How obliging of Simon Sarmiento, right on the heels of Bunting’s incomprehension at my claim that laws handed down by an unaccountable god can be oppressive and difficult to change.

Anglican and RC church representatives, giving evidence to a parliamentary committee on Tuesday, were very concerned that a new definition of “the purposes of an organised religion” would curtail their own existing right to discriminate against lay people for reasons other than religious belief.

Oh were they. And yet I thought ‘that in any religious tradition there is interpretation’ and ‘the way Christian teaching has changed over two thousand years is enormous and it continues to change’ so surely there can’t be a problem with Christian teaching not having changed enough, because if there were such a problem then Bunting would have understood what I was talking about, and she said she didn’t, so there must not be a problem. Right? Or perhaps not.

Fittall said: “You might believe that some of our rules and disciplines are wrong, but our view is that that is a matter of religious liberty – a matter for the Church of England, Roman Catholics, the Jews or whoever.”

Right, and that’s how you get away with it – you talk pious boilerplate about ‘religious liberty’ so that you can go on treating people unequally. Well – this is what I was saying. Religious laws are very hard to change because religions get this kind of special dispensation called ‘religious liberty’ and because the rule-giver does not answer requests for judicial review. That’s not an unmixed blessing.

And whaddya know – a colleague of Humera Khan’s has a lot more sense than Humera Khan seems to have –

There also seemed to be little support for the churches from their religious colleagues on the witness panel. Indeed Maleiha Malik, speaking for the Muslim Women’s Network said:

“I do not think that there is any evidence that there is a narrowing, but, like the British Humanist Association, we would very much welcome and strongly support any narrowing of the exemptions, for the following reason. The way the exemptions strike the balance between the rights of organised religion to discriminate and the rights of individuals to be free from discrimination is deeply unfair. It gives too much power to organised religions to police their internal members.”

Well said Maleiha Malik.

A note or two on Night Waves.

I think the most striking thing about both Bunting and Khan is the callous frivolity of their claims. This is probably inevitable when religious apologists are invited to defend religions from charges of injustice and cruelty – but then that’s what’s wrong with religious apologetics, isn’t it.

Bunting for instance started by saying, in a tone of well-feigned bewilderment, that she just really didn’t quite understand what I was talking about, because it seemed to her that in any religious tradition there is interpretation, and ‘the way the way Christian teaching has changed over two thousand years is enormous and it continues to change.’ But she must know perfectly well – how could she not? – that ‘Christian teaching’ hasn’t changed so thoroughly that it has managed to catch up to secular liberal thinking on human rights or women’s rights or gay rights. She must know perfectly well that Catholic bishops are currently insisting precisely on the difference between ‘Church teachings’ and gay rights and demanding that the former be allowed to trump the latter – so what does she mean by saying she doesn’t understand what I’m talking about? I don’t think she means anything, I think she’s just mouthing. And that’s what I mean by callous frivolity. She shouldn’t do that – she should be honest about the subject. This isn’t a game, this is stuff that fucks up people’s lives.

Khan was just as frivolous, talking dismissively about ‘what we call in the Muslim community call “Sheikh google”‘ – which apparently means something like ‘track down news items about various incidents of religious brutality around the world.’ Well look – the incidents are there – they’re real – they happen to real people – so what does it mean to shrug them off in that contemptuous way? Khan may have even had that thought herself, because she promptly added that we’d collected a lot of stuff, but then on third thought she said it was nothing new. No, it’s not new, we never said it was new; the point is not its novelty but that it happens at all. Khan said nothing whatsoever to palliate that – which is not surprising, because what could palliate it? In fact later she said something quite remarkable about ‘the things that aren’t quite working, the violence…’ Ah yes, the violence, which is ‘things not quite working.’

