Judges speak

Apr 30th, 2010 5:14 pm | By

Lord Justice Laws said

The precepts of any one religion – any belief system – cannot, by force of their religious origins, sound any louder in the general law than the precepts of any other.

If they did, those out in the cold would be less than citizens, and our constitution would be on the way to a theocracy, which is of necessity autocratic.

The law of a theocracy is dictated without option to the people, not made by their judges and governments.

Beautiful. Compare the ruling in FREEDOM FROM RELIGION FOUNDATION v OBAMA:

However, religious expression by the government that is inspirational and comforting to a believer may seem exclusionary or even threatening to someone who does not share those beliefs. This is not simply a matter of being “too sensitive” or wanting to suppress the religious expression of others. Rather, as explained in a recent book by the Provost of Princeton University and the Dean of the University of Texas School of Law, it is a
consequence of the unique danger that religious conduct by the government poses for creating “in” groups and “out” groups:

Then quoting:

Religious affiliation typically implicates an expansive web-of-belief and conduct, and individuals often feel and are seen as “in” or “out” of such webs. In a variety of ways the perceived and actual stakes of being within or without these webs of belief and membership can be very high: being fulfilled and redeemed or eternally damned; being welcomed as a member of the community or shunned. Moreover, it is in the nature of religion that persons outside a given faith will on occasion fail to understand or appreciate matters internal to that faith, and so will be inappropriately indifferent, suspicious, or even repelled and hostile to beliefs and practices central to that faith. These are matters of sociological fact, and they justify distinct constitutional concern that governmental conduct will valorize some beliefs at the cost of disparaging others, and further, that in the course of such conduct, government will valorize some citizens at the cost of disparaging others.

Christopher L. Eisgruber and Lawrence G. Sager, Religious Freedom and the Constitution, 61-62.

The Supremes will throw it out, of course, but it’s a great ruling all the same.



Let me count the ways

Apr 30th, 2010 4:58 pm | By

I love the new place. (Take a bow, Josh and Cam.) I love the search engine. I was looking for something a few minutes ago, something to do with the Motoons and reactions in Denmark; I searched with “Motoons,” which produced a lot of items but not the right one, so I tried “Denmark” which brought it right up – along with a surprising array of other stuff just on the first page. I wouldn’t have guessed I mention Denmark that often! But I do – not always because of the Motoons. It just gave a nice sense of a rich resource…It’s a beautiful search engine.



Multitasking

Apr 30th, 2010 11:49 am | By

I didn’t say anything about “boobquake” because although I thought it was quite funny and a good riposte to ridiculous clerical misogyny, I also have reservations about women joining in with laddism – plus I hate the word “boobs.” They’re tits, dammit! Like the birds.

But Miranda Hale said anything and Jerry Coyne said anything, and then they got some rather strong reactions, so I thought I would say anything.

A commenter at Why Evolution is True made the point succinctly:

There’s a big difference between paying attention to what women are saying and paying attention to their breasts. If women want attention to be paid to what they have to say, they should stop trying to get it with their cleavage.

Exactly; not least because the cleavage distracts attention from the saying. Does this really have to be said? Doesn’t everybody know this? Isn’t that in fact the point?

I think of it as The Cuddy Effect. What do you think of when you see Cuddy? She’s so brilliant, she’s such a great doctor-administrator? I don’t think so. I don’t think you’re supposed to, and I don’t think you do.

In a perfect world we could have both – we could revel in everything all at the same time and nothing would distract from anything else. But we don’t live in that world. We can’t drive and text at the same time, and we can’t not be distracted by sexual signaling.

This fact disadvantages women a lot more than it does men. Women are always already seen (by men, and men do still set the rules – for how tv shows like House get made, for instance) as primarily for and about sex, whether yes or no (yes she’s a hotty, no she’s repulsive). We have to fight to be seen as for and about anything else. The more we play up tits and ass, the more we lose that fight.

This isn’t fair, obviously, but it’s true.



A deeply unedifying collision

Apr 30th, 2010 10:17 am | By

Carey turns purple in the face and insists that yes religious believers do too so have a right to treat people badly just because their religion says to.

The former archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey today accused judges of moving towards a new “secular state” that would downgrade the rights of religious believers. Attacking a “deeply worrying” court ruling, Carey claimed the judiciary was now tipping the legal balance against believers in “a deeply unedifying collision of human rights”.

