And then there’s Prince Charles’s surprise colleague.

Captured war crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic was living in Serbia’s capital Belgrade and practising alternative medicine, Serb officials say. He was sporting a long white beard…

Good good; glad he looked the part. And so appropriate…’alternative medicine’ – yes that’s one of those ironic euphemisms that murdering bastards go in for, isn’t it, like Sonderbehandlung. Killing people wholesale is special handling all right, and it’s also alternative medicine, very alternative indeed. Very droll, Rado.

“He was involved with alternative medicine, earning his money from practising alternative medicine… he was working in a private practice.”…He even gave public lectures and was a regular contributor to Healthy Life magazine, editor Goran Kojic said.

Okay that’s carrying irony a little too far. There is such a thing as good taste.

Let’s see – fish? Check. Barrel? Check. Shooter? Check.

But what else can I do?

Diners have been flocking to a restaurant in northern Nigeria to see pieces of meat which the owner says are inscribed with the name of Allah. What looks like the Arabic word for God and the name of the prophet Muhammad were discovered in pieces of beef by a diner in Birnin Kebbi. He was about to eat it, when he suddenly noticed the words in the gristle, the restaurant owner said.

Ah, in the gristle – that’s a nice touch. I remember gristle from my childhood – I was always spitting it out, and having to be instructed in the polite way to remove gristle from the mouth and leave it daintily on the edge of the plate. Funny that Allah chose the gristle instead of the nice chewable meat. Maybe it was a precaution against being accidentally or blasphemously eaten. Imagine the horror if some apostate or kafir in Birnin Kebbi spotted the name and just went ‘Ha, Allah’s name, yum yum,’ and gobbled it down with some horseradish. Thinks of everything, that Allah. Well, everything except a slightly more exciting or in the public eye place to do his gristle-signing.

The meat was boiled and then fried before being served, owner Kabiru Haliru told newspaper Weekly Trust. “When the writings were discovered there were some Islamic scholars who come and eat here and they all commented that it was a sign to show that Islam is the only true religion for mankind,” he said.

Ah yes, quite right too. Of course it was! Because what else would Allah do to give a sign to show that Islam is the only true religion for mankind? Write his name in letters of fire across the night sky, high enough and large enough for a whole hemisphere to read? Send his only begotten daughter to be tortured to death? Dictate another really boring book about camels and finance? Pick up the Chrysler building and move it to Ponca City Oklahoma? Issue the 11th commandment, forbidding people to wear their baseball caps backward? Of course not. The only sensible way to give a sign to show that Islam is the only true religion for mankind is to write your name and your prophet’s name on three pieces of meat the gristle thereof in the kitchen of a restaurant in Birnin Kebbi, Nigeria.

A vet told the newspaper the words “defied scientific explanation”. “Supposing only one piece of meat was found then it would be suspicious, but given the circumstances there is no explanation,” Dr Yakubu Dominic said.

Absolutely. You have only to look at the accompanying illustration to see that. There are some random bumps in the meat; that defies scientific explanation all right. I’m thinking of converting. The apostasy thing is a bit of a discourager though; I do like being allowed to change my mind about things.

(It’s thoughtful of the BBC to provide a list of other inexplicable signings and sightings. Message from Allah in tomato; thief steals Nun Bun; miracle chapati. Hours of fun for the whole family.)

That unrepentant one has thought deeply and then pronounced. He has expanded on the elegant brevity of ‘How appropriate that a smug, shitty, rightwing publication like “Butterflies and Wheels” shares the name of a sentence in a book that is key to the plot of an idiotic movie like “Shattered”‘; he has explained what is shitty (smug and rightwing we can figure out for ourselves) about B&W.

[A] fountainhead of Islamophobia…There is the usual defense of the Danish Mohammad cartoons, etc. There are attacks on other religions as well…

So maybe ‘Islamophobia’ is a little inaccurate? Never mind.

In addition to religion, the website mounts attacks on multiculturalism…Kenan Malik, a Spiked Online regular, seems to be a designated hitter when it comes to such matters.

No. Kenan’s an occasional contributor, I’m pleased to say, but there are plenty of other contributors who are skeptical about multiculturalism, as well as plenty of other contributors who write about other things. There are no ‘designated hitters’ around here.

This clever phrase is just the sort of thing you can find on New Criterion, a magazine edited by the neoconservative Hilton Cramer or any other rightwing standard bearer in the “culture wars”.

Ah yes! And therefore they are all the same kind of thing, and no further thought or investigation is required.

It took about five years to figure out that things were not so simple.

Ah did it. Imagine my surprise.

The B&W website is not particularly concerned with such issues, preferring to bash religion rather than environmentalism. There is one exception, however. They do seem to get worked into a lather when it comes to the animal rights movement, which they obviously consider an impudent assault on the absolute rights of Scientific Research. They have taken up the cause of Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS), a company that has been the target of the Animal Liberation Front.

Funny the way he makes a plural of everything, as if nothing were signed around here. Who’s this ‘they’? He’s obviously referring to my republished article on the ALF, which wasn’t written by ‘them,’ it was written by me. And it’s not about ‘taking up the cause’ of HLS, it’s about questioning the tactics and morals of the ALF. Different thing. I don’t think there is such a thing as the absolute rights of scientific research, and I certainly don’t think animal research should be beyond question and protest. But it doesn’t follow from that that the ALF is without flaw.

