Stanley Fish is moved to let us know that he is just as woolly and assertive and bad-mannered and rhetorical as Terry Eagleton and Mark Vernon and Madeleine Bunting and the rest of the ‘new atheists are bad‘ crowd.

[T]he British critic Terry Eagleton asks, “Why are the most unlikely people, including myself, suddenly talking about God?” His answer, elaborated in prose that is alternately witty, scabrous and angry, is that the other candidates for guidance — science, reason, liberalism, capitalism — just don’t deliver what is ultimately needed.

Eh? ‘Other candidates’ than what? Other than Eagleton? Those are our choices – Eagleton on the one hand and science, reason, liberalism, capitalism on the other? Why? How? Who says?

Perhaps Fish means ‘other candidates’ than literary criticism, and we’re supposed to be able to figure that out via the word ‘critic’ in front of ‘Terry Eagleton’ – but ‘critic’ could mean restaurant critic, movie critic, dance critic – it could mean a lot of things, and in any case, it’s far from obvious that we’re supposed to understand Terry Eagleton as standing for the entire genre of literary critics. In short, that’s a bit of remarkably slovenly careless lazy writing, and it’s the opener for an attack on – you’ll never guess – the ‘new’ atheists. An opener as sloppy as that doesn’t bode well for the care and intelligence of the rest – and the rest is indeed surprisingly crappy stuff.

Fish goes on to say that Eagleton admits religion is flawed but ‘at least religion is trying for something more than local satisfactions, for its “subject is nothing less than the nature and destiny of humanity itself…”

The other projects, he concedes, provide various comforts and pleasures, but they are finally superficial and tend to the perpetuation of the status quo rather than to meaningful change: “A society of packaged fulfillment, administered desire, managerialized politics and consumerist economics is unlikely to cut to the depth where theological questions can ever be properly raised.”

Again, already, the sloppiness makes it hard to tell exactly what is being claimed, but it seems to be that religion alone is trying for something more than local satisfactions and that religion alone takes the nature of humanity for its subject, and all other projects are finally superficial and are merely about consumerism. That suggestion is so obviously stupid I can’t be bothered to say why it’s stupid – I don’t think anyone who reads this needs to be told.

By theological questions, Eagleton means questions like, “Why is there anything in the first place?”, “Why what we do have is actually intelligible to us?” and “Where do our notions of explanation, regularity and intelligibility come from?” The fact that science, liberal rationalism and economic calculation can not ask — never mind answer — such questions should not be held against them, for that is not what they do.

So that is what he’s claiming – on the one hand there are theological questions, which are alone able to ask ‘why is there something rather than nothing’ and related questions, and then there are ‘science, liberal rationalism and economic calculation’ which are all much of a muchness and which can’t ask ‘ ‘why is there something rather than nothing.’ Further, the interpolated ‘never mind answer’ implies that ‘theological questions’ can answer – without of course offering any actual examples of such ‘answers.’

This is lamentable stuff.

On and on it goes – sneers at progress, liberalism and enlightenment, sneers at cures for diseases, sneers at technology, much use of the word ‘Ditchkins,’ and finishing up with a triumphant blast at ‘the shallow arguments of school-yard atheists like Hitchens and Dawkins.’

It is so hard not to wish both of them suddenly transported to a place bereft of progress, liberalism and enlightenment – the Swat valley would be just the ticket – and see how they like it.

That’s not a nice thing to say, it’s even a bit schoolyardy, but I am so sick of smug prosperous safe comfortable pale men urinating all over progress, liberalism and enlightenment while desperate threatened terrified women would weep scalding tears of joy and deliverance to get just a taste of some. I am so sick of safe prosperous men who are never, ever going to be grabbed on the street and whipped, or shot in the back, or locked up in their houses, or married off to some abusive bully, going on and on and on and on about how much they hate progress, liberalism and enlightenment.

Another woman is reminded that she is not allowed to do anything, and so are all the other women in her part of the world.

The murder of Ayman Udas, who was in her early thirties and newly married, has shocked the city’s artistic community because it symbolises a backlash against women and cultural freedom in an area that is increasingly dominated by Islamic fundamentalists. As a singer and song writer in her native Pashto, the language of the tribal areas and the NorthWest Frontier province, Udas frequently performed on PTV, the state-run channel. She won considerable acclaim for her songs but had become a musician in the face of bitter opposition from her family, who believed it was sinful for a woman to perform on television. Ashamed of her growing popularity her two brothers are reported to have entered her flat last week while her husband was out and fired three bullets into her chest.

