It’s B&W’s birthday again. Well actually it was a week ago, but other things were more urgent to post, and I’m always late anyway, so close enough.

Seven years old. Why, when B&W started, there were no proper roads between Missouri and Oregon, and credit default swaps were things that no nice girls would wear after nine in the evening. When B&W started Pepsi hadn’t been invented yet, and dogs still wore corsets, and families still gathered around the radio to listen to Jay Leno make fun of Jerry Seinfeld’s dinner jacket. When B&W started people still thought Cream of Wheat was food, and you could get a pound of assorted chocolates for a penny, and milk arrived at the back door every morning as if by magic. When B&W started Jefferson was in the White House and LaGuardia was mayor of New York. B&W started a loooooooong time ago, man. Many happy returns.

What nice people there are running Afghanistan.

Afghanistan’s upper house of Parliament has condemned the presidential pardon of a journalist sentenced to 20 years in prison for downloading an internet article about women’s rights and Islam…The upper house “expresses its strongest concerns and annoyance and considers this decision contrary to the Islamic values and the laws in place in the country”, said the statement signed by the speaker of the upper house on Monday. It called on Kambakhsh to serve his term, and said that those convicted of apostasy and hatred of Islam must be punished.

So the upper house of Afghanistan’s Parliament thinks apostasy and hatred of Islam in the form of downloading an internet article about women’s rights and Islam must be punished with 20 years in prison if not execution. So anything short of that, like permanent exile from home and friends and relations, is contrary to Islamic values. Well how horrible Islamic values must be then.

Josh Rosenau talks about ‘ways of knowing’ and the non-empirical nature of the claims made by most religions.

It’s certainly true that the Jewish Bible can be read as making a number of empirical claims, for instance about the timing of human origins…But that’s not how Jews have understood the Bible for the last couple thousand years. Maimonides, writing well before any of the modern squabbles over evolution, explained:

“Ignorant and superficial readers take them [certain obscure passages] in a literal, not in a figurative sense. Even well informed persons are bewildered if they understand these passages in their literal signification, but they are entirely relieved of their perplexity when we explain the figure, or merely suggest that the terms are figurative.”

That won’t work – that quotation doesn’t back up the claim that “that’s not how Jews have understood the Bible,” it backs up a different claim, which is that that’s not how Maimonides understood the Bible. Notice that he’s complaining of all those other fools who understand it the other way! Granted he doesn’t give us a demographic breakdown or an opinion poll – but he does say that both ignorant people and well informed people get it wrong, and he doesn’t sound optimistic about it. Rosenau seems to be doing an Armstrong here – pretending that a minority view of religion is in fact all but universal.

To call these “empirical” claims then seems to miss the point. They are certainly truth claims, but not claims about what literally happened. I like to compare this to the non-literal truth claims of good novels, or good stories more broadly. I think we can all agree that literature offers a different “way of knowing” than science does.

Wait, slow down. One, for a great many believers, yes they are claims about what literally happened – that’s exactly what they are. They are for the Archbishop of Canterbury, for instance, as he has said very firmly. They are for Albert Mohler of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. They are for Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church.

Two, yes lots of people like to compare religious truth-claims to the truth-claims of novels, but that doesn’t make the comparison a good one, and it isn’t a good one. Novels aren’t the same kind of thing as religion, and religious truth claims aren’t the same kind of thing as novelistic truth claims, if there even is such a thing.

And three, no actually we can’t all agree that literature offers a different “way of knowing” because I don’t agree that literature offers a way of knowing at all. I think knowledge is the wrong word for what literature offers. I think it offers (sometimes) understanding, including understanding of what it might be like to be a different person, what it might be like to be in a different situation, what other people feel like, and so on – but not really knowledge. Why not knowledge? Because that’s not what it is. It’s speculative. It has to be speculative, and it’s none the worse for that, and it can (sometimes) offer real understanding, but it still amounts to speculation on the part of the author which if good enough is convincing and empathy-inducing in the reader. I don’t think we get to call it knowledge because it’s basically a form of (at best educated) guesswork. It’s imagination. Imagination is a great thing, but what it produces on its own isn’t exactly knowledge(except perhaps knowledge of what the imagination can produce).

