Did you watch that selection of speeches at the anti-pope protest? It’s a good selection – Geoffrey Robertson, Johann Hari, Maryam Namazie, Dawkins, Peter Tatchell, Andrew Copson. You can see Ben Goldacre to the right of the stage, and Terry Sanderson in the background.

And Barbara Blaine speaks; she is a survivor of priestly sexual abuse. She said this:

When we were children, and the priests were raping us, and sodomizing us, and sexually abusing us, we thought we were all alone – and we felt very alone, guilty, and ashamed. And over these past years, and even more recently over these past months, many of us as victims have found each other, and we have learned that we’re not alone. And I must tell each and every one of you: thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for all the victims, because today we recognize that you too care about the victims.

That’s why the protest was not mere grandstanding, or a party, or piling on, or any of that over-fastidious bullshit. It was, among other things, a yell of rage about what the Catholic church and its priests have been doing to people – including children – for its entire history, and in particular within the living memory of millions of people. That yell of rage is music to the victims. What do you think its absence sounds like? It sounds like indifference, or worse, endorsement. It sounds like the apathetic or enthusiastic agreement of the whole society that it’s perfectly all right for priests to prey upon and torment children, and get away with it. Imagine how that adds to the misery of the whole thing. Imagine what a relief it is to know that a lot of people don’t agree and don’t endorse.

Next to that fact, finicky objections to groupthink or the joy of protest just look callous at best, and revoltingly self-indulgent at worst. Someone at Facebook (SIWOTI!) made a comment in that vein –

People are having way too much fun laying into the Pope. It’s like a party, which is parasitic on the sins of the Catholic Church. People just love the frisson of protest, and I find that rather distasteful, given that it tends to be parasitic upon the suffering of other people (precisely the sorts of people one is supposed to be protesting on behalf of).

Barbara Blaine didn’t see it that way. She saw it the opposite way. No doubt people do just love the frisson of protest, but so the fuck what? If what they are protesting needs protesting, then so the fuck what? Why is that more important than, you know, saying this evil is an evil?

That’s my considered view.

And having said that, I will add – you’re damn right. I wish I’d been there. Those people aren’t just trendy butterflies – Peter Tatchell got beaten up by Russian cops in Moscow on a gay pride parade – Maryam Namazie risked her life in Iran – Ben Goldacre does about six jobs. Yes, I damn well do feel elated listening to Johann lay into the pope. People who sneer at him and the rest of the protesters and moan about finding it all rather distasteful – well they don’t impress me so much.

Mina Ahadi and Maryam Namazie wrote a letter to the UN.

We are writing to ask that the UN general assembly condemn stoning as a crime against humanity and issue an emergency resolution calling for an end to the medieval and barbaric punishment as well as the immediate release of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani and others sentenced to death by stoning.

We also ask that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad not be allowed to address the general assembly and that his government be boycotted.

The letter has 40 signers. Is that too many, do you suppose? Would Julian Baggini consider that over the maximum for signing a letter whose content he agrees with?

I am glad that people are protesting on the key issues that the pope has got very wrong. If only a few people were doing so I might have felt it necessary to sign the petition. But when everyone starts piling in, it is perfectly reasonable for others to say it is time to back off before it gets too ugly.

What number adds up to “everyone”? It certainly wasn’t literally everyone in the case of the letter protesting against the pope’s visit, we know that; we know that from the fawning media coverage and the sycophantic government attendance and the groveling of much of the public. So what is the number? 40? 100? It’s hard to know if 40 makes it under the wire as “only a few people” or gets shut out as “everyone piling in.”

The two letters have a good deal in common – both have to do with urging bodies that should recognize universal human rights not to give a platform to a male autocrat who does not recognize universal human rights and who is at the head of a body that systematically violates human rights.

I have a hard time seeing any good reason for refusing to sign either one, much less for arguing against doing so in public.

The BBC is all but wetting itself in its excitement about the pope’s visit. Everything was so wonderful! It was just so so so beautiful and touching and moving and spirichal and compassionate and terrific and brilliant.

A pope who had previously been regarded as someone rather cold, professorial, aloof and authoritarian; had suddenly been perceived as a rather kindly and gentle grandfather figure.

Ohhhhhhh – that’s so sweet! Of course kindly gentle grandfather would let any woman die before he would let her have an abortion, and he condemns Africans in their thousands and their tens of thousands to a miserable death and their children to orphanhood with his stupid, pointless, arbitrary Law against condoms, and he shielded child-raping priests – but he’s old and tottery and he can bare his fangs in a scary grin, so he must be a nice man and that’s what counts. Didn’t I tell you it was sweet?