She also talked about the upside of patriarchy, and how if you redefine patriarchy so that it doesn’t mean patriarchy then it’s quite a good thing; she talked about tribes in Indonesia that are an example of matriarchy in Islam; she talked about Eurocentrism. Bunting agreed that there is patriarchy but then shouted that to go from that to the accusation that God hates women is an absurd illogical jump and why not ask do men hate women and how daft that is, there are lots of nice men, it’s a banal argument. Well yes it is a banal argument but it’s not our argument so that takes care of that anyway. Then by way of flourish she interrupted me to tell me the tone of the book is strident and shrill. I would call it, rather, indignant, or heated, or impassioned, in places. That’s because the stuff we talk about is bad – cruel, oppressive, unjust; bad. It’s not something to be callously frivolous about. It’s not something to shrug off with palaver about the Anglican church ordinating women or little pockets of Islamic matriarchy. It’s more serious than that.

Hitchens too sees flaws in Obama’s Cairo speech.

Take the single case in which our president touched upon the best-known fact about the Islamic “world”: its tendency to make women second-class citizens. He mentioned this only to say that “Western countries” were discriminating against Muslim women! And how is this discrimination imposed? By limiting the wearing of the head scarf or hijab…The clear implication was an attack on the French law that prohibits the display of religious garb or symbols in state schools.

He then quotes ‘from an excellent commentary by an Algerian-American visiting professor at the University of Michigan Law School, Karima Bennoune, who says’

I have just published research conducted among the many people of Muslim, Arab and North African descent in France who support that country’s 2004 law banning religious symbols in public schools which they see as a necessary deployment of the “law of the republic” to counter the “law of the Brothers,” an informal rule imposed undemocratically on many women and girls in neighborhoods and at home and by fundamentalists.

This is what people who are horrified by bans on wearing the hijab so often neglect to mention, what they so often in fact obscure by calling the hijab a free choice which simply ignores the fact that in some places women are beaten or murdered for not wearing it. That’s an important fact and it shouldn’t be ignored.

This will amuse you – I’m going to be on Nightwaves on Thursday. A ‘debate’ – more or less about the book, as I understand it. The Other Side will be represented by two people – which perhaps hints at where the BBC’s sympathies lie.

I won’t tell you who the other people are now, because I prefer to tell you later.

One reason religion is not good for women.

God represents an absent, unknown, unknowable, unaccountable, arbitrary power – which makes God a tyrant. To quote from the book, it’s a bad principle to expect humans to obey a putative god that is inaccessible and unknowable, just as it
would be to expect us to obey human legislators who were equally
hidden and unknowable and unaccountable. The God of most believers is a God that no one has
ever seen, that does not make appearances, that sends no messages;
this God is hidden, secretive, permanently and inviolably locked away
from all living people; this fact alone is enough to disqualify it as a source of laws or morality.

It’s surprising, in a way, that so many people are happy to take orders from an unavailable unaccountable God; it’s especially suprising in the case of people who are consigned to inferior status by that unavailable unaccountable God. Habit, custom, training, and inertia explain a lot, but it’s still surprising.

Muriel Gray points out some sad realities.

What new creative solutions were on offer to reconcile the directly opposing ideologies that are obedience to Islam and progressive Western democracy? No big thinking of any kind. Actually, worse than that…Obama informed us that throughout history, “Islam has demonstrated through words and deeds the possibilities of religious tolerance and racial equality”. Hasn’t it just? Darfur was all a silly misunderstanding, and Sunni and Shia Muslims tolerate each other magnificently. Islam also, the president assured us, overlaps and shares common principles with America, namely the “principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings”. Many of these can currently be seen on view in Afghanistan, northern Nigeria, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Pakistan, to name but a very few.

One possible reply is that what Obama said was aspirational – meant to inspire people to live up to the flattering description, not to say how things really are. But…it’s not a very satisfactory or convincing reply, given the vastness of the gap between the flattering description and how things really are. Since Islam as it is really practiced in the real world in places where it has state power is conspicuously bad at tolerance and the dignity of all human beings, it seems foolhardy to say otherwise. (Would Obama be happy to see an adult Malia living in Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan or Pakistan? If not…maybe he should hesitate before talking about shared principles of the dignity of all human beings. [If the answer is yes, he’s nuts – but I strongly doubt that the answer is yes.])