This is not to denigrate literature, it’s to attempt to be precise about what is what. I just don’t think literature is a “way of knowing” unless we’re broadening the concept of knowledge to fit, in which case we’re talking about something new.

Vampires don’t exist…But telling stories about vampires is a great way to convey certain truths about the world we all live in. These aren’t truths that science can independently verify, but they are still true in a meaningful way.

Telling stories about anything can be a great way to convey certain truths about the world we all live in, but conveying truths about the world is not the same thing as being a “way of knowing” and religion is not the same thing as either one. Religion includes stories, but a story is not all it is.

I like novels. I like TV. I like art. I like baseball. I think there is truth to be found in such endeavors, and I think any brush that sweeps away the enterprise of religion as a “way of knowing” must also sweep away art and a host of other human activities.

And that’s where I completely fall off the train. I think that’s an absurd claim, and I can’t see how he got himself there. Can you?

Albert Mohler the president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary is so obliging and has saved us so much trouble – at a stroke he has rid us of the obligation to keep answering the charge that “New” atheists are all wrong because they ignore sophisticated theology and are talking about a crude old version of God that nobody believes in anyway.

Mohler points out that the Wall Street Journal paired articles by Dawkins and Armstrong were not articles by an atheist and a theist but articles by two atheists.

Armstrong insists that Darwin really did God a favor by forcing us to give up our “primitive” belief in his actual existence — thus freeing us to affirm merely a “God beyond God” who exists only as a concept. Along the way, Armstrong offers a superficial and theologically reckless argument that comes down to this: Until the modern age, believers in God were not really believers in a God who was believed to exist…She makes statements that amount to elegant nonsense. Consider this: “In the ancient world, a cosmology was not regarded as factual but was primarily therapeutic…” So she would have us to believe that, in centuries past, cosmology was merely therapy. She simply makes the assertion and moves on. Will anyone believe this nonsense?

Oh yes – lots of people – people of an Armstrongian cast of mind – people who get thrills from talk about an indescribable transcendent. Along with them, people who want religion and science to lie down together like the lion and the kid, and people who want to be able to insist from dawn to dusk and from dusk to dawn that science and religion are compatible. But they are not everyone, and they are not even most people. In some places they are outnumbered by people who think ‘God’ is just a dead idea and of no interest, and in other places they are outnumbered by people who think God is a really real person with real attributes who does real things and will really give you a big hug and some ice cream when you die.

Armstrong calls for the emergence of “a more authentic notion of God.” Her preferred concept of God would be about aesthetics, not theology. “Religion is not an exact science but a kind of art form,” she intones. Interestingly, it is Dawkins, presented as the unbeliever in this exchange, who understands God better than Armstrong. In fact, Richard Dawkins the atheist rightly insists that Karen Armstrong is actually an atheist as well. “God’s Rotweiller” sees through Armstrong’s embrace of a “God beyond God.”

Exactly! This is what we keep saying! This is what we’ve been saying ever since The God Delusion came out and five minutes later people started saying but Dawkins has such an unsophisticated idea of God and what about Tillich and nobody believes in that silly idea of God any more and what about Terry Eagleton’s toaster and God is just a word for all our best impulses and what about apophatic theology and Karen Armstrong could set Dawkins straight in an instant. We’ve been saying what Mohler says – yes but all that is not what most believers mean by ‘God’ so it’s just deceptive to pretend that it is. It’s so helpful of Mohler to corroborate! From now on we can just quote him.

