People who oppose abortion rights are making a big fuss about Obama’s invitation to Notre Dame, the Catholic university in Indiana.

The vast majority of faculty and students support the invitation. However, a few academics have come out against and are planning a commencement-day protest. Most of the noise, though, is coming from outside the university. Over 60 bishops have publicly opposed the invitation…

But that’s not the best bit. This is:

The ability of Notre Dame to stir Catholic hearts speaks to the role it plays among “subway” alumni – immigrants and their descendants who in many cases have never visited the university but whose devotion to it and its American football team forms part of their Catholic identity.

Yeah! They’ve never been there, and they couldn’t give less of a shit about actual education or learning or research, but man they love that football team and that there Catholic identity. That’s what universities are for – football, and identity.

Except places like Cambridge. Cambridge has its priorities straight. Right?

Maybe not.

After the university amended its equal opportunities policy to stress it “respects religious or philosophical beliefs of all kinds” and opposes discrimination, Prof Ross Anderson warned it could [damage] freedom of speech among staff frightened of causing offence.

It could also damage Cambridge’s reputation for being a university. How can a university possibly respect religious or philosophical beliefs of all kinds? When so many religious or philosophical beliefs are idiotic? How can a university sign up to deciding in advance that religious or philosophical beliefs of all kinds are automatically worthy of respect?

University policies on race equality were approved in 2002, with statements on disability and gender equality added in 2007. Further development of those policies, as the university puts it, would see respect for philosophical and religious beliefs (including lack of belief) put under this banner of protection. The new addition to policy says: “The university’s core values are freedom of thought and expression and freedom from discrimination. It therefore respects religious or philosophical beliefs of all kinds, including the lack of religion or belief.”

But respect for philosophical and religious beliefs shouldn’t be put under a banner of protection. Respect for people, as a shorthand for not doing bad things to them, yes, but for beliefs, no. At a university of all places!

Ross Anderson, a professor of security engineering, hit out at the amendment, submitting an official note of dissent. He wrote: “The university has no duty under this legislation to ‘promote religion and belief equality’, merely a duty not to discriminate when hiring staff or admitting students – which we stopped doing in 1877. The unfortunate wording of this policy might be interpreted to suggest that Cambridge is to promote the equality of evolution with creationism, or of cosmology with shepherds’ tales. We must never accept any duty to promote the equality of truth and falsehood.”

Out of the mouths of professors of security engineering.

Watch out for beliefs.

[Judge] Rodenberg found Daniel has only a “rudimentary understanding at best of the risks and benefits of chemotherapy. … he does not believe he is ill currently. The fact is that he is very ill currently.”…Johnson, the parents’ attorney, said everyone should be able to get medical care that follows their beliefs. “The Hausers believe that the injection of chemotherapy into Danny Hauser amounts to an assault upon his body”…The Hausers, who have eight children, are Roman Catholic and also believe in the “do no harm” philosophy of the Nemenhah Band. The Missouri-based religious group believes in natural healing methods advocated by some American Indians.

But what the Hausers ‘believe’ is beside the point here in the most fundamental way. It’s beside the point in the same way as it would be beside the point to ‘believe’ that one could stand in front of an approaching high-speed train and be undamaged because one was holding a magic amulet. The Hausers’ ‘beliefs’ make no difference to what is happening inside their son’s body and to what would change that, any more than anyone’s ‘beliefs’ make any difference to what a moving train does to a human body. The train does what it does, lymphoma does what it does, chemo does what it does. What’s needed here is not belief but knowledge. The oncologist knows what chemotherapy does to lymphoma, and the Hausers don’t know, and they apparently don’t know that they don’t know and don’t know that the oncologist does know – or else they do know but choose to decide not to ‘believe’ it. They shouldn’t do that, any more than they should tell their kid to stand in the path of a high speed train while holding a magic amulet.

Rodenberg wrote that Daniel claims to be an elder in the band, but does not know what that means. Daniel also says he is a medicine man under Nemenhah teachings but can’t say how he became a medicine man or what teachings he has had to become one. He also noted that at age 13, Daniel can’t read. “He lacks the ability to give informed consent to medical procedures,” Rodenberg said…According to Daniel’s court testimony, he believes the chemo will kill him, and said: “I’d fight it. I’d punch them and I’d kick them.”

His parents have failed to make sure he knows how to read, and have apparently failed to correct his mistaken belief that the chemo will kill him as opposed to probably saving him. Beliefs are beside the point here, and being beside the point, they are lethal.

Let’s find out what the Child Evangelism Fellowship believes and presumably teaches to very young children immediately after school, on school property.

That the whole entire bible ‘is given by inspiration of God’ and ‘that it is inerrant in the original writing and that its teaching and authority are absolute, supreme and final.’ So if something is in the bible (the translation of the bible into English, that is, though of course they don’t bother to say that) then it is absolute, supreme and final – so no matter what it is, no matter how harsh, no matter how unjust, cruel, tyrannical, interfering, none of anyone’s business, pointless, reactionary, stupid – it cannot be changed or rejected or refused. What a nice little recipe for the abdication of human reason and reflection and thought, and what a great system for anyone who wants to impose the morality of a few Mediterranean goatherds on people living 5 thousand years later. We’re not allowed to think, we’re not allowed to fashion our own laws on the basis of human needs and wants, we have to obey whatever is written down in a very old book, because a bunch of fools take it to be absolute, supreme and final.

And that’s only the first item. This doesn’t bode well.

They believe in

the infallible interpreter of the infallible Word, who indwells every true believer, and is ever present to testify of Christ, seeking to occupy us with Him and not with ourselves or our experiences.

That’s sick. Being occupied with someone who’s been dead for two thousand years and not with ourselves or our experiences is sick, it’s diseased. I can see being interested in someone who’s been dead for two thousand years; I’m interested in a lot of people who’ve been dead for a long time; but I’m not interested in them to the exclusion of my experiences. The hell with that.