By far the greatest disappointment was Obama’s “dealing” with women’s rights as lowly point number six in his speech. In a few short sentences he referred, rightly, to the importance of educating Muslim women, then bizarrely to the importance of keeping American citizens in their hijabs…No mention of the shameful atrocities being carried out worldwide in Islamic countries every single day; nothing of injustice and hopelessness, of the drudgery, powerlessness and virtual enslavement suffered by millions of women and girls in the name of an invented deity. To so sure-footedly ignore what is happening to women right now is nothing short of a disgrace, and his appeasement of this outrage is on a par with appeasing apartheid.

Right. He needs a copy of the book.

Jason Rosenhouse looks at this natural v supernatural problem.

If you hold views about a supernatural realm that have absolutely no empirical consequences whatsoever then you have nothing to fear from science. There are even certain religious systems that posit such a realm. But that is not the sort of faith held by most Christians.

True; so the business about what is ‘beyond’ nature becomes irrelevant.

So long as we are talking about a divine creator in the abstract then there is no conflict with evolution. Deism is not threatened by evolution.

But Deists aren’t the people who freak out about evolution, so they’re not actually the people Mooney is talking about, so again, they are irrelevant.

One more time, science can not rule out the existence of a supernatural realm, but it can certainly make certain ideas about how the supernatural realm interacts with our earthly realm seem highly implausible.

Just so. If it’s entirely beyond and outside, nobody knows, so you can believe anything you want to, but don’t expect anyone to agree with you; if it’s not beyond and outside, then science can investigate it, so the ‘this is where science stops’ claim doesn’t apply.

The clear distinction between methodological and philosophical naturalism is mostly irrelevant to the question of whether science and religion are compatible, since religion typically claims far more than the mere existence of a supernatural realm…Different people can draw different metaphysical conclusions from the same empirical data. The argument is over whether it is reasonable to accept both evolution and traditional Christianity, not over whether it is possible to accept both.

Yes that’s what I meant by the more long-winded “It’s perfectly possible to know that one can’t know X and still believe X. It’s a constant battle, to be sure, and there’s no guarantee that atheists and naturalists won’t always be saying ‘But there’s no good reason to believe that’ – but that’s life as a grown-up, isn’t it.” It’s possible, and that’s all you get. We can’t give you reasonable too, and it’s unreasonable to expect it.

Chris Mooney says why compatibilism matters via a discussion of Robert Pennock’s testimony at the Kitzmiller trial and Judge Jones’s decision.

Jones and Pennock describe science, and its “ground rule” of methodological naturalism, as an inquiry into the workings of the natural world–one assuming the existence of natural laws that we can discern, and naturalistic processes that we can measure and describe. But, they add, there science basically ends. Is there a “supernatural” that is somehow beyond or outside of nature? Science just can’t say.

Why can’t science say? Because a “supernatural” that is somehow beyond or outside of nature is by definition beyond or outside anything we can meaningfully inquire into: ‘meaningfully’ in the sense of being able to get real results. The reasons science can’t say are the reasons no one can say. It’s not as if science can’t say but some other kind of inquiry or investigation or examination can. There is no discipline or branch of knowledge that can say. That which is outside or beyond is outside or beyond – so we know nothing about it. That means all of us – not just scientists, but all of us.

People can of course believe anything they want to about that which is outside or beyond – but that’s not the same thing as being able to say. I think people who say ‘science can’t say’ often tend to blur that distinction, whether deliberately or not. I think saying ‘science can’t say’ leaves an impression that non-science can say, which is mistaken.

Pennock’s testimony, a key basis for all this, draws a core distinction between such methodological naturalism on the one hand, and “philosophical naturalism” (or atheism) on the other. The latter is a stronger view, and goes beyond the limits of science to claim that the natural is all there is, period. This view may well be true; indeed, I personally believe it to be true. But it is a philosophical view, not a scientific one.

