The Hitchens-Blair debate was on one of the local public radio stations the other day, and I listened to a few minutes of it; something caught my attention that I hadn’t noticed at the time (because I mostly read it, and watched only a bit). What caught my attention (because it irritated the bejeezis out of me) was Blair’s insistent unctuous repetition of the word “faith.” It occurred to me that Hitchens used that word little if at all, and that I should check the transcript to see what the proportions were. They were as I suspected. It’s quite amusing to use the search function (CTRL + F) and see Blair’s sections speckled like measles with the highlighted word.

This is bad. This is annoying and bad; it’s annoying because it’s bad. “Faith” is a decidedly hooray-word, but it has become a pervasive synonym for religion, which gives pro-religion people an opportunity to load the dice, and to pat themselves on the back multiple times in every conversation. The word should be “religion,” which is a neutral, factual, descriptive word as opposed to an emotive one. “Atheism” and “theism” are the same kind of word – dispassionate and factual. There is no equivalent of “faith” for atheism, which puts us at a disadvantage. This use of “faith” should be challenged regularly. It’s a question-begging device, and I say the hell with it.

Check out just one sample from Blair:

I do say at least accept that there are people doing great work, day in, day out, who genuinely are not prejudiced or bigoted, but are working with people who are afflicted by famine and disease and poverty and they are doing it inspired by their faith. And of course it’s the case that not everybody — of course it’s the case that you do not have to be a person of faith in order to do good work, I’ve never claimed that, I would never claim that. I know lots of people, many, many people, who are people not of faith at all, but who do fantastic and decent work for their communities and for the world. My claim is just very simple, there are nonetheless people who are inspired by their faith to do good.

This is a big reason I find the “interfaith” outreach stuff from Christopher Stedman so irritating: he’s an atheist, yet he does that thing with the F word – he leans on it as heavily as Blair does. Doing that implies that religion is a good thing, and doing that implies that atheism is a bad thing. Clearly Stedman doesn’t intend that, but he should be more aware of rhetorical effects.

I can’t read this calmly; it makes me quake and gibber with rage. The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that Ireland is messing with the human rights of women by not allowing them to get abortions to save their lives.

Taoiseach Brian Cowen said the ruling raised “difficult issues” that needed to be carefully considered. Speaking in Brussels, he said it was much too early to make any decision on whether legislation would be required in light of the court’s decision.

Minister for Health Mary Harney said the Government [would] take legal advice. Acknowledging the judgment was binding on the State, she said the Government would have to come forward with proposals to reflect it. “However, this will take time as it is a highly sensitive and complex area,” Ms Harney said.

What is highly sensitive and complex? What is highly sensitive and complex about it? Is it really “sensitive” to say that women should not be forced to continue a pregnancy that will kill them?

Both Cowen and Harney seem to think so (or to think that the Irish public want them to talk as if they think so). Both seem to think they can’t just agree that the state should not force women to let themselves be killed by pregnancies.

The Government robustly defended the laws and said Ireland’s abortion laws were based on “profound moral values deeply embedded in Irish society”.

It argued that European Court on Human Rights has consistently recognised the traditions of different countries regarding the rights of unborn children. However, it maintained that the women’s challenge sought to undermine these principles and align Ireland with countries with more liberal abortion laws.

“These principles” – the ones that claim a fetus has rights that trump those of a grown woman. “Principles” is the wrong word.

William C Chittick PhD is a professor of religious studies at SUNY Stony Brook. He wants us to understand “the Islamic notion of mercy.” He tells a story to illustrate it.

Another account tells us that the Prophet had stopped to rest at a bedouin camp, where a woman with an infant was baking bread over an open fire. The child slipped away and approached the fire, and the mother quickly pulled him back. She turned to the Prophet and said, “Do you not say that God is ‘the most merciful of the merciful’?” He replied that he did. She said, “No mother would throw her child into the fire.” For a moment the Prophet turned away and wept. Then he said that God puts into hellfire only those who refuse to go anywhere else.

Chittick seems to think that that illustrates genuine mercy. I think it illustrates the pathetic and disgusting tininess of the theocratic mind. “God” is all about mercy; for example, he puts people into hellfire for eternity only if they don’t jump when Mohammed says jump.

That’s not mercy, you fucking fool.

You should see Puget Sound right now.

We get a very interesting phenomenon here in the aftermath of a particular kind of winter storm, locally called a “pineapple express,” in which warm temperatures combine with heavy rain to cause massive river-flooding. The phenomenon is that Puget Sound is two colors instead of one. For a distance of maybe a quarter of a mile from shore, the water is pale green, and beyond that it is the usual grey.