I saw a hummingbird a couple of hours ago, close up. I was walking down the street thinking about something or other and I don’t remember what alerted me – I think I heard the high-pitched little vocalization that hummingbirds make, without really registering it (so now I don’t remember it), but it was enough to make me stop walking and look (for I didn’t know what, until I saw it) – and there it was, maybe six feet away, hovering in front of some flowers. That was my experience. It was a good experience. I find hummingbirds enchanting. Why the hell would I want to occupy myself with Jesus instead? Jesus can at least wait until a duller moment.

That no degree of reformation however great, no attainment in morality however high, no culture however attractive, no humanitarian and philanthropic schemes and societies however useful, no baptism or other ordinance however administered, can help the sinner take even one step toward Heaven…

Calvinist trash, devaluing everything good. A pox on it.

That He was made a curse for the sinner, dying for his sins according to the Scriptures, that no repentance, no feeling, no faith, no good resolutions, no sincere efforts, no submission to the rules and regulations of any church can add in the very least to the value of the precious blood…

Good stuff for very young children (or anyone else). Nothing good is good, it’s all crap crap crap, except Jeezis and his god damn blood.

That the souls of the lost remain after death in misery until the final judgment of the great white throne, when soul and body reunited at the resurrection shall be cast “Into the lake of fire” which is “the second death,” to be “punished with everlasting destruction”…In the reality and personality of Satan, “that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world”…

Bad stuff. Bad, bad, bad stuff. Cruel, vindictive, frightening, punitive – ugly. The ugly product of the ugliest part of the human mind. And, fortunately, false. Just a bunch of nonsense that a surprising and depressing number of people take pleasure in believing – and trying to get other people to believe.

But whatever else it is, it’s not something that should be taught to young children on school property. (Or anywhere else, in a better world, but churches have rights.)

This is the scariest thing I’ve read in awhile, at least locally. Schoolgirls being gassed in Afghanistan is much scarier, but locally the Child Evangelism Fellowship is scary as hell. Good News Clubs are terrifying.

Remember the little girl who told her classmate that she was going to hell? Well that was a Good News Club at work.

Their teacher overheard the increasingly heated exchange. When class resumed, she asked everyone to pay attention. People from different religious backgrounds, she explained, have very different perspectives on certain kinds of issues. Emma, feeling good that she had stood her ground, seemed content with the result. But Ashley was crushed. “You mean they lied to me right here in school?!” she began to cry. “Because that’s what they taught me here! How can they lie?”

Because they aren’t actually part of the school but they seem to be, thus giving small children the impression that they are Teachers telling The Truth.

Because the Good News Club seeks to reach children who in many cases are not old enough to read, a centerpiece of its program is the “wordless book,” a simple picture book intended to convey different Evangelical doctrines…The Good News Club aims to use afterschool facilities as soon as possible after the bell rings. Aside from adding to the convenience for students and parents, this maximizes the possibility of contact with non-participating students. It also has the effect of making it difficult for very young children to distinguish between the Good News Club and the other classes they take in school.

And that’s not just a by-product, it’s part of the point.

The club’s best promoters, as the CEF well understands, are the children themselves. Participating students are instructed to invite their classmates to join the group, and prizes are often given to those who succeed. The group’s focus, indeed, is concentrated on the “un-churched” children more than it is on those already in the fold. “If every public elementary school student in the United Sates could join a Good News Club,” the CEF Web site states, “we could revolutionize our culture in one generation!” In short, the confusion Ashley evinced on the playground about just what her school was teaching her was no accident. It is built into the design of the Good News Club program. The average six-year-old cannot reliably distinguish between programs taught by his/her school and those taught in his/her school; and the CEF may be determined to make use of this fact in order to advance its religious aims.

Bad…but at least schools can say No, right? Parents can say No and the schools can say No. Right?

No.

In 2001, in Good News Club v. Milford Central School, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that to exclude the club on the grounds that it is a religious group is to discriminate against its particular religious viewpoint, in violation of 1st Amendment protections on the freedom of speech. The court also went out of its way to say that it could conceive of no basis for concern about a possible violation of the clause of the 1st Amendment that prohibits the establishment of religion. The author of the court’s majority opinion was Clarence Thomas. It is perhaps interesting to note, in that respect, that in a recent speech before a school group, Justice Thomas reminisced fondly about his own school days when he would see “a flag and a crucifix in each classroom.”

Fucking hell – where have I been? How did I not know about the Milford decision? What a nightmare…

“Milford is a bad decision,” a lawyer for Americans United for Separation of Church and State wrote to my husband. But it “is not going to be overturned right now. The lower courts will all follow it and the Supreme Court in its current configuration is not going to reverse itself on this issue.”

Help help.

Fuambai Ahmadu is really quite creepy.

I am not surprised that the women of Kailahun have taken to the streets to protest what is now becoming a brazen attack by anti-FGM activists against female initiation and excision in Sierra Leone…I have witnessed first-hand the proliferation (and invidiousness) of this alarming multi-million dollar “development” industry, financed largely by western countries and international agencies such as UNICEF, WHO, UNFPA and so on. Faced with a global media onslaught depicting the most insidious and racist types of representations of African men and women witnessed since colonial times and the downright force of anti-FGM campaigns to shame, more and more circumcised African women have come to see and define themselves through these media lenses as “mutilated”.