She’s not popular any more, so they’re not ashamed any more, and that’s what counts.

Fellow performers, many of whom have received death threats from hardline Islamist groups, were stunned by the killing. In recent months several popular artists have been forced to stop performing as singers and comedians. Others have fled the country or moved to other cities.

As some people try to hang onto a somewhat normal happy life with some room for art and pleasure, and others try to grind such a life into powder.

A senior Shia cleric in Kabul stands up for democracy.

Supporters of the Afghan law which critics claim legalises marital rape and restricts the rights of women say they will oppose amending the legislation significantly. “A change in this law will be illegal and against democracy,” said Sayed Abdul Latif Sajadi, a senior Shia cleric in Kabul who played a leading role in drawing up the legislation and pushing it through parliament. “Any change will be against the wishes of four million people.”

Men. Against the wishes of four million men. He means any change will be against the wishes of four million men – women of course were not asked and not given any way to voice an opinion. Women, on the contrary, were presented with multiple examples of women being murdered for sticking their heads over the parapet, so we know they had every incentive to shut up and pretty much no incentive to protest a law that makes their enslavement more official than ever.

The Shia Family Law, which has been denounced inside and outside Afghanistan, applies only to the four million Afghans who are Shia. It is the first time in predominantly Sunni Muslim Afghanistan that the Shia, mostly members of the long-oppressed Hazara ethnic group, have had their rights legally defined and recognised.

No; there again, that’s not right, and this time it’s the reporter who gets things backwards. It’s not the case that ‘the Shia’ ‘have had their rights legally defined and recognised’ because what this law does is take rights away from Shia women. What this bill legally defined and recognized was the ‘right’ of men to subordinate women, which is quite different from defining and recognizing the rights of the Shia in general.

“Those Afghans who protest against the law just want to make the West happy,” says Mohammed Sarwar Jahadi, a former prisoner of the Taliban and an MP for the Hazara heartland of Bamyan province in central Afghanistan. He said the law was discussed in parliament over a two-and-a-half-year period and was whittled down from 750 to 249 articles. “During that time we didn’t hear a single protest.”

Gee I wonder why – it surely couldn’t have anything to do with the fact that Afghan women live under a constant threat of death. Could it?

Mr Sayed Sajadi, a Hazara, said the strength of protests against the law surprised him. “It was unexpected because already 99 per cent of Afghan women only leave the house with their husband’s permission.”

Ah! Ah yes! There we have it – that’s the real puzzle. 99 per cent of Afghan women are already completely ground into the mud so where the hell would protests come from? Nowhere! They wouldn’t! Thus all these protests are simply astonishing. All the men are looking at each other in baffled amazement, at a stand to figure out how anyone could have the nerve or the energy or the muscle power to make a protest.

Many Afghans say that in any case the relationship between men and women in their country is none of the business of foreign non-Muslim politicians and Nato commanders. Women protesting against the law were denounced by counter-demonstrators chanting: “Death to the enemies of Islam! We want Islamic law!”

Yeah! The relationship between men and women in Afghanistan is none of the business of foreign non-Muslim politicians and it’s also none of the business of the women of Afghanistan, so they’d better shut the fuck up before somebody does it for them, if you get my drift.

Simon Blackburn has fun teasing John Gray. John Gray strikes me as a great dogmatic repetitive bore, so I enjoy seeing people teasing him.

The habit of abstraction enables Gray to position himself as a lone voice against a world of fantastical optimists: “All prevailing philosoph­ies embody the fiction that ­human life can be changed at will,” he tells us sweepingly, naming no names. What? I suppose many ­philosophers do think that if you need to have a drink, you can change your life, a ­little, by doing so. Other things can be harder to do. But I challenge Gray to name a single philosopher who thinks we can change everything about our lives at will.

Oh, naming people is for pedants, it’s so much more fun to declare that they all do it. It’s the Mark Vernon school of argumentation.

In reality, Gray’s abstractions have overwhelmed his analytic faculties. Nearly all human action, including political action, goes on without paying even lip service to any gospel of Progress in the abstract…For someone so contemptuous of reason and its constructions, it must have been horrid to spend a life looking at political theories, all of which Gray despises. He does however admire some of the myths of religion. He revels in the idea of original sin, but blames Christianity for inventing the idea of salvation, or, in other words, Progress. Gray could be comfortable only in a religion with no faith, no hope, and no charity.