I remember staring at this oddity in befuddlement the first time I ever spotted it, and then suddenly realizing what it is. Silt, of course.

It’s incredibly impressive. That is one hell of a lot of mud, that can turn all that water a different color. Do admit.

It’s been changing all morning, as the clouds thicken or thin. One minute it’s a subtle effect, and the next it stands out as if lit by a spotlight. From where I’m sitting I can see a grain ship at anchor (the grain terminal is just at the bottom of the hill) in the middle of all the pale green – the line between the green and the grey is well to the west of the ship.

They’re kidding, right? This is a joke? It has to be a joke – right? They can’t be serious?

A doctor has been arrested for insulting the Prophet Mohammed in Pakistan…

Naushad Valiyani was detained on Friday following a complaint by a medical representative who visited the doctor in the city of Hyderabad.

“The arrest was made after the complainant told the police that Valiyani threw his business card, which had his full name, Muhammad Faizan, in a dustbin during a visit to his clinic,” regional police chief Mushtaq Shah told AFP.

“Faizan accused Valiyani of committing blasphemy and asked police to register a case against the doctor.”

And the police obliged.

So………no phone books can be thrown out in Pakistan? No newspapers or magazines? They must all contain myriad instances of the name “Mohammed,” so if it’s blasphemy to dispose of any bit of paper on which the name “Mohammed” appears, then that would seem to be the rule, yes?

Shah said the issue had been resolved after Valiyani, a member of Pakistan’s Ismaili community, an offshoot of Shiite Islam, apologised but local religious leaders intervened and pressed for action.

“Valiyani had assured Faizan that he did not mean to insult the Prophet Mohammed by throwing the visiting card in the dustbin,” Shah said.

So why didn’t Shah tell the “local religious leaders” to fuck off? Why didn’t the “local religious leaders” tell each other that they were a disgrace to the species? Why – oh never mind.

Stephen Law offers us a video of the Permanent Secretary for Government Communications telling a bunch of people that communications are goods things and that he is goods at doings them. I watched a minute or two, which was enough to confirm me in my surmise that I didn’t want to watch more than that. Stephen explains why.

He has little to say, surely? Strip out the “successful behavioural outcomes”, “partnership”, “stakeholder”, “co-creation”, “we’re on a journey” jargon and rhetoric, and his message boils down to:

• The public used to be seen by Government as passive recipients of information, not as customers to engage with, which they now are, ‘cos of the internet, twitter, etc. Citizens can now provide feedback on services.

• There should be more effective working together between government departments.

• Government needs to apply psychological research if Government wants to affect behaviour, not just make ads saying: “stop smoking”, “eat less fat”, “do more exercise”, “get a job”, etc.

Now, surely, all of this is pretty trite and obvious, not cutting edge insight? Won’t everyone in the audience already know this? Most of us know it, surely. It’s platitudinous.

Yes but you need a highly-paid expert to say it so that…well so that he can earn his high pay. What else would you have him do? Teach philosophy?! Come now.

3. Much of what Tee says seems to serve primarily as a device for reminding us of how successful he has been. The talk is in large part a puff for himself and his career.

4. Is Tee himself a good communicator? I found this presentation dull, uninformative, and I suspect it’s unlikely to motivate his audience to do anything different. The one concrete bit of advice he gives them is: think of how your next communication might be tweeted.

As I say, Tee earns over £160,000 per year of taxpayer’s money (equivalent to, say, the combined salaries of three university professors). Maybe he’s very good at managing. But I’d say he’s a rather poor communicator and, on the basis of this performance, a bit light on ideas.

You might think that, but I couldn’t possibly comment.

As is typical with coverage of this subject, the New York Times has to blame Lars Vilks just a little for doing that Motoon.

But the country’s prime minister, Fredrik Reinfeldt, stopped short of connecting the bombs to an e-mail that a Swedish news organization received minutes before the blasts, which seemed to link the attacks to anger over anti-Islamic cartoons and the war in Afghanistan.

It wasn’t cartoons plural, it was one cartoon. And anti-Islamic? What’s that supposed to mean? It sounds sinister.

The e-mail’s reference to Mr. Vilks, a 64-year-old artist and free-speech activist, pointed to the deep anger in the Muslim world over his drawings of the prophet Muhammad in 2007.

“The” deep anger in “the” Muslim world – by which is meant, some Muslims were very angry, but what it sounds like is, all Muslims were very angry, and probably justifiably (“deep” tends to imply that).

It would be nice if journalists and editors could learn to be more careful about this. But they won’t.

Alice Dreger was at the American Anthropological Association meeting when it moved to kick science out.