The new secular state would downgrade the rights of religious believers to say no ew ick I won’t serve/marry/advise/cut the hair of gay people because I don’t want to because I think they’re gross and god thinks so too. Those rights. Those time-honored rights to hate certain kinds of people for random meaningless ick-based reasons, and in addition to hating them, treat them as a thing apart, and when times get tough, go the rest of the way and kill them.

Those are the rights that Carey is demanding that the state make extra-special room for. If he lived in another country, it would be child witches, or Tutsis, or Bosnians, or untouchables, or Armenians. It’s strange and terrible that he doesn’t have the brains to figure that out.

Carey reacted angrily to a judge who sharply criticised him for previously appealing for a court of hand-picked judges to determine religious rights cases. Carey had also warned of civil unrest over decisions he claimed could lead to Christians being barred from jobs.

Carey wants a theocracy, and he can’t have one. Tough.



“I consider God’s law and that of his prophet above any other law”

Apr 29th, 2010 11:41 am | By

Nigeria’s Senator Ahmad Sani Yerima assures us that he has done nothing wrong. What a relief.

Ahmad Sani Yerima, 49, told the BBC that his fourth wife was not 13, but would not say how old she was.

He denied breaking the law but said he would not respect any law that contradicted his religious beliefs.

Ah good; how noble, how pious, how devout, how holy. If any pesky law contradicts his “religious belief” that he is allowed to fuck a girl who is too young to give her life away and too small through the pelvis to bear a child safely, why then he will bravely and nobly ignore that law in favour of the “religious belief” that lets men of 49 fuck girls of 13.

The Nigerian senate ordered an investigation after complaints from women’s groups but the senator said he did not care what the groups thought.

Mr Sani was the governor of Zamfara state, where he oversaw the introduction of Sharia law – for the first time in a northern state – in 1999.

Well, that’s the kind of guy who doesn’t care what women’s groups think all right.

The senator said he had followed “standard rules for marriage in Islam”.

“I don’t care about the issue of age since I have not violated any rule as far as Islam is concerned,” he said.

“History tells us that Prophet Muhammad did marry a young girl as well. Therefore I have not contravened any law. Even if she is 13, as it is being falsely peddled around.

“If I state the age, they will still use it to smear Islam,” he said.

Thus revealing that the age is still much too low to be marrying a brutal callous goat of 49.

But, much more, also revealing that most of the point of all this “introduction of Sharia” crap is to strip women of rights and enable men to fuck more and younger women as well as getting rid of the older ones they don’t want to fuck any more. Also revealing that this selfish greedy moron thinks that the fact that Mohammed married a child makes it perfectly all right for him to marry a child and that his doing so is a way of standing up for Islam.

The women’s groups want Mr Sani to be taken to court, to face a fine and a jail sentence.

They say he has contravened the Child Rights Act of 2003 which, although not ratified by all Nigeria’s 36 states, is law in the capital where he lives and his marriage is believed to have taken place.

“As a Muslim, as I always say, I consider God’s law and that of his prophet above any other law,” Mr Sani said.

“I will not respect any law that contradicts that and whoever wants to sanction me for that is free to do that.”

That’s exactly why the very idea of “God’s law” is so dangerous.



Teasing the pope is much worse than raping children

Apr 29th, 2010 9:15 am | By

Omigod omigod omigod somebody insulted the Catholic church!! And even the pope!!! Omigod omigod.

The memorandum, apparently written by staff planning events for the four-day visit by Pope Benedict XVI, suggested he might like to start a helpline for abused children, sack “dodgy” bishops, open an abortion ward, launch his own brand of condoms, preside at a civil partnership, perform forward rolls with children, apologise for the Spanish armada and sing a song with the Queen.

But it’s all right, the somebody’s bosses apologized and apologized and apologized.

Jim Murphy, the cabinet minister overseeing the visit and a practising Catholic, failed to see the funny side of it, describing the memo as “absolutely despicable. It’s vile, it’s insulting, it’s an embarrassment”.

You bet! It’s just beyond words terrible and appalling and evil that some young whippersnappers suggested that the pope should do some decent reasonable generous things.

The ludicrous nature of some of the memo’s suggestions did not prevent some within the Catholic church demanding apologies for a disrespectful slur rather more urgently than senior Vatican officials have offered apologies over children abused in church care.

Quite so.



Scientism on stilts

Apr 28th, 2010 3:58 pm | By

Carlin Romano goes after the annoying scientistic arrogant smug Galileo-wannabe whatsits that get on everyone’s nerves so much.

