likely to cause “outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of [a] religion”. UCC could yet have a case on its hands.

Priorities, people. Fix them.

The BBC continues to pretend not to understand.

Geert Wilders has been acquitted of “inciting hatred” because the judges managed to distinguish between annoying/unpleasant/offensive and illegal. The BBC isn’t so sure about that.

With Thursday’s acquittal, it appears that Mr Wilders’s radical words are now more mainstream in a country that for decades was viewed as one of the most liberal and tolerant in the world.

But “liberal” and “tolerant” about what? About Islam, mostly. But there are difficulties with being “liberal” and “tolerant” about Islam, given that Islam itself is not altogether “liberal” and “tolerant.” Many critics of Islam, partly including Wilders, are critics of it because it is not altogether liberal and tolerant, or egalitarian or fair. The BBC’s implied claim that all the liberalism and tolerance are on the side of Islam and all the opposition to liberalism and tolerance are on the side of critics of Islam, is profoundly wrong.

Mr Wilders is an enormously popular politician, his Freedom Party the third
largest in parliament, and many analysts say Thursday’s acquittal will only
boost his popularity in the immigrant-wary Dutch mainstream.

…

In turn, the government is supporting many of his anti-immigrant positions,
from limiting immigration to banning face-covering attire.

But “immigrant” is not synonymous with Muslim and vice versa. Even if Wilders conflates the two, explicitly or by suggestion, the BBC should not follow his lead. “Face-covering attire” can’t just be reduced to “immigrant” so banning it can’t just be reduced to “anti-immigrant.” Yes there’s overlap and confusion and suspect motivation, but that’s all the more reason to make the distinctions.

“I’m very disappointed,” said one Dutch Moroccan, Zenap al-Garboni, eating a bagel with her children in a restaurant near the courthouse.

“He should not create hate and that’s what he’s doing. He’s creating hate
against Islam.”

Nobody should be required to love Islam.

Good news about Ai Weiwei though.

The release of Mr. Ai, 54, who is widely known and admired outside China, appeared to be a rare example in recent years of China’s bowing to international pressure on human rights. Mr. Ai was the most prominent of hundreds of people detained since China intensified a broad crackdown on critics of the government in February, when anonymous calls for mass protests modeled after the revolutions in the Middle East percolated on the Chinese Internet.

Crappy about the hundreds though.

China came under unusually heavy pressure from all corners of the globe, not only from standard diplomatic channels but also from prominent people like Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg in New York, who harangued China in May at a Manhattan opening of an outdoor sculpture exhibition by Mr. Ai, and Anish Kapoor, a leading sculptor based in Britain who this month canceled a show planned for the National Museum of China in Beijing.

And Salman Rushdie.

Don’t get too happy though.

Few dissidents who have been detained in recent years have been shown leniency. International pressure so far has not helped Liu Xiaobo, a writer who was given a 11-year prison sentence in 2009 on subversion charges. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last October, which he was not allowed to collect.

Always more to do.

Salil Tripathi set off a seriously interesting discussion of Arundhati Roy at Facebook, via a piece by Andrew Buncombe in the Independent. (This is why, say what you will, FB is not altogether silly.) I got his permission to quote him.

The subject is, as Buncombe put it:

It was the writer and activist Arundhati Roy who set foreign journalists in India busily chattering recently. In an interview with Stephen Moss in the Guardian, Ms Roy was discussing the Maoist and Adavasi “resistance” to encroachment on tribal lands. Mr Moss, asked her why, “we in the West don’t hear about these mini-wars?”. Ms Roy replied: “I have been told quite openly by several correspondents of international newspapers, that they have instructions – ‘No negative news from India’ – because it’s an investment destination. So you don’t hear about it…”

Salil said (among other things)