We should at least give Dawkins credit here for knowing what he rejects. Here we meet an atheist who understands the difference between belief and unbelief. As for those, like Armstrong, who try to tell believers that it does not matter if God exists — Dawkins informs them that believers in God will brand them as atheists. “They’ll be right,” Dawkins concludes. So the exchange in The Wall Street Journal turns out to be a meeting of two atheist minds. The difference, of course, is that one knows he is an atheist when the other presumably claims she is not. Dawkins knows a fellow atheist when he sees one. Careful readers of The Wall Street Journal will come to the same conclusion.

You betcha.

Life in Yemen.

A 12-year-old Yemeni girl, who was forced into marriage, died during a painful childbirth that also killed her baby, a children’s rights group said Monday. Fawziya Ammodi struggled for three days in labor, before dying of severe bleeding at a hospital on Friday, said the Seyaj Organization for the Protection of Children…Born into an impoverished family in Hodeidah, Fawziya was forced to drop out of school and married off to a 24-year-old man last year.

Well it was life for awhile and then it was premature death after three days of torture.

The Yemeni parliament tried in February to pass a law, setting the minimum marriage age at 17. But the measure has not reached the president because many parliamentarians argued it violates sharia, or Islamic law, which does not stipulate a minimum age.

And that of course is the important thing, not the health and survival and education and chance for some modicum of happiness of little girls.

Life in Aceh.

Adulterers can be stoned to death and homosexuality is punishable by long prison terms under a new law passed in Indonesia’s devoutly Muslim Aceh province today…The law, which reinforces Aceh’s already strict Islamic laws, is to go into effect within 30 days. Its passage comes two weeks before a new assembly led by the moderate Aceh party is sworn in after a heavy defeat of conservative parties in local elections.

Ah – the conservatives have been voted out, so as a parting gesture, they pass a law saying that ‘adulterers’ can be buried up to the neck and slowly pelted with stones until they are dead – under ‘Islamic’ laws which notoriously have an impossible standard of proof for men but not for women, so that punishments for ‘adultery’ tend to fall exclusively or all but exclusively on women. So that’s life in Indonesia’s devoutly Muslim Aceh province.

So…what’s the Home Office thinking? That now that Pervez Kambaksh is out of prison and safely out of Afghanistan, it’s only right to replace him with another apostate? Or what?

[Anonymous], activist of the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain (CEMB) and One Law for All Campaign, has been detained on September 10, 2009 and is facing imminent deportation back to Afghanistan where he will face the death penalty for ‘apostasy.’ As part of his fight against the Islamists, [Anonymous] has publicly renounced Islam in order to break the taboo that comes with such a renunciation and push for the right to leave religion, particularly crucial given that apostasy is punishable by death under Sharia law. As [Anonymous] has said on the CEMB’s website: ‘I was not born to be a Muslim and be afraid of God and more importantly I did not sign an agreement with him/her /it to worship him. As a child, religion has been forced upon me. I have been forced to pray, fast, etc… In Afghanistan where I was living, questioning the existence of god or religion is deemed blasphemy and punishable by stoning to death. Now in the UK I have the opportunity and courage to declare who I am. I AM A FREE MAN WITHOUT ANY EXTRA BONDAGE ON ME.’

He was, until last Thursday, when he was summoned to the Gillingham police station in Kent.

[H]e was issued a Home Office refusal letter that very afternoon and told he would be deported to Afghanistan in a couple of days. The authorities initially tried to force him to sign his removal order and refused him any calls until he persisted…[Anonymous]’s removal to Afghanistan will create yet another Perwiz Kambakhsh with far worse consequences because of the severity of his ‘crime.’

He didn’t just read some material about women’s rights under Islam, he explicitly rejected Islam. The HO can’t send him to Afghanistan – it’s not their policy to deport people to be executed.

Join the Facebook group; get your friends to join; get them to get their friends to join. Write to Phil Woolas. Blog about it. Make a stink.

Karen Armstrong is irritating in a great many ways, but one of the major ways is her passion for stringing together resounding words that sound vaguely impressive but don’t actually mean anything that one can figure out – that are carefully chosen not to mean anything. That is a habit that always makes me want to hit things, and she has a really severe case of it.

