There’s another thing about Stedman’s campaign “to find common ground between the religious and the secular.” It’s that all his finding and common grounding and affirmativing and positiving is directed toward the religious while he is in effect quite unfriendly toward the nonreligious. He goes about his work of saying what should be done, by throwing a little dirt at atheists.

We cannot promote Humanist values when we expend our energy lobbing simplistic critiques at the religious…we must get over this sense that provocation should be our number one goal, and that positive engagement with others is unimportant…the future of Humanism isn’t blasphemous billboards, bombastic rhetoric or even blogs…

Little jabs, one after the other, all over-general and subtly unpleasant, all just the kind of thing that appeals to existing prejudices which have been getting systematically stoked for several years, all directed at atheists.

Well…if positive engagement is such a good idea, why so much negative engagement with us? Why recycle the hostile stereotypes yet again? Why add yet more stiffener to the existing hostility to atheists?

It’s a safe path he’s chosen. He’s agreeing with The Great Majority, and kicking sand in the direction of the widely-hated minority. His schtick is that he’s more benevolent and ecumenical than other people, but doing the 87 millionth trashing of atheists isn’t really all that benevolent.

The comments at the Huffington Post bear this out. Lots of people gleefully seize the opportunity to say how boring and smelly and awful atheists are, as Stedman must have known they would. We’re an easy target.

Yet another confusion between equality and deference to religion.

Something called the “Equality Challenge Unit” is doing a survey called Religion and Belief in Higher Education. Given the name of the “unit,” one smells a rat at once. One smells bossy people creeping around universities demanding more “respect” for religions and religious beliefs in the name of “equality.”

The ECU said the research will “inform the further development of more inclusive policy and practice”.

Ah yes – just what we’re afraid of. We don’t think universities should be “more inclusive” of unreasonable beliefs.

In a letter to David Ruebain, the ECU’s chief executive, [Keith] Porteous Wood takes issue with some survey questions, including one asking students if they agree that “the content of my course is presented in a way which is sensitive to my religion or belief”.

That’s why we don’t think universities should be more “inclusive” in that way. Being “inclusive” should not extend to welcoming mistakes and fantasies into the curriculum.

An ECU spokeswoman said that Derby was chosen through a “competitive and comprehensive tendering process”, and that “assuming that a religious academic wouldn’t be able to conduct robust and unbiased research raises several equality issues in itself”.

This is where we came in.

Paul W has a long interesting comment on Ben Nelson’s The Unquiet Scientist post from last year, a post which has been quiet so long that Paul’s comment might be missed.

One or two highlights:

…experimental data that seem to support the opposite view—including a bunch of very basic and very well-known social psychology results from the 1960’s and 1970’s about bracketing, conformity, and groupthink. They seem to support Overton reasoning: if you don’t voice the “extreme” views, the group tends to converge on a new center position, midway between the views that are voiced. The center thus shifts away from the people who self-censor their (perceived) “extreme” views.

And

The individual psychology of belief fixation is complicated, and the social psychology is far more complicated. If things were as simple and one-sided as Mooney makes them out to be, politics would be simple, and that’s just false. There are a lot of two-edged swords flying around, for basic, deep reasons.

Good image!

Once again Chris Stedman is at the Huffington Post (home of woo and worse, home of Jenny McCarthy in deep denial about the exposure of Andrew Wakefield’s fraud) saying how great it is when atheists Reach Out to peopleoffaith.

He had a good time at Christmas. He went home and hung out with his family. Excellent; lovely; I have not a word to say in dissent. But he drew a moral from it, which seems to be that atheists are grumpy therefore it is urgent for humanists to Reach Out.

The trouble with that is that not all atheists are grumpy and that, especially, even atheists who are grumpy are not necessarily grumpy all the time. Things aren’t as stark as that.

We cannot promote Humanist values when we expend our energy lobbing simplistic critiques at the religious, or demand that people stop participating in practices they enjoy simply because they’re associated with religion.

Yes we can. We can do the one, and then the other.

All right, I know; he means we give Humanism a bad name by doing the things he accuses us of doing. But I think that oversimplifies the matter. Maybe some vocal atheists give some branches of humanism a bad name by doing foolish or trivial things – but that’s life in the big city. I’m not convinced that vocal atheists need to shape what they say and do according to what might possibly give Humanism a bad name.