Not exactly. Atheism doesn’t necessarily or always claim that the natural is all there is; atheism doesn’t even necessarily or always claim that there is no God; atheism can be and often is just non-theism, which needn’t say anything so definite as that the natural is all there is. Furthermore, even more assertive atheism, or ‘strong’ atheism, doesn’t necessarily claim that the natural is all there is; it often contents itself with pointing out that the natural is all we can know anything about.

In truth I’m not really sure how philosophical naturalism fits here – I’m not sure whether or not it’s true that philosophical naturalism does necessarily say as a matter of definition that the natural is all there is, period, or whether it says simply that we (humans, stuck here in nature) don’t and can’t know anything about the non-natural. I don’t know if its claims are ontological or epistemological. But frankly I’m a little skeptical that many people are philosophical naturalists of the type who say the natural is all there is, period. I suspect that the vast majority say simply that no one knows, and perhaps further that, by definition, no one can know.

Does it matter? Yes, I think so. I think it’s at least possible that if Chris and other accommodationists could take it on board that most atheists and philosophical naturalists don’t actually claim that the natural is all there is, period, but rather that anything beyond nature is beyond us so we simply can’t know anything about it – then there might be less worry about strategy. Because the next bit of Chris’s argument goes:

Crucially, such logic suggests that it is most emphatically possible to accept the results of science’s naturalistic methodology, and yet also retain supernatural beliefs that science cannot touch.

But that’s still true with philosophical naturalism if it is as I have described it. It’s perfectly possible to know that one can’t know X and still believe X. It’s a constant battle, to be sure, and there’s no guarantee that atheists and naturalists won’t always be saying ‘But there’s no good reason to believe that’ – but that’s life as a grown-up, isn’t it.

The disagreement between incompatibilists and accommodationists goes on. I’m on the incompatibilist side (surprise surprise). One thing in particular that Chris Mooney said stood out for me:

Religion is a very private matter, and given that liberal religionists support church-state separation, we really have no business questioning their personal way of making meaning of the world. After all, they are not trying to force it on anybody else.

But religion is not a very private matter in the sense of being that to the exclusion of being a very public matter. It’s a private matter in the sense of being internal, personal, sometimes bashful, and the like, but that does not mean that it is always and everywhere exclusively private. That’s obvious from Chris’s Mooney’s post itself –

In a recent New Republic book review, [Jerry] Coyne took on Kenneth Miller and Karl Giberson, two scientists who reconcile science and religion in their own lives. Basically, [Barbara] Forrest’s point was that while Coyne may be right that there’s no good reason to believe in the supernatural, he’s very misguided about strategy. Especially when we have the religious right to worry about, why is he criticizing people like Miller and Giberson for their attempts to reconcile modern science and religion?

Why? Because they wrote books on the subject, that’s why. The New Republic commissioned him to review the books, so he reviewed them. This involved disagreeing with some of their claims. But the point is – their claims were not ‘a very private matter,’ they were a very public matter in published books that were out in public for the public to read. It’s just incoherent to claim that Jerry Coyne is being naughty to ‘criticize’ Miller and Giberson for their ‘very private’ religion when what he in fact did was dispute public claims in their published books. He didn’t go poking into their minds, he read their books and then reviewed them for a magazine. Why is anyone asking why he did that? The question is absurd.

The arrogance of Tariq Ramadan is truly breathtaking.

What we expect from the new president is effective and necessary action as well as a change in attitude. Humility is a key factor…Islam is a great civilisation and Barack Obama should bring a message of true and deep respect by announcing that we all have to learn from each other and that he will commit himself to spreading knowledge of cultural and religious diversity in the United States itself. Humility means we all have to learn from one another and America should be ready to learn from Islam and Muslims as well as from the Hindus or the Buddhists.

Islam is not a civilization at all, just as Christianity and Hinduism and Buddhism are not civilizations; they are all religions, not civilizations. Treating the two as interchangeable is a typically Ramadanesque bullying tactic. The peremptory demands for humility and true and deep respect are…pathetic, if you think about the kind of true and deep respect for other religions (and civilizations) that is on offer in, say, Saudi Arabia. I would urge Tariq Ramadan to learn a little humility himself and stop barking out orders in the name of ‘Muslims’ as if he spoke for all Muslims everywhere.