Lots of emotive language there, along with a fair amount of trendy code. Anti-FGM activists are ‘brazen’ – as if there is something shameful about opposing the mutilation of girls. And then there’s all the sly nonsense about money and scare-quoted ‘development’ and industry and financed and western and international – as if it were Walmart and McDonald’s and Coke teaming up to make a profit from saying girls shouldn’t be mutilated. The disdain for UNICEF, WHO, and UNFPA is odd too. But no problem, just pretend it’s all racist and colonialist and there’s no further need to explain. So her position is that international agencies are, by definition, invidious and racist/colonialist and anti-FGM campaigns are brazen and corrupt (being financed by all those invidious international agencies), while people who mutilate girls are all that is good.

[T]here ought to be some respect and sensitivity to Sierra Leonean women and our culture. The term FGM is offensive, divisive, demeaning, inflammatory and absolutely unnecessary!! As black Africans most of us would never permit anyone to call us by the term “nigger” or “kaffir” in reference to our second-class racial status or in attempts to redress racial inequalities, so initiated Sierra Leonean women (and all circumcised women for that matter) must reject the use of the term “mutilation” to define us and demean our bodies…For those of us who take pride in our culture, our ethnicity, and our female ancestors, which Bondo represents, we must continue to stand up for ourselves and defy any attempt by others, however powerful they may be, to rewrite their own histories onto our bodies, to negate our particularities as they universalize their own.

That ‘as…so’ is completely bogus, obviously, because ‘nigger’ does not work the same way as ‘mutilation’ does. Ahmadu calls herself a scholar but her way of ‘arguing’ is not very scholarly.

Meet theologian-social theorist John Milbank.

Militant atheism or “scientism” is expanding to fill the gap left by the “exhaustion” of secular ideologies such as capitalism, communism and humanism, he suggests. “What’s left to turn into an ideology except for natural science itself?”

That’s a false choice. It assumes that everyone wants an ideology and that the putative exhaustion of his list of putative secular ideologies leaves a ‘gap’ and that the ‘gap’ is something that people want to fill. Some people are attracted to ideologies, but not all people are, and even some people who are attracted to them can learn to outgrow the attraction. He is perhaps extrapolating from himself, perhaps for reasons of self-protection: he is dependent on an ideology, so he wants to think that everyone is, so that he will seem to himself less gullible and pathetic. That’s a very very common ploy of the religious, we know: the ‘huh huh you think you’re so smart but you’re just as religious as I am only more so because your religion is more dogmatic than mine and plus besides you don’t even know it’s a religion so ha.’

Milbank’s 1990 book Theology and Social Theory ‘argues that instead of asking how theology may fit into the conclusions of secular social science, theology should challenge social scientists’ assumptions.’

On reviewing the second edition of the book in 2006, Charles Taylor, emeritus professor of philosophy at McGill University, said: “When the first edition was published, the reaction was one of shock. Now, 15 years on, the shock has worn off; more and more people are questioning the universal competency of secular reason.”

And isn’t that just wonderful. More and more people are questioning the universal competency of secular reason, and turning to theology instead. And? What will that accomplish? In what way is theology a good or useful or humane substitute for secular reason? Oddly, Milbank never actually says, at least not in this piece, which one would think would be a golden opportunity to reach a broad audience.

In 1999, Milbank broadened his thesis into a general challenge to secular dominance in Radical Orthodoxy…”In a sense, we were going on the offensive against secularism,” Milbank says. Radical Orthodoxy argued for a return to Christianity’s medieval roots, when “faith and reason were inseparable”. It used creedal Christianity as a base from which to criticise modern society, culture, politics and philosophy.

Right – just as the pope does, just as the Southern Baptist Convention does, just as Fred Phelps does. Only they don’t so much get a respectful hearing in the Times Higher. Dress up fundamentalism in some academicky robes and hey presto, grown-up people pretend to think it’s sort of kind of vaguely sane.

Habit is a “mediating category” between the purely material (the brain) and the purely mental, Milbank theorises. “When you ask yourself where that habit comes from, you either have to see it as random or as something that has established itself in response to something. Then you can start talking about God.”

Sure, I can, but I don’t see why I should, and I don’t want to. I don’t think it’s interesting to start talking about God then. I think it’s orders of magnitude more interesting to go on talking about where habit comes from, but in a way that really wants to find out, as opposed to pretending to find out by talking about God. ‘God’ is not interesting because ‘God’ doesn’t tell us anything real or illuminating about where habit comes from.

There follows paragraph upon paragraph of banal political musing which is remarkable neither for acumen nor for persuasiveness. Then along comes an ally.

Among Milbank’s proteges is Philip Blond, head of Demos’ progressive conservatism project and a former theology lecturer at the University of Cumbria. The ideas within “Liberality versus Liberalism” informed Blond’s concept of “Red Toryism”…

Oh gawd – it would be – Philip Blond, the postmodern theologian. It’s good to see that he’s sustaining his project of Pervasive Oxymoronism. If there’s anything I love it’s a postmodern theologian who is a progressive conservative Red Tory.

Okay – that’s my six impossible things not long after breakfast taken care of; now for the rest of the day.

Now…about PZ’s elephant allegory. It all depends exactly what it is that Eagletosh is getting up to with those wings and iridescent feathers of many hues. That final question, in particular –

Where do you find meaning and joy and richness and beauty, O Reader? In elephants, or elephants’ wings?

In both. Both, both, both. (Gee, that’s a silly word if you say it more than once.) Absolutely in both. There’s no way I’m going to pick one over the other, or repudiate the elephants’ wings. Always assuming, that is, that Eagletosh is doing what we can loosely call poetry, and not religion. He’s doing some of each in the allegory, so that’s why I say it depends. But to the extent that he is doing what we can loosely call poetry; to the extent that he is making up stories and fantasies about what a magical imagined elephant could be like; and to the extent that he is clear that that is what he is doing; to the extent that he is not making truth-claims about the world – then I find meaning and joy and richness and beauty in both. I get to keep Babar, and the Elephant’s Child, and the mammoth in Ice Age. I guess I’m also stuck with that ridiculous line in ‘Paradise Lost’ – a risible item about how the elephant, to make them mirth, wreathed his proboscis lithe, or something like that. But never mind – it’s worth the freight.