As the Interfaith and Community Service Fellow for the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard, I am working on the ground to build up positive Humanist community…To build, literally and metaphorically, a Humanist community that is healthy and sustainable, we must get over this sense that provocation should be our number one goal, and that positive engagement with others is unimportant.

What sense? I have no such sense. I don’t have some settled view that “positive engagement with others is unimportant.” I don’t put it in those terms, because I’m not enamored of managementspeak, but I certainly think it’s fine to get along and sometimes collaborate with other people. Of course I do! Stedman’s version is sheer strawman. What I don’t think, however, is that I have some affirmative duty to Reach Out to Faith Communities as such, any more than I have some affirmative duty to Reach Out to Republican Communities as such, or Banker Communities as such, or Realtor Communities as such. Stedman, on the other hand, does think he has such an affirmative duty. He seems to think that he has to Reach Out to People of Faith precisely because they are in some sense opposites. I don’t have that. To me, disagreement is disagreement. It’s not a motivation for Reaching Out. I disagree with “faith” as a way of thinking, so I’m not going to Reach Out to it. That doesn’t mean I’m going to pounce on anyone I happen to encounter who has it, it just means I’m not going to open a diplomatic mission to it.

I believe that ethics and engagement are central to what it means to live in the world as a Humanist, and that Humanist community and identity require an affirmative foundation, not one structured in contrast to ideologies we disagree with.

But you can have both. You can be affirmative and still go on disagreeing with ideologies you disagree with. The one does not interfere with the other. Stedman really wants to persuade people that it does (so he’s not being affirmative toward atheists, wouldn’t you say?), but it doesn’t.

I don’t know how Leo Igwe keeps going, I really don’t.

Leo Igwe, an activist arrested last Tuesday in the ongoing onslaught against child rights activists by the Akwa Ibom State government, was released today by the Police who claimed it was a case of mistaken identity.

Confirming his freedom in a telephone chat with Saharareporters, Mr. Igwe described his incarceration as a nasty experience.

It was a terrible encounter and it was premeditated going by the way they executed the plot to hold me accountable for “kidnapping;” my hands were tied behind me and they beat me mercilessly,” he said.

Martin Robbins has a good, longish piece on the subject today. More publicity, which could make it harder for people to bully Leo and his parents and siblings; excellent.

Jerry Coyne said some things about atheism and anger today, giving a few of the excellent reasons to be angry about religion.

What is the proper response to all this religiously-inspired nonsense?  Anger, of course.  No, you don’t have to be a red-faced, sputtering jerk when confronting the faithful, but controlled anger is without doubt the right response to a form of superstition that wreaks uncountable harms on humanity.  And not “transitory” anger, either—permanent anger.

…

Again, the proper response to religious stupidity, as it was to segregation in the South, is anger—persistent anger.  Anger that remains until the kind of religion that forces its tenets and superstitions down humanity’s throat vanishes for good.

It’s odd that we even have to argue this. With the bishop of Phoenix and the murderer of Salman Taseer to point to, how can there be any dispute that anger is necessary? It’s as if we’ve all been sleepwalking for several decades, lulled into a stupid complacency about religion only because we never looked hard enough at its gruesome ways of carrying on.

Yes I see you there in the second row, Mr Blair. Yes I know that many people do good things in the name of religion; I do understand that many people think the way to be good is via religious institutions. But they’re laboring under a misapprehension: they could be good via secular institutions. The special ways religion is bad, on the other hand, are harder to replace with secular equivalents. What secular official would try to compel hospitals not to save the lives of women by ending their pregnancies? What secular person is not shocked to the core to learn that US bishops earnestly defend exactly that policy?

Until there are no bishops and no mullahs coming up with creative ways to oppress people, anger is not something we can afford to give up.

Via a commenter at Jerry’s, a salient remark by Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker in 2002, in a Talk of the Town piece on Niceness.

