All right, I’ve adjusted my attitude since yesterday and the day before. We had a nice chat on the phone, and it will be okay. The seminar will be mostly discussion and q and a, so I won’t have to give a big long talk while yawning and scratching, so I can handle it. And hey, it will be fun. A conversation with a lot of people interested in women’s rights and the role of religion in interfering with same, in Stockholm. Fun!

And the cover of the Swedish translation of Does God Hate Women? is by Elisabeth Ohlson Wallin, whose Homosexuality in religion exhibit was canceled by one museum in June.

Sweden’s Museum of World Cultures canceled the Homosexuality in religion exhibit after consulting with representatives of the three religions involved in the exhibit, Judaism, Christianity and Islam claiming that it might offend some believers. The exhibit was by artist Elisabeth Ohlsson-Wallin. The pieces in the exhibition depict texts from holy books condemning homosexuality beside pictures of people of the same gender in sexual positions.

In other words a Swedish museum of world cultures gave three religions the right of veto over an artist’s exhibition, because somebody claimed it “might” “offend” “some” “believers.”

Perhaps representatives of the three religions will turn up at the seminar Thursday afternoon and bust all of us, because what we’re talking about “might” “offend” “some” “believers.”

Best fun evah.

Gary Gutting is a philosopher of religion at Notre Dame, a Catholic university in the US; he writes for the New York Times philosophy blog The Stone. He has a long post saying what’s wrong with Dawkins’s arguments for the strong improbability of god. It’s worth reading because it’s more than just shouting or hand-waving or tone trolling or border disputing or last Thursdayism or science has nothing to say about the supernatural-ism. That’s not to say it’s convincing, but at least there’s something there.

He addresses Dawkins’s argument (not unique to him, of course) that a god that created the universe would have to be even more complex than the universe, and thus would require explanation even more than the universe does, so it doesn’t explain the universe after all, so it’s not a good argument for the existence of god. (That’s not how Gutting puts it, it’s how I do.)

Here Dawkins ignores the possibility that God is a very different sort of being than brains and computers. His argument for God’s complexity either assumes that God is material or, at least, that God is complex in the same general way that material things are (having many parts related in complicated ways to one another). The traditional religious view, however, is that God is neither material nor composed of immaterial parts (whatever that might mean). Rather, he is said to be simple, a unity of attributes that we may have to think of as separate but that in God are united in a single reality of pure perfection.

Okay…but what good is that? What good is a view, what good is “he is said to be”? It’s just saying. Anyone can say, but that doesn’t mean anyone else should believe what is said.

Obviously, there are great difficulties in understanding how God could be simple in this way. But philosophers from Thomas Aquinas through contemporary thinkers have offered detailed discussions of the question that provide intelligent suggestions about how to think coherently about a simple substance that has the power and knowledge attributed to God.

Okay, but I don’t really see why anyone should bother, given that there’s no real reason to pay attention to the claim in the first place. Saying “God is simple” is an ad hoc way to get around the “god would have to be more complex” objection, but it’s not a claim with any apparent relationship to observable reality. That means that intelligent suggestions about how to think coherently about this legless claim don’t strike an outsider as all that valuable.

Making Dawkins’ case in any convincing way would require detailed engagement not only with Swinburne but also with other treatments by recent philosophers such as Christopher Hughes’ “A Complex Theory of a Simple God.” (For a survey of recent work on the topic, see William Vallicella’s article, “Divine Simplicity,” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

Okay, I had a look.

According to the classical theism of Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas and their adherents, God is radically unlike creatures in that he is devoid of any complexity or composition, whether physical or metaphysical. Besides lacking spatial and temporal parts, God is free of matter/form composition, potency/act composition, and existence/essence composition. There is also no real distinction between God as subject of his attributes and his attributes.

Okay, but again, this is just dogma. It’s just saying. I’m sure it’s internally coherent, but there’s no reason to believe it in the first place. Without any reason to believe it in the first place, it’s hard to care whether it’s internally coherent or not. Don’t you find?