I would not be surprised to discover that B&W gets some funding from Huntington and other such animal torturers.

Oh, wouldn’t you? Well I would! I would be surprised to discover that B&W gets funding from anywhere at all. B&W gets zero funding of any kind, thank you.

I was just going to point this out, but (of course – I should have known) I got intrigued by the absurd claims. Lenny’s at it too but I can’t be bothered to tease that one.

Tom Clark points out that ‘an essential disagreement between secularists and their opponents is epistemological, about how we hold and justify our factual beliefs.’

Are they arrived at empirically, by consideration of public evidence potentially available to any observer (so that the evidence is intersubjective, not merely subjective), or are they more a function of religious tradition or faith? Are beliefs held to be fallible and thus corrigible by open inquiry and empirical testing, or are they held to be the infallible and unquestionable deliverances of authority, whether scriptural or institutional?

Yup; that’s an essential disagreement all right. In fact without that disagreement the others kind of drift away like smoke, because they are at least in principle resolvable through further discussion and inquiry. But with that disagreement, they aren’t.

On what basis do we choose between these opposing epistemologies? Why should we, or anyone, side with Dacey and the secularists, not the Iranians and other fundamentalists in deciding where to place our cognitive bets? To defend secularism, this root issue of our epistemic commitments must be brought into the public square…The beginning of such an argument is obvious but too often left unstated. It is simply that beliefs arrived at via publicly available (thus intersubjective) evidence, science, critical reason, logic, and open debate – what we might call open intersubjective empiricism – are far more reliable than beliefs based in faith and non-empirical modes of justification, such as appeals to scriptural authority.

Just so. And, Clark goes on to say, even fundamentalists know this when dealing with quotidian matters. I’ve pointed this out a few times myself. Nobody mumbles about faith when she wants to know how to get from Buffalo to Skaneateles, or when to plant tomatoes, or what to put on poison ivy. There are double standards in play. When we actually want to know something in the real world, we do what we know we have to do to find out. When we just want to believe something, we use completely different (and noticeably lax) methods.

But of course these same true believers abandon the epistemic commitment to intersubjective empiricism when deciding about matters of god, human nature, human flourishing and ethics – all the traditional domains of religious belief. They have a double standard of justification, falling back on intuition, faith, scripture and authority when it comes to the basic metaphysical and moral content of their worldviews. The fundamentalist/authoritarian proposition is that we are warranted, when considering matters of ultimate import that make up our worldview, in carving out an exception to the basic epistemic norms that rule our everyday lives.

But we’re not warranted in doing that. The world isn’t divided into two parts, one knowable via intersubjective empiricism and the other knowable via guesswork and fantasy and wishes. It’s odd to think it is.

The question that should be raised publicly, while we still have the chance, is whether and why this exemption is warranted. What is its rational basis? Why are we suddenly permitted to abandon the normal empirical constraints on belief when deciding about such things as god, life after death, the soul, free will, and the status of women, homosexuals, and those of other races and creeds? Is it because there are means of deciding the truth of such matters that are superior to logic, science, public evidence, and critical inquiry? If so, what are these and why are they trustworthy?

No, there are no such means. We know what the proposed alternatives are and we know they’re not trustworthy.

The nut of the article:

The future of secularism may depend on using the open public square to expose the epistemic weakness of faith and non-empirical justifications for belief.

Send me in, coach.

Okay this is a joke.

Clerics need to “restore the dignity of women,” Juan Jose Tamayo, director of theology at Madrid’s Juan Carlos III university, told a roundtable on Thursday, July 17…”Women have been forgotten and marginalized in religions,” Tamayo said as reported by the AFP news agency. “They are organized hierarchically and patriarchically, excluding women in all fields of knowledge and religious matters.”

Yes indeed – and Juan José Tamayo is urging the Vatican to reverse its position on women in the church and allow them to become priests and bishops and popes, is he? He’s urging Muslim clerics to do the same? I don’t know, maybe he is, but since this conference was organized by the World Muslim League, it seems unlikely.

Ahmad Ibn Saifuddin, a Saudi professor of theology, agreed that women’s role had been misunderstood and that it was time to re-examine the issue. “Eve was born from Adam, so women and men are the same,” he said.

Um…no. Eve was born from Adam, so women are inferior to men – that’s how that goes. Jeez, you’d think a Saudi professor of theology would know that. Don’t the Saudis teach their professors of theology anything any more?

The Egyptian Centre for Women’s Rights did a study on sexual harassment.

Sexual harassment of women in Egypt is on the increase and observing Islamic dress code is no deterrent, according to a survey published this week…ECWR head Nihad Abu El-Qoumsan said that even veiled women who were victims of harassment blamed themselves. Western women who took part in the study demonstrated a strong belief in their entitlement to personal safety and freedom of movement, she says, but this was totally absent among Egyptian respondents. No-one spoke about freedom of choice, freedom of movement or the right to legal protection. No-one showed any awareness that the harasser was a criminal, regardless of what clothes the victim was wearing.