Interestingly, it isn’t just that the AAA leadership is ditching science. They’re also trying to position the AAA as being primarily about “public understanding” of humankind. As Stu Plattner, who served for many years as Cultural Anthropology Program Director for NSF, observed in email exchanges, this looks like “another step in the conversion of Anthropology from a social science into an esoteric branch of journalism.” Yeah, but the kind of journalism that is much more concerned with editorials than factual reporting.

So not one but two giant steps away from genuine truth-seeking.

Presumably, in the AAA’s tradition, the promotion of the “public understanding of humankind” will include anything that is politically unoffensive to the AAA leadership, and nothing offensive. It’s safe to assume the AAA will not be promoting the public understanding of how human behaviors evolved, especially if those human behaviors are anything that might make some or all humans look violent, greedy, harmful to the environment, or (worst of all) sexually dimorphic.

Among the scientific anthropologists I talked to about this yesterday, pretty much to a one, they were unsurprised yet angry. The primatologist Sarah Hrdy (a member of the National Academy of Sciences) wrote, “My reaction is one of dismay – actually, even more visceral and stronger than that – albeit not surprise.”

So they’re deciding whether to fight, or just give it up and leave.

In the messages flying back and forth, I was reminded why anthropologists refer to the annual conference as “the meetings,” plural: it’s because they go and meet with their own actual disciplinary types, in separate groups, so that the real scientists don’t have to deal too much with the fluff-head cultural anthropological types who think science is just another way of knowing.

Not all cultural anthropologists are fluff-heads, of course. You can usually tell the ones who are fluff-heads by their constant need to look like superheroes for oppressed peoples, and you can tell the non-fluff-heads by their attention to data. But the non-fluff-head cultural anthropologists are feeling utterly beleaguered in this environment that actively denigrates science and consistently promotes activism over data collection and scientific theorizing.

Wait, I have an idea – they could split, and the fluff-heads could all move to Women’s Studies departments. Meanwhile the non-fluff head WS people could move to departments that actually value data collection, though that could include history as well as scientific fields.

And we learn that the archbish of Canterbury isn’t as fond of the pope as we had been led to believe.

During his recent visit to Rome and meeting with the Pope –planned before the Pope urged disaffected Anglicans to convert to Catholicism— Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams challenged the position of the Catholic Church on ordination of women and made it clear that the Vatican should have consulted with him before reaching out to the Anglican community. Although Williams’ visit to Rome was cast as positive and reinforcing of ecumenical dialogue, it’s clear the wounds from this controversy will affect that dialogue negatively (at least for now) and are likely to cast a pall over the Pope’s planned state visit to England in 2010.

Too bad about that last part – it didn’t happen, at least not at official levels. There was plenty of pall in Trafalgar Square, but none emanating from the great and the good.

As for the Pope’s visit next year to England, Campbell said he now expected a chilly reception, especially from the Royal family – which was not a great supporter of ecumenical dialogue even before the crisis.

Right, that didn’t happen either. The Royal family all but adopted the stinking pope. Special People stick together.

I’m very ambivalent about WikiLeaks and especially about the diplomatic data dump, but I must say, the Vatican stuff is certainly worth having (and it’s not something the Vatican has any moral right to keep secret, either). The more we know about the inner workings of the Vatican, the better.

Requests for information from the 2009 Murphy commission into sexual and physical abuse by clergy “offended many in the Vatican” who felt that the Irish government had “failed to respect and protect Vatican sovereignty during the investigations“, a cable says.

Typical Vatican, isn’t it? Not shock-horror and remorse about rape and physical violence by clergy, but “offense” at failure to “respect” Vatican “sovereignty.” It’s all about them, and it’s all about them not as perps but as offended dignitaries.

Ultimately, the Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone (equivalent to a prime minister), wrote to the Irish embassy, ordering that any requests related to the investigation must come through diplomatic channels.

Typical. Not “Yes yes of course we’ll help you in every way we can”; on the contrary, “No no, how dare you, you have to go through diplomatic channels, we are a Sovereign Nation as well as Divine Intermediaries with God Himself.”

As usual with the Vatican, the reserves of disgust are quickly exhausted.

I’m reading Charles Freeman’s AD 381.

This sounded familiar already; it’s only page 2.

Theodosius was not himself a fanatical Christian, and despite the harshness of the language in which his decrees were expressed, he showed some restraint and flexibility in the way he applied them. In a vast and administratively unwieldy empire, any law lost its impact as it filtered down into the provinces, and some may never have been systematically enforced. However, this worked both ways – a law might be ignored, or it might be imposed with brutality by a local enthusiast.