The Pope’s triumph was really his speech to leaders of civil society at Westminster. One political mover and shaker told me afterwards his performance had been “sheer magic”.

Within the space of two hours Pope Benedict penetrated the heart of the Anglican Establishment.

Quite. And why was that?

Seriously – why was that? What the hell is this? No other religious boffin gets this treatment, so why does the pope get it? No other religion has a pope, but why does the fact that Catholicism does have a pope mean that countries have to treat him as some kind of super-dooper extra special starry exciting guy?

The UK is not an officially Catholic country; it’s not an unofficially Catholic country; why did it treat the pope as some kind of ambassador from god?

I don’t get it. I don’t see what’s in it for them. I don’t see what’s in it for the media, or what’s in it for the gummint. It looks like some kind of mass hallucination, from here.

The Guardian must have scared itself with its “turbulent priest” editorial on Saturday – it has now taken it back.

The one on Saturday was not wholly admiring of the pope’s performance.

[H]e believes that there is only one one spiritual source – again his – from which all our values derive. He is attacking not only the Reformation, the separation of church and state, but the very basis on which a secular society is built.

But today, well, on further consideration, when confronted with an actual pope, the only thing to do is grovel.

Despite Benedict XVI’s unbending and in some senses cruel conservatism, the Guardian supported his visit, recognising that there was diplomatic business to do and, perhaps, a chance of reconciliation.

What diplomatic business? Vatican city is not a real state, so what diplomatic business can there be to do? And why would reconciliation be a good thing? Given the recognition of the unbending and in some senses cruel conservatism, why reconcile? Few people want reconciliation with Nazis or fans of apartheid or Fred Phelps; why should the Guardian want reconciliation with the reactionary top priest of a reactionary church?

The Guardian doesn’t say, perhaps because it is in too much of a hurry to say fuck those motherfucking atheists (that’s not me, I’m channeling Tim Minchin).

If the pope has not done much reconciling, then neither have his militant opponents. The thousands who traipsed through London chanting “he belongs in jail” may not see any connection between themselves and the anti-papist mobs of the past, but there is a failure to afford sincere faith the respect it is due.

What respect? What respect is the due of sincere faith? And does the Guardian really mean respect? Since it’s incompatible with protest, the meaning is apparently more like universal unquestioning obedience. Yes, the protesters failed to afford sincere faith that. Whew!

(And what on earth does the Graun mean “traipsing”? Automatic contempt for the very act of protesting now?)

Apparently the Grun takes exception to “he belongs in jail.” But it is at least arguable, and is being argued, that he has (as the head of his organization) committed a crime against humanity. It’s not simply self-evident that he is in no sense a criminal.

But hey – he is a religious leader. It Is Forbidden to say harsh things about religious leaders, at least according to the Tory papers and all the others too.

There’s another thing that frets me (for want of a better term) about Julian’s “why I didn’t sign the anti-pope letter” article. I mention this again because it seems to me symptomatic of a particular school of anti-atheist tut-tuttery.

It is that it seems kind of frivolous, at bottom. I think that’s probably why the arguments seem unconvincing…it’s because they are! Maybe he didn’t actually have any real reasons, maybe the letter just got on his nerves, and he had to reach for reasons, and it was a big stretch, and the reasons aren’t up to much.

And that makes the whole thing a bit self-regarding. He certainly wasn’t required to sign the letter, but for actually arguing that the letter and the people behind it are wrong and bad and ugly, I think he should have felt a responsibility to come up with something real, or not do it. I don’t think he did come up with anything real. He doesn’t even say why the letter and the protests are “creating divisions” more than any other letter or protest or other political activity – he just asserts that they are. I wonder if he really even believes that, or just thought it was the kind of thing you say when you take a dislike to a political view and can’t really explain why.

And here’s the thing. This is not a subject to be frivolous about. This isn’t some fad, you know. The pope is real, and he does real harm. He does the kind of harm that was done to Miranda Celeste Hale, for instance; he does it to millions of children – not personally, but institutionally. He does harm to women whose husbands are infected with the Aids virus; he does harm to women who need abortions; he does harm to people who would like to limit the number of children they have. These are not small things – these are things that mess up people’s lives.