 God is what he has. As identical to each of his attributes, God is identical to his nature. And since his nature or essence is identical to his existence, God is identical to his existence. This is the doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS). It is represented not only in classical Christian theology, but also in Jewish, Greek, and Islamic thought. It is to be understood as an affirmation of God’s absolute transcendence of creatures.

Okay – that all makes sense if you believe in this god in the first place. But if you don’t, it just sounds like people saying fancy things about something they know absolutely nothing about. It sounds grand, that kind of thing, but it’s just saying. Just saying is not convincing to outsiders.

You need a better first step. I already know that theology sounds explanatory and serious to insiders, but you need a better first step to convince outsiders. Science and other empirical forms of inquiry have that better first step; theism doesn’t.

Oh come on. The brush Toby Young paints with is so broad that he’s lost his grip.

No other prominent feminist has spoken out about Ashtiani’s case, unless you include Yoko Ono who has signed the petition calling for her to be freed. We’ve heard nothing from Germaine Greer, nothing from Gloria Steinem, nothing from Jane Fonda, nothing from Naomi Wolf, nothing from Clare Short, nothing from Harriet Harmen.

Well that’s interesting, and in some cases reprehensible if true, but it’s hardly conclusive. That’s not a complete list of prominent feminists, to put it mildly; arguably it’s not even a list of feminists. Jane Fonda? Yoko Ono? They’re celebrities rather than feminists.

 Almost no one on the left, with the honourable exception of Christopher Hitchens, dares to breath a word against any Islamic country for fear of being branded “Islamophobic”. Thus, a brutal dictatorship is able to torture and murder thousands of innocent women, safe in the knowledge that the self-styled keepers of the West’s conscience will remain silent.

Oh come on. Yes parts of the left are way too “sensitive” about what they take to be “Islamophobia” and way too confused about the difference between racism and criticism of religion, but it’s certainly not the case that Christopher Hitchens is the sole exception to that.

Could a feminist outcry today about the plight of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani do anything to prevent her death? We will never know, but it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that their continuing silence reveals the moral bankruptcy of their movement.

What do you mean we will never know?! There is such an outcry; it’s going on right now. There could be even more people involved, of course, but that doesn’t mean there are none.

Wiley-Blackwell sent me The Secular Outlook by Paul Cliteur a few days ago. It has a blurb by Russell Blackford on the back, which is a good sign.

Cliteur says it’s important to distinguish between  predictions of secularization, which are descriptive, and secularism, which is normative. There’s an amusing passage on page 4 where it becomes apparent that he does not think much of Karen Armstrong.

Armstrong, like some other authors writing on religion and secularization, mixes up “secularism” and “the secularization thesis.” A secularist to her is someone who believes in the secularization thesis. ..Armstrong and others may, of course, gleefully criticize the secularization thesis, but that is flogging a dead horse. Their argumentation has no consequence whatsoever for the viability of secularism as a moral and political philosophy or a vision of how the state should relate to religion. On the contrary.

Yes well – that’s Armstrong.

He makes a key distinction on page 5 between

tolerance as practiced by religions, not tolerance toward religions. Although both forms of tolerance are important, the first issue is a blind spot in the literature on this subject, the latter a sole preoccupation.

Ohhhhhhh – so it is. So religions are supposed to practice tolerance themselves! Who knew?

I’m going to Stockholm for a couple of days next week. It seems very absurd to go from Seattle to Stockholm for a couple of days, but then again, it’s better than not going to Stockholm at all, so I’m going. Does God Hate Women? is being published in translation, and there’s going to be a launch and stuff.

I will have a very horrible time the first day at least, and possibly throughout, because they got confused and scheduled a seminar and then the launch on the day I arrive as opposed to the next day. I have to go directly from the airport to the seminar. This is not good. I will be filthy and red-eyed and ravenous and grumpy, and it will be 4 a.m. my time without any sleep. I do not like to think what kind of spectacle I will present at this seminar, much less what I will feel like, but I have told them not to expect anything. They have only themselves to blame.