There, that’s Gray well teased.

Department of Strange Ideas.

[W]hile the Constitution requires an offence of blasphemy it also, like the position in many other countries, expressly protects freedom of expression. …No innocent conduct will be captured. The revised provision in regard to blasphemy requires at least three elements to be present: that the material be grossly abusive or insulting in matters held sacred by a religion; that it must actually cause outrage among a substantial number of adherents of that religion; and, crucially, that there be an intent to cause such outrage.

Okay, that does clear things up: it will be a crime to produce ‘material’ that is grossly abusive or insulting in matters held sacred by a religion, if it causes outrage among more than a few adherents of that religion and the outrage is intentional – all this in spite (not to say in defiance) of the fact that the Constitution ‘expressly protects freedom of expression.’ But Dermot Ahern assures us that no innocent conduct will be captured, presumably because of that crucial third stipulation that there must be an intent to cause such outrage. How Irish courts may decide to identify intent, of course, is a difficult question, so the best idea is probably just to…produce no material at all. Better be safe than sorry.

G did a comment on ‘The downside of torture’ that needs to be out here in the daylight, so here it is. OB.

What is perhaps most appalling about this is that prosecuting torture has become nothing more than another tawdry political game. Barack Obama is, among other things, not just a Harvard Law graduate but an actual Constitutional scholar. He knows what an appalling clusterfuck the Bush Administration made of the Constitution with its denial of habeas corpus, secret prisons, torture, and all that. He knows what the morally and legally required path must be. But he is rather scrupulously avoiding that path.

Worse, Obama’s administration has in almost all terrorism-related court cases pushed the absurdly counter-Constitutional secrecy policies and claims of authority to defy law at whim of the Bush administration. I am fairly certain that this is not, as some have claimed, out of the desire to preserve those claimed powers for his own use. Rather, I think it is fairly clear that his stated political position of “moving forward” and “not looking back” – i.e. avoiding politically troublesome legal prosecutions of Bush administration criminal acts – absolutely requires that he perpetuate the official legal cover-ups for those activities as long as possible. It is a delaying tactic.

I think Obama has decided that it would be too politically costly to prosecute Bush Administration war crimes at this time. (Sadly, he may be right. Recent polls show that less than half of all Americans support legal investigations of torture and all that, and the ugly reality of such prosecutions would only make them less popular as they proceeded.) But I think Obama also realizes that investigations and prosecutions must happen eventually, both for the good of the nation and for the sake of U.S. standing in the community of nations. So he talks about moving forward and insists that he doesn’t want prosecutions, but he never quite entirely rules out future legal action: Instead, he has officially left that decision it in the hands of his Attorney General (where it belongs, incidentally) – but A.G. Eric Holder will of course not pursue anything until given the go ahead by President Obama.

Meanwhile, the torture memos are released and an al Qaeda operative (Ali al-Marri) is successfully prosecuted in ordinary Federal court without any of the unnecessary and unconstitutional measures introduced by the Bush administration to hold “enemy combatants” indefinitely without trial. (Watch Rachel Maddow’s report on the al-Marri case here. Rachel’s money quote, commenting on the successful prosecution of al-Marri without the Bush system of eternal imprisonment without charges or trial, torture, and so on: “So we end up, at the end of this – after all these years and all of these Constitutional crises one after the other provoked by this system – ending up being able to charge people and bring evidence against them as if we are a normal country under the rule of law.”)

The torture memos and the al-Marri prosecution (along with several other clues) give me the distinct impression that the Obama administration is playing a game of slowly exposing both the brutal reality and the complete ineffectiveness of the Bush administration’s illegal methods, and will keep doing so until the point where the public and the political landscape not only support, but demand investigations and prosecutions.

I don’t know what bothers me more: the manipulative and corrosive character of this political game, or the fact that the American public and U.S. elected officials are so incredibly stupid and venal that such manipulative tactics are probably necessary – and hopefully effective.