I agree that journalists who probe too much into Kashmir are likely to have visa problems. I also agree that editors in the West like to look at unusual stories out… of India, and not ones they’ve been covering all the time. But I don’t think there’s a grand conspiracy among editors, who meet at a pub every night in Wapping, exchanging notes, about which rah-rah story about India should they run. Likewise, there is no conspiracy among correspondents either, to meet at specific places and plan coordinated stories that decide to underplay poverty and overplay the Gurgaon malls. In fact, most journalists want the unusual – and so you will find stories that show cracks in the India shining story, just as you will find stories about Indian companies making it big abroad. The trouble with Arundhati Roy is precisely that she thinks only her truth is valid, only the story she focuses on is important, and others must write the same story, and reach the same conclusions. That was infuriating at one point; it is tiresome now. Which is why she is less relevant in India than at any time, and continues to be loved by the Guardian and the Nation, two newspapers which have a patronising view of the “Other”, and can see only one form of stories from that place. (Sure, Guardian will write about Outsourcing, but focus on the soullessness of the job, and not about how it has liberated a person from the Indian hinterland, who’d have married within her caste to whoever her parents insisted, and exposed her to an urban lifestyle, and allowed her to assert her identity, creating her own space in the big adventure called India. Roy sees her as a collaborator; I see signs of emancipation there.)

I’ve noticed the same thing (perhaps alerted to it by reading Meera Nanda): the way UK and US journalists treat Roy as an oracle when there are countless other Indians they could talk to but don’t. (They do the same thing with Vandana Shiva.)

I’m burning up the time reading sapient comments on PZ’s response to “Be” Scofield’s “5 stupid things stupid atheists think” so I might as well recycle one so that I can pretend I’ve accomplished something more than reading sapient comments on a post of PZ’s, not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Sastra quotes a bit from “Be” and annotates it:

Scofield has gone into Therapist Mode (sometimes known as Anthropologist Mode.) If you’re trying to help or understand other people, don’t treat them as equal members of your own group and argue with them over truth or content. Instead, you concern yourself with what works for them. Are they happy? You shouldn’t try to change their minds because that interferes with the natural course of things — which is allowing them to discover and be who they are on their own terms, not yours.

Spot on.

While I was reading, “Be” Scofield commented. He said he has replied (at Tikkun, oh urgh). So now I have to read that. Is there no end to it?

I’m reading Final Rights: Reclaiming the American Way of Death by our own dear Joshua Slocum and Lisa Carlson. It’s very good and very infuriating.

The situation is the totally familiar one of an industry straining every nerve and pulling every string to winkle more dollars out of other people’s pockets into its own, but in a context where doing so allows a lot of really nasty forms of manipulation – like creating a bogus “requirement” to view the body and then saying “wouldn’t you prefer to see her in an upgraded” vastly more expensive box?

There’s a weird strain of hilarity behind the whole thing – the basic idea of buying an expensive box that’s going to be buried in the ground. There’s one quoted item of PR-speak that refers to the body “nestling” in whatever it is. Nestling?

One thing I didn’t know is that in most places there are a lot more funeral outfits than are needed, and given that there’s no legitimate way to expand the market, the only way to survive is to inflate the prices. With shoes or hamburgers or phones, you can just market the bejeezis out of them and sell more and more and more, but there’s no way to sell more and more and more burials.

Maybe they should consider that. Reburial every few years, just like getting new appliances and granite counter tops. The living room looks a little dull and drab, time for new curtains and a lick of paint. Same thing with the ancestors.

Exctract here.

Catherine Bennett isn’t fooled or wowed or befuddled or rendered absent-minded by the archbishop.

After a great success with Jemima Khan, the New Statesman had made the archbishop guest editor. Why? Why not?…As it turned out, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s internship proved equally inspired, exposing a public tolerance of episcopal power that, even as it dismays reformers, can only encourage undimmed Anglican ambition.

What was that all about? It seemed more like a Monty Python joke than anything else. Who’s the next guest editor, the queen? Could they have found anyone less appropriate for a putative left-wing magazine?

The response to his provocation could hardly have been more satisfactory. Clearly, everyone had forgotten his flirtation with sharia and that other time, with Labour’s equality bill, when Williams won his church a special bigotry exemption.