Religion has nothing to offer to morality, because religion as such adds nothing to moral reasoning. Religion as such is an obstacle to moral reasoning, because it injects elements that are irrelevant and false – irrelevant because they are false. Randall Terry on abortion for instance.

George Tiller was a mass-murderer…Abortion is still murder. And we still must call abortion by its proper name: murder. Those men and women who slaughter the unborn are murderers according to the law of God.

Randall Terry has no idea what ‘the law of God’ might be, and neither does anyone else. Billions of people think they do, but in fact no one does. No one has any reliable knowledge of what the law of God might be, or if it is something human beings could and should endorse or not. For all Randall Terry knows God is a vicious sadist who loves watching animals torn apart screaming and people swept away in floods. But Terry thinks he does know, and he thinks God thinks what Terry thinks, and so Terry approves the murder of a doctor.

This is why religion is so inimical to women and to anyone else who is not born to one of the top spots in the hierarchy. Once people become convinced that they know what the holy law is, then that law becomes difficult or impossible (depending on the numbers and the ferocity) to change. If enough people are firmly enough convinced that God wants women to be the property of men and shut up and do what they’re told, then women are essentially slaves, and that’s that. If enough people are convinced that the foetus is far more important than the woman carrying it, then women of child-bearing age can never really own their own lives. That’s the law of God for you.

Clerics will say anything, and they’re allowed to; that’s their job. In some jobs you have to try to get things right and then report them truthfully; in others you’re allowed and indeed encouraged to just make things up. Archbishops are firmly in the second camp.

Many Catholics see in the dismay over MPs’ expenses and the behaviour of the financial markets, a growing public conviction that all is not well in the moral life of the nation. They believe it presents a rare opportunity for the Church to make its voice heard, and see in the archbishop a forceful and articulate spokesman…[The archbish] said the revelations about expenses and the activities of the markets showed rules alone could not make a society work. He insisted they showed that some sense of “virtue” – such as that offered by Christianity – was also needed.

From an obvious truism to a ridiculous non sequitur. Of course ‘rules alone’ can’t make a society work, but who ever said they could? What’s that got to do with anything? Nothing, apart from the automatic slandering of all things secular. ‘Those pesky unbelievers – they think rules alone can make a society work – how shallow and uninformed and clueless can you get? Typical godless.’ Nobody said rules alone can make a society work, and in any case, why is the only other option ‘some some sense of “virtue” such as that offered by Christianity’? It isn’t, of course, the archbishop just felt like saying it is, and his job description says he’s totally allowed to do that.

So – what would this ‘sense of virtue’ be? Especially this ‘sense of virtue’ offered by Christianity? Think hard now. Hmmm. Is it anything like the virtue of
the religious congregations in Ireland? No, probably not. What then? Oh…humility, turning the other cheek, loving your enemy, that kind of thing. Unless you’re in charge of an industrial school, of course, in which case humility and turning the other cheek and loving your enemy is quite the wrong kind of thing. So that must not be what’s meant by a sense of virtue then? So what is? Hmmm. Not getting hitched to someone of the same sex? Yes, perfect! But then – that’s just a rule, right?

Well, the archbishop probably did have something in mind, but I’ll be damned if I can guess what it might be.

The truth is that religion has nothing to offer to morality. It may have some utility as a morality-assistant, but it’s worthless at moral reasoning. That’s not to say that no religious people can engage in moral reasoning, it’s just to say that the religious part doesn’t add anything to the reasoning. Well it doesn’t. Moral reasoning is secular, and religion either gets it dead wrong, or muddies the issues, or simply applauds what everyone knows anyway.

This is why I won’t be applying for any archbishop jobs soon.

Finally, people who can’t think for themselves have an easy way to get instructions.

A telephone help-line offering advice about the true teaching of Islam is being launched in the UK today. Callers to the Islamic Hotline will get answers to their questions within 48 hours, from scholars trained at one of the world’s principal Islamic universities…The Islamic Hotline believes it has good news for British Muslims – keeping the laws of Islam is not as difficult as you thought.