Philippe Sands said on ‘Fresh Air’ that Judge Garzon attempted to prosecute a couple of people that the Bush administration had tortured and that the case collapsed because the evidence, being the product of torture, was not admissable in court. Sands said this is one reason Garzon has started a criminal investigation of some of Bush’s team: they (allegedly) not only violated international law, they also made it impossible for other courts to prosecute the objects of the torture.

He also discussed the irony of the fact that Chuckie Taylor was convicted in a US court for crimes he committed in Liberia; that was possible because the crimes he committed were violations of international law. States that have signed such laws have an obligation – not permission, but an obligation – to act on such violations when they have the ability to do so. He also said he was shocked that Jay Bybee still insists that waterboarding was legal; he says Bybee is a federal judge, and US federal courts are highly respected even outside the US, and the honourable thing for Bybee to do would be to admit that in the frantic atmosphere of the time he made a mistake.

In the frantic atmosphere of the time a lot of people neglected to ask necessary questions.

In a series of high-level meetings in 2002, without a single dissent from cabinet members or lawmakers, the United States for the first time officially embraced the brutal methods of interrogation it had always condemned. This extraordinary consensus was possible, an examination by The New York Times shows, largely because no one involved – not the top two C.I.A. officials who were pushing the program, not the senior aides to President George W. Bush, not the leaders of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees – investigated the gruesome origins of the techniques they were approving with little debate.

And the result is…they screwed up.

The top officials [Tenet] briefed did not learn that waterboarding had been prosecuted by the United States in war-crimes trials after World War II and was a well-documented favorite of despotic governments since the Spanish Inquisition; one waterboard used under Pol Pot was even on display at the genocide museum in Cambodia.

Well that’s a distinguished legacy to be part of.

I saw a horrible thing on tv last night, in a PBS show about the Kalahari. There are flamingos that nest in in an area of the Kalahari which slowly dries out during the nesting season, with the result that the chicks have to walk a hundred miles through the desert to get to water. They have to walk. A hundred miles. Through a desert. It’s as ridiculous as it sounds. They’re small, they’re feeble, it’s burning hot. It takes weeks.

250,000 leave; some years not one chick makes it.

Good planning! Wouldn’t you think the adults would manage to think ‘gee, maybe we should find a better place to nest’? Or that, failing to think that, they would all quickly die off because they couldn’t keep the numbers up? But apparently that’s not happening. So instead you get this disgusting trek of misery. One revolting detail is that the chicks’ wing tips pick up mud as they trudge along, and the mud hardens and just hangs there, so they’re all staggering along with these heavy blobs dragging them down. It’s a truly sickening sight – one wants to arrest all the parents for abuse.

Another tale for the Devil’s Chaplain.

Oh all right – I quit too soon. It’s too annoying to leave.

[A]ttacking them in broad and often hilarious strokes…allows him to develop an extended interpretive summary of what he describes as mainstream Christian doctrine, a subject about which (as he repeatedly reminds us) the Ditchkins duo, along with the Western intellectual elite in general, knows almost nothing. Eagleton’s terminology is deliberately provocative, and some Christians won’t find his account of their beliefs, colored as it clearly is by the Catholic “liberation theology” of his youth, to be mainstream at all.

Well exactly – a great many Christians won’t find his account of their beliefs to be mainstream at all. So in what sense is he justified in pitching a gigantic name-calling fit at the ‘new’ atheists for knowing nothing of his peculiar idiosyncratic personal version of what Christian belief is? His ‘terminology is deliberately provocative,’ which being interpreted, means he says his version of Christian belief is mainstream when it is no such thing and then screams bloody murder at people who don’t buy his version. ‘Provocative’ is a desperately polite way of describing such a way of proceeding.

I did a post on the same bait-and-switch a couple of years ago, the one in which he said God was no more a person than his left foot was – whatever he said; but I can’t find the post and don’t have time to keep looking. But this is familiar stuff – which doesn’t make it any less irritating.

Horrible man. Revisit this loathsome outburst on the occasion of Salman Rushdie’s K, if you want more evidence of that. He’s an intellectual thug.

Terry Eagleton has at least one fan anyway.

Eagleton…is determined not to commit the same elementary errors he ascribes to such foes as biologist Richard Dawkins and political journalist Christopher Hitchens. (Those two, collectively dubbed “Ditchkins” by Eagleton, are the self-appointed leaders of public atheism and the authors of bestselling books on the subject, Dawkins’ “The God Delusion” and Hitchens’ “God Is Not Great.”)