Ahhh yes – that does sound familiar. It sounds exactly like Pakistan. It sounds exactly like a lot of places. There is never any shortage of local enthusiasts.

So those bastards in Iran were having a little joke. Ashtiani isn’t free at all.

Contrary to a vast publicity campaign by Western media that confessed murderer Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani has been released, a team of broadcast production team with the Iran-based Press TV has arranged with Iran’s judicial authorities to follow Ashtiani to her house to produce a visual recount of the crime at the murder scene.

Well that’s the right way to determine guilt: take a tv crew to someone’s house and force her to agree with you that she’s guilty guilty guilty.

 Bastards bastards bastards.

In much less good news, our friend and fellow-troublemaker Josh Slocum had a very serious heart attack a couple of days ago. He’s fine now, he assures us, but it was Bad and Scary and Horrible, and he’s only a youngster. So send him your affection and raillery and friendly insults and other helpful things.

Sakineh Ashtiani is free.

Her son is free, her lawyer is free, two German journalists who were arrested Monday for trying to interview her are free.

Her release is a triumph for an intensive international campaign launched by her son Sajad Ghaderzadeh…Ecstatic campaigners hailed the news. “This is the happiest day in my life,” said Mina Ahadi of the International Committee against Stoning (Icas).

So maybe international pressure does work.

The reaction to the NASA-arsenic based life story makes a nice study guide to epistemology and how scientists think and how various distorting influences (like media priorities and funding needs) can bollix things up. PZ set us straight last week almost before the ink was dry, Rosie Redfield wrote a scathing analysis on Saturday, Carl Zimmer talked to a dozen experts on Monday.

Almost unanimously, they think the NASA scientists have failed to make their case. “It would be really cool if such a bug existed,” said San Diego State University’s Forest Rohwer, a microbiologist who looks for new species of bacteria and viruses in coral reefs. But, he added, “none of the arguments are very convincing on their own.” That was about as positive as the critics could get. “This paper should not have been published,” said Shelley Copley of the University of Colorado.

Read the whole article for details; read Redfield’s post; read Jerry Coyne’s post including comments, most of which are from people who know something relevant.

Oh how sweet – theists (or am I supposed to call them people of faith?) are so caring and concerned and helpful. There is this terrible atheist bus ad campaign in Fort Worth, Texas, saying that lots of Murkans are good without god – no I don’t know how such a thing could be allowed, but it was, and as much as 4 buses are carrying this horrible malicious insulting ad, and the concerned helpful Christians of FW have pitched right in and paid for a van to follow that bus around and counterdickt it. That’s good because of course as the nice woman with the giant torture device around her neck says, the bus ad is an insult to Christians.

The ad on the van is so sweet: it just says “I still love you” and signs it “God” – iddn that sweet? They could have had it say something hateful, but no, they’re bettern that, they just reach out to those poor benighted twisted bastards and say God still loves’em. They turn the other cheek, you know? The Atheists are so malicious and mean, saying it’s possible to be good without God, but the Christians don’t pay them back, they just follow them around and nag them as long as the money holds out.

Phil Plait is disappointing some very long-term fans. They’re telling him so in comments.

He did a post yesterday saying congratulations to Chris Mooney on being appointed to the Board of the American Geophysical Union

to advise the AGU on how to better and more effectively communicate with the public and lawmakers in Washington.

Comments came in saying skeptical things about Mooney and effective communication. Phil asked for evidence that Mooney “isn’t above banning reasonable dissent from his own blog.” Evidence came in from commenter after commenter. That was more than 24 hours ago, and as recent comments have pointed out, Phil has yet to acknowledge it. What kind of science communication is that?

What sort of science communicator demands people do something and then just ignores them when they do? I would consider most people who do that to be dicks, honestly. You don’t enter a discussion, demand people provide facts to back up their case, and then just vanish when people actually do so. That behavior is typical of creationists, denialists of all stripes, and various proponents of woo. It is the absolute last thing I would expect from a skeptic.

I stuck my nose in yesterday, because Sigmund told me my name had been mentioned, and I found that it had appeared in three separate comments, so I thought I should corroborate what the comments said; so I did.

From this far away, it could look as if I planned and intended all this. It could look as if I set out to goad Mooney into banning me and thus looking like someone who bans reasonable dissent from his blog. But I didn’t. I asked my questions repeatedly, but I always thought Mooney would answer them. Each time, I thought (however fatuously) “this time he’ll answer.” I didn’t intentionally set him up. What happened to him is not my fault. I bother to say that because one or two people who used to be friends of mine think it is. They’re mistaken.