Yet the great and the good in the UK are treating him as if he were a lovely auld fella. That means there really is a need to hear from people who say no he isn’t. I don’t see how that can be done other than by doing it. I think the only way to say the pope is not a lovely auld fella is to say it. Given that – I think it’s just self-regarding and self-indulgent and generally self-obsessed to worry about how groupy it all is, or whether the people doing it are having too much fun or not, or whether it will turn ugly some day. It’s over-scrupulous – and making a kind of parade of it. Get me, I have this fine radar that spots moral problems that the peasants don’t see.

That’s not a very nice thing to say, but I think it’s true.

I watched part of the pope’s speech at Westminster Hall on C-Span yesterday evening. He’s sure as hell not what you’d call charismatic, or even tolerable to listen to – fast, whispery, monotone – not fun. But the substance is what counts. The point is what he said.

Britain has emerged as a pluralist democracy which places great value on freedom of speech, freedom of political affiliation and respect for the rule of law, with a strong sense of the individual’s rights and duties, and of the equality of all citizens before the law.While couched in different language, Catholic social teaching has much in common with this approach, in its overriding concern to safeguard the unique dignity of every human person, created in the image and likeness of God.

No it doesn’t. The Catholic church does not have an overriding concern to safeguard the unique dignity of every human person. If it did it wouldn’t have let its priests fuck little boys in the ass, as Tim Minchin so elegantly put it. If it did it wouldn’t think it better for a woman to die than to abort a pregnancy. If it did it wouldn’t tell people not to use condoms during an Aids epidemic – if it did it wouldn’t tell people not to use contraception, period. If it did it wouldn’t have such scorching contempt for the notion that women should be allowed to be priests.

If the moral principles underpinning the democratic process are themselves determined by nothing more solid than social consensus, then the fragility of the process becomes all too evident…

Without the corrective supplied by religion, though, reason too can fall prey to distortions, as when it is manipulated by ideology, or applied in a partial way that fails to take full account of the dignity of the human person.

Such misuse of reason, after all, was what gave rise to the slave trade in the first place and to many other social evils, not least the totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century.

But religion was around then, offering its “corrective” – but the Catholic church was perfectly fine with slavery at the time, and it didn’t do much to “correct” Hitler, either. So what is the pope thinking of? That’s not clear. Perhaps he’s just hoping no one will notice that, and instead people will just think the Catholic church is just the ticket for a “corrective” now. That would be a stupid thing to think. The Catholic church has an absolutely terrible record of “taking full account of the dignity of the human person.” It’s been taking full account of the dignity of the Catholic church, but that’s not the same thing.

 I cannot but voice my concern at the increasing marginalisation of religion, particularly of Christianity, that is taking place in some quarters, even in nations which place a great emphasis on tolerance.There are those who would advocate that the voice of religion be silenced, or at least relegated to the purely private sphere.

He says, talking to a hall full of former prime ministers and other movers and shakers. He says, in the middle of a news-dominating trip to a mostly secular and/or Protestant country. He says, having received an amount and quality of deference and attention that would have made an emperor blush.

 there are those who argue – paradoxically with the intention of eliminating discrimination – that Christians in public roles should be required at times to act against their conscience.These are worrying signs of a failure to appreciate not only the rights of believers to freedom of conscience and freedom of religion, but also the legitimate role of religion in the public square.

“Their conscience” being the bit of them that thinks gays are icky and wants to treat them as different from and worse than other people. “The rights of believers to freedom of conscience and freedom of religion” being the rights of people to treat certain sets of people as inferiors. That’s what this reactionary theocratic bastard is telling the British state – and complaining about being marginalized while he does it.

Is anyone else unable to get to Talking Philosophy? I’ve been getting a page that says “Forbidden” for almost a week; is it just me or is it some kind of magnetic disturbance over the US?

In case you want the lyrics to the pope song, here they are.

This is my favorite stanza, because it’s what I’m always thinking and what I keep saying and what was a big part of the argument of Does God Hate Women?

But if you build a church on claims of fucking moral authority
And with threats of hell impose it on others in society
Then you, you motherfuckers, could expect some fucking wrath
When it turns out you’ve been fucking us in our motherfucking asses.

That’s exactly it. Here’s the pope telling us we can’t be good without his god, but he and his priests aren’t good with his god, so I don’t think he knows a damn thing about being good, so I think he should stop acting like Global Boss of Morality. Or as Richard Dawkins put it more succinctly at the “We dislike the pope” rally,

Joseph Ratzinger is an enemy of humanity.