A brave champion of beleaguered science in the modern age of pseudoscience, this Ayn Rand protagonist sarcastically derides the benighted irrationalists and glows with a self-anointed superiority. Who wouldn’t want to feel that sense of power and rightness?

You hear the voice regularly—along with far more sensible stuff—in the latest of a now common genre of science patriotism, Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science From Bunk (University of Chicago Press), by

By…one of the new atheists it must be? This should be good. By?

by Massimo Pigliucci, a philosophy professor at the City University of New York.

Yes! Massimo, the scourge of the scientistic scientists! Being scourged for being so god damn scientistic. It’s the funniest thing I’ve read in weeks.

…it mixes eminent common sense and frequent good reporting with a cocksure hubris utterly inappropriate to the practice it apotheosizes…Pigliucci offers more hero sandwiches spiced with derision and certainty…Tone matters. And sarcasm is not science.

Does that remind you of anyone? No, I won’t rub it in – it’s too cruel.

The problem with polemicists like Pigliucci is that a chasm has opened up between two groups that might loosely be distinguished as “philosophers of science” and “science warriors.” Philosophers of science, often operating under the aegis of Thomas Kuhn, recognize that science is a diverse, social enterprise that has changed over time, developed different methodologies in different subsciences, and often advanced by taking putative pseudoscience seriously, as in debunking cold fusion. The science warriors, by contrast, often write as if our science of the moment is isomorphic with knowledge of an objective world-in-itself

They don’t, do they?! That’s so unsophisticated! If only they were philosophers, they wouldn’t do such silly things. But isn’t M – now now, none of that.

Pigliucci similarly derides religious explanations on logical grounds when he should be content with rejecting such explanations as unproven.

Okay – that’s all. It’s too funny; I don’t want to do myself an injury.



Paul Sims on the Harry Taylor question

Apr 28th, 2010 2:56 pm | By

I don’t disagree with Paul Sims on all points, but I do on some.

If Taylor had been convicted for publishing the images in a magazine, or on a website, where members of the public have the choice not to buy or visit, I would strongly oppose his conviction. But this isn’t what Taylor did – he placed the images in a room provided for the religious to quietly practise their faith, away from public space.

But why is a room provided in an airport for the religious to quietly practise their faith? Rooms aren’t provided for the religious to quietly practise their faith in supermarkets and bookshops and bus terminals and parks, so why in airports? And if such rooms are provided in airports, do they thereby become the equivalents of churches and mosques? If they are, then, again, what are they doing in airports? Why is part of a public space provided for the religious to quietly practise their faith at all? Why is part of a public space turned into a mini-mosque or church?

Either the “prayer room” isn’t really a quasi-church or mosque, in which case Harry Taylor was just expressing his views in public, or it is, in which case Harry Taylor was making what seems to me to be a valid objection to religious encroachment on public space.

But given the confrontational nature of the material, isn’t it entirely plausible that his aim was in fact to “harass, alarm or distress” religious believers by making them feel uncomfortable using a room provided precisely to allow them to feel comfortable practising their faith in a busy public building?

But there again – why are rooms being provided to allow people to feel comfortable practising their faith in a busy public building? Why is this seen as desirable or necessary? Why can’t people just “practice their faith” internally until they get home or to a mosque or church?

And it follows that the Chaplain was right to inform the police once she discovered that someone who clearly had no business in the prayer room was leaving this material in public view with a deliberateness that certainly warranted investigation.

But there again, again – how can you have a room in a public facility where someone “has no business”? – apart from obvious exceptions like rest rooms and nursing rooms. And what are airports doing having “chaplains”? And if religious believers get to have chaplains, can we have the atheist or secular equivalent to speak for us and protect our delicate feelings and keep people out of our room?

Having said all that – I don’t entirely disagree that what Taylor did was obnoxious. On the other hand, I don’t think being obnoxious should be illegal, much less subject to the ferocious punishment he got.



The Christian churches are the conscience of our country

Apr 27th, 2010 10:01 am | By

Lawrence Lessig notes that the pope told victims of priestly rape in Malta last week that the church “was doing all it could to investigate abuse accusations and find ways to safeguard children in the future.”

But it’s not, Lessig says. In fact it’s doing the opposite. It’s defending a New Jersey statute immunizing charities against negligence even if their employees acted “willfully, wantonly, recklessly, indifferently — even criminally.”