In the past, many of the most influential Jewish, Christian and Muslim thinkers understood that what we call “God” is merely a symbol that points beyond itself to an indescribable transcendence, whose existence cannot be proved but is only intuited by means of spiritual exercises and a compassionate lifestyle that enable us to cultivate new capacities of mind and heart.

What on earth is a symbol that points beyond itself to an indescribable transcendence? What does she mean by an indescribable transcendence? What exactly is that?

Whatever you want it to mean, right? After all, she did say it’s indescribable. But if it’s indescribable – why is she talking about it? Why does she do both? Why does she lay down the law about this stuff but choose her language in such a way that she avoids saying anything exact that one can get to grips with?

Well that’s a stupid question; we know why; because she can, because it works, because it sells lots of books, because it wins her an undeserved and indeed ridiculous reputation as an expert on religion among hordes of people who don’t know any better. Because it’s a good wheeze. There’s very little reason (apart from intellectual honesty) for her not to do it, because it does work such a treat.

And yet it surprises me all the same; I suppose it surprises me that she doesn’t make herself sick. It always surprises me that people who peddle meaningless jargon don’t make themselves sick in the process.

The best theology is a spiritual exercise, akin to poetry. Religion is not an exact science but a kind of art form that, like music or painting, introduces us to a mode of knowledge that is different from the purely rational and which cannot easily be put into words.

Says Armstrong. But the trouble with that is, it isn’t true. It’s apparently what Armstrong thinks should be true, it’s apparently what she wishes were true, but she expressed it in the indicative, not the conditional or the subjunctive. It would be nice if she were right about what religion is – it would be great if it were a kind of art form. But she isn’t right – she’s just confusing her wishes with reality.

As you may or may not know, Marie-Therese O’Loughlin, survivor of the nightmare of Goldenbridge Industrial School, has been working hard to get the education that the ‘Sisters of Mercy’ denied her. She took her first exam, in English, last June. She wasn’t sure she’d done terribly well, but was determined to re-take the exam next year if necessary.

She got her results a few days ago.

She got an A.

Boris Johnson said a fatuous thing.

“There are valuable lessons people of all backgrounds can learn from Islam, such as the importance of community spirit, family ties, compassion and helping those less fortunate, all of which lie at the heart of the teachings of Ramadan.”

Obviously meant to be a very kind inclusive generous outreachy thing, but fatuous nevertheless, because if that were true, wouldn’t it show up somewhere? Wouldn’t there be at least one country run according to ‘Islamic principles’ or just plain sharia that was unusually good at compassion and helping those less fortunate? A city on a hill, a beacon to the rest of the world? Or at least a well-known and much-discussed example of compassionate and egalitarian governance? And as far as I know there isn’t. Do correct me if I’m wrong. Sudan? No. Pakistan? No. Afghanistan? Don’t make tasteless jokes. Malaysia? No. Northern Nigeria? No. Saudi Arabia? Please.

So the question becomes, what exactly are the ‘valuable lessons’ that ‘people of all backgrounds can learn from Islam’ about compassion and helping those less fortunate? I don’t dispute that there are words about compassion and helping those less fortunate in Islamic sources, but one, do they say anything unique to Islam? And two, have they made any difference to ‘Islam’ as it actually plays out in the world?

As far as I know the answer is no and no. Do correct me if I’m wrong. In the meantime I will go on wishing political figures would stop sucking up to religion in this way. Be kind and inclusive and generous and outreachy to people, by all means, but skip the religion-flattering.

Sultan Munadi.