I guess I also bother to say it because…well because it clearly did work out badly for Mooney. Those comments on Plait’s site make that obvious. They’re by people I don’t know, so it’s not just a matter of groupthinky loyalties. There is a big segment of the skeptical and pro-science “community” that knows about Mooney’s short way with dissenters, and does not admire it. He gets exciting gigs all the same, so perhaps it doesn’t matter, but I suspect he cares what that “community” thinks of him.

An observation by Sam Harris in The Moral Landscape:

“while it is a standard rhetorical move in such debates to accuse scientists of being ‘arrogant,’ the level of humility in scientific discourse is, in fact, one of its most striking characteristics. In my experience, arrogance is about as common at a scientific conference as nudity. At any scientific meeting you will find presenter after presenter couching his or her remarks with caveats and apologies. When asked to comment on something that lies to either side of the very knife edge of their special expertise, even Nobel laureates will say things like, “Well, this isn’t really my area, but I would suspect that X is…” or “I’m sure there are several people in this room who know more about this than I do, but as far as I know, X is…” The totality of scientific knowledge now doubles every few years. Given how much there is to know, all scientists live with the constant awareness that whenever they open their mouths in the presence of other scientists, they are guaranteed to be speaking to someone who knows more about a specific topic than they do.” [p 124]

Oh gee surprise surprise what do you know – 

Germany’s Catholic Church systematically covered up cases of sexual abuse within its own ranks for several decades, according to an expert study commissioned by the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising.

Total cognitive dissonance. Religion makes people good, and it especially makes them compassionate. Any fule kno this, so it must be true. But if people are compassionate…they don’t conceal cases of sexual violence against children, do they. Compassionate people are motivated to do other things, such as making sure no more children will be the objects of sexual violence. Compassionate people are concerned with the suffering of other people as opposed to themselves – their first impulse is to protect victims as opposed to victimizers. Their first and main concern is not to protect themselves and/or their colleagues from exposure and prosecution at the expense of the current victims and the future victims.

“Only 26 priests were convicted for sexual offences,” Westpfahl explained to reporters, saying she found 365 files containing evidence that “acts of abuse had taken place in an almost commonplace manner.”

…

The incriminating evidence Westpfahl found among 13,200 available files implicated 159 priests, 15 deacons, 96 religion teachers and six pastoral employees, with rural areas particularly affected.

The victims’ suffering often remained a mystery, she said, as the reports usually discussed abuse in coy euphemisms.

All those priests and deacons and religious teachers turn out to have been like everyone else, only more so – selfish, self-protecting, greedy, and ruthless. They turn out to have used children as if they were inflatable dolls, and to have lied a blue streak to protect their jobs and their continued ability to rape children. What do you know.

Westpfahl also said that the period of 1977 to 1982, when Pope Benedikt XVI – then Archbishop Josef Ratzinger – headed up the archdiocese, was particularly poorly documented.

In this timeframe, she only found one document, regarding an abuse case. Ratzinger had dealt with the case himself, ordering that an abusive priest be removed from his parish, she said.

The article doesn’t spell it out, but that sounds as if Ratzinger presided over copious destruction of incriminating documents.

Where did the day go? It’s 5:45 and no new post. Well I know where it went – some TPM work, News posting, cat contest judging, Saturday afternoon stuff – it all adds up.

Anyway – yesterday in Pakistan shouters were out in the streets shouting. What about? Social justice. No, that’s not right. Peace. No again. Solidarity. Wrong.

No, they were shouting about people who think and say that people shouldn’t be killed for “blasphemy” and especially not for trumped-up “blasphemy” at the behest of spiteful neighbors. Well there’s a lovely cause.

Hundreds of Islamist hardliners took to the streets of Pakistan’s main cities yesterday in support of the country’s prejudicial blasphemy laws and against two leading politicians they have threatened for speaking out against the persecution of a Christian woman. At rallies in Karachi, Lahore and other cities, the crowds of protestors warned the political class against any attempt to amend or repeal the laws. They also chanted slogans denouncing Salmaan Taseer, the governor of Punjab, and Sherry Rehman, a liberal parliamentarian. 

Mr Taseer and Ms Rehman were singled out for speaking out against the treatment of Aasia Bibi…

Were they indeed. Well they’re two new friends of mine then.

Mr Taseer responded with characteristic insouciance. “It doesn’t bother me,” he said. “Who the hell are these illiterare maulvis to decide to whether i’m a Muslim or not?” Earlier, he tweeted: “Tomorrow mullahs r demonstrating against me…Thousands of beards screaming 4 my head.What a great feeling!”

 It’s true. I looked him up on Twitter, and it’s true. I’m following him now. Maybe there’s a point to Twitter after all.