What was truly astonishing was the appearance of the New Jersey Catholic Conference in the case. As its Web site explains, the conference “represents the Catholic bishops of New Jersey on matters of public policy,” because “the Catholic Church calls for a different kind of political engagement: one shaped by the moral convictions of well-formed consciences and focused on the dignity of every human being, the pursuit of the common good and the protection of the weak and the vulnerable.”

Yet the “well-formed consciences” of the conference had not entered the case on behalf of the weak and the vulnerable. The Catholic Conference had filed a brief in support of the insurance company, to defend a rule that would have left institutions — like the church — immune from responsibility even if employees “criminally” protected an abuser.

Meanwhile in New York state there is an effort to reform the statute of limitations for child sexual abuse, which currently gives victims all of five years after turning 18 to sue.

At the core of the opposition to this bill is heavy lobbying by the New York Catholic Conference; according to published reports, the conference has hired top-dollar lobbyists to kill the bill. At least one bishop is reported to have threatened to close schools and parishes in legislators’ districts if they vote for the bill. And as Marci Hamilton, a law professor at Cardozo University, has written, bishops “publicly rail against statute of limitation reform as though it were the equivalent of mandatory abortion.”

Once again we find that there is no bottom to this story. It just keeps going farther and farther and farther down. The Catholic church is a sanctified Mafia, which means it is a Mafia with enormous political power and clout. It is a Mafia that gets to veto women’s rights in the US by writing health care legislation to exclude abortion. It is a Mafia that exhales endless fraudulent rhetoric about its concern for the weak and vulnerable, all the while grinding the weak and vulnerable to powder.

Gordon Brown however is still telling us that

The Christian churches are the conscience of our country, always ready to bear witness to the truth and to remind us of our responsibilities to what the Bible calls ‘the least of these’. I am incredibly grateful for all that you do to ensure our public square is more than a place of transaction and exchange and remains always, as it should be, a place of shared values and social justice.

No bottom in sight; bullshit all the way down.



For the record

Apr 27th, 2010 9:15 am | By

It gets more and more tedious, but it can’t be helped – or it can be helped but it shouldn’t be. The relentless brainless dishonest denigration of “New” atheists has to be shown up for what it is every damn time it happens. It may be futile to say “That’s a lie, and that is, and that is, and that’s another”; it may just entrench the lies even deeper (depressingly, there is research that indicates this is what happens); but it has to be done, if only for the record. (What record? Oh shut up.)

Michael McGhee, Comment is Free (sugar and tea, rainbows at sea, la de da dee).

I am not a believer. I incline towards a secular humanism that leaves space for “spirituality” – conceived as the disciplined search for self-knowledge – and recognises that we can sometimes and beyond the exercise of our will transcend the narrow perspective of ego-centric self-enclosure.

That sets the scene. He’s not a believer, yet he chooses to call something entirely this-worldly and secular by the means-everything-and-nothing word “spirituality,” thus establishing himself as better and wiser than people who don’t call their thoughts by that elevated name. Then having done that, he moves right into the “New” atheist-bashing.

But my wariness of “belief” is matched by an equal wariness of the new atheists’ rejection of belief. It is not just that their popular polemic shows a juvenile comprehension of religion as altogether “a bad thing”, nor that they are silent about self-knowledge and transcendence.

There: that’s for the record. A stupidly sweeping and false generalization, closely followed by a stupidly sweeping and false generalization.

After that there’s a lot of guff which boils down to some this-world morality bolted clumsily onto hand-waving about spiritual transcendence and transcendent spirituality for the sake of…I don’t know, separating himself from the “New” atheists or something.



On dryness

Apr 27th, 2010 8:08 am | By

Kenan Malik points out that fundamentalism is an idea, not a biology.

Secularism and fundamentalism are not ideas stitched into people’s DNA. They are not born so. Secularist ideas and religious beliefs are like any values: people absorb them, accept them, reject them. A generation ago there were strong secular movements within Muslim communities and fundamentalism was a marginal force. Today secularism is much weaker, and Islamism much stronger. This shift has been propelled not by demographic trends but by political developments. And political developments can also help reverse the shift.

Kaufmann doesn’t deny any of this. But, he insists, nothing can stop the inevitable demographic triumph of the fundamentalists. Why? Because ‘we inhabit a period of ideological exhaustion’. The ‘great secular religions have lost their allure.’ In their place we have ‘relativism and managerialism’, outlooks that ‘cannot inspire a commitment to generations past and sacrifices for those yet to come.’