Barry Bearak, South Asia Bureau Co-Chief, 1998-2002: “Mr. Munadi, as well as the other “translators” who have worked—and continue to work—for The Times in Afghanistan are also skilled journalists. They accompany Western reporters into the field, leading as much as following. They are a walking Who’s Who, historian, guide, lie detector, supply sergeant, master of logistics, taking equal the risks without equal the glory or pay. One more thing: “translators” like Mr. Munadi take responsibility for the reporter’s life…With the Taliban driven from Kabul, Sultan returned to his formal journalism studies while also working for The Times. When he was graduated, party was held at a newly-opened restaurant. I had the opportunity to talk with Mr. Munadi’s favorite professor. “Sultan was the very best of my students,” he told me.”

Amy Waldman, South Asia Bureau Co-Chief, 2002-2005: “My main memory of Sultan is laughing with him. He was extremely intelligent, scrupulous, honest, curious, dedicated, and fair, but he was also full of mirth – prepared to find almost anything funny, from a politician’s hypocrisy to the not-always-adept Afghan bureaucracy to my weak wisecracks.He had a very distinctive laugh – like a hard giggle, or a soft cackle, a hearty laugh from someone built like a beanpole…When I wanted to write about Afghan women, he helped me find women who could work with me to interpret. He took me home to meet his sister, who he felt, by virtue of being a woman, was too often trapped in the house…All of our interpreters, Sultan among them, were men in their 20s who had lost years to the Taliban, almost always leaving school or university and finding work to support their families.”

That’s just a sample – read the whole thing. It’s heartbreaking.

Tony Blair gets more sickening every day. Individualism, financial crisis, profit, communal good, deeper level, materialistic, my generation, urk urk urk.

The danger is clear: that pursuit of pleasure becomes an end in itself. It is here that faith can step in, can show us a proper sense of duty to others, responsibility for the world around us, and can lead us to, as the Holy Father calls it, caritas in veritate.

Ew? Ew ew ew ew EW!

What the hell does he mean ‘the Holy Father’? He’s not my fucking Holy Father! He may be Tony Blair’s Holy Father but he’s not mine, so he’s not ‘the.’ The arrogance of them – thinking there is such a thing as ‘the Holy Father’ and we’re all obliged to call it that. The me no the, Tony! Keep your holy pater to yourself.

And if you can’t manage to develop a proper sense of duty to others yourself without help from ‘faith’ then there’s something wrong with you – so go improve yourself instead of nagging everyone about your poxy ‘faith.’

The recent Papal Encyclical is a remarkable document in many respects…It puts God’s Truth at the centre of it. In one passage, it describes humanism devoid of faith as “inhuman humanism”: “Without God, man neither knows which way to go, nor even understands who he is.”

That’s nice – he approves a description of atheists as inhuman and then tells us we don’t know where to go or who we are because we don’t believe in his ‘God.’ Odd how nostalgic I feel for Alastair Campbell.

I often wonder why there are so few women mixing it up on atheist sites or running atheist and related sites themselves. Are they all too busy working the double shift, or what?

I thought of one possible reason today, and that is that (to my ever-renewed surprise) lots of men still think it’s hip and funny to be sexist. Then if a woman says it’s not, a lot of them think it’s hip and funny to be sexist some more by way of reply. Then the woman decides she doesn’t want any more of this crap, so she stops visiting the site in question – and it becomes even more of a boys’ club than it already was.

That’s a bad thing, in my view. It repels women from places they would otherwise like to go, and it makes such places woman-free, not because women just aren’t interested in the subject matter, but because (some) women dislike chronic sexism and won’t subject themselves to it. Lots of people would probably say they should just toughen up then – but that’s not it. It’s not about not being tough enough – it’s not about being a sensitive plant, or feeble and whiny, or too good for this world. It’s about just not wanting to deal with stupid mindless retrograde contempt from random strangers.

It’s still the case, or maybe even more the case, that ways of talking that would be obviously outrageous coming from white people talking to non-white people are just routine and ordinary coming from men talking to women. I persist in finding that odd. Lots of people find it not odd at all. This is depressing.

There are a few sites that I used to like but don’t visit any more, just because I don’t feel like getting patronizing crap from idiots who think they get to patronize me because they have penises (one each, as far as I know). That’s tiresome.