So…’Western’ women believe strongly that they ought to be able to walk around outside without being pestered by men, and Egyptian women don’t believe that. Well I guess I’m one of the first kind then, because I certainly believe I ought to be able to walk around outside with no pestering or opposition or impertinent interruption of any kind. I think I was almost born with that belief. I’m serious – I had a habit of bolting when I was a child. I did it once when I was about three – we lived in the country and one evening I was playing innocently outside among the apple trees and then simply turned that into a long walk up Bedensbrook Road and along the Great Road. I was brought home by a stranger, which must have been exciting for everyone. I did it again when I was about five, we lived in town then and were walking up Mercer Street and I just turned around and rushed off for a more private walk of my own. I’ve been like that ever since. The idea that women are in some way public property, subject to interference from strangers, as soon as they go outside, has always been anathema to me. We’re not children, we’re not broken, we’re not feeble in our intellects, we’re not ill, we’re not weak, we’re not damage, we don’t need help or supervision or attention or moral instruction, and we don’t need men just helping themselves to us. Women of Egypt: tell them all to piss off.

After Noha’s story was published in the Badeel daily, editor-in-chief Muhammad El Sayyed Said wrote that the behaviour of the crowd was characteristic of oppressed societies, where the majority identified with the oppressor. He blamed the increase in sexual harassment on what he said were “three decades of incitement against women” from the pulpits of some of Egypt’s mosques. “This verbal incitement is based on the extremely sordid and impudent allegation that our women are not modestly dressed. This was, and still is, a flagrant lie, used to justify violence against women in the name of religion.”

Women of Egypt: push back.

I got a surprise email from a stranger yesterday. It read, in its entirety, so:

How appropriate that a smug, shitty, rightwing publication like “Butterflies and Wheels” shares the name of a sentence in a book that is key to the plot of an idiotic movie like “Shattered”. Both the ‘zine and the movie are worthless.

No greeting or signature or anything stuffy like that, just that rather random observation. It made me laugh a good deal, I must say. I also forwarded it to Jeremy, knowing it would cause him to grin sharkishly with delight. He’s always wanted abusive mail about B&W. In fact it’s really very sad: he thought there would be abusive email, he thought it would pour in and keep on pouring, he thought B&W would attract hostility and contempt as soon as anyone noticed it. He was looking forward to it. A month or so before he started creating B&W ex nihilo he had a nice little exchange about something at TPM Online with some guy in Prague, full of rough and tumble and raillery; he told me that soon I would be luxuriating in that sort of thing too. But…that was six years ago, and it never really happened. There haven’t been any really furious emails. Some mild dissents and criticisms, yes, but nothing like what Jeremy was expecting. Six years of waiting – so you can imagine how pleased I was to be able to forward him a genuine example at last.

Jeremy asked if he could reply, and I (being a byword for generosity, and besides I hadn’t been planning to reply) said sure. You’ll be wondering who sent the abrupt little note. It was the Unrepentant Marxist himself, Louis Proyect. Jeremy’s affable reply went as follows:

Dear Louis

It’s always lovely to receive fan mail from sophisticated and erudite readers such as yourself.

I’ve seen it said many times of you that you should stick to film reviewing. But I say no, Louis, no! I can see a role for you after the revolution – don’t worry, it’s just around the corner! – as a kind of ambassador of goodwill; a communist love machine, if you like, fostering a common humanity wherever you go, bringing joy to the masses, that sort of thing.

I know what you’re thinking. Nobody takes you seriously, right (except maybe that strange fella with the odd surname at Lenin’s Tomb – though come to think of it that might be you)? Don’t despair, I’m sure that will change! A bit of collective ownership, and you’ll be right up there in the pantheon of communist greats: Trofim Lysenko, Nadia Comaneci, Falco… and Louis Proyect.

Hey, it’s even possible that someday somebody will read your blog. Okay maybe that’s pushing it, but hope, Louis, hope!

Anyway, my friend – comrade even – please keep in touch; it has been a joy.

Love

Jerry (fraternal, of course – though, if I may say so, you look damned sexy in that picture of yours – xxx)

The unrepentant one replied, as elegantly as before:

Neocon scumbag, your “philosophical” credentials are one rung beneath those of Dennis Miller and Michelle Malkin. I once told Alan Sokal that there are a lot of creepy, crawly things drawn to his writings, you included.

Impressive, isn’t it. Substantive; well-reasoned; cogent; rigorous but civil; erudite. How could either of us not be persuaded? Jeremy admitted defeat:

Dear Louis, You Old Goat

You seem troubled, my friend. This is not good!

Has your life not turned out as you hoped? I imagine as you rage against the dying of the light that you look back and wonder whether you should have taken an alternative course. Perhaps you wish that you’d chosen charkhas rather than dialectics, Himalayan goat-herding rather than… what is it you do exactly?

But I say again, Louis, despair not! There’s still time. There are projects to complete. Indigenous peoples to patronize. Small archives to create. Your life has meaning, Louis, you must believe it. Do not fear the existential void, my friend, for you are… <--- dramatic pause - an unrepentant Marxist! This is lovely, isn't it - that we get to talk like this. I've lunched with Alan (Sokal) a couple of times. He never mentioned you. Odd that... Love Jerry, xxx

The UM shot back:

How are you spending the riches accumulated from sales of “Little Book of Big Ideas”, by the way?