This gets us to the heart of the problem. For the real issue at stake is not demography but politics. I do not accept the secular ideologies amount to ‘religions’. But Kaufmann is right to suggest that in our post-ideological age, secularists find it much more difficult to inspire a sense of purpose and collective direction.

Yes, and ironically, fundamentalism itself fills the gap – fundamentalism does a brilliant job of reminding secularists why secularism is worth having and defending.

Not just the obsession with demography but the very fear of Islam expresses the lack of conviction in a progressive, secular, humanist project. The spectre of ‘Eurabia’ is really an admission that the critics of Islam lack the wherewithal to challenge the fundamentalists. Or, as Kaufmann puts it, ‘Dry atheism… can never compete with the rich emotions evoked by religion.’

I’m not so sure about that…But if it is right, then that’s another way “New” atheists are not such a bad thing after all. Part of what the Be Quieters hate about us is precisely our lack of dryness – our energy, our enthusiasm (in the older sense, the one that Hume and Mill senior were so wary of), our heat, our zeal. I can understand all that – enthusiasm and zeal are of course one short step away from more sinister qualities, or to put it another way, like so many things (respect, tolerance, liberty), they are only as good as they are: used for the right purposes they are good but used for bad ones they are a nightmare.

But all the same – I think in fact the current revival (so to speak) of atheism really is useful for altering the perception and perhaps the reality that atheism is dry while religion is full of rich emotions. I think we are doing at least a little to make it clear that atheism is not dry; that it too can evoke rich emotions. Atheism – at least in a context where the alternative is so visible and ambitious and competitive – is not just a negation, not just a no-god shrug. It is a liberation. It is the rejection of authority, tyranny, patriarchy, of bossdom of all kinds. It is the repudiation of the idea that there is a Superbig male Boss squatting at the top of everything and that we have to obey and worship and grovel to it. Freedom from that idea brings a lot of good things with it. Kenan indicates why.

The irony is that, for all their poisonous hostility towards Islam, the Eurabists express considerable admiration for Islamist arguments. Melanie Phillips is militantly opposed to what she sees as the ‘Islamic takeover of the West’ and ‘the drift towards social suicide’ that supposedly comes with accepting Muslim immigration. Yet she is deeply sympathetic to the Islamist rejection of secular humanism, which she thinks has created ‘a debauched and disorderly culture of instant gratification, with disintegrating families, feral children and violence, squalor and vulgarity on the streets.’

Phillips is talking idiotic nonsense. What does she think the culture was like before? What does she think 19th century culture was like? Or 16th century, or 11th century? What does she think life was like when the vast majority of people were dirt poor and illiterate and without rights? Does she think the whole world was a drawing room out of Jane Austen? This debauched and disorderly culture is one that is capable of improvement over time, and fairly short time at that; it is flawed but reparable; it comes with freedoms and rights and responsibilities that used to be reserved for one or five or ten percent of the population. Secularism is a big part of the reason for that; secularism makes belief in progress (not perfection, John Gray please note, but progress) more tenable and realistic.

There is nothing like a vivid sense of the alternative for making secularism and atheism seem about as dry as Niagra Falls.



A sufficiency of delight

Apr 26th, 2010 11:07 am | By

Grayling’s reply to Gray is a much better read.

Anxious to appear original while in fact pushing a familiar counter-Enlightenment line, Gray has often entertained us with his assaults on logic and historical fact, each time repeating the two tenets of his faith, one acquired from Isaiah Berlin and the other from his Sunday school, namely, that we are condemned to live with the conflict between irreconcilable goods, and that we owe everything of significance in human achievement (not, he gloomily adds, that there has been much) to religion.

Concise, sly, cutting, and funny – also accurate. Gray is extraordinarily repetitive and predictable. I knew what his “review” would say before I read it. “Gray has often entertained us” reminds me irresistibly of Mr Bennett’s “You have delighted us long enough” to his middle daughter when she had bored everyone rigid with her relentless piano playing singing.

That Gray endlessly wears his own two old hats does not get in his way here. But I don’t mind this. What I mind is his attributing to me the idea that the scientific and social advances of the post-sixteenth century Western world are the road to perfection, and that if only we could be reasonable, accept pluralism, respect human rights, defend the rule of law, and apply the findings of science to the improvement of mankind’s lot, we would realize Utopia. No: though I do and always will champion these things (“shrilly” and “peevishly,” with “adamantine certainty” and “high-minded silliness” Gray shrilly, peevishly and high-mindedly complains), I don’t confuse Meliorism with Perfectibilism as Gray persists in doing, though I have before now, in print, tried to help him understand the difference.