And of course now that the news is out, clerics are talking disgusting nonsense about Kambaksh and what he did.

Maulavi Hanif Shah Hosseini, a prominent mullah, declared: “Kambaksh committed a crime against the Koran and the people who conspired so that he escaped the law have also committed a crime. All the decisions to help this man who disrespected Islam are coming from the foreigners…We are going to call for a gathering of the ulama to decide what to do…[A]ny trouble will be the fault of people who helped Kambaksh.”

A crime against the Koran – that’s an interesting notion of a possible crime, right there. It presumably means something like ‘disagreeing with some tenet of Islam as laid down in the Koran.’ So, one, it’s a crime to disagree with any tenet of Islam as laid down in the Koran, and two, doing so is a crime against the Koran. So…that makes it pretty risky to do anything at all, in case whatever it is you do turns out to be in disagreement with some tenet of Islam as laid down in the Koran. It certainly makes it insanely risky to do anything that might imply disagreement with the surrounding status quo if you live in a place where the surrounding status quo is supposed to be and assumed to be in conformity with all the tenets of Islam as laid down in the Koran. So, welcome to the 7th century, we’re going to stay here forever.

Qari Rahmatullah, MP for Kunduz, said: “This just shows that our country is not independent. Our policies are dictated by outsiders. Why should a man be allowed to insult Islam and then just walk away?” … Muqbullah Ali, a 46-year-old labourer, was adamant that: “This is a very bad thing and it is not good for the country, those responsible cannot just walk away as if nothing had happened. If our religious leaders now ask us to take some action then I shall do so.”

And any trouble will be the fault of people who helped Kambaksh.

Well at least Sayed Pervez Kambaksh is free and safely out of Afghanistan. It’s too bad the women of Afghanistan have to stay behind, but it’s good that Kambaksh is out, all the same.

Mr Kambaksh was moved from his cell in Kabul’s main prison a fortnight ago and kept at a secure location for a few days before being flown out of the country. Prior to his departure, he spoke of how his relief was mixed with deep regret at knowing he was unlikely to see his family or country again…Hardline Islamists, including a number of political figures close to the government of President Karzai, have repeatedly called for Mr Kambaksh’s execution and were fiercely critical when an appeal court reduced the original death sentence to 20 years’ imprisonment.

It’s too bad anyone in Afghanistan who doesn’t want to live among bloodthirsty mindless ratbags like that has to stay behind…but still, I’m glad Kambaksh has gotten away from them.

A reader asked me earlier today why religions so adamantly resist assisted suicide legislation, is it just the idea that God is supposed to decide when we die or what. I said that as far as I knew it was all rather ad hoc (not to say lame) and that what justifications were offered tended to be quite disgusting. I offered the example of Richard Swinburne saying suffering is good because it gives people the opportunity to show compassion, and Jonathan Sacks saying he was glad his father hadn’t had the ability to escape the final stages of his death because that mean he, Jonathan, had the chance to take care of his father. Having brought them up, I wanted to read the exact quotes again, so I spent considerable time and ingenuity tracking them down.

Sacks said his piece on ‘Thought for the Day’ in October 2005.

Nine years ago my brothers, my mother and I saw my father go through five major operations in his eighties. It was almost unbearably painful to see one who was once so strong and upright, fight a long, slow, losing battle with death. Yet I can’t begin to imagine what it would have been like if he, or we on his behalf, had been given the choice to bring that last day closer. He was a proud man who hated being a burden to others. How easy it would have been for him to spare us those final tormenting days. I can see him doing it. Yet he would have been so wrong – because, more than anything else, we wanted to be there with him in his suffering giving back some of the care he’d given us when we were young.

Notice that this horrible, arrogant, domineering man doesn’t even ask himself if what his father wanted might be more important than what he Jonathan Sacks wanted. Notice his conviction that what he wanted was more important than what his father may have wanted. Notice that he doesn’t even consider moving from the awareness that his father hated being a burden to the thought that perhaps he should not force him to continue doing what he hated.