Amazon.com Sales Rank: #756,628 in Books

I love how you are obsessed with how many people read or don’t read my blog. This kind of Norman Podhoretz desire to “make it” is an odd obsession of snot-nosed ambitious neocons like yourself. Too bad you don’t have Podhoretz’s dubious talents otherwise you too might get invited to pontificate like your hero Hitchens.

And there the matter will rest, because Jeremy is content to let him have the last word. But it’s interesting that people feel free to do this kind of thing, and it’s also interesting when people on the left, who presumably think they are working for a better world with more peace and harmony and solidarity, think the road to utopia is paved with vituperation. Proyect is very reminiscent of Bill Donohue of the ‘Catholic League,’ a guy so full of Christian compassion and mercy and agape that he tries hard to get students expelled and professors fired or perhaps kicked out of Minnesota, for trivial and invalid reasons. That’s why we thought the exchange worth publishing. It’s interesting that supposedly idealistic types give themselves permission to engage in various kinds of unprovoked bullying.

(I should add that I don’t feel the smallest compunction about publishing Proyect’s emails, because I never requested them.)

What the Saudi king said.

This message declares that Islam is a religion of moderation and tolerance, a message that calls for constructive dialogue among followers of religions, a message that promises to open a new page for humanity in which, God willing, concord will replace conflict.

And God not willing? What then?

More to the point, of course, the idea that Islam and especially Wahhabi Islam is a religion of moderation and tolerance is a bad joke. Saudi Arabia tolerates almost nothing, especially if women want to do or drive or walk into or sit down in or refuse or accept or look at or listen to or read it.

Mankind is suffering today from a loss of values and conceptual confusion, and is passing through a critical phase which, in spite of all the scientific progress, is witnessing a proliferation of crime, an increase in terrorism, the disintegration of the family, subversion of the minds of the young by drug-abuse, exploitation of the poor by the strong, and odious racist tendencies. This is all a consequence of the spiritual void from which people suffer when they forget God…There is no solution for us other than to agree on a united approach, through dialogue among religions and civilizations.

Okay – one at a time. Don’t push. Notice anything missing? No mention of oppression of women. No mention of women, for that matter; it’s mankind that is suffering. (Don’t tell me he means women too; he doesn’t.) No mention of women, instead mention of ‘the disintegration of the family,’ which of course is code for women not being submissive enough. And then there’s the bit about exploitation of the poor by the strong, and odious racist tendencies. The Saudi king has a fucking nerve lecturing anyone about that, given the way Saudis treat domestic servants from other countries. Just ask Nour Miyati.

[The third time in Riyadh], the wife of the employer beat me, she did not work. Everyday she beat me. She beat my head, so I would cover it with my hands. She hit my foot with her sharp high heels. Everyday she did this until my foot was injured. When I told the husband about his wife’s behavior, he also beat me. After she beat my hands and they became swollen, [they made me] wash my hands with … one whole cup of bleach. I felt very hurt and had a lot of pain. I never got enough food. After one year, they still had not paid my salary.

If there is no solution for this loss of values because of forgetting God, other than dialogue among religions, then why is Saudi Arabia such a shitty cruel oppressive nightmare place? Saudi Arabia hasn’t forgotten God, S.A. never shuts up about the bastard, so why are we supposed to think that remembering God makes people nicer to the poor and to other races? Because the Wahhabi king says so, that’s all.

This is a very stupid observation, presumably by a dull-witted sub-editor who didn’t read the article with attention:

The fruits of the feminist revolution? Sisterhood, empowerment, and eight hours a day in a cubicle.

That’s right. Why? Because lots of jobs involve eight hours a day in a cubicle. Such is life. But the point of the feminist revolution is that women ought not to be debarred from life in the larger world merely because they are women. Women ought to be seen as and treated as people just as men are people, and both sexes ought to have the ability to take their chances in the world as it is. That’s all. ‘The feminist revolution’ did not think or suggest that all women would or should have the ideal perfect paradisal job. Who thought it did? The idea was just that women should be equal, and treated as equal, so neither sheltered nor banished. That’s all. That doesn’t bring with it some kind of gilded promise of Thrilling Jobs Only, does it – all it brings is the ability to try on reasonably equal terms. Life is life, work is work, jobs are jobs; most jobs suck; big news flash. How could ‘the feminist revolution’ have meant anything else? How would it have gone about guaranteeing Wonderful Jobs for all women who wanted jobs? What is the complaint here? That ‘the feminist revolution’ promised all women would be monarchs or globally-famous poets or archaeologist/adventurers? Please. The feminist revolution was never that stupid.

Not believing there is a god should be enough (enough for atheism, enough for being an atheist). We shouldn’t have to sign up to more. We don’t have time to figure out all the things that we think don’t exist. We can just not think they exist, and let it go at that – or we can not think they exist and then go on to think they don’t exist, if we want to and have time, but that’s extra. Just not thinking so is the minimum needed for entry, or at least it should be.

There’s no sense in believing things exist for no reason – so we don’t (if we have sense) – and for atheists ‘god’ is one of those things. That’s important. The negative matters more than the affirmative.