He gets it right by saying Eagleton ascribes these elementary errors, but then he promptly labels Dawkins and Hitchens ‘foes’ – why are they foes? Because Eagleton doesn’t like what they’ve written. That doesn’t really make them his foes, it just makes them people he is quarreling with. ‘Foes’ is more ascribing. And then, what is that ‘self-appointed leaders of public atheism’ doing there? They’re not self-appointed leaders of anything; they wrote books about something. Eagleton writes books about things; now he is busy ascribing things to ‘foes’; does that make him a self-appointed leader of public anti-Ditchkinsism? Not particularly. We’re all allowed to write books without being labeled self-appointed leaders of something or other. (And this ‘Ditchkins’ thing…that’s just childish.)

[Eagleton] freely admits that what Christian doctrine teaches about the universe and the fate of man may not be true, or even plausible. But as he then puts it, “Critics of the most enduring form of popular culture in human history have a moral obligation to confront that case at its most persuasive, rather than grabbing themselves a victory on the cheap by savaging it as so much garbage and gobbledygook.”

That’s just populist bullying. Why do they? Why can’t critics of any form of popular culture – no matter how enduring, how popular, how ‘authentic,’ how anything you like – just criticize whatever they think is bad about it? In argument it’s better to argue with the strongest case, but in criticism, you can go after the worst stuff, because that’s your point. There’s no ‘moral obligation’ to be deferential to the most enduring form of popular culture in human history; how pompous to say there is.

Still, attacking them in broad and often hilarious strokes – he depicts Dawkins as a tweedy, cloistered Oxford don sneering at the credulous nature of the common people, and Hitchens as a bootlicking neocon propagandist and secular jihadist – lends his book considerable entertainment value.

Hilarious? That’s hilarious? Oookay, if that’s the taste level, I won’t bother reading any more.

There’s no sensitivity like the sensitivity of Deputy Health Minister Yakov Litzman. It makes the sensitivity of that princess who slept on the pea look like a longshoreman’s glove.

The outbreak of swine flu should be renamed “Mexican” influenza in deference to Muslim and Jewish sensitivities over pork, said an Israeli health official Monday. Deputy Health Minister Yakov Litzman said the reference to pigs is offensive to both religions and “we should call this Mexican flu and not swine flu,” he told a news conference at a hospital in central Israel. Both Judaism and Islam consider pigs unclean and forbid the eating of pork products.

Oh right, so they do! Therefore it’s a hell of a good idea to name a scary lethal disease after a set of people instead of after an animal that one isn’t allowed to eat by one’s whimsical deity. Yes indeedy. Sure you don’t want to name it Perez flu? Juan and Maria flu? Spic flu? Funny little brown people on the far side of the world flu? They don’t wash their hands in Mexico flu? In deference to Muslim and Jewish sensitivities over pork and everything?

There is one particular, pressing problem with Eagleton’s incoherent rant: the problem is that, as in the past, he writes as if the only criticism there is to make of Islam and Islamism is ‘terrorism,’ meaning terrorism in the sense of blowing the legs off small children. That is not the only criticism there is to make of Islam and Islamism. Terrorism-as-bombing is not the only reason there is to be critical of Islam and especially of Islamism. How Eagleton can be unaware of that fact is hard to understand. Does he carefully avoid all news coverage? Does he have a special filter that excludes anything with the word ‘Islam’ or ‘Taliban’ or ‘women’ or ‘girls’ in it? If he doesn’t, I really don’t know how he manages to ignore the way Islamists and Islam treat women, not to mention gays and ‘apostates’ and ‘blasphemers’ and other rabble. It’s inexcusable, this blindness, this silence. It’s inexcusable of him to pretend to be giving a defense of Islam against the whatever-it-is of his selected bogeymen while never mentioning the plight of women in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, northern Nigeria, Niger, Sudan, Ethiopia, Algeria, Palestine, Berlin, Paris, Birmingham, London, Toronto, Atlanta. It’s inexcusable of him to fail to mention ‘honour’ killings and forced marriage and FGM and beatings and purdah and blown-up schools and murdered teachers and acid thrown on girls going to school and all the rest of it.

There is no quarrel about how to treat those whose scorn for liberal values takes the form of blowing the legs off small children. They need to be locked up…Writers such as Martin Amis and Hitchens do not just want to lock terrorists away…There is also an honorable legacy of qualifying too-absolute judgments with an awareness of context: the genuine liberal is appalled by Islamist terrorism, but conscious of the national injury and humiliation that underlie it.