So anyway that’s where I’ll be next week for a couple of days.

Damon Linker makes a great observation, in discussing Hitchens and death and god. He compares Hitchens on the difference between his lucid self and the thing he could be turned into by drugs or pain, to Primo Levi on entering Auschwitz as a non-believer and exiting it the same way, and cites a too-devout Christian former colleague of his who had only contempt for Levi’s stoicism, calling it sinful pride.

Levi and Hitchens imply that a person’s capacity to determine the truth depends on his or her ability to think calmly, coolly, dispassionately. It depends on the capacity to bracket aspects of one’s subjectivity (like intense emotions, including fear of imminent death) that might distort one’s judgment or obstruct the effort to achieve an unbiased, objective view of the world in itself. This is the outlook of the scientist (Levi was a chemist), the philosopher, the champion of rational enlightenment, the secular intellectual and social critic. From this standpoint, the terrified, irrational effusions of a man facing his own extinction are no more to be trusted than a blind man’s account of a crime scene: each witness lacks the capacity to perceive, make sense of, and accurately judge the essential facts. Far more reliable are the sober, critical reflections of a man in good health, protected from danger, insulated from threats to his well being. That, for Levi and Hitchens, is a man at his best and most capable of determining the truth of things.

Religious believers—including my devoutly religious colleague at First Things—make very different assumptions about the proper path to truth and what constitutes a man at his best. As Rod Dreher noted in a post about Hitchens’ recent statements, a Christian believes that the experience of suffering discloses essential truths that cannot be discovered or known in any other way. What are these truths? That we are fundamentally weak and needy creatures. That we are anxious animals, longing for someone or something to soothe us, to protect us from and relieve us of our worries…

For the religious person, human beings are at their best when they accept these truths and live humbly in their light, offering up their existential anguish as prayers, opening themselves up to the possible existence of a providential divinity who will answer those prayers and grant salvation from the horror of obliteration…

Levi and Hitchens reside in the first camp, believing that they are most themselves when they are healthy and free—at the height of their human powers; whatever they may feel or say (or be tempted to say) in moments of weakness or degradation deserves to be dismissed as inauthentic. But the devout reside in the second camp, insisting that human beings are truest to themselves—most authentic—when they are most vulnerable.

That’s a beautiful point, and it clarifies what’s at stake. The devout think that humans are at their best when they are damaged: weak, suffering, miserable. The undevout think we are at our best when we are at our best – strong, healthy, functioning well, not afraid or depressed or flattened by grief.

Well which would it be? Is a sick, deaf, lame, tired dog a dog at its best or is it a dog that is not even itself anymore – that is no more than a tube to ingest and exrete food?

It’s the same for humans. I’ll come over all Aristotelian here and say that humans are at their best when they are best at doing what humans do – talking, thinking, laughing, making, designing, inventing, cooking, dancing, singing, and a thousand things more. That is humans at their best – when they’re living up to their potential. A human that is too lazy and apathetic to do anything but slump on a couch and watch tv 18 hours a day is not a human at her best, and neither is one who is physically damaged to the point of surrender.

If a gang kidnapped you and tortured you until you agreed to betray a friend to them – would that be you at your best? Hardly. If “god” takes advantage of your illness and pain to get you to surrender – would that be you at your best? I see absolutely no reason to think so.

How familiar this statement by Rachel Polonsky sounds…

I am very glad to report that the legal dispute that Robert Service and I have had with Orlando Figes and Stephanie Palmer has now been settled.

This dispute began in mid-April when Orlando Figes denied responsibility for the ten Amazon reviews signed ‘Historian’ in a circular email to colleagues…

Our objectives in pressing this case were…to gain a contractual undertaking from Professor Figes not to use fraud, subterfuge or unlawful means to attack or damage us or our works in the future; and to require Professor Figes to circulate a formal apology and retraction to all the recipients of his email of 15 April.