That’s important. Gray is risible, but he’s also sinister. The idea that we should not be reasonable, accept pluralism, respect human rights, defend the rule of law, and apply the findings of science to the improvement of mankind’s lot is no joke, and Gray’s endless flirtation with it is a lot more repellent and more dangerous than conformity in Hampstead.

If nevertheless it is high-minded silliness to champion the cause of trying to conduct our affairs sensibly, and to free our minds and lives to the greatest extent conformable with our being social animals who owe one another moral regard, I embrace it with enthusiasm. Gray, with his shallow and rather aimless hostility to this view, is the least likely fellow to talk me out of it.

You have delighted us long enough, John Gray.



The well thinkings

Apr 26th, 2010 10:26 am | By

John Gray makes a familiar point.

SEEING THEMSELVES as fiercely independent thinkers, bien-pensants are remarkable chiefly for the fervor with which they propagate the prevailing beliefs of their time.

Prevailing where? Prevailing among whom?

Bertrand Russell, John Stuart Mill’s godson and a scion of one of England’s great political dynasties, exemplified this contradiction throughout most of his life. British philosopher A. C. Grayling can now be counted amongst his number.

Okay – he means “prevailing among people who think similar things” – which is a tautology. He’s pointing out that independent thinkers (fierce or otherwise) are not usually so very independent that they think things that no one else anywhere thinks. Right. Well we knew that, actually. If you’re such an independent thinker that no one on the entire planet agrees with you about anything, you’re a paranoid schizophrenic.

He’s letting us know that independent thinkers too form clumps, or groups, at least in the sense that one can point out ideas that they have in common. Yes – that’s true – but who thought it wasn’t?

His point perhaps is that you can’t claim to be an independent thinker if you have ideas in common with other self-proclaimed independent thinkers, because ideas-in-common rules out independent-thinking.

It doesn’t though, because the ideas could be in common and also independent in the sense of examined, thought about, questioned, critically considered, analyzed.

There’s another thing: I don’t actually know anyone who goes around saying “I am a fiercely independent thinker.” How does John Gray know that’s how bien pensants see themselves? I don’t think he does know; I think it’s his interpretation. There may be some truth in it, but his flat-footed announcement is a trifle smug, especially for the purposes of deriding the putative smugness and bien pensantness of other people.

His real point, stated more neutrally and clearly than he managed, is that people can pride themselves on being independent thinkers while still in fact conforming closely to the norms of their own social group. True. It is possible to be critical and skeptical in one direction and conformist and credulous in another, or the former in some directions and the latter in others. It’s as well to be aware of that.

But then again, it’s also as well not to get too hung up about it. Being an independent thinker isn’t the only good, or an absolute good, or the highest good. There are some parts of the bien pensant Book of Rules that are worth conforming to. Sometimes conformity is better than independent thinking. Traffic is one example – but equality is another. That’s at the heart of Gray’s sneer, I think – the terrible bien pensant herds of Hampstead all think alike on the subject of equality; they are all sheeplike in their aversion to racism and sexism and homphobia. Well, good. Independent thinking that takes the form of belief in social subordination is no loss.



Be Quieters v atheists

Apr 25th, 2010 12:36 pm | By

It reminds me of the old Bugs Bunny line – “Of course you know, this means war.”

This means war. The grotesque punishment meted out to Harry Taylor might as well be an official government announcement that atheists have no rights.

It is a common accusation that the “new” atheists are bullies who gang up on poor innocent bystanders like Mooney and De Dora and other Be Quieters.

Well – not so fast. Let’s pause and consider. Who exactly is bullying whom?

Which is the majoritarian view? Which is the conventional wisdom? Atheism? Hardly. No, the majoritarian conventional wisdom is, at the very least, that religion deserves an almost infinite amount of “respect” and that any atheist who falls short of that heightened “respect” is automatically a “New” aggressive militant brash extreme atheist and subject to being called just that by people with prominent soapboxes like…Mooney and De Dora.

The dissenting view is a minority one, and it is somewhat odd to accuse people with minority views of bullying people with majority views. Only somewhat odd; it is of course literally possible that, say, an atheist could physically bully a theist or a Be Quieter. But to see the disagreements between Be Quieters and atheists as the latter bullying the former seems warped to me. To me it looks much more as if various prominent Be Quieters with lots of media access started shouting at atheists and calling them names, and then atheists fought back. I don’t consider fighting back “bullying.”