That’s it – that’s all he admits – ‘terrorism’ – by which he makes sure to let us know at the beginning he means only blowing legs off, he does not mean the terrorism of threatening girls with death if they keep going to school, of butchering girls who refuse a marriage or want to marry someone of their own choosing or get a job or wear jeans or refuse to wear a hijab, of yanking girls out of school and out of the country and marrying them off to a stranger. How dare he keep silent about all that? How dare he rant and rave at Hitchens and Grayling for not keeping silent about that?

Russell comments, as does Mick Hartley, as does Martin in the Margins.

The Taliban murdered a couple for alleged putative who cares anyway ‘adultery’ and somebody took pictures.

In footage which is being watched with horror by Pakistanis, the couple try to flee when they realise what is about to happen. But a gunman casually shoots the man and then the woman in the back with a burst of gunfire, leaving them bleeding in the dirt. Moments later, when others in the execution party shout out that they are still alive, he returns to coldly finish them with a few more rounds.

Coming soon to a neighborhood near you.

It was the kind of barbarity that has become increasingly familiar across Pakistan as the Taliban tide has spread. But this time, with black-turbaned gunmen almost at the gates of Islamabad, the rare footage has shown urban Pakistanis what could now await them…In the past few days the footage has circulated among Pakistanis who usually show little interest in the rough ways of the distant frontier regions. They have now started to wake up to the fear that al-Qaeda-linked rebels from the frontier could take over their nation.

The Pakistanis I know have been awake to that fear for some time, and especially since Swat was handed over bound and gagged.

The footage Pakistanis have been watching shows them what they could expect. A local journalist was invited to witness the execution, who filmed it with his mobile phone for a Pakistani channel, Dawn News…”Using the media is part of their (the Taliban’s) psychological warfare,” said Imtiaz Gul, chairman of Centre for Research and Security Studies, an independent think tank in Islamabad. “This way, they inject fear into the minds of people who might oppose them, keeping the majority silent.”

Terry Eagleton please note.

Typical sinister bullshit from Terry Eagleton.

There is no quarrel about how to treat those whose scorn for liberal values takes the form of blowing the legs off small children. They need to be locked up.

But everyone who doesn’t blow the legs off small children is perfectly all right. In particular those who strip women of all rights and beat them up for breathing incorrectly, we have no quarrel with them.

Writers such as Martin Amis and Hitchens do not just want to lock terrorists away. They also tout a brand of western cultural supremacism. Dawkins strongly opposed the invasion of Iraq, but preaches a self-satisfied, old-fashioned Whiggish rationalism that can be wielded against a benighted Islam. The philosopher AC Grayling has an equally starry-eyed view of the stately march of Western Progress. The novelist Ian McEwan is a freshly recruited champion of this militant rationalism. Both Hitchens and Salman Rushdie have defended Amis’s slurs on Muslims. Whether they like it or not, Dawkins and his ilk have become weapons in the war on terror. Western supremacism has gravitated from the Bible to atheism…Liberals are supposed to value nuanced analysis and moral complexity, neither of which are apparent in the slanderous reduction of Islam to a barbarous blood cult. They are noted for their judicious discriminations, rather than the airy dismissal of all religion as so much garbage. There is also an honorable legacy of qualifying too-absolute judgments with an awareness of context: the genuine liberal is appalled by Islamist terrorism, but conscious of the national injury and humiliation that underlie it.

He thinks Islam can be slandered – and he thinks that the people he named slander it. Again it’s only terrorism that is mentioned as appalling, and then instantly whisked out of sight in favour of the ‘national injury and humiliation’ explanation. What about the injury and humiliation of countless women? Doesn’t register. He’s too busy lifting his leg on naughty naughty naughty Amis Hitchens Dawkins Grayling and Rushdie. What a spectacle.

I would say more but have to go. Maybe tomorrow.

An archbishop has been reading The Little Golden Book of DNA, and he has derived much wisdom therefrom.

Archbishop Timothy Dolan yesterday said advocates of gay marriage “are asking for trouble,” arguing that traditional, one-man/one-woman marriage is rooted in people’s moral DNA. “There’s an in-built code of right and wrong that’s embedded in the human DNA…Hard-wired into us is a dictionary, and the dictionary defines marriage as between one man, one woman for life, please God, leading to the procreation of human life.”