Doesn’t that sound familiar? The denial of responsibility – the “no not me I never”? The use of fraud and subterfuge and unlawful means to attack and damage people and their works? It sounds awfully familiar to me.

So does Robert Service’s version:

I am pleased that this squalid saga is over. I never wanted to go to law, but the behaviour of Prof. Figes over three months made it impossible to let matters rest. He lied through his teeth for a week and threatened to sue me for libel if I didn’t say black was white. His wife, herself a lawyer, took up his cause and lied that she was the culprit and not he. At the end of the second week he was forced by the incontrovertible evidence to admit that he had written the anonymous reviews posted on the Amazon website. There followed weeks of grinding, needless altercation as he tried to tamp down the wording of his apology and retraction…

Check; check; check.

Universities in the UK are under all manner of pressures and criticisms at the moment, and it is terrible that Figes has made it easier for the critics to pounce. He has brought shame on that fine institution Birkbeck College. In my view it is inappropriate that a lecturer teaching about the lies in public life in Stalin’s USSR should himself be so menacing and dishonest. I would also question whether such an academic should soon or ever again be trusted to supply confidential, impartial references or reports for research grant-giving bodies.

And what about his students? Who would want a menacing dishonest teacher?

At the moment I obviously feel sore about the hundreds of hours of wasted time since mid-April, not to mention the unpleasantness…In some of his statements according to the press he has come close to depicting himself as the victim.

Check; check; check.

So. There was this widow in Afghanistan; she was 35, and pregnant. So, the Taliban decided the thing to do with her was first to imprison her for three days, then to whip her in public: to whip her two hundred times, in public, being pregnant and all, and a widow. And then to shoot her in the head. And then to dump her body somewhere.

Why? Well the Taliban said she’d committed adultery. The thing to do with a woman who has committed adultery is to whip her two hundred times in public, and then shoot her in the head.

The man, not so much. The man wasn’t punished. The man didn’t get so much as a tap on the hand with a pencil in private. Nothing bad happened to the man at all, while the woman was imprisoned for three days then whipped two hundred times in public and then shot in the head.

Why? Well, clearly, because men are the right kind of people, and women are the wrong kind. Clearly because men are of value and women are so much garbage. Clearly because women are so foul and disgusting and horrible that it is simply not possible to punish them harshly enough. Killing them isn’t enough – you have to flay them alive first in front of an audience, and even that isn’t really enough, but the arms get tired.

Bibi Sanubar was a widow, so she wasn’t even being unkind to her husband by having sex with a different man. It’s just that she had sex without the Taliban’s permission, and that she was a woman at the time.

Sarah McKenzie points out that religion and atheism both need smart women.

Part of the problem, I think, stems from the brand of atheism that is dominant today. Many people, especially women, might find it intimidating or unappealing…Atheists must be prepared to actively defend their non-belief, a process that by definition will offend many believers.

While there is most definitely a place for this so-called “militant” atheism, it is little wonder that some women might find it off-putting. After all, girls are taught to be sensitive and emotional, to not cause trouble or be particularly forthright with their opinions.

Some girls are. I can’t say that I remember being taught that, and if anybody really did attempt to teach me that, it obviously didn’t work. If anything it’s the other way around – I’m a woman, and women are seen as weak and placating and ingratiating, so I owe it to the gender to be abrasive and obstinate and contentious. That’s not it, of course…it’s not a matter of owing anything, it’s a matter of a visceral loathing of that image, and of wanting no part of it. I refuse to be weak and placating and ingratiating. So I get called a lot of hard names by a lot of threatened men, but I also have a good time. And maybe, who knows, I’m clearing a little ground for other women.

McKenzie seems to think so, much to my surprise. Kiran Mehdee pointed out this article to me, saying it mentioned me. I turned an unbecoming shade of puce when I found it was true.