The problem, of course, is that niceness is overrated as a virtue. Many cultures are nice. The Southern antebellum aristocracy was marvellously well-mannered; its members left tasteful calling cards, entertained gracefully, and conducted their personal affairs with the utmost discretion. But they had few other virtues; in fact, it was the practice of niceness that helped to keep other values, such as fairness, at bay. Fairness sometimes requires that surfaces be disturbed, that patterns of cordiality be broken, and that people, rudely and abruptly, be removed from their place. Niceness is the enemy of fairness.

He may have derived that from Mark Twain – it’s related to what Twain called Sir Walter disease. The South was rotten with delusions about chivalry and other such nonsense while it wouldn’t have recognized justice if it had bitten them on the ass.

I’m relieved to see that somebody in the UK is aware of the…….erm……..the lack of warmth in the ahem service professionals there. I wondered if it was just me.

No I didn’t really; instead I wondered if everybody there is crazy.

Surly, slapdash and dreadful. That’s how chef Michel Roux Jr sums up customer service in the UK.

“It’s not just in restaurants, you get bad service anywhere,” he says. “Even buying a newspaper you can find that you’re not even acknowledged. There’s no eye contact, no greeting or anything. Bad service is unforgivable and it’s everywhere in the UK.”

It’s true you know. It’s the surliness I can’t stand. Dignity would be all right; a polite reserve would be acceptable; but the surliness is truly awful. Buying a few harmless groceries at Waitrose leaves one feeling depressed and vaguely ashamed – as if one were an aristocrat walking on the faces of the poor merely because one wanted to buy some pasta sauce and the pasta to go underneath it.

Apparently they don’t even know they’re doing it – apparently they think that’s just how one acts.

One of the things that has shocked him most about making the show is how little some of the young people he has been working with know about basic courtesy.

“Just saying please and thank you, I was aghast that some of these kids found it very difficult even to utter those words,” he says. “There’s not much more basic in life than that, it’s simple upbringing. Whatever your background, courtesy matters.”

What a dreary picture that conjures up of their daily lives – with none of the tiny civilities that make social interaction pleasant instead of like an ugly highway to nowhere.

In Seattle it’s customary to say thanks to the bus driver when you get off. I love that.

Two of the ACLU attorneys who signed the letter to the feds did a blog post on it. The ACLU website has a whole section on Reproductive Freedom. Useful stuff.

I’ve been reading the bishop of Phoenix again. (I have my reasons. I’m doing a talk at CFI Vancouver in a couple of weeks, and I intend to draw on the bish.) I’ve been doing a close reading, as one might with a poem or a PR release. I noticed some things. Here’s one of them.

The decisions regarding life and death, morality and immorality as they relate to medical ethics are at the forefront of the Church’s mission today. As a result, the Church and her bishops have a heightened moral responsibility to remain actively engaged in these discussions and debates.

Look at what he’s saying there. He’s saying that decisions regarding life and death are at the forefront of the church’s mission, meaning, decisions that women should die are at the forefront of the church’s mission. He’s saying it’s a central and urgent matter that the church should see to it that women who could be saved should instead be made to die. He’s saying that the church and her bishops have a heightened moral responsibility to remain actively engaged in medical matters so that women who could be medically rescued will not be medically rescued. He’s saying his outfit and its hired guns have a moral responsibility to interfere with hospitals and doctors in order to force them to let women die when they could be rescued. He’s saying that decisions about life and death are his business and that he gets to decide them against pregnant women.

He never says that in so many words, of course, but that is exactly what he’s saying.

I have attempted to do my part in calling CHW and your hospitals to uphold the dignity of human life, and to embrace the fullness of what the Catholic Church teaches on the immorality of those actions that are an affront to the gift of human life and its inherent goodness from God.

He has done that by trying hard to coerce CHW and its hospitals to promise in writing to let all women die if an abortion is the only way to save them, even if the fetus can’t survive anyway. He calls that “calling hospitals to uphold the dignity of human life.” He calls refusing to save a woman’s life “upholding the dignity of human life.”

He pushes very hard on the noble-sounding bullshit about moral responsibility and the dignity of human life, in aid of a concerted effort to force hospitals to stop saving women’s lives.

He repays study.

Eww!

I was browsing Churchandstate.org, via a post on Eric’s blog, and what did I find but a fetid little abomination called “the stay-at-home-daughters movement.” As in “stay at home because you are inferior and subordinate and your Duty in life is to be a conduit for child production and a domestic servant.”