Uh huh. Traditional one-man/one-woman marriage is rooted in people’s moral DNA – which would explain why there is no such thing as polygamy anywhere on earth: it’s because it just ain’t in our biology, that’s why. We can’t fly, we can’t dig tunnels with our snouts, we can’t hide in cracks in the woodwork, we can’t lick our crotches, we can’t scurry up walls, we can’t decipher olfactory messages left on bushes and trees and bits of grass, we can’t digest bamboo – and we can’t do polygamy. Traditional one-man/one-woman marriage is the only way human adults have been managing sex and reproduction and child-rearing and economy for six million years, so now it’s gotten into our DNA and we’re stuck with it. Ask us to have one man married to two or ten or thirty women, and we all just look at you blankly, puzzled, unable even to figure out what you’re talking about. We can’t process it. It’s not in our moral DNA.

It’s also not in the dictionary that is hard-wired into us. I actually didn’t know that – I learned something new today. I never realized we have our very own dictionary hard-wired in. (But in which language? How does the wirer know which language to use? What if something happens and the kid has to move and then is stuck with a DNA dictionary in the wrong language? Is there a 1-800 number to call, or what?) I never realized that, but now I know, and in that dictionary it defines marriage as between one man, one woman for life, and anything else is not marriage, and that’s that. All these funny people who have been calling other things marriage all this time are just wrong, because they don’t know how to consult the dictionary that is hard-wired into us.

Actually…I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I don’t know how either. I guess that’s not suprising, since I didn’t know I had such a dictionary until just now, but the archbish seems to think everyone does know how to consult it, because that’s his point – it’s in our DNA and it’s hard-wired and we can’t change it without messing everything up in a big way, so we must know about it, the same way we know we can’t fly or dig tunnels with our snouts. But I seem to have been behind the door the day that lesson was covered. I don’t know how to consult my wired-in dictionary, and I don’t know how to check what the archbish says.

But I should just take his word for it, you’ll be thinking. Well maybe, but how can we be sure he’s not an impostor? Maybe he’s really a geneticist dressed up as an archbishop. Ah – you didn’t think of that, did you. It pays to be careful.

Jeremy has done a new game for TPM: The Monty Hall Puzzle. He would be grateful if people would give it a test run, and especially grateful if they (you) would tell him if there are any bugs.

I saw a headline at BBC News today – on the Manchester page, so doubtless it reads differently to Mancunians. It read

Tributes to flat stabbing victim

Sorry, no offense to the departed, but you must admit…

Typical of the moral blindness of the Catholic church on the condom issue – the archbishop of Sydney talks a lot of emollient drivel about sexual morality as the putative reason for saying condoms make the AIDS epidemic worse – without ever mentioning the blindingly obvious (to anyone but a moral idiot) that condoms are needed because AIDS transmission involves two people, one of whom can be as sexually faithful as any pope or archbishop could desire and still be infected by the other party. Usually this cashes out to women infected by men. The archbishop talks and talks and talks and talks and never mentions this. It is wicked to fail to mention it.

To blame Catholics and Pope Benedict for the spread of HIV/AIDS requires proof that while people are ignoring the first, essential Christian requirement to be chaste before and within marriage, they are slavishly obedient to a second requirement not to use condoms…Catholic teaching is opposed to adultery, fornication and homosexual intercourse, even with condoms, not because it denies condoms offer health protection, but because traditional Christian moral teaching believes all extra-marital intercourse contradicts the proper meaning of love and sexuality.

But even if one agrees with every word of that the problem remains that a woman (or, much less likely, a man) could heed and obey that to the last jot and tittle and still, without a condom, be infected. Why does the archbishop ignore this fact? Because he has nothing to say? Because there is nothing to say other than that condoms are indeed needed as (at least) insurance? If so, that’s a wicked reason to keep silent.

Christ called Christians to a different way of living, to a purity of heart where even looking on a woman with aggressive and disordered desire (lust) is wrong.

Oh – well maybe the answer is even simpler, as indicated by that remark. Maybe the archbishop really is so stupid and so callous that he really doesn’t even realize that women exist – maybe he really does think that it’s only men who are agents, only men who are called to a different way of living, only men who can and should be faithful, and therefore only men who can be infected. Maybe he just doesn’t get it that women are also part of the equation, that when men ‘look on’ them with lust and then act on the looking, the act has consequences for the woman as well as the man.