The minimal definition matters because it has to do with reasons. We don’t believe because we see no good reason to believe – we know of no evidence that god exists. Believing that god doesn’t exist requires some as it were expertise – and like theism, atheism is a public, non-expert view. You can have more detailed or engaged or ‘expert’ atheism, but that shouldn’t be the main definition, because everyone should be able to Just Say No as easily as everyone is able to say yes.

There’s a discussion at Talking Philosophy of how to define atheism. It’s basically about the difference between saying atheism is not believing that there is a god and saying that it is belief there there is no god. Me, I would define it the first way first and then add the second as a more affirmative or energetic version – but what I wouldn’t do is leave out the first. I think the first is 1) an important part of atheism and 2) a version of atheism that is more useful to a lot of people than the more affirmative version is. It has to be possible to be definitely non-theist without having to be affirmative about it.

It does seem fair to say that atheism doesn’t (or shouldn’t) really apply to people who’ve never thought about the matter at all – atheism does seem to be more affirmative than that. So the definition should include that. I suggested ‘Atheism is, at a minimum, explicit nonbelief in a god.’ ‘Explicit’ means that the question has been considered, and that belief has been at the very least declined, and perhaps refused or rejected. But that still doesn’t entail affirmative belief that there is no god – but it also doesn’t entail the ‘oh gee I just don’t know, I have no idea’ popularly attributed to agnosticism these days. It’s just a No. No means No.

Dogmatism is on a roll.

Westminster Theological Seminary suspended Peter Enns, professor of Old Testament after he ‘wrote a book urging wobbly believers to embrace [humans’] role in shaping the Bible’ and is going to hold a hearing to decide if he should be fired.

Some of his supporters are condemning the hearing, due to begin Aug. 25, as a “heresy trial.” They say the trustees want to harden the school’s national reputation as a fortress of ultra-orthodox Calvinism, and purge perceived “liberals” from the faculty…The real issue, administrators say, is whether Enns violated the oath he took when he joined the faculty 14 years ago. The oath requires all faculty members to pledge they will not “inculcate, teach or insinuate anything” contrary to the 1646 Westminster Confession of Faith, the core creed of the Presbyterian faith. That lengthy creed begins by proclaiming the “infallible truth” and “entire perfection” of Holy Scripture, whose sole author is God.

Which means, of course, that Westminster Theological Seminary is not engaged in education (much less research or inquiry) at all. Any putative educational outfit that requires faculty to sign an oath that they will not deviate from any particular given, much less a ‘Confession of Faith’ dated 1646 which in turn declares a much older book infallible and entirely perfect, is not doing anything related to actual education. It’s doing indoctrination, which is a different enterprise.

And the tribunal’s ruling in the case of the Christian registrar who refused to perform same-sex marriages is a blow against the ability of secular government institutions to ask people to perform their assigned jobs.

Lillian Ladele, who said the civil partnership ceremonies went against her Christian faith, hailed the decision as a “victory for religious liberty”. The tribunal ruled that Miss Ladele was discriminated against on grounds of religious beliefs and was harassed…”Gay rights should not be used as an excuse to bully and harass people over their religious beliefs,” she said.

But ‘religious beliefs’ should be used as an excuse to exclude and deny services to people over their sexual orientation? Because why?

Gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell said…”Lillian Ladele claims she has won a victory for religious liberty. No, she has not. She has won a victory for the right to discriminate,” he said. “Public servants like registrars have a duty to serve all members of the public without fear or favour. Once society lets some people opt out of upholding the law, where will it end?” Condemning the “catastrophic judgement” the National Secular Society said: “This decision appears to show that religious rights trump gay rights…”

Ladele already had ‘religious liberty,’ of course; what she didn’t have was liberty to discriminate on the job. Now she does. Some triumph.

Eric pointed out in commenting on Hard to think of anything more vile that ‘desecrating the Host’ was an old accusation against ‘the Jews.’ Sure enough.

Throughout history, a number of groups have been accused of desecrating hosts; because of the religious importance of the consecrated wafer, the accusation is one of metaphysical evil and hostility towards God. Accusations against Jews were a common pretext for massacres and expulsions throughout the Middle Ages in Europe. Similar accusations were made in witchcraft trials; the witch-hunter’s guide Malleus Maleficarum mentions the desecration of hosts by witches a number of times.

Well that’s good to know. Bill Donohue is rooting around in some very foul old garbage. Tell all your friends.

Clearly I haven’t been paying enough attention to Bill Donohue, another impressive candidate in the Bullying and Intimidation by Believers of People Who Fail to Respect and Defer to Their Particular Beliefs sweepstakes.

To protest student fees for religious services at the University of Central Florida (UCF), a student walked out of a campus Mass on June 29 with the Eucharist.

When he says ‘with the Eucharist’ he of course means with a communion wafer, that is to say, with one cracker of many many crackers. The student didn’t walk out with ‘the Eucharist’ such that nobody else could have any, he just walked out with one of a large number of mass-produced crackers. (Suddenly I’m reminded of the Seinfeld episode in which George obsesses over whether the actor auditioning for the part of Kramer took the box of raisins that everyone had been snacking on.) The student walked out with something of an inherent value too small to calculate.