We don’t have to choose. We can have both. We can have ethics without religion, we can have meaning without religion, we can have hope without religion, we can have solidarity without religion, and we can have poetry and fantasy and imaginary iridescent feathers of many hues without religion.

Last February four female journalists in Sierra Leone were attacked, forced to strip and marched through a town by a pro-FGM group.

Witnesses said the four were accused of reporting on an anti-FGM campaign last Friday, which marked the international day of zero tolerance to female circumcision. The women were allegedly abducted by a pro-FGM group in the eastern city of Kenema, then stripped naked and marched through the streets before police and human rights organisations intervened to set them free.

The significance of their being stripped and marched through the streets is of course obvious – it’s the pinching and spitting and shouts of ‘Kintirlee!‘ all over again. The point was to say ‘Look at these disgusting shameful horrible uncut women with their grotesque hideous shocking unfixed genitals.’

Witnesses said the women were forcibly taken to the forest headquarters of the Bondo society, a secret organisation of women which traditionally carries out female genital mutilation as part of initiation rites…Speaking to journalists, the head of the Bondo society, Haja Massah Kaisamba, would not comment on the allegations other than saying the four women were taken into “our custody because they spoke unfavourably on radio against FGM”.

Ah. Well that’s a fairly comprehensive comment right there. It says that people who speak against FGM are subject to being abducted by the Bondo society. What more does she need to say?

‘On Feb. 6, 2007, two women, both of whom had been circumcised in Africa , met in the conference room of a small foundation on Fifth Avenue in New York City for a highly unusual debate. It was the fourth annual International Day of Zero Tolerance of Female Genital Mutilation, an occasion for events across the globe dedicated to abolishing the practice.’ One was Fuambai Ahmadu, the American-born daughter of a Sierra Leonean family, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago with a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics; the other was Grace Mose, who grew up in an Abagusii village in southwestern Kenya. Mose was there as an active opponent of FGM, and Ahmadu was there as a defender. Michelle Goldberg continues:

“My sitting here is a perfect example that female initiation can have a place in a global society,” [Ahmadu] insisted. “I don’t see that initiation is somehow an impediment to girls’ development.”…As she spoke, Mose, a fervent campaigner against the practice, glared at her. Unruffled, Ahmadu continued, arguing that in Sierra Leone, “female circumcision is empowering.” Toward the end of the debate, a Senegalese woman, incensed by Ahmadu, stood up and said, “I really feel very frustrated seeing an African sister defending female genital mutilation.” A few people applauded.

The Senegalese woman protested the term ‘circumcision’ and said the word should be mutilation. Then Ahmadu got angry.

“In Senegal, in Gambia, in my country, Sierra Leone, there are words that we can use, as circumcised women, against uncircumcised women that are very insulting and very nasty and very offensive.”

In Somalia, too. Ayaan Hirsi Ali tells us that.

The kids at madrassah were tough. They fought. One girl, who was about eight years old, they called kintirleey, ‘she with the clitoris.’ I had no idea what a clitoris was, but the kids didn’t even want to be seen with this girl. They spat on her and pinched her; they rubbed sand in her eyes, and once they caught her and tried to bury her in the sand behind the school.

Later, after a fight, another girl shouts at Ayaan, ‘Kintirleey!’

Sanyar winced. I looked at her, horror dawning on me. I was like that other girl? I, too, had that filthy thing, a kintir?

Ahmadu continues her objection:

Comparing these slurs to the word “mutilation,” she continued, “I may be different from you and I am excised, but I am not mutilated. Just like I will not accept anybody calling me by the n-word to define my racial identity, I will not have anybody call me by the m-word to define my social identity, my gender identity.”

The trouble with that is that it’s not just about her. She can say she is not mutilated, but that doesn’t mean she can say other women are not mutilated – especially since, as Goldberg points out, she was mutilated or ‘circumcised’ at the age of 22, with her own consent. There’s something quite self-regarding about the way she personalizes the issue.

Ahmadu sees herself as speaking for African women who value female genital cutting but are shut out of the rarified realms of international civil society. “The anti-FGM activists have access to the media, and they have enormous resources, so they’re able to influence the media in such a way that most of the women who support the practice cannot,” she told me later that evening.

But most of the very young girls who get mutilated also cannot influence the media, to put it mildly, so to pretend that anti-FGM activists are the big powerful bullies while the fans of cutting are the victims is…partial, at best.

Ahmadu’s argument, that to decry circumcision is to decry her very culture, is a persuasive one. Liberals have many reasons to sympathize with people struggling to hold on to their ways of life in the face of the hegemonic steamroller of globalization. But they have even more reason to sympathize with people like [Agnes] Pareyio who are fighting for individual rights in societies that demand subsuming such rights to tradition and myths about sexual purity. After all, even if relativists like Shweder truss them up in fashionable thirdworldism, such demands are the very essence of reactionary conservatism…To support people like Pareyio – as well as those fighting to implement the Maputo Protocol or working against draconian abortion bans or the terrible iniquities of Sharia law – is to reject relativism. It is to believe that other cultures, like our own, can change in necessary ways without being destroyed.

Quite.

I read something very interesting in an interview with Timothy Williamson the other day.

Not long ago I had a revealing discussion with a professor of ancient Greek literature, who was convinced that, by contrast with the tradition of Sartre, Foucault and Derrida, contemporary analytic philosophy had nothing useful to offer the study of poetry ― a common view in departments of literature. He claimed that it could not handle phenomena such as meaning more than one says. I discovered that he didn’t know of the analytic philosopher Paul Grice’s analysis of just such phenomena, which has had a huge impact on linguistics as well as philosophy. The point is that he had never even looked at Grice’s book (Studies in the Way of Words); he wasn’t reacting negatively to its content or manner of presentation. That’s not untypical. Outside philosophy departments, many people are taught that analytic philosophy is sterile logic-chopping, so they don’t feel the incentive to do the hard work that is needed to master the ideas and see how they can be applied to literary texts and other material.