This always happens when people start to feel their oats and speak up, you know. It happened with the civil rights movement, it happened with the women’s movement, it happened with the gay rights movement. There are always anxious people hopping up and down on the edges saying, “Oh dear oh dear I agree with you, I support you, I’m on your side, but for god’s sake slow down, and ssshhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, don’t say it so loudly, be careful, watch out, keep your head down, you mustn’t be so extreme. I fully support you but be patient! Extremeness never got anyone anywhere. Be patient, be respectful, be well-dressed and punctual and neatly brushed, and in a few decades, or it may be generations, things will start to get better, I promise you.”

Fuck that. (I should work up a “fuck that” dance to go with Stewart’s “go fuck yourself” dance.) Things are starting to get better, Harry Taylor notwithstanding, but that’s because we have been making noise rather than being quiet. Annie Laurie Gaylor says as much.

“It used to be a lot worse,” said Ms. Gaylor, 54, an atheist whose organization, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, recently won a suit in federal court here that declared the National Day of Prayer to be a violation of the First Amendment. “Things are changing. Society is becoming more secularized. It’s becoming acceptable to be atheist and agnostic. And there are more of us.”

And there are more of us. Not fewer – not quieter – not more apologetic – but more, and more vocal, and more forthright. And that’s how change is made.



It’s even more of an outrage than I thought

Apr 25th, 2010 11:47 am | By

Manic street preacher reports that

Mr Taylor seemed like a perfectly rational, intelligent and calm man who wanted to put his point across and was certainly not the “crackpot” that several bloggers, including myself to an extent, had presumed him to be. He was clearly still deeply affected by his horrendous childhood experiences of a strict Catholic upbringing by the Christian Brotherhood and was so distressed by the prospect of receiving a custodial sentence that he had to leave the courtroom midway through the hearing after nearly fainting.

He also quotes the Telegraph with more and even nastier details:

Judge James told him: “Not only have you shown no remorse for what you did but even now you continue to maintain that you have done nothing wrong and say that whenever you feel like it you intend to do the same thing again in the future.”…

He was sentenced to six months in jail suspended for two years, ordered to perform 100 hours of unpaid work and pay £250 costs.

Remorse – why should he show remorse for something so minor, so non-criminal, so victimless, so basically anodyne? What is all this monstrous bullying in the name of ever more abject “respect” for religion?



Put out an APB for Cardinal Bernard Law

Apr 25th, 2010 11:09 am | By

Hitchens gently suggests that the pope should be questioned like anyone else.

His apologists have done their best, but their Holy Father seems consistently to have been lenient or negligent with the criminals while reserving his severity only for those who complained about them.

As this became horribly obvious, I telephoned a distinguished human-rights counsel in London, Geoffrey Robertson, and asked him if the law was powerless to intervene. Not at all, was his calm reply. If His Holiness tries to travel outside his own territory—as he proposes to travel to Britain in the fall—there is no more reason for him to feel safe than there was for the once magnificently uniformed General Pinochet, who had passed a Chilean law that he thought would guarantee his own immunity, but who was visited by British bobbies all the same.

The law is not at all powerless to intervene. This is very good to know.

Also being considered are two international approaches, one to the European Court of Human Rights and another to the International Criminal Court. The ICC—which has already this year overruled immunity and indicted the gruesome president of Sudan—can be asked to rule on “crimes against humanity”; a legal definition that happens to include any consistent pattern of rape, or exploitation of children, that has been endorsed by any government.

Now that is very interesting – because the Vatican wants to be considered a state, with Ratzinger as its (flagrantly unelected and unaccountable) head. Well if it is a state, then it is a state that has endorsed (by protecting) child rape, and apparently that makes it subject to the ICC. That is fascinating.



Masons bring down innocent Catholic church

Apr 25th, 2010 10:50 am | By

It gets crazier and crazier every day. Now a Colombian Cardinal tells us what’s what.

A senior cardinal defended the Roman Catholic Church’s practice of frequently not reporting sexual abusive priests to the police, saying Thursday it would have been like testifying against a family member at trial…

“The law in nations with a well-developed judiciary does not force anyone to testify against a child, a father, against other people close to the suspect,” Castrillon told RCN radio. “Why would they ask that of the church? That’s the injustice. It’s not about defending a pedophile, it’s about defending the dignity and the human rights of a person, even the worst of criminals.”