There’s another thing about Julian Baggini’s rebuke of atheists for ganging up on the pope. It is the fact that it overlooks the gang on the other side. There was the gang that toddled obligingly along to Westminster Hall yesterday to listen deferentially to the pope telling them what’s what.

Pope Benedict tonight used the keynote address of his visit to Britain to protest at “the increasing marginalisation of religion” in public life, maintaining that even the celebration of Christmas was at risk.

In a dense, closely argued speech to an audience that included four former prime ministers, the pope said social consensus alone could not be left to decide policies…

Below him, seated in neat rows that stretched to the back of the vast, 900-year-old hall, were hundreds of parliamentarians and religious leaders.

Among them were Gordon Brown, Tony Blair, Sir John Major, Lady Thatcher, William Hague and Nick Clegg.

That gang. The state, basically. There is also the vast majority of the mainstream media. Yet Baggini chooses to characterize atheists and protesters as being too many and too much and too rough.

I am glad that people are protesting on the key issues that the pope has got very wrong. If only a few people were doing so I might have felt it necessary to sign the petition. But when everyone starts piling in, it is perfectly reasonable for others to say it is time to back off before it gets too ugly.

Why is it the people saying “no” who are piling on and likely to get ugly? Why is it not the monarchy and the government and the media who are creating and enforcing a coercive consensus? Why is Baggini treating power, hierarchy and privilege as normal and protest against those things as deviant and excessive? Why is he worrying about “polarising disputes” and “contributing to an atmosphere” and “party lines” and “collateral damage” only in relation to the protesting minority while letting the theocracy-embracing majority entirely off the hook? Why is he blaming us while shielding them?

Julian Baggini says why he declined to add his signature to a letter protesting against the pope’s visit and why he thinks the pope-protest is a bad thing.

Consider for a moment why almost every secular, liberal-minded person thought that Pastor Terry Jones was wrong to plan to burn Qur’ans on the anniversary of 9/11…The main problem is that by burning the holy book of all Muslims, the protest would fail to target jihadist murderers and would be seen as vehemently anti-Islam.

But jihadist murderers are not necessarily the only problem with Islam; it is not necessarily the case that being anti-Islam is self-evidently bad. It could be the case that there are many things wrong with Islam, and that it is reasonable to be critical of Islam and even anti-Islam. One can be anti-libertarian, anti-socialist, anti-Tory, anti-union. Why should one not be anti-Islam?

The kinds of protests against the pope we’re seeing in the UK do not, of course, match the idiocy of Jones’s pyrotechnics. But they too are creating divisions at a time when mutual understanding is already at a low…

But if it is forbidden to “create divisions” then we can never change anything. If it is automatically and self-evidently bad to “create divisions” then we just have to accept whatever the status quo is without a murmur. Baggini is “creating divisions” just by writing this piece. So what? Yes of course protests against the pope “create divisions”; my relationship with the Vatican, for instance, is at an all-time low. But I don’t think that is a reason to stop saying how bad the Vatican is.

Take Britain’s five million Roman Catholics. They are a very disparate bunch. Many despair of their church’s stance on women priests, homosexuality, condoms and child abuse. They would also like to take this trip as an opportunity to let the pontiff know that his British flock cannot be loyal on these issues. A few have even joined the Protest the Pope campaign. But how many more could have found common cause with their secular brethren had not the latter opposed the trip outright. “Nope pope” is not a slogan of a campaign that is doing its best to bring dissatisfied Catholics along with it.

But you can always say that, about anything – if you made your message more anodyne and ingratiating, you could find common cause with more people. Finding common cause with more people is not always the goal; sometimes the goal is to say what one thinks needs to be said.

It strengthens the perception that Britain is under the sway of what Cardinal Walter Kasper called an “aggressive neo-atheism”. It means that when the pope made a comparison between “atheist extremism” and Nazism, far from seeing it as the absurdity it is, many found themselves wondering if he had a point. We atheists can protest about the slur as much as we like, but we ought to realise that the more we engage in polarising disputes, the easier it will be to portray us as contributing to an atmosphere which, at its extreme, leads to assassination plots against religious leaders.

He says, doing his bit to portray us as contributing to an atmosphere which, at its extreme, leads to assassination plots against “religious leaders.” And what are “religious leaders,” anyway? The pope is the only official one in the world, and none of them are leaders in the democratic sense; they’re just men who have reached the top of some clerical hierarchy or other. The rest of us are under no obligation whatsoever to obey them or “respect” them or bend the knee to them in any way. They’re not the bosses of us. They’re not anyone’s leader except maybe the clerics of their own institutions. I trust I can say that without being accused of contributing to an atmosphere which leads to assassination plots against them.