I said a few mild words at the time.

Richard Swinburne said his piece around June 2006 [pdf].

Theodicy provides good explanations of why God sometimes — for some or all of the short period of our earthly lives — allows us to suffer pain and disability. Although intrinsically bad states, these difficult times often serve good purposes for the sufferers and for others. My suffering provides me with the opportunity to show courage and patience. It provides you with the opportunity to show sympathy and to help alleviate my suffering. And it provides society with the opportunity to choose whether or not to invest a lot of money in trying to find a cure for this or that particular kind of suffering.

As I said at the time –

Well why stop there? It also provides pharmaceutical companies with the opportunity to develop pain medications, and nurses with the opportunity to apologize for the fact that the pain can’t be alleviated, and vicars and priests with the opportunity to pray that it will be alleviated, and God with the opportunity to refuse to alleviate it, and the funeral people with the opportunity to dispose of the corpse after the victim has committed suicide. Lots and lots of opportunities. Good. So – we should all act accordingly? We should all rush outside with our carving knives and soldering irons and distribute injuries generously around the neighborhood so that there will be further abundance of such opportunities? Suffering is a good thing because it creates these good opportunities so there should be lots more of it so we should all bend every nerve to create more of it?

Swinburne goes on.

Although a good God regrets our suffering, his greatest concern is surely that each of us shall show patience, sympathy and generosity and, thereby, form a holy character. Some people badly need to be ill for their own sake, and some people badly need to be ill to provide important choices for others. Only in that way can some people be encouraged to make serious choices about the sort of person they are to be. For other people, illness is not so valuable.

Pretty? Yes?

The ‘oh sweet jesus Obama is going to talk to little school children and tell them to sniff cocaine and spread their legs and rob banks help help it’s all such a nightmare’ fuss is too much even for some conservatives. Which is good, I suppose, but it ought to be too much for anyone. It ought to be too stupid and too vicious and too evil for anyone.

Blue Indiana knows why.

Let me proffer the following: there is absolutely nothing that could possibly be planned for students next Tuesday that can even begin to approach the pedagogical and personal benefit of hearing the President of the United States tell you that he believes you can change the world.

Quite. And if that ‘you’ who hears the POTUS tell you that is a child who is not lily-white and not rich and not destined for Yale as a legacy and not related to a former president – then that is ten, twenty, fifty times more true. This isn’t just any President of the United States telling you he believes you can change the world, this is one who would have made people’s eyes bug out of their heads if they could have flashed forward to his inauguration day from forty-five years ago. Bug right out, man. Think about that, and what it says to school children now.

I think he’s made a dog’s breakfast of the health care thing, but then his plans were so small even during the campaign that I never did expect much. But when it comes to sending messages to students, especially students of Other Races and of Small Incomes – he’s like a shower of gold, and it just makes my mind go all every which way to see people determined to fuck that up, for no genuine reason but for sheer lunatic fantasy. Or worse – much worse. The real message they are sending is that Obama is not worth listening to, or is worth carefully not listening to, not because he is a Democrat or a “socialist” but because he is a nigger. The real message is that no matter how talented, dedicated, intelligent, thoughtful, eloquent, and principled you are, even if those qualities get you all the way to being the president of the USofA, we will turn our backs on you, because you are a nigger. There’s a message of hope to give to school children!

Evil bastards.

The ayatollahs know what threatens them, bless their little hearts.

Ayatollah Khamenei said this week that the study of social sciences “promotes doubts and uncertainty.” He urged “ardent defenders of Islam” to review the human sciences that are taught in Iran’s universities and that he said “promote secularism,” according to Iranian news services. “Many of the humanities and liberal arts are based on philosophies whose foundations are materialism and disbelief in godly and Islamic teachings,” Ayatollah Khamenei said at a gathering of university students and professors on Sunday, according to IRNA, the state news agency. Teaching those “sciences leads to the loss of belief in godly and Islamic knowledge.”