All of this is not to say that there are no vocal or intelligent women out there talking about the role of religion, sharing stories about their own loss of faith and generally waving the atheist flag. However, we rarely hear the names of Dutch activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali or author Ophelia Benson mentioned alongside Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens.

There’s a treat! Putting me in that company. Excuse the narcissism, but…well you see I’m a shy blushing violet really, despite all the above, so I don’t expect this kind of thing, so when it comes along I have to boast about it as loudly as possible. Right? Right.

Oh, sad – Gillian McKeith is in trouble for saying what her spa can do. The Advertising Authority thinks she might not quite be on firm ground here.

Scottish nutritionist Gillian McKeith is to be reported to the advertising authorities over claims that visitors to her new age health resort can be healed by mystic powers.

The Perth-born health guru has set up a Wellness Retreat in rural Spain, which boasts that its “amazing energy vortex” can help to heal and rejuvenate visitors as well as assist them in losing weight.

Yes – so? Maybe it can. Spain is a mystical kind of place, especially rural Spain, so maybe its energy vortices can do just that.

Promotional material for the venture, on McKeith’s official website, states: “I want you to be able to literally detox from the world in a most glorious location with unsurpassed nurturing mountains, swooning eagles, a magnificent lake, big blue skies and an amazing energy vortex for rejuvenation, weight loss and vitality.

“Feel the vibration of the energy vortex of this spectacular location, and be healed by it! It is a moment that will stay with you forever.”

Swooning eagles! Okay I take it back – swooning eagles are dangerous. Thousands of people die of broken necks every year because eagles swoon on them from a great height. If they’re a feature of the magic energy vortex spa, then the detox comes at too high a price.

Jay Rosen on “the church of the savvy” is great; thanks to Physicalist in comments for pointing him out.

Though they see themselves as the opposite of ideological, the people in the national press actually share an ideology: the religion of savviness.  Since it differs from both liberal ideology and conservative ideology and from political thought itself, savviness often eludes description, or even recognition as a set of beliefs.

Oh is that what it’s called – the way they’re always talking about the process at the expense of the policy. “How will this affect the November elections?” is always the point, after a perfunctory and unenlightening glance at the substance. So that’s savviness.

The savvy do know how things work inside the game of politics, and it is this knowledge they try to wield in argument…. instead of argument. In this sense savviness as the church practices it is the exemption from the political that believers think will come to them because they are journalists striving only to report on politics or conduct analysis, not to “win” within the contest as it stands.

And that’s what makes them so boring and depressing – they report as if the process were an end in itself as opposed to…the process. They report as if winning were the only aim and as if all of us should be as enthralled by the contest as they are, when in fact most of us don’t give a flying fuck about the process, we want to know how they expect us to cough up thousands of dollars for health insurance every month.

Prohibited from joining in political struggles, dedicated to observing what is, regardless of whether it ought to be, the savvy believe that these disciplines afford them a special view of the arena, cured of excess sentiment, useless passon, ideological certitude and other defects of vision that players in the system routinely exhibit…[T]he savvy don’t say: I have a better argument than you… They say: I am closer to reality than you. And more mature.”

And that explains why they think they get to lecture people who are much older and wiser and cleverer than they are; it’s because they’re savvy. Yes that does explain a lot.

Russell Blackford posted a comment he made at the Intersection on July 30th, that never got posted, in reply to Mooney’s “final word” on Tom Johnson. It’s a good comment – thoughtful, and civil. But it’s not uncritical – and it’s not posted there.

It may have been penny wise and pound foolish to censor it though, since it’s more conspicuous as a post than it would have been as a comment. Russell suggests (this alone will have been enough to explain the non-posting) that Mooney should lift the ban on me, and adds that if he did I would probably ask the old question again about why he thinks Jerry Coyne was wrong to review books by Miller and Giberson for the New Republic.