How nice – submitting to the authority of reactionary outdated self-serving androcentric laws dating from fourteen centuries ago is not as difficult as you thought. It’s still a ridiculous pathetic slavish way to live and to make others live, but it’s not as difficult as you thought.

Prof Aboshady provides callers with a sense of the varying interpretations of Islamic law and then recommends one in their particular case. “We are not sticking to one view, or one school of law,” he says. “What we present is what we believe is suitable to people in different times and places and let them choose which is suitable to them. This gives Islamic law some flexibility, so we are not changing the religion or creating new religion, but simply give people the chance to choose which is suitable to them.”

So there’s a kind of gloss of flexibility, an appearance of being sensible and reasonable, but in an eviscerated form. You get a choice of a few views or schools of law, but all of them are imprisoned within the one religion, so there is ‘some flexibility,’ but no actual freedom. It’s like a bigger, airier prison with more privileges and better facilities – but it’s still a prison. It’s nothing to boast of.

Hanaa Ismail called the line about what she calls “issues in the family, about the relations between a man and his wife, what a wife’s duties are…She might be abused by a man for a long while and yet she could get embarrassed to talk about it. This has been… an Arab tradition. With this helpline she can ask for help without any embarrassment, and [the scholar] won’t know who she is, and she can ask about all the details.”

Right – but what she can’t do is say ‘the hell with this, I’m leaving.’ She can’t decide for herself that she has no duty to be beaten by her husband and no desire to tie her life to someone who wants to beat her – she has to ask a ‘scholar’ what the rules are. If he says the rules are that she has to stay with the guy who beats her, that’s that.

She should look elsewhere for advice.

This is one reason I think the Times article is very odd and in fact unfair.

There is no Muslim outrage about this book yet, but the fear of it is palpable enough for the Sunday Times to write an article about it. And if that outrage does indeed materialize, this will be yet another case, as here and here and here, of Muslims becoming outraged over accurate representations of Islamic texts and teachings.

Yes, it will, but on the other hand, in this case as well as the Jewel of Medina/Denise Spellberg case, it will also be a case of ‘Muslims’ (which is to say, some Muslims) being nudged into becoming outraged. I’m really not sure it’s fair to start with nudging people into being outraged and then rebuking them for their hypothetical future state of being outraged. How about waiting until someone actually does get outraged before rebuking anyone for getting outraged? That would be an idea, don’t you think?

Robert Spencer did say there is no Muslim outrage yet, which was alert and fair of him. One could be forgiven for getting the impression from the Times article that there was some such outrage, or at least rumours of outrage. That’s the problem. Spencer had no way of knowing and no reason to think that Toomey was in fact reporting on her own ‘concerns’ and ‘suggestions’ and no one else’s, and that’s why such an article is so dubious. It gives an impression that is just plain false. The idea that ‘the fear of [“Muslim outrage”] is palpable enough for the Sunday Times to write an article about it’ is simply wrong. It’s not a matter of palpable fear that the Sunday Times picked up on, it’s a matter of Toomey predicting something and then reporting on her prediction as if it were reality.

Of course, it’s true that people can always refuse to get outraged even if people try to nudge them into it; and they ought to; but all the same, if people do try to nudge them into it…that’s a kind of entrapment. I thought that when Spellberg did it, and I think it about this.

First posted May 31

Okay, now you know all. I said last week ‘For reasons which I will explain another day, the publisher became nervous’; now you know the reasons. I must say, given the way the article is worded, and given the headline, I understand the publisher’s reaction better, and I regret the slightly acid tone of my post.

The article is, frankly, worded in a rather peculiar way. There’s a very noticeable lack of attribution throughout – there are free-floating feelings and reactions with no actual people having them or expressing them or taking ownership of them. There are fears and concerns and suggestions, but the reader can’t tell whose fears and concerns and suggestions they are.