The professor of ancient Greek literature thought he knew something that he in fact didn’t know. Outside philosophy departments, many people are taught that analytic philosophy is sterile logic-chopping, so they think they know that, so they never bother to look into it – and the teaching that analytic philosophy is sterile logic-chopping goes right on being the conventional wisdom. So often that is how conventional wisdom becomes conventional wisdom: just by people saying stuff and other people taking it as true and no further inquiry taking place. I’m sure I ‘know’ lots of things in that way. Sometimes I’m fortunate enough to become aware of them and shed or correct them – but I’m not so optimistic that I think I’ve spotted all of them.

It would be a good idea to have an academy for tracking down items of conventional wisdom for further examination and inquiry and investigation. Sir Thomas Browne compiled a Pseudodoxia Epidemica, and Flaubert had Bouvard and Pécuchet compile a Dictionnaire des idées reçues, and there is of course the indispensable Skeptic’s Dictionary now – but I think there’s still need for a conventional wisdom branch.

The pope’s a funny guy. The right hand knoweth not what the left hand getteth up to. The right hand has an attention deficit.

During his address in Amman, the pontiff called on Jordan’s Muslims and Christians to work together to improve their society. “Some assert that religion is necessarily a cause of division in our world and so they argue that the lesser attention given to religion in the public sphere the better,” he said…”However, is it not also the case that often it is the ideological manipulation of religion, sometimes for political ends, that is the real catalyst for tension and division, and at times even violence in society?”

Yes…but…but Herr Rotweiler, sir, have you not noticed that you yourself go in for a certain amount of ideological manipulation of religion, sometimes for political ends? And that your cardinals and bishops and priests do so too? And that sometimes you instruct them to do that very thing? Have you forgotten your own insistence that politicians who support the right to abortion were to be excommunicated? If you have forgotten, I have to say, that’s a little careless and irresponsible of you. If you’re going to go swanning around the globe telling everyone what to do on the pain of religious sanctions, you really have a duty to keep track. You have a power to bully that no one else on the planet has, you know – don’t you think you should take that power very seriously? Seriously enough to be unable to forget the occasions when you use it? I do. Catholics, sadly for them, may well take your threats seriously, and be badly harmed by them – yet here you are making them one day and forgetting them the next. Callous bastard, aren’t you.

…as he flew toward his much anticipated five-day trip in Brazil, the Pope addressed the question of the “good standing” of Catholic politicians who support abortion rights — a delicate issue that has come up in the U.S., Europe and, most recently, Mexico. During an unprecedented 25-minute on-flight press conference, Benedict left little room for interpretation: pro-choice politicians not only should be denied communion, but face outright excommunication from the Church for supporting “the killing of a human child.” The Pope’s declaration came in response to recent comments from the spokesman of the Mexican bishops conference, who said politicians who pushed through a new Mexico City pro-choice law were to be excommunicated.

One truth in Mexico City and another in Amman, popey? Is that the idea? Going all situationist on us, are you? Or is it more of an irregular verb matter – what you do cannot, by definition, be manipulation, but what other people do can? Is that it? Well if so you should spell it out, so that we know what we’re dealing with.

You know how John Stuart Mill had a mental crisis, and became unable to take pleasure in anything. One thing that helped him was reading Wordsworth. Byron was no good to him, Byron was too melancholy himself, but Wordsworth was just the thing – ‘the miscellaneous poems, in the two-volume edition of 1815,’ to be exact.

“In the first place, these poems addressed themselves powerfully to one of the strongest of my pleasurable susceptibilities, the love of rural objects and natural scenery; to which I had been indebted not only for much of the pleasure of my life, but quite recently for relief from one of my longest relapses into depression. In this power of rural beauty over me, there was a foundation laid for taking pleasure in Wordsworth’s, poetry. the more so, as his scenery lies mostly among mountains, which, owing to my early Pyrenean excursion, were my ideal of natural beauty. But Wordsworth would never have had any great effect on me, if he had merely placed before me beautiful pictures of natural scenery. Scott does this still better than Wordsworth, and a very second-rate landscape does it more effectually than any poet. What made Wordsworth’s poems a medicine for my state of mind, was that they expressed, not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought coloured by feeling, under the excitement of beauty. They seemed to be the very culture of the feelings, which I was in quest of. In them I seemed to draw from a Source of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure, which could be shared in by all human beings…”

And we can do it without God. The Eagletons of the world don’t need to get in a panic.

God damn spammers. They keep coming back. I’m having to spend two hours a day cleaning the god damn ads for viagra and xanax and the rest of it out of old comments. Miserable blood-sucking bastards.

[beats head against wall until the blood runs]

I read something interesting in M H Abrams’s The Mirror and the Lamp this morning.

Ever since Aristotle, it had been common to illuminate the nature of poetry…by opposing it to History…But to Wordsworth, the appropriate business of poetry is ‘to treat of things not as they are…but as they seem to exist to the senses, and to the passions,’ and as worked upon ‘in the spirit of genuine imagination.’ The most characteristic subject matter of poetry no longer consists of actions that never happened, but of things modified by the passions and imagination of the perceiver; and in place of history, the most eligible contrary to poetry, so conceived, is the unemotional and objective description characteristic of physical science. Wordsworth therefore replaced the inadequate ‘contradistinction of Poetry and Prose’ by ‘the more philosophical one of Poetry and Matter of Fact, or Science,’ and similar formulations became a standard port of departure in romantic discussions of poetry…Such statements are intended only as logical devices for isolating and defining the nature of poetic discourse. The prevalence of philosophical positivism, however, which claimed the method of the natural sciences to be the sole access to truth, tended to convert this logical into a combative opposition. To some writers, it seemed that poetry and science are not only antithetic, but incompatible, and that if science is true, poetry must be false, or at any rate trivial.