 You seem to think that Jerry did something wrong in agreeing to review the books and in reviewing them the way he did. I don’t see it. If you no longer think that, it would be nice if you said so explicitly. If you do still think it, I’d be interested to know what you think Jerry should have done when asked to review those books.

Yes, so would I. I don’t expect I will ever know. It’s one of those haunting unanswered questions that irritate us while we’re waiting for the bus.

Sadly, the comments on Russell’s post got infested by the Pieret-Ramsey faction and then by Ramsey jabbing at me endlessly – not to mention DM, who has added me to his death threat list, blasphemous little bitch that I am.

The Telegraph is also worked up about the pope and his impending visit and the rudeness and badness of people who think he’s a bad man. That’s not as surprising from the Telegraph as it is from the New Statesman though. But it’s still sick-making.

…the Queen will be playing the formal role of host to a fellow head of state, who is also the spiritual leader of a billion people.

Yes, yes, it’s all very glam. Some people get a sexual thrill from that phrase, “spiritual leader” – and when it’s of a billion people, oh well then – the pope must be very important and thrilling indeed. Never mind that the whole thing is a vast fraud and a system of mental imprisonment – let’s just admire their pretty clothes and their big shiny cars.

 Old-fashioned anti-Popery is not the force that it was in 1982, because the community of anti-papal fundamentalists has shrunk, along with the Christian community in general.

The community of anti-papal fundamentalists! Who knew there was such a community – I certainly didn’t. But everybody is a community in the UK. The lucky ones have spiritual leaders, and the others are fundamentalists about the people who have spiritual leaders. Or something.

Both the BBC and the Government set great store by “celebrating other cultures”. Benedict XVI’s arrival is an opportunity to celebrate a culture that planted our Christian roots; for it was a Pope who sent St Augustine to Britain.

Well yes, they do, as they also set great store by “celebrating communities.” It’s one of their more gag-worthy qualities, especially when the cultures and communities in question are centrally concerned with bending the knee to a non-existent deity. Anyway – you have your orders – be nice to the pope.

Disobey them.

So now we have the New Statesman rhapsodizing about Newt Gingrich converting to Catholicism and presenting a film that rhapsodizes about the previous pope. Yes really. Then it (in the person of Carla Powell) rhapsodizes about the current pope’s upcoming visit, and his meeting with the queen. Gingrich, two reactionary popes, a monarch…The people’s flag is deepest red, all right.

 And yet, on recent visits to London, I have been shocked by the negative criticism of the Pope and the Catholic Church. Why are so many of the capital’s liberal elite upset? Why is Pope Benedict, an 83-year-old retired university professor, causing such anxiety?

What a fucking stupid question. Because he is the reactionary head of a reactionary institution that tells millions of people what to do, and tells them wrong. Because he is a man at the top of a pyramid of men in an organization that officially bans women from all the decision-making jobs but doesn’t hesitate to tell them what to do.

The child abuse scandals central to all this have been a stain on the Catholic Church. But it is important to remember that this is a problem the Pope has been working to resolve for at least a decade. Grave as it is, the scandal should not be allowed to obscure his core message.

Which is that secularism is evil, that condoms cause Aids, that the ordination of women is The Worst, and that when priests rape children it is up to the church to protect…the priests. Well don’t worry, the “scandal” of child rape and the church’s protection of child rape doesn’t seem to be obscuring that message too much.

The tabloids will always offer apparently easy solutions and those hostile to the robust moral teaching of my faith will jump on any bandwagon.

Bandwagon shmandwagon. Yes I am hostile to the “robust moral teaching” of your “faith.” Why aren’t you? It sucks. The “robust moral teaching” of your faith is that homosexuality is a sin, women must never have the freedom to use their own bodies for their own purposes instead of other people’s, birth control is evil, men must be in charge of everything, and a bunch of priests have access to a special spooky holy morality that cannot be adapted to fit modern sensibilities. I despise the “robust moral teaching” of your faith and your church.