Now, that’s not the point, the point is that the cracker is supposed to have been transubstantiated into the body of Jesus. (Is it into the body? Or into a bit of the body? If it’s a bit, which bit? If it’s the whole thing – how does that work? You’re supposed to be eating all of Jesus each time? You and all the others? But if it’s a bit, which bit? Just some, like, flesh off the arm or a buttock or something? A small bit that wouldn’t be missed? These are deep theological waters, which I should not get into.) Okay, so the believers believe the cracker is [part of?] the body of Jesus. But so what? They also believe the whole thing is infinitely renewable, presumably – so what’s the problem? Really – that’s not entirely facetious. What is the problem? What do they think will happen? What do they think has happened? What kind of difference do they think it makes?

Do they think Jesus minds? Do they think the student will damage Jesus in some way by carrying off [a piece of?] his body? Surely not. Jesus is God, and God is omnipotent and invulnerable, so…what does it matter? God created the universe, so why would God be bothered that some erring human walked away with a cracker that is also [part of] an infinite god?

Who knows. But that’s probably not the issue, is it – the issue is much more likely to be the joy of having an occasion to Take Offense and then milk it. Better yet, there is the bliss of having an occasion to tell people what to do and tell them to hurry up about it besides.

Catholic League president Bill Donohue offered the following remarks today: “For a student to disrupt Mass by taking the Body of Christ hostage—regardless of the alleged nature of his grievance—is beyond hate speech.”

The Body of Christ – so the cracker is supposed to be the whole thing then? (I know, it’s such a crude question, but I never have understood this, despite some efforts.) And it makes sense to say the removal of one cracker is taking it hostage? So this student was holding the Body of Christ hostage in just the same way that the Farc was holding Ingrid Betancourt hostage? But Bill Donohue doesn’t actually think Jesus was missing during the period the student still had the cracker, does he? Does he think God was missing too? (I don’t understand the Trinity either, I must admit.) If so why doesn’t he mention it? It’s all Christ Christ Christ with these people.

“That is why the UCF administration needs to act swiftly and decisively in seeing that justice is done. All options should be on the table, including expulsion.”

Don’t be shy, Bill. Do your best to get some kid that you don’t know expelled from a university for doing something that you dislike. Don’t hesitate, don’t have any qualms, don’t worry about consequences or proportion, just get right in there and demand.

And then do your best to get PZ Myers fired too. PZ reacted to Donohue’s bullying of the Florida student by pointing out that the cracker was a cracker and then offering to desecrate some, and Donohue carried his Khomeini-imitation a few more steps farther:

[W]e are contacting the President and the Board of Regents to see what they are going to do about this matter. Because the university is a state institution, we are also contacting the Minnesota legislature. It is hard to think of anything more vile than to intentionally desecrate the Body of Christ. We look to those who have oversight responsibility to act quickly and decisively.

Oh, I can think of lots of things more vile than to intentionally desecrate a cracker that is rather arbitrarily claimed to be ‘the Body of Christ’ – lots and lots and lots. Tormenting children in industrial schools for instance; telling people not to use condoms in the midst of an HIV pandemic; trying to get people expelled or fired for petty reasons.

John Gray has a burr up his ass about the Enlightenment.

Central and Eastern Europe was a morass of ethnic enmities, and in Germany the Nazis were implementing their poisonous mix of nationalism and racism. Was this just a detour in the onward march to a brave new world where everyone will be treated equally? Or did it – as Roth suspected – reveal a darker side of modernity? There can be no doubt about Kenan Malik’s view. A pious disciple of the Enlightenment, though not untroubled by the doubts that can afflict any believer, he cannot tolerate the thought that some of the last century’s worst atrocities were by-products of modern Enlightenment thinking…Nazism – though it drew on some strands of Counter-Enlightenment thought and mobilised the prejudices of Christian anti-Semitism – was able to make use of a tradition of “scientific racism” that belongs squarely within the Enlightenment. The darkness that settled on Europe between the wars was not a reversion to medievalism. In crucial respects, it was peculiarly modern.

Well of course it was, but was it a necessary product of the Enlightenment? No. The darkness that settled on Europe between the wars was a very contingent sort of darkness; a lot of factors caused it and it wasn’t inevitable.

A belief in science and progress is part of the Enlightenment creed. So why does Malik resist the conclusion that these racists were, despite the ersatz character of their so-called science, Enlightenment thinkers?

Because belief in science and progress is only part of the Enlightenment ‘creed’? Because ersatz science doesn’t make anyone an Enlightenment thinker? Those would be a couple of my reasons, anyway.

When Roth mourned the demise of the Habsburgs, communists and liberals ridiculed his attachment to a pre-modern imperial structure. Yet it was Roth, not the progressive thinkers of the day, who foresaw the horrors that would come from its collapse. There is a lesson here, but it is not one that Malik – for whom progress and modernity are articles of secular faith – can be expected to learn.

Pious, doubts, believer, belief, creed, faith – he got quite a few variations on that – very stale by now – joke about secular religion. Me, I prefer people who prefer progress and modernity to those who prefer the other thing.