The stay-at-home-daughters movement, which is promoted by Vision Forum, encourages young girls and single women to forgo college and outside employment in favor of training as “keepers at home” until they marry. Young women pursuing their own ambitions and goals are viewed as selfish and antifamily; marriage is not a choice or one piece of a larger life plan, but the ultimate goal. Stay-at-home daughters spend their days learning “advanced homemaking” skills, such as cooking and sewing, and other skills that at one time were a necessity—knitting, crocheting, soap- and candle-making. A father is considered his daughter’s authority until he transfers control to her husband.

So women (and girls) are viewed as a kind of livestock – all women and girls. They’re all too weak and stupid to learn anything or do anything more than soap-making and child-rearing.

Vision Forum, for its part, is fully dedicated to turning back the clock on gender equality. Its website offers a cornucopia of sex-segregated books and products designed to conform children to rigid gender 
stereotypes starting from an early age. The All-American Boy’s Adventure Catalog shills an extensive selection of toy weapons (bow-and-arrow sets, guns, swords, and tomahawks), survival gear, and books and DVDs on war, the outdoors, and science. The Beautiful Girlhood Collection features dolls, cooking and sewing play sets, and costumes. There’s no room for doubt about the intended roles these girls will play later on in life.

Excellent. If the trend spreads, we have a pretty good chance of catching up to Pakistan in a decade or two.

Hitchens notes a difference between Mumtaz Qadri, and Paul Foot and Nelson Mandela.

A decision to resort to violence was not something to be undertaken without great care—and stated in terms that were addressed to reasonable people. From his prison cell, Nelson Mandela had joined the great tradition of the French philosophes, of Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, of Marx and Engels in 1848, and of Jawaharlal Nehru in the 1930s—of men and women who felt the historic obligation to make a stand and to define it.

In other words, to give reasons.

Now look at the grinning face of Mumtaz Qadri, the man who last week destroyed a great human being. He did not explain. He boasted. As “a slave of the Prophet,” he had the natural right to murder Salman Taseer, the governor of Punjab, not even for committing “blasphemy” but for criticizing a law that forbade it for Muslims and non-Muslims alike. And this sweeping new extension of the divine right to murder not only was not condemned by the country’s spiritual authorities; it was largely approved by them. No argument, no arraignment, no appeal—permission to kill anybody can merely be assumed by anybody, provided only that they mouth the correct incantations.

The incantations create the permission – it’s the ultimate speech act.

This is only one of the many things that go to make up the hideousness of Islamic jihadism, but I believe that it has received insufficient attention. Amid all our loose talk about Muslim “grievances,” have we even noticed that no such bill of grievances has ever been published, let alone argued and defended?

Well I’ve been paying attention to this. I paid attention to it in the aftermath of the London bombings, when there was indeed a good deal of vacant talk of “grievances.” I pointed out that a grievance is only as good as it is. Qadri had a “grievance,” and it was an absolutely shitty grievance. It was beneath contempt. He was aggrieved that Taseer would offer compassion to Aasia Bibi, and that he would urge reform of the blasphemy law. He was aggrieved that Taseer was less eager than he was to persecute or kill people for the crime of not being Muslim. His grievance was not legitimate.

Oh god…it’s the usual problem, the problem I’ve been having so often lately, especially in the last week. It’s the problem of reading about something that’s so disgusting it’s hard to keep reading. It’s the surge of fear and loathing at the malevolence and brute stupidity and more malevolence in fellow human beings. Like this:

is in jail, desperately praying that she won’t be executed. Her neighbours are hoping she will be.”Why hasn’t she been killed yet?” said Maafia Bibi , a 20-year-old woman standing at the gate of the house next door. Her eyes glitter behind a scarf that covered her face. “You journalists keep coming here asking questions but the issue is resolved. Why has she not been hanged?”

Maafia was one of a group of about four women who accused Bibi, also known as Aasia Noreen, who is Christian, of insulting the prophet Muhammad during a row in a field 18 months ago. But she will not specify what Bibi actually said, because to repeat the words would itself be blasphemy. And so Bibi was sentenced to hang on mere hearsay – a Kafkaesque twist that seems to bother few in Itanwali, a village 30 miles outside Lahore.