It hurts me that those advocating the arrest of His Holiness are increasingly in danger of sounding like the Chinese government, which seeks to use its brute economic influence to silence the Dalai Lama whenever he travels abroad. So much for British freedom of speech.

Nonsense. It’s nothing to do with silencing, and it’s nothing to do with freedom of speech. Ratzinger concealed crimes from law enforcement; that’s a crime; that’s why he should be arrested.

What is this falangist drivel doing in the New Statesman? I know they’re crazy there, but this? A Catholic rant about liberal elites?

Harriet Baber likes to put things in a provocative way (as do I), and she does so in answering the Comment is Free belief question of the week. Lots of provoking, and I will oblige by being provoked into commenting.

I see no reason why I should believe that life is, as Tony Soprano’s perfectly awful mother Livia put it, “a great big nothing” after which we are annihilated. That may very well be the way things are. But I see no benefit to believing it is so.

Yes but that’s a false choice, because it’s an incomplete description of the alternative to believing that life is made into Something by the existence of god. The choice is not: 1. god, and life=something, or 2. no god, and life=nothing. I don’t think of life as a great big nothing. In fact that’s a very odd way to describe life – life is very much something. The amount and variety of life on this average-size planet is staggering; it’s light years away from “nothing.” If the idea is that life feels like nothing to people who don’t believe god exists, that’s wrong too. Harriet must know that, but…she likes to provoke.

But if I believe in God and a blissful afterlife contemplating him, then even if I am wrong I will not be disappointed. I would rather live in a fool’s paradise than no paradise at all.

Really? An eternity of blissfully contemplating god? Wouldn’t that start to get boring after about, oh, say fifty years?

Truth is overrated. And it’s remarkable that the very individuals who are most vocal in their opposition to religiously motivated puritanism are the most fiercely puritanical when it comes to truth.

No. It’s not remarkable at all, because the two are not the same kind of thing. (And who are these people, anyway?) Thinking that truth matters is not the same kind of thing as thinking that pleasure is sinful.

People in any case overestimate the value of truth and underestimate the difficulty of arriving at it. There are a great many truths in which I have abolutely no interest – truths about the lifecycle of Ctenocephalides felis, (the common cat flea) or the extensive body of truths about the condition of my teeth that my dentist imposes on me. I see no reason why I should bother with these truths or make a point of believing them.

I see no such reason either, but the whole thing is a red herring. It’s not a question of bothering with every truth there is, it’s a question of paying attention to the truth or otherwise of what one already believes.

There is some notion that even if we can ignore these workaday truths we should be concerned about the larger, more significant truths about the meaning of life, if any, and the human condition. I don’t see why. In any case, I’m a satisficer, quite happy in every department of life with good enough…I don’t much care about getting the right answers to what are commonly called the big questions.

An interesting remark from a philosopher.

That is no doubt what she wanted people to say. I’m nothing if not obliging.

Paul Sims watched Stephen Green on Channel 4’s 4Thought.tv the other day, so you won’t have to. 4Thought.tv is Channel 4’s version of the ever-laughable Deepity for the Day on BBC Radio 4. Stephen Green was srsly good, apparently. His Thought was about that there HoMoSeckShuality and why he thinks it should be put a stop to. Paul Sims collected some extracts, which is way helpful of him.

Homosexuals can never be one flesh, so they have to press into, like, sexual duty parts of the body that aren’t designed for that.

I think Stephen Green has been overthinking this. I think he has been having smutty thoughts.

In 30 years our dying civilisation is going to be taken over by a stronger one and the obvious candidate is Islam and the gays aren’t going to like it much living under that system.

So – um – let’s get rid of them all now before that happens, and then they won’t have to worry about not liking it much living under that system, because they’ll all be gone.

But srsly. Why are people giving Stephen Green air time? It’s like giving Bill Donohue air time. It’s like giving mildew a plate of food in your kitchen. It’s a mistake.