The cardinal seems to be confused. The human rights of criminals are not taken to include the right not to be reported to the police by anyone “close” to them. The UDHR makes no mention of the human right to be shielded by colleagues when one has committed a crime. The worst of criminals do have human rights, of course, but not the ones the cardinal is claiming.

While the church stands by “those who truly were victims (of sexual abuse),” he added, “John Paul II, that holy pope, was not wrong when he defended his priests so that they were not, due to economic reasons, treated like criminal pedophiles without due process.”

More confusion, I’m afraid. That holy pope wasn’t making sure his priests had due process, he was making sure they would have no contact with the law at all. One hopes the cardinal has some vague sense of the difference, but one is not confident.

The cardinal also accused unnamed insiders and enemies elsewhere of feeding the sex abuse scandals hurting the Catholic Church.

Yes…Masons, Jews, fags, atheists, secularists, Protestants; we know. You keep telling yourself that, Cardinal. Blame Canada.



My magisterium is bigger than yours

Apr 24th, 2010 5:04 pm | By

As is well known, Stephen Jay Gould offered ‘the principled resolution of supposed “conflict” or “warfare” between science and religion’ in his short book Rocks of Ages.

No such conflict should exist because each subject has a legitimate magisterium, or domain of teaching authority—and these magisteria do not overlap (the principle that I would like to designate as NOMA, or “nonoverlapping magisteria”).

The net of science covers the empirical universe: what is it made of (fact) and why does it work this way (theory). The net of religion extends over questions of moral meaning and value. These two magisteria do not overlap, nor do they encompass all inquiry (consider, for starters, the magisterium of art and the meaning of beauty).

I’ve always disliked that formula; I disliked the book when it came out. Here’s one reason.

Gould treats the two ‘magisteria’ as if they were equal – ‘the net of science covers’ and ‘the net of religion extends over’ sounds as if they’re doing more or less the same kind of work. But that’s wrong. Science is the best and only way to explore nature, while religion is not the best and only way to explore moral meaning and value.

Religion is actually not a very good way to do either one – it tends to be misleading, it tends to be irrelevant, it’s often just plain wrong. The magisterium isn’t really a magisterium. The church has its ‘teachings,’ as it’s always reminding us when they conflict with equality legislation, but its teachings are…not really teachings.



It’s an outrage

Apr 24th, 2010 11:38 am | By

Harry Taylor left some religion-mocking leaflets and cartoons in a “prayer room” at Liverpool airport. (Why does Liverpool airport have a “prayer room”?) For that he was charged with “three counts of causing religiously aggravated harassment” and convicted by a jury at Liverpool Crown Court. He was given a suspended six-month sentence and an Asbo forbidding him to carry anti-religious leaflets in public.

One of the posters Taylor left at the airport depicted a smiling crucified Christ next to an advert for a brand of “no nails” glue. In another, a cartoon depicted two Muslims holding a placard demanding equality with the caption: “Not for women or gays, obviously.” A third poster showed Islamic suicide bombers at the gates of paradise being told: “Stop, stop, we’ve run out of virgins”.

This is simply disgusting, and contemptible, and reactionary, and a scandal.



The law simply acknowledges

Apr 23rd, 2010 12:39 pm | By

And what business does the Obama administration have appealing the ruling that the “National Prayer Day” is unconstitutional? Yes I know they are under pressure from Fox News, but that’s going to be the case no matter what they do, and they weren’t elected to jump when Fox says jump.

Crabb ruled the government could not use its authority to try to influence when and whether individuals pray, writing: “In this instance, the government has taken sides on a matter that must be left to individual conscience.”…

The administration had argued the law simply acknowledges the role of religion in the United States.

What is that supposed to mean? And how can a law merely “acknowledge” something? And even if it could why should even that be the president’s business? Even if the law ordered the president to announce once a year that religion has a role in the United States, that would still be the state pushing religion on people instead of keeping its mouth shut on the subject. The state saying that religion has a role in the United States carries a wealth of implication with it, and that’s why it shouldn’t do it; and National Prayer Day mandates a good deal more than merely announcing religion’s “role” anyway.
I’m aware that religion has a role in the United States, and I’m tired of that role, and I’m tired of having it forced on my attention, and I would like it to withdraw a considerable distance and mind its own business.

The Justice Department signaled it would appeal not only Crabb’s decision on the merits of the case but also her ruling last month that the defendants had the standing to bring the lawsuit in the first place.

Well, I hope you lose, Justice Department. You piss me off and I hope you lose.