I am glad that people are protesting on the key issues that the pope has got very wrong. If only a few people were doing so I might have felt it necessary to sign the petition. But when everyone starts piling in, it is perfectly reasonable for others to say it is time to back off before it gets too ugly. Party lines are the death of rational, free-thought movements: divided we stand, united we fall.

So…the protest against the pope is very naughty because it doesn’t find common cause with more people, but on the other hand, the protest against the pope is very naughty because it is too big and everyone is piling in and it’s a party line and divided we stand, united we fall.

It’s both of those? At the same time? Srsly?

All right; in that case they cancel each other out and I will feel free to ignore them.

Andrew Brown, for some opaque and never-explained reason, devotes himself to explaining what the pope meant in his “atheists=Nazis” speech. He does a kind of ventriloquist’s dummy act, saying “the pope believes” or “according to the pope” throughout, while in fact saying things that he clearly enjoys saying.

For him, a nation that turns away from God entirely has nothing to keep it from treating people as disposable means, rather than ends in themselves. The liberal appeal to reason, to choice, and to human rights doesn’t go far enough. He believes in all three, but he thinks they must be derived from something else. That something else was once generally understood to be Christianity. If that is no longer true, Benedict believes we are all shrunken and impoverished.

Yes, we know. We know he believes that. That is what we object to – along with the stunning amount of deference that is paid to the guy and to his vicious illiberal beliefs. We know he believes that reason and human rights “must be derived from something else” and that that something else is “God” and that “God” is “God” as understood by the Catholic church, which means one that thinks women should die rather than have abortions, that people should die of Aids rather than use condoms, that child rape by priests is church business only, and that women must never ever be priests on pain of excommunication. We think that’s an imbecilic thing to believe, and also harmful and authoritarian and reactionary. We know the pope believes that “we are all shrunken and impoverished” if we believe that; that’s exactly why we hate him and his church.

The astonishing variety and force of invective thrown at the pope and his church in much of the media over the last week must certainly, some of it, come from people who would like to drive religious faith out of public life. At the same time, it’s hard not to suppose that in some of this the Roman Catholic church is standing as a proxy for Islam, which is certainly a great deal more unpopular.

So…on the one hand it’s the product of evil secularists who don’t want bishops making laws, and on the other hand it’s the product of evil Islamophobes who are just pretending to be Catholocismophobes. Seriously?

Where secularists see religion as a divisive force, and their own beliefs as the self-evident and true base on which a healthy society can be built, Benedict sees that secularism itself can be challenged.

Here Brown takes the mask off and speaks for himself – and he apparently thinks that a country governed by the Catholic church would be more “healthy” than a secular one. He apparently would prefer 1950s Ireland to contemporary Britian. Of course he’s not a woman, or an impoverished child, but still –

Seriously?

So the pope, feeling somewhat backfooted by all this fuss about a few children being groped or cuddled or raped by priests and bishops, goes on the attack in his friendly pastoral visit to the UK.

Even in our own lifetime, we can recall how Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially the Jews, who were thought unfit to live. I also recall the regime’s attitude to Christian pastors and religious who spoke the truth in love, opposed the Nazis and paid for that opposition with their lives. As we reflect on the sobering lessons of the atheist extremism of the twentieth century, let us never forget how the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society and thus to a “reductive vision of the person and his destiny” (Caritas in Veritate, 29).

That vicious authoritarian theocratic homophobic misogynist hierarchical thug presumes to blame atheists for Nazism when his own fucking church was all but an ally of the Nazis and really was an ally of Mussolini and Franco.

Richard Dawkins is not terribly charmed.

This statement by the pope, on his arrival in Edinburgh, is a despicable outrage. Even if Hitler had been an atheist, his political philosophy was not based upon atheism and had no connection with atheism. Hitler was arguably (and by his own account) a Roman Catholic. In any case he enjoyed the open support of many of the most senior catholic clergy in Germany and the less demonstrative support of Pope Pius XII…

I am incandescent with rage at the sycophantic BBC coverage, and the sight of British toadies bowing and scraping to this odious man. I thought he was bad before. This puts the lid on it.

Quite. It’s simply foul – accusing people whose “crime” is refusal to believe in the invented god of the Catholic or any other church of being on a slippery slope to Nazism. Yet there are the great and the good bending the knee to this horror show. It’s revolting.