Well I can tell you. I have privileged information here, so I can tell you. No one’s. They are no one’s fears and concerns and suggestions. This is not altogether surprising, since the book is not out yet, and very few people have read it. I suppose it could be that some people could have read about the book, and developed fears and concerns, and told the journalist, Christine Toomey, about them – but it seems very unlikely, and the fears and concerns would have to be awfully vague and amorphous. The article makes it sound as if (without actually saying) there are real people who have real fears and concerns about the actual content of the actual book – but there can’t be any such people, because they can’t have read the book. You see what I mean? Of course you do. So that makes it odd to talk about fears and concerns and suggestions.

An academic book about religious attitudes to women is to be published this week despite concerns it could cause a backlash among Muslims because it criticises the prophet Muhammad for taking a nine-year-old girl as his third wife…This weekend, the publisher, Continuum, said it had received “outside opinion” on the book’s cultural and religious content following suggestions that it might cause offence.

What Toomey doesn’t say there is that the ‘suggestions that it might cause offence’ came from Toomey. That’s how all this got started. Toomey interviewed the publisher, and that’s when the publisher decided to get outside opinion. (The ecumenicist by the way behaved very well. The ecumenicist put aside his likes and dislikes, and judged it on impartial grounds. The ecumenicist is impressive.) That last sentence really should say ‘This weekend, the publisher, Continuum, said it had received “outside opinion” on the book’s cultural and religious content after I suggested that it might cause offence.’ As it is the article creates the impression that there is already a set of people who have fears and concerns about the book. There isn’t.

It’s all rather odd, really. It’s like another Denise Spellberg except it’s one who likes the book as opposed to hating it. Toomey does great reporting, but I don’t think much of this anticipatory ‘there could be a backlash’ approach. It’s too closely related to internalized self-censorship. Saying a book is controversial is one thing, but sounding a warning is another.

Still – it’s always nice to be noticed eh?

Roxana Saberi talks to NPR:

“I learned a lot from the other political prisoners there, too — the other women — because after several weeks, I was put into a cell with them. Many of those women were there because they are standing up for human rights or the freedom of belief or expression.

Many of them are still there today; they don’t enjoy the kind of international support that I did. And they’re not willing to give in to pressures to make false confessions or to sign off to commitments not to take part in their activities once they’re released; they would rather stay in prison and stand up for those principles that they believe in.

They gave me a lot of inspiration. I learned a lot from those women. I think they’re some of the most admirable women I’ve met, not only in Iran, but all over the world. I shared a cell with Silva Harotonian, who is a researcher of health issues, and she’s been sentenced to three years in prison.”

Silva Harotonian…another one to keep track of.

Times change. Customs change. Views on morality change. Customs and views on morality also vary from place to place. An older person from one place may well have different views on morality from younger people in another place.

But that doesn’t mean there is nothing to say about the customs and the views on morality, or that none are better or worse than any others, or that people who do cruel things have not in fact done cruel things. It may be understandable that they have done cruel things – but ‘understandable’ is not the same as ‘okay.’

[B]ehind closed doors the grandmother imprisoned her three daughters-in-law and used one as her slave for 13 years…The three women, who cannot speak English, were married to her three sons, who were also their first cousins. Preston Crown Court heard that the three women would be subjected to constant beatings and abuse and were made to sit behind a sewing machine for 13 hours a day.

Constant beatings and abuse and slave-labour may be customary in some places but they are not okay.

Shop owner Jamil, who knows the family, said he was shocked that this could happen to “such a nice family”. But he condemned Bibi’s abusive actions, saying: “It’s acceptable to treat women like this in other countries but not in our country, in England no, it’s not acceptable.”

It is not acceptable to treat women like this in other countries. Not anywhere, not nohow. Let’s get that straight. It is not.

Jamil may have meant it is considered acceptable to treat women like this in other countries; let’s hope so.

Young men at the Darul Uloom Haqqania madrasa spend their time memorizing all 77,701 words of the Koran.

