And then there’s this whole idea that we can make morality a science by basing it on universal desire for well-being.

One problem with that is that we don’t all have the same view of what constitutes well-being, to say the least. We don’t agree on what constitutes well-being in general and we certainly don’t agree on what constitutes it for self as opposed to other.

And suppose someone did come up with a survey that found – convincingly – that aggregate well-being was higher when women were more or less forced, by the lack of opportunity to do anything else, to be wives and mothers and nothing else, and lower when they had wider opportunities and correspondingly more freedom. Suppose there is such a survey, that shows aggregate well-being higher and women’s well-being lower. Suppose a world where women are distinctly a minority, as they are in India and China because of selective abortion. Would that outcome – a less happy minority but a happier total – be moral?

No; not in my view at least. But the idea that we can make morality a science by basing it on universal desire for well-being seems to mean that it would be.

Sholto Byrnes did a nice job of defending Evan Harris.

A consistently strong voice for the NHS and for science, he shared the title of “Secularist of the Year” with Lord Avebury in 2009 for their work in helping abolish the offences of blasphemy and blasphemous libel. He has campaigned against faith schools and argued courageously in favour of abortion, euthanasia, immigration and gay rights…I think he has been one of the most principled MPs in parliament, sticking to his convictions and standing up for a true-liberal view of free speech and of the idea of liberty itself.

The fact that some of the policies he advocates led “one Labour MP” in this peculiarly nasty Daily Mail profile to say “he’s way to the left of us”, only serves to show that Evan — or “Dr Death” as the Mail’s Leo McKinstry calls him — has not trimmed and tacked to the centre-right as New Labour did.

Well said. Under that there’s a very long and very whiny self-justifying comment by George Pitcher, claiming that he wasn’t really so terribly nasty and dishonest as all that in his Telegraph blog post. He doesn’t even mention his foul accusation that Harris “supported the strange idea that terminally ill people should be helped to kill themselves,” much less take it back or claim he said it by accident. Horrible man.

And speaking of not having the right to have rights –

“According to African culture, the man is the overlord,” said Peace Atwongyeire, 42, a handsome counselor whose face adorns local billboards saying she is not ashamed to be H.I.V.-positive. “You have to say yes.”

Because a man buys a wife from her father for cows or cash, he “owns” her. If she refuses sex or insists on a condom, he may beat her or throw her out of the house.

Also, condoms thwart pregnancy, and “I prove my manhood by having children,” said Mr. Bitti, a father of 14. “That is how a girl proves she is a woman. In Africa, you cannot tell anyone to stop having children. They will even think, ‘I would rather have AIDS and leave my children when I die. At least I will have produced my three.’ ”

And then abandoned them to misery; terrific.

Sam Harris has been (belatedly, he says) considering the unpleasant ways the Catholic church has with children, and the reasons therefore.

Consider the ludicrous ideology that made it possible: The Catholic Church has spent two millennia demonizing human sexuality to a degree unmatched by any other institution, declaring the most basic, healthy, mature, and consensual behaviors taboo. Indeed, this organization still opposes the use of contraception, preferring, instead, that the poorest people on earth be blessed with the largest families and the shortest lives. As a consequence of this hallowed and incorrigible stupidity, the Church has condemned generations of decent people to shame and hypocrisy — or to Neolithic fecundity, poverty, and death by AIDS.

That sums it up pretty nicely. The church prides itself on this ideology, which takes great care not to think about sex and sex-related issues in a reasonable way but instead simply recycles dogma year after year, decade after decade, century after century. This makes the church “our better conscience” – because it has this hypertrophied ability to invent stupid cruel useless moral rules that make nearly everyone worse off than they have to be.

Harris has been reading the Ryan report, and like everyone who reads that blistering document, he is staggered and horrified. And he is taking (joining) action:

I would like to announce that Project Reason, the foundation that my wife and I started to spread scientific thinking and secular values, has joined Hitchens and Dawkins (both of whom sit on our advisory board) in an effort to end the “diplomatic immunity” which the Vatican claims protects the Pope from any responsibility.

Hear hear.

George Pitcher, Anglican vicar and Telegraph columnist, is just beside himself with glee that Evan Harris lost his seat in the election. Why is Pitcher so delighted? Because Harris is a secularist, and because he thinks terminally ill people should be able to choose when their suffering ends. That’s not exactly how Pitcher puts it though.

For a doctor, he supported the strange idea that terminally ill people should be helped to kill themselves…His political demise will be mourned only by those with a strange fascination for death, those euthanasia enthusiasts whose idea of care for the elderly and infirm is a one-way ticket to Switzerland.

Stupid, stupid man, and dishonest besides. (And he can’t even write. “For a doctor, he supported the strange idea” – sheesh!) Harris did not support the idea that “terminally ill people should be helped to kill themselves” nor was his idea of care for the elderly and infirm a one-way ticket to Switzerland (i.e. euthanasia). Stupid malicious man – as if he can’t tell the difference between having the option of euthanasia and having euthanasia imposed!