Well why? If so, why?

Even rightwing Anglicans, who recoil from Williams’s politics, relish the spectacle of the established church being recognised, unlike their competitors, as a prominent and respected meddler in sublunary affairs.

Yes of course they damn well do, but what is the Staggers doing helping them?

Next up was the Rev Michael Banner, on Thought for the Day, exulting in the bravery of his spiritual brother – and boss – Rowan. “The voice of prophecy – the voice of what Christians have called the Spirit of God – ought never to be silenced and ought never to go unheeded,” said Banner. What, never? some listeners must have thought as they sprinted for the off-switch. How about Rasputin?

Or Savonarola, or Jerry Falwell, or Fred Phelps, or Terry Jones (of the Florida clan), or all the various “spiritual leaders” of Hizbollah, Jamaat-e-Islami, the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Shabab and all the other “spiritual” gangs – how about them?

It is this “voice”, Banner continued, presumably alluding to the established church, speaking through him on the BBC, “which constantly challenges a complacent satisfaction with the existing social order, which dreams of a better society” etc etc.

Ah yes, the established church and the BBC joining hands to challenge complacent satisfaction with the existing social order. Makes the eyes mist up, don’t it.

But don’t non-prophetic voices also do that, without recourse to a contested spiritual authority? That’s the great thing about pulpits: they don’t take questions. And Banner was right in thinking that his superhuman case for being “heeded”, over inferior, secular voices emanating from, say, charities or academies, is often accepted as blindingly obvious.

Pulpits don’t take questions because god doesn’t take questions. A great deal too convenient, if you ask me.

Last week, the media response to Terry Pratchett’s intensely troubling investigation of assisted dying was, similarly, a deferential search for the nearest bishop, even though a bishop’s moral insight on this question, whatever he may add about palliative care, represents not so much superior expertise as an immutable faith requirement. Defying an overwhelming lay majority that supports assistance for dying people who want to control their deaths, Rowan Williams has called the proposal, flatly, “immoral”.

He’s the immoral one.

Trevor Phillips of the UK’s Equality and Human Rights Commission talks a lot of sinister crap to the Telegraph.

“The thing I’ve become anxious about in recent times is this – there is   certainly a feeling amongst some people of belief that they are under siege,   that they are often disadvantaged, that they are looked at and considered in   some way different and their faith makes them less worthy of regard,”   he said.

That could be so, but it could also be inevitable given that their beliefs are not well supported. The conspiracy of silence about that incovenient fact has been broken lately. That’s as it should be.

I understand why a lot of people in faith groups feel a bit under siege.   They’re in a world where there are a lot of very clever people who have a lot of access to the airwaves and write endlessly in the newspapers knocking   religion and mocking God. The people who want to drive religion underground are much more active, much more vocal.

Yes, we are, and people in faith groups will just have to learn to put up with it. (And note that those people too have a lot of access to the airwaves and write endlessly in the newspapers knocking atheism and mocking atheists.) We are allowed to be both active and vocal. People in faith groups don’t get to veto us.

There is no doubt there’s quite a lot of intolerance towards people of faith   and towards belief. There’s a great deal of polemic which is anti-religious, which is quite fashionable.

And there’s quite a lot of intolerance towards people of no faith, and towards unbelief. There’s a great deal of polemic which is anti-atheism, which is quite fashionable.

Being an Anglican, being a Muslim or being a Methodist or being a Jew is   just as much part of your identity and you should not be penalised or   treated in a discriminatory way because of that. That’s part of the   settlement of a liberal democracy.

“Just as much part of your identity” as what? He doesn’t say. Either the Telegraph cut that bit, or he never did say. If he said “as race or sex” he’s wrong; he’s also wrong even if he didn’t. Religious beliefs can’t have a total, blanket protection order, because some of them are murderous or otherwise dangerous.

“It’s perfectly fair that you can’t be a Roman Catholic priest unless you’re a man,” he said.

Oh jeez. I give up.