There was also the Presbyterian minister who commented (and replied to comments, in an obliging and patient way) on Jerry’s post yesterday. He’s the liberal kind of minister, which is good in its way (less likely to persecute sinners and doubters, that kind of thing), but not convincing. What he said sounded merely evasive and empty to me (and to others). It sounded like what you would say if you were a liberal minister in an age of science; it sounded more like excuses than like theology.

For instance:

There are lots of priests, pastors and theologians in the Catholic Church and in many other denominations who would describe the resurrection as mystery or metaphor. What is essential in these branches of Christianity is the confession of faith in the resurrection, not a scientific explanation of how it happened.

I can’t make any sense of that. It’s a mystery or metaphor, yet what is essential is the confession of faith in it. What is a confession of faith in a metaphor?

I asked about that, and he politely answered (he really was generous about replying – if it’s the metaphor that makes him like that, well, that’s some points for the metaphor):

As I said, religious claims don’t fit into some kind of universal discourse. They have a peculiar character rooted in the story of each religious community and its story. So I’m sure that this does not make a whole lot of sense to you, any more than other people’s religious claims make much sense to me.

Which amounts to atheism, if you think about it. He thinks it doesn’t, because the story of each religious community makes sense to that community, therefore atheism, but I think it does, because if the other claims don’t make much sense, then there’s precious little reason to think any such claims make sense.

A later iteration:

Just because it’s a story doesn’t mean it isn’t true, and by true I don’t mean scientifically true, but true within the framework of the community’s understanding of truth, which is a kind of truth that is thousands of years older than scientific truth.

But what does that mean? How is that not just empty verbiage? What does “true within the framework of the community’s understanding of truth” mean? If Wittgenstein were here I would ask him, but he isn’t, and anyway I probably wouldn’t understand if he explained, and he would probably hit me with the poker rather than explain. Meanwhile I can’t make any sense of it – it just looks like an evasion, and (I apoligize, Rev. Simpson) rather smug about it – smug in the sense of being indifferent to its lack of real meaning. There is something rather smug about allowing oneself to be persuaded by verbiage in that way. Communities don’t get to have their own understandings of truth. They get to have their own stories if they want to, but their own truth? No. They can call it that, but it won’t be

true.

I’m an expert on the hidden god, so I’m interested in what Rabbi Alan Lurie has to say about it.

This notion, that God’s presence is hidden, is a significant dilemma for many, and for some is clear proof that God does not exist…Many site the Holocaust, for example, as clear proof of God’s impotence or indifference.

No not proof; evidence; reasons. The notion that God’s presence is hidden is a reason to think god either doesn’t exist or is a nasty trickster.

The first step, then, is to let go of a literal vision of God, and to begin to know that the search for God is more akin to the search for love and connection than the search for a graviton or Big Foot.

In that case, why call it “God”? (I know I’ve said that some ten million times, but they don’t listen, so one just keeps having to say it again.) If you’re searching for a feeling, why call it by the same name as the all-powerful person? Well because that way you can make a living as a cleric. Any other reason?

the true purpose of religion is to help us recognize that we are more than our momentary desires

and that’s why god is hidden. Uh huh.

It takes a lot of time and effort to find god.

We don’t expect…to sleep through school and never open the textbooks and yet miraculously absorb the material.

So why don’t parents make their infants struggle to find them? Why isn’t that considered the best way to raise children?

Then he ends by saying the proofs are not much good and besides they’re useless because the point is the feeling. You have to have the feeling, and then you don’t care about the proofs – or the fact that god is under the currant bush behind the barn ten miles down the road in a distant galaxy.

I saw this article by Chris Mooney yesterday but I couldn’t summon the will to comment on it. I waited for Jerry to do so instead. If I had commented I would have said something brisk about the silly word “spirituality,” but mostly I would have pointed out how heavily Mooney always leans on war-language when he talks about overt atheists, and how invidious that is. He leans especially heavily here.

We hear a lot these days about the “conflict” between science and religion — the atheists and the fundamentalists, it seems, are constantly blasting one another. But what’s rarely noted is that even as science-religion warriors clash by night, in the morning they’ll see the battlefield has shifted beneath them.

The old science-religion story goes like this: The so-called New Atheists, such as Richard Dawkins, uncompromisingly blast faith, even as religiously driven “intelligent design” proponents repeatedly undermine science. And while most of us don’t fit into either of these camps, the extremes also target those in the middle. The New Atheists aim considerable fire toward moderate religious believers who are also top scientists, such as National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins. Meanwhile, people like Collins get regular flack from the “intelligent design” crowd as well.