This perhaps does a lot to explain what Eagleton is getting at – but he apparently considers it beneath him to put it in Romantic terms – which would be too naive, too sentimental, too vieux jeu for someone as hip as he is, for whom only toasters and Chekhov will do. But he seems to be speaking Wordsworth all the same.

That’s probably what he means about religion – it’s not facts but feeling, just as it is with Wordsworth. That is at least intelligible, though not really a good defense of religion, given the temporal, political, institutional, rhetorical power it has, and given the fact that it does make literal factual truth-claims about the world and what is in it.

But it is at least intelligible. I don’t strictly think it’s ‘true’ that the mountains are full of meaning – but I do think it’s true that humans feel that way – and in fact that they ought to. I think less of people who don’t. I’m chilled by people who are dead to natural beauty, and to beauty of other kinds. I think beauty is an illusion in a sense, or in several senses, but I think it’s a necessary one. I would loathe to be without it. Imagine a brain lesion that made one indifferent to the blossoming fruit trees, the lilacs, the saturated blue of Puget Sound on a bright day, the swallows, the hummingbirds, the long grass, the stars, the sunset. Imagine what life would be if all that and everything like it became just so much Stuff, like a heap of sawdust or a dirty cement wall or a bucket of decomposing slime.

So perhaps Eagleton’s claim is that religion is like the brain without the lesion – it’s the ability to feel a particular way about things. Well – if that’s what he thinks, I can to some extent understand his vehemence. Perhaps he thinks atheism is a kind of machine for draining all of that kind of feeling from the world.

But it isn’t. It just isn’t. If it were…I might be tempted to see if I could force myself to believe too. But it isn’t. Feeling that way is part of the human equipment. Religion is probably one door into it, for a lot of people, but there are others. Music, art, sport, work (drugs) – there are lots of doors. Mind you – it may be that religion does it better for a lot of people than anything else does. Merlijn de Smit once told us that was true for him – growing up in a drab town he could find lavish beauty in the Catholic church that just wasn’t available elsewhere.

Hummingbirds. The world needs more hummingbirds.

Mark Bauerlein had some thoughts on Terry Eagleton almost a decade ago.

[I]t is a mistake to treat social constructionism as preached in the academy as a philosophy. Though the position sounds like an epistemology, filled with glib denials of objectivity, truth, and facts backed up by in-the-know philosophical citations (“As Nietzsche says. . .”), its proponents hold those beliefs most unphilosophically. When someone holds a belief philosophically, he or she exposes it to arguments and evidence against it, and tries to mount arguments and evidence for it in return. But in academic contexts, constructionist ideas are not open for debate. They stand as community wisdom, articles of faith…Save for a few near-retirement humanists and realist philosopher holdouts, academics embrace constructionist premises as catechism learning, axioms to be assimilated before one is inducted into the professoriate. To believe that knowledge is a construct, that truth, evidence, fact, and inference all fall under the category of local interpretation, and that interpretations are more or less right by virtue of the interests they satisfy is a professional habit, not an intellectual thesis.

Take, he suggests a couple of pages later, Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory: An Introduction for an example.

[T]he conceptual analysis is thin, the methodological description hasty. Instead, the book reads like a textbook case of commentary by genetic fallacy and ethical consequence. To the patient exposition of terms and concepts Eagleton prefers the oblique adumbration…In the chapter on post-structuralism, Eagleton spends little time detailing the arguments of founding tests like “Différence,” and instead strings together deconstructive platitudes…Literary Theory: An Introduction hardly counts as a serious discussion of literary theory, but its tactics have come to dominate humanities criticism. Commentaries on ideological origins and ethical results far exceed conceptual analyses and logical expositions. Evaluating concepts and arguments by their political backgrounds and implications has become a disciplinary wont, a pattern of inquiry.

Does it not sound familiar? Does it not sound like the Eagleton (and the Fish too) that we have just been reading, and gently but firmly disputing?

Constructionist notions have become so patent and revered that their articulation need no longer happen, except as reminders to professors who stray from the party line (many utterances begin with “We must remember that. . .”). Those who raise objections soon find themselves trapped in debates shaped by us versus them forensics, enunciated in an idiom of brazen philosophical avowals and insinuations about the character of adversaries. Non-constructionists feel not so much refuted, as ostracized. The humanities become a closed society, captive to a weak epistemology with a mighty elocution.

And the result apparently is that Eagleton and Fish manage to get through their entire careers without ever being compelled to argue properly, with the sad and poignant result that we see before us now – a couple of grizzled sages who think they’re making a case when they’re just making word salad.

Jerry Coyne, after discussion with other scientists and upon reflection, refused an invitation from the organizers of the World Science Festival to participate on a panel that would discuss the relationship between faith and science. One of the Festival’s sponsors was The Templeton Foundation, ‘whose implicit mission,’ Coyne said, ‘is to reconcile science and religion (and in doing so, I think, blur the boundaries between them).’ The people at the SWF wrote to him and other concerned scientists.

[T]he Festival has programs that not only focus on the content of science traditionally defined, but programs that seek to illuminate how science interfaces with other disciplines and outlooks…For the Festival to have programs exploring the art-science relationship, the government-science relationship, the business-science relationship, the literature-science relationship, and yet to willfully ignore the prominent and tumultuous religion-science relationship would be a strange and, dare we say, cowardly omission.