So I feel sick, and can hardly stand to read more (but there is more, and it’s even uglier). And there’s so much of that kind of thing.

And for refreshment I can come home and catch up on the news from Tucson, and Sarah Palin, and the Tea Party, and Glenn Beck.

You know Deeyah? She’s doing a great thing.

Now a project to recognise the contribution of some of the world’s most important protest singers has been pulled together by a woman who was forced to give up performing on stage because of threats made on her life. Listen To The Banned is an album including the work of 14 international artists, all of whom have experienced imprisonment, censorship, harassment or violence because of their music.

Deeyah, a classically trained singer born in Norway, of Pakistani and Afghan parents, had a burgeoning career in pop music when she had to leave Norway because of harassment and disapproval from hardline Islamic groups. She moved to the US and then the UK, but gave up the limelight when the threats and antagonism proved just as strong wherever she went.

She emailed me a few days ago to ask me to get the word out. Seriously! I’m all hero-worshippy.

Tiken Jah Fakoly, a singer from Ivory Coast who has been forced into exile, said: “Normally people get trophies for selling most records, but this CD highlights artists who fight for justice.”

Abazar Hamid, a Sudanese songwriter now living in exile in Egypt, said: “Listen To The Banned has empowered me to face censorship and let me trust on my music and feel I am not alone.”

Mahsa Vahdat of Iran said that she was encouraged by being part of the project. “I am honoured to be part of this, we are invisible and hidden voices that can impress the world and can elevate the feeling of life,” she said.

Pass it on.

Update: Links to purchase sites in different countries here.

I think Ahmed Rashid, much as I value his work, is over-optimistic about what is possible.

Taseer’s death has unleashed the mad dogs of hell, inspiring the minority of fanatics to go to any lengths to destroy the democratic, secular and moderate Islamic Republic of Pakistan.

How can there be such a thing as a secular Islamic Republic of anything? Or a secular Christian or Hindu one either?

I don’t think there can. That’s where Jinnah went wrong, and it’s where the whole idea falls apart before it takes its first breath. People who think there can be such a thing don’t grasp what “secular” means. An Islamic Republic is, obviously, an officially religious state, and that is the very thing that a secular state can’t be.

The idea must be that you can do both…but how could you? If it’s Islamic it’s Islamic, and then it’s not secular. You can’t do both. And that’s exactly why Pakistan is so fucked up, and getting more so every day.

Sadly, poignantly, indeed tragically, Aatish Taseer sees things more clearly than his father did.

Pakistan was part of his faith, and one of the reasons for the differences that arose between us in the last years of his life–and there were many–was that this faith never allowed him to accept what had become of the country his forefathers had fought for.

…

And where my father and I would have parted ways in the past was that I believe Pakistan and its founding in faith, that first throb of a nation made for religion by people who thought naively that they would restrict its role exclusively to the country’s founding, was responsible for producing my father’s killer.

For if it is science and rationality whose fruit you wish to see appear in your country, then it is those things that you must enshrine at its heart; otherwise, for as long as it is faith, the men who say that Pakistan was made for Islam, and that more Islam is the solution, will always have the force of an ugly logic on their side. And better men, men like my father, will be reduced to picking their way around the bearded men, the men with one vision that can admit no other, the men who look to the sanctities of only one Book.

Exactly. Better men and women will be wiped out by the bearded men, until there is nothing left but bearded men and their terrorized slaves.

Already, even before his body is cold, those same men of faith in Pakistan have banned good Muslims from mourning my father; clerics refused to perform his last rites; and the armoured vehicle conveying his assassin to the courthouse was mobbed with cheering crowds and showered with rose petals.

I should say too that on Friday every mosque in the country condoned the killer’s actions; 2,500 lawyers came forward to take on his defence for free; and the Chief Minister of Punjab, who did not attend the funeral, is yet to offer his condolences in person to my family who sit besieged in their house in Lahore.

And so, though I believe, as deeply as I have ever believed anything, that my father joins that sad procession of martyrs – every day a thinner line – standing between him and his country’s descent into fear and nihilism, I also know that unless Pakistan finds a way to turn its back on Islam in the public sphere, the memory of the late governor of Punjab will fade.