I wish I could gloat that George Pitcher had lost his seat on the Telegraph.

A group of lawyers in Egypt who call themselves (with horrible sarcasm) “the Association of Lawyers Without Restrictions” have sued a bunch of people for publishing or just somehow vaguely having something or maybe nothing to do with publishing The Thousand and One Nights,

claiming that the book “offends public decency.” Hisba cases allow citizens to prosecute individuals who they deem to have insulted Islam…

They are demanding those responsible for the publication be brought to trial under Article 178 of the Penal Code, which if convicted is punishable by imprisonment for a term of two years and a fine for everyone that publishes any prints or pictures that “offends the public decency.”

I heard an Egyptian guy talking to the World Service about this a couple of days ago, disgustedly saying that this is just Wahhabism and nothing to do with Egypt or the way Islam is understood there.

Wahhabism sucks.

So you’ve spent the day praying, right? Well not all of you of course, but those of you who are loyal citizens of the United States…and hey, why not, also those of you who want to show solidarity with devout Americans. No doubt there are some of you bending the knee or head-butting the floor in Swansea and Cracow, Lagos and Kinshasa, Bombay and Karachi, Lima and Santiago, Kyoto and Shanghai, just for the sake of showing that state-sponsored prayer must be supported by the united peoples of the world. Yes?

Okay, I’ll stop now. I’ll just offer a thought from Americans United for Separation of Church and State:

It’s obvious that Americans don’t need a government-sponsored day to pray. But this day has never really even been about prayer or the freedom to pray or not.

Instead, the NDP has served as another opportunity for the Religious Right to exert its influence on our government and laws and send a not-so-subtle message that those who don’t agree with the Religious Right on theology are second-class citizens.

Go, sing a song, read a poem, watch a hummingbird, or just scratch your bum and eat a chocolate bar.

My friend Claire went to Denver and she saw something very nice there.

Ruth Gledhill in The Times tells us that

The civil servant in charge of the Pope’s visit to Britain has been suspended and is to be investigated for misconduct after a memo lampooning the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church was leaked to the press.

All the staff involved in producing the memo are to be sent on “urgent diversity training”

Urgent diversity training? Meaning what? They’ll be trained not to have contempt for contemptible beliefs? How will that be accomplished, exactly? Heavy drugging? Waterboarding?

A Foreign Office spokesman said: “As we have made clear publicly, it was a foolish document that did not in any way reflect FCO views. Although it was intended only for internal use, it was ill-judged, naive and disrespectful of some key tenets of the Catholic faith. It has caused great offence…

Why do key tenets of the Catholic faith have to be respected? They are false after all – and the ones that were mocked in the memo are also harmful – so respect should not be mandated. I do realize it’s not the Foreign Office’s job to make the Catholic church a better institution, but it also shouldn’t be its job to lick Ratzinger’s boots.

The FCO very much regrets this incident and is deeply sorry for the offence which it has caused. We strongly value the close and productive relationship between the UK Government and the Holy See and look forward to deepening this further with the visit of Pope Benedict to the UK later this year.

Does it? Why? Why does the Foreign Office strongly value the close and productive relationship between the UK Government and the Holy See? What is there to value in that? The “Holy See” is a horrible secretive coercive all-male obscurantist organization that shields fugitives from justice (Cardinal Bernard Law) and conceals decade upon decade of child rape until the last rag has been stripped away. The “Holy See” tells Africans not to use condoms during an Aids epidemic, it tells everyone everywhere not to use any birth control at all, it works tirelessly to prevent women from getting abortions and thus to deprive all women of childbearing age of a secure sense that they own their own lives. The “Holy See” stinks – it is repulsive to see the Foreign Office crawling to it in this slavish way.

A pretty story.

Three sisters have suffered serious facial burns after two unidentified men on a motorbike threw acid at them in Pakistan’s Balochistan province. The sisters, aged between 14 and 20 years old, were attacked as they walked from Kalat city to Pandarani village…The police named the girls as Fatima Bibi, 20, Saima Bibi, 16 and Sakina Bibi, 14…Two weeks ago, an unknown group – the Baloch Ghairatmand Group (the Honourable Baloch Group) – claimed responsibility for a similar attack on two women in a market in Dalbandin city. The group had warned women to wear the hijab, the traditional Muslim headscarf, and not to visit markets unaccompanied by men from their families.

So in other words these three girls had acid thrown in their faces because they existed, because they were girls, because they went outside, because they went somewhere, because they were visible, because they walked and talked and breathed, because there were three of them. They had acid thrown in their faces because nothing. They had acid thrown in their faces because two thugs felt like throwing acid on some women, and the Bibi sisters were there. “Honourable” indeed – give me a fucking break.

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.

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.