No, it wouldn’t, at least not necessarily. One can organize and arrange and categorize such things in more than one way. One could decide that such a Festival should be about science and everything, so that inclusiveness and breadth would be the first criterion. But one could also and instead decide, say, that such a Festival should be about science and other human endeavors that are compatible with science. The second looks, frankly, a lot more interesting than the first. It is genuinely interesting and rewarding to explore various kinds of human activity that can co-exist with science, and enrich or illustrate or expand on it. It’s also, I would think, a better way in the long run to get people interested in science, because the science and everything idea would be too broad and undemanding to hook onto anything. Science and cookies, science and fashion, science and ghosts, science and religion…it’s everything and nothing. But science and history, science and criminal investigation, science and journalism, science and art? Those all indicate the presense of some content, and thus something to think about.

Anyway, as Coyne points out, religion has a problem in this context that dance and literature don’t.

you consider faith as a topic appropriate for discussion in your Festival. You mention that you feature programs that integrate science with dance, with public policy, with literature, and so on. But these are quite different from religion. Neither dance, public policy, nor literature are based on ways of looking at the world that are completely inimical to scientific investigation. Science and religion are truly incompatible disciplines; science and literature are not. That is, one can appreciate great literature and science without embracing any philosophical contradictions, but one cannot do this with religion (unless that religion is a watered down-deism that precludes any direct involvement of a deity in the world).

That of course is just what the Templeton Foundation would like to deny and make disappear, which is why Coyne refuses to take their dime.

The issue is that, by saying it sponsors the Festival, the Templeton Foundation will use its sponsorship to prove that it is engaging in serious discussion with scientists. Like many of my colleagues, I regard Templeton as an organization whose purpose is to fuse science with religion: to show how science illuminates “the big questions” and how religion can contribute to science. I regard this as not only fatuous, but dangerous. Templeton likes nothing better than to corral real working scientists into its conciliatory pen.

Kudos to Jerry Coyne for blowing the gaff on them.

Russell encounters an Eaglefish and has one of those epiphanic moments when a few things suddenly “click”.

[A]mong our friends on the political Left – which is where I have my roots – there are people, not just a few but many, who despise everything I hold dear. These are supposed to be my allies, but they despise liberalism, reason, science, progress, and the Enlightenment. They hate the so-called “New Atheism”…because they see people like Richard Dawkins as providing a rallying point for … yes, liberalism, reason, science, progress, and the Enlightenment…It’s not some sort of accident or coincidence that their commitments so often have them opposing liberalism and all the values associated with it. They know that that’s what they’re doing; they actually see those values as disvalues.

Yeah. And that’s why I would so love to see them magically turned into women and transported to Swat so that they could ponder the absence of liberalism, reason, science, progress, and the Enlightenment up close and personal.

I despise and detest their frivolity. Their stupid, shallow, giggling lack of responsibility; their treating subjects that are very literally life and death to billions of people as mere toys for them to play with. They don’t even offer any serious reasons for their hatred of liberalism, reason, science, progress, and the Enlightenment – that’s what’s so frivolous about it. They just take it for granted, and offer at most silly lightweight pseudo-reasons, like the fact that their grandparents had religious beliefs. These guys aren’t children – they should know they need better reasons than that. They should pay better attention to the world, they should look around them, they should yank their heads out of their own stifling little egos.

Stanley Fish and Terry Eagleton, for example, are not just isolated, idiosyncratic sentimentalists who believe in belief. They really do hate the things that I value, and they see themselves as in a struggle to resist the very things that I am fighting for in all my work. When Eagleton says that Richard Dawkins is standing in his way, he actually means it. What’s more, such Eaglefish don’t see themselves as expressing a view that their colleagues and acquaintances will find alien and bizarre. They expect their views to seem familiar and attractive to many readers; they expect to find an audience for which such views will have the ring of truth.

Quite. This is why Butterflies and Wheels was created and why it still exists – because Eaglefish don’t see themselves as expressing a view that their colleagues and acquaintances will find alien and bizarre. B&W has been working hard (that is, I’ve been working hard, but it sounds grander to call myself B&W, as if I were a committee) for nigh on seven years now to make the Eaglefish view seem alien and bizarre to as many people as possible.

And people wonder why atheists get huffy.

Obama is scaling back White House plans for Thursday’s National Day of Prayer even as his administration defends the tradition in federal court in Wisconsin…The Obama administration has asked a judge to dismiss a lawsuit filed by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, which claims the day violates the separation of church and state. In a rare alliance, 31 mostly Republican members of Congress and a prominent Christian legal group are joining the administration to fight the lawsuit. Congress established the day in 1952 and in 1988 set the first Thursday in May as the day for presidents to issue proclamations asking Americans to pray.

Okay, it’s a small thing, and we can always just ignore it, but just the same – what business do presidents have asking us to pray? Fuck off! What business do secular heads of secular states have asking us to perform some magical rite? They’re not our priests, they’re not bishops, they’re not clerical officials of any kind; it is none of their business whether we pray or not. None, zip, zero. It’s a highly offensive intrusion for them to make such a request. It also sends that notorious excluding message that atheists are always complaining of and that does a lot to explain our sometimes irritable attitude toward religion, the one that mystifies our friends and acquaintances on the other side of the Atlantic. It sends the message ‘everyone prays and we’re all alike in this and anyone who isn’t is deeply weird and, as Bush I so wisely said, probably not exactly really quite a citizen.’ That’s a stupid and ill-mannered message to send for no good reason – it’s a kind of pro-active rudeness. What the hell do we need such a day for? People who want to pray can pray; why do the rest of us have to be chivvied and hassled?

Well it’s obvious from the initial date what we need it for: to remind us that we’re not like those godless commies. But that’s a bit out of date now, and it’s not, alas, the godless commies who are gathering their forces in Pakistan, getting ready to start slouching towards Manhattan. So it would be nice if we could ditch the gratuitous National Marginalize Atheists Day.