In this schematic, the battle lines may appear drawn, the conflict inescapable. But once spirituality enters the picture, there seems to be common ground after all.

It’s invidious, and it’s also quite sinister. It’s a kind of hate-mongering, done in a climate in which atheists are already abominated. I don’t think Mooney is unaware of that climate, so I don’t think he can be acquitted of being at least irresponsible about this. I think he is more or less deliberately stoking hatred of what he persists in calling “the New Atheists,” and I think that is reprehensible.

The Freethinker tells us of an unusually idiotic outburst even for the Institute of Ideas (which is a refuge for the old Living Marxism gang, who apparently converted from “Revolutionary Communism” to libertarianism as a group and overnight) and Claire Fox. It’s about how the (wait for it) new atheists are demonizing that nice man the pope and (yes really) engaging in a witch hunt.

A New Atheist witch-hunt – in stark contrast to their own professed views on tolerance.

What professed views on tolerance? I, for one, have said many times that I don’t believe in blanket “tolerance”; it depends what is being tolerated and what the tolerance consists in. I don’t profess to tolerate everything. I don’t think most gnu atheists do; so what is Claire Fox referring to? I doubt that she knows; I think it’s just a cliché that right-thinking people profess tolerance and surely gnu atheists think of themselves as right-thinking so surely they must profess tolerance…or something.

But more to the point – what does she mean “witch hunt”? People – including some new atheists – are saying that Ratzinger should be held accountable for his actions and the actions of the organization he heads. That’s not the same thing as hunting witches. It’s nasty and dishonest to pretend it is.

No really, it’s all been a big misunderstanding. Sharia is

• not just one thing
• a matter of ideals rather than law
• a matter of interpretation
• subject to change
• not all that much about punishment
• full of rules about evidence that make punishment notional
• inspiring

See? Totally reassuring, right? And all those women being whipped or stoned in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan and the like are just having some kind of mass hallucination, because sharia is nice so that kind of thing couldn’t happen.

In short, shariah includes the attempt to proffer God-conscious responses to an ever-changing reality. And in this capacity, many of its rules are subject to change with changes in the circumstances to which it seeks to respond.

Except, of course, when it doesn’t, and they aren’t. But always look on the bright side of life, eh?

Obama says we are one nation under god. But we’re not. That’s factually incorrect.

1. Not all of us are under god. I’m not. Lots of people I know are not. We don’t think there is any god to be under; we don’t think there is any good reason to think there is any god to be under; we wouldn’t be under it even if we did think it existed.
2. The government doesn’t get to order us to be under god. It doesn’t get to enlist us into the party of those under god. It is none of the government’s business whether or not we are under god. We get to not be under god if we want to; that is our right.

So Obama shouldn’t be telling us we are one nation under god. It’s not true, and he has no business trying to make it true by asserting it. He should keep his poxy god to himself.

Notice, by the way, that PBS too, like the BBC, has something it calls “Religion and Ethics.” PBS, like the BBC, stupidly thinks religion and ethics go together, thus perpetuating the stupid and coercive fiction that ethics depends on religion and that non-religious people are unethical, if not downright evil.

A pox on all of them.

For yet more illiberal bullying from theists and friends-of-theists, you could do worse than to read the comments on this post at the feminist site The F-Word. The post is about C of E priest Miranda Threllfall-Jones saying gosh darn it Jesus was a big ol’ feminist and anyone who says he wasn’t is just a big poopy-head. Our friend Amy Clare, who has written for the F-Word, wrote the first comment to say 1. there is no evidence that Jesus was a feminist and 2. what does it matter anyway? There was some agreement and some disagreement, and then there was a temper tantrum by an outraged entitled Christian.

I am so fed up of people, mostly atheist thinking that it is their right to make horrible comments about Christianity. I am actually surprised these comments ended up on this site. calling the bible a book of fairytales does not show respect to the many Christian feminists (myself included). If the same comments were made about the Koran I doubt they would be included. i have just turned 18 and i have never in my whole life took the piss out of any kind of religion because it is so disrespectful.

The first sentence is especially choice – imagine, we think it is our right to make “horrible comments” about Christianity! But people say silly things all over the internet; nothing to see here. What is worth noticing though is the near-torrent of supportive bullying that followed, and especially the really nasty bullying that came from the people who run the F-Word.