Some people call it the University of Jihad. The fact that some of Haqqania’s graduates go on to become Taliban fighters and suicide bombers isn’t the school’s concern, said Syed Yousef Shah, the head of the 3,000- student madrasa. “One person may become a journalist, another a driver,” he said as he reclined on a pillow in a small meeting room in the school. “We can’t control what people do afterward.”

Well that’s bullshit. Granted, a madrasa can’t control directly what its graduates do later, but any school naturally shapes and influences what its graduates do later, by means of what it teaches. Madrasas teach nothing except the Koran and this fact shapes what their graduates do later in several ways, including by making it impossible for them to do any jobs that require real, substantive education. One person may become a journalist, as Shah said, but one graduate of a madrasa may not, because such a graduate won’t have any of the skills needed to be a journalist. Graduates of madrasas can do the usual kind of underpaid unskilled shitwork, but they can’t do anything that depends on knowledge and literacy and critical thinking.

That’s the minimal objection to what Shah said; there is of course a less minimal one, which is that obsessive focus on the Koran does tend to, at least, soften people up for outfits like the Taliban. Madrasas can’t control what people do afterward but they sure as hell can influence it; they can and they do.

Madrasas are places that train people (mostly male, though not exclusively) to be narrow, uninformed, fanatical, and submissive to authority. They train people to memorize and obey a book written in a language that they don’t even know. They are factories for producing ignorant zealots.

The madrasa curriculum and routine – studying the Koran and other religious texts to the exclusion of much else, with a strong focus on rote memorization and strict obedience – has resisted change for centuries. The vast majority of Pakistan’s estimated 20,000 or so Islamic seminaries are benign. Several hundred, however, teach extreme forms of Islam that experts say provide a training ground for militancy and jihad, or holy war.

No, they’re not benign. This is that excessively minimalist idea of what is benign that we’re always encountering – the idea that anything short of terrorism is okay. There’s a lot that’s short of terrorism that is still not okay. The first sentence of that extract flatly contradicts the next sentence. A pseudo-school that teaches rote memorization of and strict obedience to the Koran is not benign. It deprives all its pseudo-students of anything resembling a real education, and it trains them into fanaticism. There is nothing benign about that.

Mark Vernon at Hay.

[N]ew lines are being drawn in the debate between belief and non-belief. In short, the initial dispute appears to be exhausting itself and in its place, a more subtle discussion is emerging. The question is no longer simply, Does God exist? That has never admitted of a final answer anyway. Instead, it is this: What would it be like to live in a world without God?

Oh please. That’s not a new line, for god’s sake. It’s not as if nobody has wondered or discussed what it would be like to live in a world without God until now! The question has never been simply ‘does God exist?’; who said it was? On the other hand, an awful lot of people go around simply calmly assuming that God exists, and that we all agree that God exists, and that there is no reason to think God doesn’t exist, and that we all know who and what God is, and that we all know what God wants from us, so some people have recently been reminding the assumers that their assumptions are assumptions and that they’re rather silly and presumptuous. But that doesn’t rule out talking about what it would be like to live in a world without God, or for that matter talking about what it is like to live in a world without God, and it never has, so there’s no need to draw any new lines, the lines have been there for a long time.

If there is no longer any foundation for ethics, because there is no ultimate source of goodness, then human beings alone must choose how they will live. Some people will choose to be good. But others will not; they will choose to be evil. And it is not easy to say why they should not.

No, it is not, but that ‘ultimate source of goodness’ is not helpful either, because it is easy, but wrong. It is easy only in the sense that it ignores its own weakness.

Oh come on – get serious.

A family breakfast turned into a religious experience when they spotted what appears to be the face of Jesus in the lid of a Marmite jar.

Look at the damn picture! It looks like what you’d expect on the lid of a jar of brown goo: some brown goo and some jar lid.

Not to mention the fact that nobody has the faintest idea what Jesus looked like anyway. ‘The face of Jesus’ of course just means some sleepy amalgam of various modern images of Jesus which are vaguely derived from earlier images of Jesus which are derived from more of the same which ultimately derived from whatever people thought Jesus ought to look like.

It’s unkind to make people’s foolishness public in this way.