What a lot of people like to dress up a love of bullying and violence and cruelty as some kind of quest for social justice – the FARC, Islamists, ZANU-PF – and the Animal Liberation Front. Good old Jerry Vlasak is still at it, only more so.

One scrawled “killer” in chalk on the scientist’s doorstep, while another hurled insults through a bullhorn and announced, “Your neighbor kills animals!” Someone shattered a window. Borrowing the kind of tactics used by anti-abortion demonstrators, animal rights activists are increasingly taking their rage straight to scientists’ front doors. Over the past couple of years, more and more researchers who experiment on animals have been harassed and terrorized in their own homes, with weapons that include firebombs, flooding and acid…Accompanying the attacks is increasingly tough talk from activists such as Dr. Jerry Vlasak, a spokesman for the Animal Liberation Front press office. In an interview with The Associated Press, he said he is not encouraging anyone to commit murder, but “if you had to hurt somebody or intimidate them or kill them, it would be morally justifiable.”

Glad you got that straight, Jerry. As long as you think it’s morally justifiable, there’s nothing more to be said. Meanwhile if you get bored with mere researchers, there are always teachers in Afghanistan you could behead.

And one more thing. She says something quite rude about Daniel Dennett, and what she says is not accurate. Pp. 9-10.

It is certainly supremely annoying when intellectuals talk down to religious people, speaking as if all smart people are atheists. Philosopher Daniel Dennett is particularly guilty of this. In an op-ed piece in the New York Times, he coined the term ‘brights’ for nonbelievers, suggesting very clearly that the right name for believers was ‘dummies.’

He did not coin the term, as he clearly states in the op-ed piece, right at the top of the second paragraph.

The term ”bright” is a recent coinage by two brights in Sacramento, Calif., who thought our social group — which has a history stretching back to the Enlightenment, if not before — could stand an image-buffing and that a fresh name might help.

And he doesn’t ‘suggest very clearly’ that the right name for believers is ‘dummies.’ It’s true that he doesn’t disavow that, so Nussbaum could perfectly well have said that the word seems to imply that its antonym would be ‘dulls’ or similar and that if that’s not what Dennett meant he should have said so. That would be fair. But the piece in fact does not suggest (much less ‘very clearly’) that the right name for believers is ‘dummies’; that’s not the point the piece makes. I dislike the term ‘brights’ myself, in fact I dislike it in much the same way I dislike ‘precious’ and ‘deep’ and ‘respect’ especially when repeated multiple times on page after page, but however much I dislike the word, it doesn’t follow that Dennett was ‘talking down to religious people’ in that piece, and in fact he wasn’t. He was saying that atheists exist, that they’re not weird, and that they get elbowed aside by theists because they are too quiet so they should speak up more.

Most brights don’t play the ”aggressive atheist” role. We don’t want to turn every conversation into a debate about religion, and we don’t want to offend our friends and neighbors, and so we maintain a diplomatic silence. But the price is political impotence. Politicians don’t think they even have to pay us lip service, and leaders who wouldn’t be caught dead making religious or ethnic slurs don’t hesitate to disparage the ”godless” among us.

Nussbaum would have done well to re-read the piece before she wrote what she did.

As you read further in Nussbaum’s Liberty of Conscience (or at least, as I do), it gets worse. It gets unendurable in places. Parts of it (yes like the curate’s egg) are good, and readable without too much irritation, but there are patches where it becomes simply maddening. I started counting words. On page 52 she uses the word ‘precious’ four times, and both ‘respect’ and ‘dignity’ more than that, along with ‘deep’ or ‘profound’. All five occur much too often, again, on 53-4. Look…even apart from the philosophical aspect, that’s just not a good way to write. If I’d been her editor I would have called her on it very early in the book. It’s not a good idea to repeat certain words in an obsessive way (apart from work horse words that one can’t help repeating, of course), and it’s doubly or triply not good when the words in question are highly emotive and manipulative and value-laden. The book becomes unendurable at those points because one feels nagged, bullied, yammered at. It’s too insistent. And since that which is being insisted on is so sentimental and saccharine and nursey, it’s all the more so.

And the thing is, she’s just wrong. She’s just flat wrong, and all this damp pious insistence doesn’t make her less wrong. The farther she gets into the book the clearer it becomes that her central claim that religion equals conscience equals the search for the ultimate meaning of life is just a pretty dream of hers that applies to some religious people but nowhere near all of them. Apart from anything else it simply ignores the fact that most people don’t choose a religion after or during a search, they have it handed to them in early childhood when they are maximally credulous. For most believers, religion is not a search at all, it’s a given. And it’s a particular kind of given: a special given, a sensitive given, a given that is easily offended – and Nussbaum herself is doing her best to enhance and justify that specialness. But the specialness works to prevent searching, not to encourage or foster it. She must know that – but she certainly avoids mentioning it. There’s something ‘deeply’ (to use one of her most ‘precious’ words) ironic in Nussbaum’s impassioned insistence on the importance and preciousness of this search while she is engaged in glorifying the very institutions and habits of mind that do most to block genuine searching. The result is that I’m becoming more and more deeply suspicious with every page.