We can’t get into a situation where any feminist who has religious/spiritual beliefs is constantly challenged to prove her religion is true every time she writes/reports on/ wants to publicise feminist activism in religious/spiritual groups.

In other words, we can’t get into a situation where women are actually challenged about their religious beliefs. Er…why not? What is it about feminism that makes that such a shocking prospect? Is feminism a word for “fragile flower” now? Is it a word for “woman who can’t bear to have to justify her beliefs”?

The F Word has always had (or tried to have) a broad interpretation of feminism and that includes religious/spiritual feminists as well as agnostic/atheist feminists. There is plenty of opportunity elsewhere to debate and argue the existence of God/Jesus etc. for the rest of eternity if you want to. I’m just don’t think that this is the right time and place for it.

In other words, stfu.

This was made even clearer in the final comment.

Amy Clare – The issue raised in this post was gender stereotyping in the Church of English; NOT the truth about whether Jesus actually existed. By bringing this up in the first comment, the opportunity for Christian feminists to potentially discuss this issue has been closed down. Atheists are more than welcome to contribute blog posts and features to TFW that analyse and critique religion as it relates to women’s rights, but we would also like to have some space where religious women can discuss feminism as it relates to their religion, without constantly having to justify their beliefs.

Disputing a claim is closing down an opportunity for believers in that claim to speak. If you disagree (according to this logic) you are shutting down anyone who disagrees with you. Disagreement becomes a form of silencing, and the remedy is to silence the person who disagreed. So that’s what “the collective” at the F-Word is going to be doing.

I was merely trying to explain why I think we need to make room for religious/spiritual beliefs within feminism, no matter whether you or I or anyone else views them as being sufficiently rooted in evidence.I will not be publishing any further comments on this thread, unless they relate to the post itself i.e. the issue of gender stereotyping in the Church and whether Jesus can be viewed as a feminist within the teachings of Christianity.

The collective will be amending our charter and/or comments policy in the near future to take the issues raised in this thread (and previously) into account.

If that’s feminism, what am I?

But, fortunately, that’s not feminism. It’s clearly a variant of it, but it’s not the thing itself. Feminism doesn’t think women need to be infantilized; on the contrary, feminism thinks women need to be treated like adults, and that they also need to act like adults. They don’t need to be coddled, and they don’t need to be encouraged to act like frangible fractious babies.

Yet more astonishingly illiberal bilge, this time from the “rabbinical adviser” of the Jewish Society at Yale – at Yale, generally considered a liberal university in all senses of the word. Yet here is what he has to say:

The president of the United States, like all citizens of this great country, has the right to follow the religion of his or her heart and conscience. As long as our leader pursues peace and justice through faith in the one G-d of us all, a believing president should not only be tolerated but welcomed.

Oh. So if “our leader” fails to have “faith in the one G-d of us all” then an unbelieving president should not be tolerated, let alone welcomed; is that it? Well obviously that is it; that’s the logic of the sentence. So Shmully Hecht really does think we do and should live in a theocracy.

Faithlessness and nihilism are the greatest threats to humanity, and a leader who believes in nothing, or establishes a religion to serve himself or his state, becomes Hitler, Stalin, Mao or Pol Pot; who together murdered and starved over one hundred million human beings.

That’s an extraordinarily outrageous thing to say. The guy is simply asserting that any head of state who does not believe in “God” inevitably becomes a Hitler or Pol Pot – inevitably becomes the kind of person who murders and starves people by the millions. And this revolting, sinister crap is published by the Washington Post – not the Washington Times, but the Post.

Freedom of religion…was not established to advance secularism, as is sometimes implied, but rather to allow diverse faith to flourish unhindered.

That’s a slightly more elevated way of saying “freedom of religion does not mean freedom from religion,” a favorite of Joe Lieberman’s among others, and it is of course complete crap. Freedom of religion decidedly does include the freedom to have no religion, and secularism is precisely the medium in which diverse religions can flourish.

In 1954, President Dwight Eisenhower, who was born a Jehovah’s Witness and baptized as a Presbyterian, reaffirmed the importance of faith in this country when he oversaw the addition to our Pledge of Allegiance the crucial words “under G-d.”

Well, no, the words were “under God”; but anyway, so the fuck what? It was 1954, the height of brainless anti-communism and reactive patriotheism, so there was a surge of state-sponsored theism which should have been ruled unconstitutional. We’re not required to collapse in awe at the idea now.

And people wonder why gnu atheists are so gnu. It’s because of guys like this one.