Yet he’s the archbishop of Sydney; he has a platform; he can go right on telling Catholics – women and men alike – that condoms are bad and harmful. That’s unfortunate.

It’s a funny thing how the ‘athests should shut up’ crowd is constantly passing back and forth this old crumbling shredding battered item labeled ‘atheists use intemperate language’ and then when you look at them turn out to be so unpleasant themselves. They’re a vituperative bunch to be giving advice to other people about not being so foghorn-like.

Look at Mark Vernon for instance. He’s always boasting of his own superlative and superior uncertainty, his better than anything else agnosticism, and yet when it comes to characterizing people he disagrees with, why, he throws uncertainty to the winds and just gets right down to name-calling.

Julian Baggini was asking militant atheists to turn down the volume in the Guardian yesterday. What I think Julian hasn’t quite realised is that this movement, from which he wants to distance himself, is evangelical in nature – which is to say loud in nature, and crude and ultimately dehumanising.

Well same to you, bub.

Moreover, and ironically, he won’t understand it unless he uses religious categories to analyse it. It will tarnish anyone who wants to use the word ‘atheist’ of themselves, much as fundamentalist Christianity or Islam does for Christians and Muslims.

That’s Mr Agnostic, Mr Uncertain. Nice, isn’t it? ‘Militant’ (you know, bomb-throwing, bus-exploding, mass murdering) atheists are evangelical in nature, loud in nature, crude, dehumanizing, a source of tarnish, like fundamentalist Christianity or Islam. That’s civil, that’s temperate, that’s fair, that’s reasonable.

He then jokes about Julian calling him ‘fluffy.’ Quite right; I wouldn’t call him fluffy either; I would call him just plain nasty. But unlike him I offer genuine quotes to illustrate why.

G mentioned, and quoted a bit of, On Liberty yesterday. I’d been thinking of quoting it myself, and G sent me to the right bit to quote, so here is some more. From the last paragraph of Chapter 2.

Before quitting the subject of freedom of opinion, it is fit to take some notice of those who say, that the free expression of all opinions should be permitted, on condition that the manner be temperate, and do not pass the bounds of fair discussion. Much might be said on the impossibility of fixing where these supposed bounds are to be placed; for if the test be offence to those whose opinion is attacked, I think experience testifies that this offence is given whenever the attack is telling and powerful, and that every opponent who pushes them hard, and whom they find it difficult to answer, appears to them, if he shows any strong feeling on the subject, an intemperate opponent.

That’s just it, you see. Theists and fans of faith were always going to say that atheists were too noisy and ‘militant’ and dogmatic and whatever other stick came to hand. Of course they were. They weren’t going to like explicit atheism, and once the explicit atheism hit the best-seller lists, well – the result was what you might call overdetermined. Of course they would say atheists were too noisy! For the very reason that Mill suggests. Shouting that atheists are too noisy is a lot easier than arguing. So to conclude that therefore atheists really are too noisy and should be more quiet now so that…so that I’m not sure what, is to conclude too much.

With regard to what is commonly meant by intemperate discussion, namely invective, sarcasm, personality, and the like, the denunciation of these weapons would deserve more sympathy if it were ever proposed to interdict them equally to both sides; but it is only desired to restrain the employment of them against the prevailing opinion: against the unprevailing they may not only be used without general disapproval, but will be likely to obtain for him who uses them the praise of honest zeal and righteous indignation. Yet whatever mischief arises from their use, is greatest when they are employed against the comparatively defenceless; and whatever unfair advantage can be derived by any opinion from this mode of asserting it, accrues almost exclusively to received opinions.

Bingo.

In general, opinions contrary to those commonly received can only obtain a hearing by studied moderation of language, and the most cautious avoidance of unnecessary offence, from which they hardly ever deviate even in a slight degree without losing ground: while unmeasured vituperation employed on the side of the prevailing opinion, really does deter people from professing contrary opinions, and from listening to those who profess them. For the interest, therefore, of truth and justice, it is far more important to restrain this employment of vituperative language than the other; and, for example, if it were necessary to choose, there would be much more need to discourage offensive attacks on infidelity, than on religion.

Thank you and good evening.