And where one day there might have been a street named after him, there will be one named after Malik Mumtaz Qadir, my father’s boy-assassin.

As Salman Rushdie said a couple of days ago – RIP Pakistan.

Mohammed Hanif asks who is responsible for the murder of Salman Taseer? (And who is responsible for the multiple deaths and critical injuries in Arizona? Who is responsible for the attempted assassination of a Congressional representative and the successful assassination of a federal judge outside a Safeway in Tucson? The questions are related. It’s not just a single assassin in either case – it’s also a society, a culture, a discourse, a world view, a rhetoric, a climate, a mindset, and the people who help to create them.)

When Pakistan’s television anchors and newspaper columnists describe Salman Taseer’s assassination [as] a tragedy, they are not telling us the whole truth.

Because many of these very anchors and columnists have stated, in no uncertain terms, that by expressing his reservations about the blasphemy law, Salman Taseer had crossed a line on the other side of which is certain death.

This kind of thing isn’t harmless, nor is it without any effect.

The same Islamabad where Salman Taseer bled to death in the middle of a pretty neighbourhood played host just a couple of weeks ago to a Namoos-e Risalat (Dignity of the Prophet) conference which was attended by individuals whose party manifestos include the death by murder of Shias, Ahmadis, Hindus and Jews.

Were some of our prominent politicians not in attendance?

Do these same people not inhabit our government corridors, media organisations and security agencies? Do we not break bread with them at weddings and funerals?

The same thing, mutatis mutandis, is true here.

Oh jesus god now it’s our turn – a Democratic representative and a federal judge and a bunch of aids shot at an outdoor meeting.

I’ve been to meetings with my representative, often. They’re wide open. You can chat with him up close and personal as well as during the meeting.

Salman Taseer refused to hide, Gabrielle Giffords held a public streetcorner meeting…and look what it got them.

We’re all doomed. I feel sick.

Back in Pakistan…Salman Taseer is buried.

Taseer’s three sons, men with black shirts and red eyes, flung rose petals into the grave. A bugle sounded; graveyard workers shovelled sticky winter clay on to the fearless politician’s coffin. And across Pakistan, people wondered what was disappearing into the grave with him.

Liberals have long been a minority force in Pakistan, reviled for importing “western” ideas and culture; now they are virtually an endangered species.

As Taseer was laid to rest in Lahore, his assassin, 26-year-old policeman Mumtaz Qadri, was also being showered with rose petals, in Islamabad. Cheering supporters clapped Qadri as he was bundled into court.

Oh dear god…it’s such a nightmare. That people like that exist and are happy with the way they think and feel and act. That Pakistan is full of them. That savage mindless cruelty and bullying are the norm there. That neighbors can first refuse to drink water from a glass offered them by a woman of the “wrong” religion and hence caste, and can then accuse her of the capital crime of “insulting” a guy who’s been dead for 14 centuries. And then rejoice at the murder of a man who tried to protect and support her.

It’s a nightmare.

Taseer had been abandoned by his own party.After Aasia Bibi, a Christian woman, was sentenced to death under the blasphemy laws on 8 November, Taseer visited her in jail with his wife and daughter to show his support. Shortly after, an Islamic mob rioted outside the governor’s house in Lahore, burning his effigy and calling for his death. On television, prominent media commentators joined the chorus of criticism.

Senior figures in his own party turned tail. Awan, the law minister, said there was no question of reforming the blasphemy law.

A nightmare.

Furthermore, Rosenau’s misreading is itself political, in the sense that I dislike. It’s what one might call a little too convenient. It frames me (as I just told him in a comment on his post) as dogmatic and unreasonable and nuance-free and kind of stupid. Well that’s how accommodationists like to frame gnu atheists, isn’t it – so how helpful it is that his foot slipped just as he was reading what I’d written so that he got it backward.

It’s the usual, usual, usual thing. Claim that new atheists say what they don’t say. Claim that new atheists in general say what one new atheist once said in a bilious moment. Paste in what one new atheist said and still claim that she said something much more simple-minded and doctrinaire.

That is what it is to be “self-consciously political.”