In comments on ‘Reading Nussbaum’ Tea mentioned that Nussbaum ‘is not only delusional about religious believers (and dogmatic about respecting religious beliefs), she is also a Freudian.’ True. I’d remembered the Freudian claims in Hiding From Humanity, but when I found that chapter again I realized I’d forgotten that they’re also heavily present in Upheavals of Thought. She introduces the subject in a very interesting way in the latter book (p. 181):

It has become fashionable in the United States to sneer at psychoanalysis. In part this dismissive attitude results from the fact that Americans are generally impatient with complexity and sadness, and tend to want a quick chemical fix for deep human problems. People who have that view of life will not have reached Chapter 4 of this book anyway…

Fashionable? Really? And ‘sneer’? Really? No, I don’t think so. There are people, in the US and elsewhere, who take a critical view of Freud, but do they amount to a fashion? I think it’s more reasonable to say that it used to be highly fashionable among intellectuals, especially of the humanist variety (as opposed to scientific), to view Freud as almost infallible, and that there has now been a rational and well-informed reaction against that fashion, thanks to people like Fred Crews and Allen Esterson who have carefully investigated Freud’s claims and found them wanting. It’s not a matter of sneering, it’s a matter of rational judgment – which is not something Nussbaum should be sneering at.

She goes on to say that there are people who admire humanistic approaches in literary or philosophical form (Proust and Plato) but ‘react with suspicion’ to any mention of the names Klein and Winnicott, because, she thinks, they consider such figures pretend scientists who don’t measure up to ‘a model of science set by the natural sciences.’

To them I simply want to say that I myself treat these figures as humanistic interpretive thinkers, very closely related to Plato and Proust, whose work gains texture and depth through having a clinical dimension.

Yes well that’s a very ‘fashionable’ ploy with die-hard fans of Freud, and it’s not at all how Freud thought of himself or how his ardent fans thought of him until the feebleness of his ‘science’ became too obvious to ignore, so it tends to look more like a protective dodge than like a considered view of what Freud was really attempting to do. But okay; think of Freud as a kind of poet who occasionally saw patients, if you like, but then don’t be so damn rude about skeptics. For someone who is so insistent on respect, Nussbaum can be remarkably sneery herself when it’s her ox that is being gored.

The library produced Nussbaum’s Liberty of Conscience for me yesterday so I’ve read some of it and I must say, I was surprised – it’s way worse than I expected. I think it’s terrible – and it’s also extremely irritating. Tooth-grindingly irritating.

We talked about an interview in which she discussed the book with Bill Moyers last April and then we discussed it some more a couple of days later. I was critical of what she’d said then but I also gave her the benefit of the doubt on a lot of things. My mistake. She does mean what I said I thought she didn’t mean. (I see that H E Baber commented on the second post, which is interesting because I was just reading The Enlightenment Project (Baber’s blog) to see if she had commented on Nussbaum’s book, having forgotten that she’d commented here. Baber is not a fan of Nussbaum’s work. I’m feeling pretty inclined to give up on Nussbaum myself now.

The wheels come off on the very first page, where she tells us about the Pilgrims in Massachusetts who faced all those dangers ‘in order to be able to worship God freely in their own way,’ and then says we rarely reflect on the ‘real meaning’ of that story: ‘that religious liberty is very important to people.’

Very pretty, but who says that is the real meaning of that story? I don’t think it is. I think what is very important to people is their own religious liberty, not religious liberty in general. But that’s not what Nussbaum wants us to think, so it’s not what she says, even though she does say on the very next page that the lesson of the pilgrims is easily forgotten and that ‘the early settlers themselves soon forgot it, establishing their own repressive orthodoxy which others fled in turn.’ Nonsense; they didn’t forget it; it was never what they meant; or at least there’s damn little reason to think it is what they meant and a lot of reason to think they meant what I said – their own religious liberty, but not everyone’s. How does Nussbaum know that’s not what they wanted all along? She doesn’t say. Maybe she learned the ‘religious liberty’ thing in the fourth grade and has never noticed how unlikely it is and how badly it fits the known facts.

And the whole damn book is like that, so far as I’ve read (and I’ve sampled as well as reading from the beginning). Pious, sentimental, evasive, and woefully incomplete – and that’s putting it politely. Nussbaum uses the word ‘deeply’ about once on every page, along with words like ‘precious’ and ‘profound’ and ‘meaning’ and ‘noble’ and other slushy emotive words, and she makes claims that are ‘deeply’ unconvincing. Her overall claim is that religious liberty is important because people value religion because it is how they ‘search for meaning.’ But is that why? It seems to be why for some people, but is it for all of them? Not as far as I know. I think lots of people value religion for other reasons. I also think the ‘search’ idea is terribly sentimental and incomplete and manipulative. Not all religious people are engaged in any ‘search,’ to put it mildly: a lot of them are quite convinced that there’s no need to search because they’ve already found, and they’re quite certain about what it is they’ve found, too. This ‘search for meaning’ gives a pretty picture of a lot of inquiring curious open-minded people rummaging around looking for meaning, but that simply ignores the importance of dogma and authority and orthodoxy and literalism and Absolute Truth.

Nussbaum keeps insisting on how respectful she is and how important it is to be respectful (that’s another word that crops up on just about every page), but she oozes condescension.