Karl Giberson and Lawrence Krauss seem to see things differently. (Now there’s a surprise.) Giberson tells us that science and religion aren’t in tension at all at all.

A religious scientist functions routinely as a scientist in the lab, perhaps looking for the gene that causes hyperbole. While they are engaged in this search they believe that God is the creator. On regular occasions this scientist goes to church, where he or she sings hymns, listens to sermons, volunteers at the soup kitchen, takes communion, and puts money in the offering plate, all the while believing that the scientific picture of the world is accurate. Occasionally this religious scientist may even daydream about finding that gene for hyperbole while listening to the sermon. At no time do the co-existing mindsets conflict or create cognitive dissonance.

Well one, he doesn’t know that. He doesn’t know that about any religious scientist other than himself, and he may not know it about himself. He could be kidding himself, or forgetting, or exaggerating. And two, if the co-existing mindsets never conflict or create cognitive dissonance, then that’s a sign that the religious scientist is not thinking properly. They should conflict or create cognitive dissonance. One of them is based on evidence and inference, and the other is based on just Believing. The second is inferior to the first.

Krauss highlights this:

Consider the results of a 2009 Pew Survey: 31 percent of U.S. adults believe “humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time.” (So much for dogs, horses or H1N1 flu.) The survey’s most enlightening aspect was its categorization of responses by levels of religious activity, which suggests that the most devout are on average least willing to accept the evidence of reality.

You see? That is cognitive dissonance, the very thing that Giberson said “the religious scientist” simply doesn’t have. Being unwilling to accept the evidence of reality is that tension. Giberson of course means that in practice he walls the two off from each other, and he does accept the evidence of reality when he’s Doing Science. But he also means that he (and others like him) simply never notice the wall. Well if they don’t they should, and Giberson can’t know that none of them do in any case.

Lashings of extraordinary writing in Hitchens’s cancer piece in Vanity Fair. For one thing, there’s the opening, about waking up in a New York hotel room.

have more than once in my time woken up feeling like death. But nothing prepared me for the early morning last June when I came to consciousness feeling as if I were actually shackled to my own corpse. The whole cave of my chest and thorax seemed to have been hollowed out and then refilled with slow-drying cement.

That final (frightening) sentence is an homage to a parallel scene in Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, about a much younger man waking up with a hangover. It’s a set-piece about what a hangover feels like, and it’s funny as hell. It and the Hitchens passage also have a whiff of Wodehouse – Hitchens is Bertie describing his sensations in some awkward spot.

He managed to get to the phone and summon the emergency services.

They arrived with great dispatch and behaved with immense courtesy and professionalism. I had the time to wonder why they needed so many boots and helmets and so much heavy backup equipment, but now that I view the scene in retrospect I see it as a very gentle and firm deportation, taking me from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady. Within a few hours, having had to do quite a lot of emergency work on my heart and my lungs, the physicians at this sad border post had shown me a few other postcards from the interior and told me that my immediate next stop would have to be with an oncologist.

Beautiful writing. Do admit.

 I love the imagery of struggle. I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient. Allow me to inform you, though, that when you sit in a room with a set of other finalists, and kindly people bring a huge transparent bag of poison and plug it into your arm, and you either read or don’t read a book while the venom sack gradually empties itself into your system, the image of the ardent soldier or revolutionary is the very last one that will occur to you. You feel swamped with passivity and impotence: dissolving in powerlessness like a sugar lump in water.

Yes; just what I hate. It’s bad enough in airports and on planes.

If there were an Intelligent Designer, someone who writes that well would live to be ninety. But there isn’t.

Sorry posting is a bit light. I’ve been busy trying to pull knives out of my back (no use, they’re stuck), and now I have a sudden avalanche of subbing to do for The Philosophers’ Mag and a mere few hours to do it in, so it’s hard to find a spare moment.

Will try to do better.