Quite right. The more you learn, both about how to think and about what well-conducted thinking can find out about the world, the less you believe in the baseless tissue of inventions that make up any kind of godly teachings. Therefore, real education (as opposed to the training one gets in madrassas and Sunday schools) is in tension with religion; therefore, dogmatic religion hates and fears real education. We know. Helpful of Khamenei to spell it out so clearly.

It’s interesting (though not surprising) to see that lunatics in Texas and elsewhere are right there with the good ayatollah. Education is scary bad evil socialist propaganda! Get out of here with that scary education stuff! Don’t come in here attacking godly folks with all this demonic learning and thinking and education!

President Obama’s plan to deliver a speech to public school students on Tuesday has set off a revolt among conservative parents, who have accused the president of trying to indoctrinate their children with socialist ideas and are asking school officials to excuse the children from listening. The uproar over the speech, in which Mr. Obama intends to urge students to work hard and stay in school, has been particularly acute in Texas, where several major school districts, under pressure from parents, have laid plans to let children opt out.

Well why not just have an alternate speech, in which Sarah Palin urges students to be like her and try to get by without knowing anything at all?

About Jytte Klausen’s book and the cartoons and other images of Mohammed that have been removed on the advice of various people who gave that advice.

Director of Yale Press John Donatich made the decision after consulting with a “couple dozen” diplomats, intelligence and academic experts. “I didn’t feel this was a censorship issue,” Donatich told AFP. “It had become a security issue,” he said, adding he was concerned for the safety of Yale Press employees.

Well, like it or not, it decidedly is a censorship issue, even if the motivation for the censorship is concern for security. The two can’t be separated when things are being removed from books because of real or perceived threats of violence. That is some heavy-duty censorship.

I listened to the BBC’s World Have Your Say on the subject on Monday, and Jytte Klausen there said that the people who gave their advice were all security experts or diplomats and they always advise against taking any risks. Apparently the advice Yale University Press got was distorted by the kind of people they decided to ask.

Klausen disputes the grounds for cutting out the cartoons. “Security experts were asked to provide advice without having the manuscript, without having the context in which these illustrations were going to be reprinted,” she said. “I think it’s very serious to suppress illustrations when not a single Muslim has protested the book and there were some Muslim reviewers.”

Exactly. This was what seemed to be about to happen with Does God Hate Women? – worries about projected Muslim reactions when not a single Muslim had protested the book – anticipatory silencing. Fortunately our publishers are stalwart and sensible, and the book went ahead, and no protests materialized – unless we count a laughable little Facebook group, which we don’t, any more than we count a Facebook group about Pluto.

Mona Eltahawy knows what’s what.

The controversy that many might recall as “Danish newspaper publishes cartoons of the prophet; Muslim world goes berserk” was actually much more complex. What occurred across many Muslim-majority countries in 2006 was a clear exercise in manufacturing outrage.

And now we’re stuck with it. What a horrible joke.

Italy’s drug regulation agency has authorized the use of RU-486 even though the Vatican says it will excommunicate doctors who prescribe the drug and patients who use it – so for one thing Italy’s drug regulation agency perhaps has the sense to realize that not all Italians are Catholics and thus not all Italians should be governed by what the Vatican threatens to do to Catholics. Well done Italy’s drug regulation agency.

The Vatican, which opposes all forms of abortion in the belief that human life is sacred from the point of conception, says the pill is no different from surgical abortion. “There will be excommunication for the doctor, the woman and anyone who encourages its use,” said Monsignor Elio Sgreccia, emeritus president of the Pontifical Academy for Life and the pope’s top expert on bioethical issues.

Good old Vatican, doing its level best to mess up more people’s lives ‘in the belief that’ something completely meaningless mumble mumble. Grazie, Monsignor Sgreccia.