It’s not as if we want to replace the damn thing with National Abolish Prayer Day. It’s not as if we want to set an annual date for presidents to issue proclamations asking Americans not to pray. We just want presidents to shut up about praying, that’s all. We want nobody official governmental political to talk about praying at all, because it’s not their job and it’s emphatically not their business.

Martha Nussbaum says there are liberal Muslims in India – though she doesn’t say how many or what percentage they are or how influential they are. She leaves a lot of details out of her account, which makes it less credible than it might be.

She also starts off with the familiar silly and misleading ‘community’-talk –

India’s Muslim community strongly condemned the terrorist acts and immediately took steps to demonstrate its loyalty to the nation…The world saw a deeply nationalist community, one loyal to the liberal values of a nation that has yet to treat it justly. It was not the first time India’s Muslims have demonstrated a peaceful embrace of the country’s founding values. The personal experience of Mushirul Hasan exemplifies the same commitment. A leader of the community, Hasan has been at the center of controversy for his liberal, secular views…

Come on…she’s a philosopher, so she really ought to do better than that. How can ‘India’s Muslim community’ strongly condemn anything? What does that even mean? To make any sense at all it has to mean that all Indian Muslims strongly condemned and immediately took steps, which is absurd. Perhaps she means all prominent Indian Muslims did that? But no, because she could have said that, and because that’s not what she wants to convey, either – and that’s the problem. She wants to convey, without spelling it out, that the majority of Indian Muslims strongly condemned and immediately took steps – but is that true? I don’t know, but it seems very unlikely just on the face of it, because most people are too busy with other things to do much public condemning and step-taking. But as if she had established that which she wanted to convey, she goes on in the next sentence to say what ‘India’s Muslims’ had demonstrated – when it’s vanishingly unlikely that all of them demonstrated anything. Then she dashes on to claim one person as exemplary of this commitment of ‘India’s Muslims’ and then to call him ‘a leader’ of this notional ‘community’ that all thinks with one mind. It’s all very rhetorical and sentimental and covertly manipulative, and I wish she wouldn’t do it.

It is an interesting piece though – and I hope she’s right. I would be delighted to learn that the situation is just as she describes it and that my suspicions are groundless. I’d be thrilled. I would love to know that India is packed to the rafters with people like Mushirul Hasan.

Stereotypes of the violent Muslim are so prevalent in India—as elsewhere in the world—that it is virtually impossible for Muslim liberals to be taken at their word when they say that they believe in free speech, pluralism, nonviolent persuasion, the rule of law, and the right of each person to a fair trial. ’Oh yes, a screen for darker motives,’ is the typical response, pervasive on Hindu blogs and common even in the mainstream press. You say you are a liberal, and that proves you are a radical Islamist.

Well…are stereotypes really the only reason for that? Does the Koran, and the relationship of Islam to the Koran, have nothing to do with it? Couldn’t it be that at least some people wonder if Muslim liberals still have the Koran to contend with, just as Christian liberals have the Bible, and if there is some tension? Couldn’t some people think that liberalism is just more difficult for Muslims for a lot of reasons (family pressure, customs, the Koran, friends, and so on) and that different people can mean different things by ‘liberal’? I would say it could, and that people who are slow to be convinced are not necessarily simply heeding stereotypes of the violent Muslim. They might be, but they might not.

It is a very interesting article though, and highly informative. Don’t let me put you off.

Let’s see Fish and Eagleton – or should I adopt the latter’s sophisticated witticism and call them Eaglefish? – sneer at progress, liberalism and enlightenment in the context of Delara Derabi’s last minutes, and her parents’ experience of her last minutes. First some Eaglefish sneering –

Progress, liberalism and enlightenment — these are the watchwords of those, like Hitchens, who believe that in a modern world, religion has nothing to offer us…[W]e are where we always were, confronted with a choice between a flawed but aspiring religious faith or a spectacularly hubristic faith in the power of unaided reason and a progress that has no content but, like the capitalism it reflects and extends, just makes its valueless way into every nook and cranny.

And then a few minutes in a world where contempt for progress, liberalism and enlightenment is not just a selfish smug I’m all right Jack trope among male literary critics in Florida and Lancashire but the real thing. Let’s see how funny the joke seems in Tehran.

It was 7am when Delara Darabi phoned home. “Oh mother, I see the hangman’s noose in front of me,” she garbled. “They are going to execute me. Please save me.” Moments later a prison official snatched the handset away. “We will easily execute your daughter and there’s nothing you can do about it,” he barked at the parents. Then, with a chilling click, the line went dead. The desperate couple rushed to the Central Prison in Rasht, Iran, wailing at the guards to let them see their 22-year-old. As they prostrated themselves, an ambulance emerged, most probably with Delara’s corpse inside.

There you are – will that do? Is that sufficiently without progress, liberalism and enlightenment? Is that what Feagleton wants? Is that their idea of an excitingly post-enlightenment world rich with ‘flawed but aspiring religious faith’? Is it part of their bill of indictment against atheism that there’s not enough of that kind of thing?

Yes, pretty much. Eagleton at least is pretty explicit about it.

For Eagleton the choice is obvious, although he does not have complete faith in the faith he prefers. “There are no guarantees,” he concedes that a “transfigured future will ever be born.” But we can be sure that it will never be born, he says in his last sentence, “if liberal dogmatists, doctrinaire flag-wavers for Progress, and Islamophobic intellectuals . . . continue to stand in its way.”

But Tel, your transfigured future has already been born; it’s in Tehran, it’s in Kandahar, it’s in Mingora. All those pesky liberal dogmatists, doctrinaire flag-wavers for Progress, and Islamophobic intellectuals haven’t been able to stop it. What are you complaining about?