Well after all, atheism is illegal, you know. I mean to say. What do they expect?

An Ontario billboard company is removing a controversial Rancho Cucamonga billboard promoting atheism after receiving complaints, according to the group that paid for the advertisement. The billboard…says “Imagine No Religion” in large letters on a stained-glass background. Underneath is the name of the group, “Freedom From Religion Foundation,” and the group’s Web address.

Well quite. That’s bound to be illegal. You can’t have people saying ‘Imagine no religion’ in a freedom-loving liberal democracy, now can you. I mean to say.

Judy Rooze, administrator of First Baptist Church of Rancho Cucamonga, which is two blocks from the billboard, was relieved it was coming down. Rooze said it was unsettling. “I understand people have freedom of speech, but this is taking it too far,” she said. “It’s very jarring.”

Well this is what I’m saying. You can’t have people saying things that are unsettling. Dear god no. I’m all in favour of free speech but obviously that doesn’t include things that are unsettling. Have some common sense. You can’t yell ‘fire’ in a crowded unemployment office and you can’t say things that are jarring, either. I don’t know what gets into some people.

Johann don’t want no activist King Chuck, for very good and compelling reasons.

Charles says the “responsibility and authority of his position” – and the “wisdom” it entails – requires him to “speak out” and “pressure” our elected representatives. A bevy of fawning pundits have responded by crying – yes!…Charles’s position stems from one thing and one thing only: he emerged from Elizabeth Windsor’s womb 60 years ago. That’s it. He has no “responsibility.” He has no legitimate “authority.” He has no more right to “speak for the nation and to the nation” – and pocket £7m a year for the bother – than you, me, or the next person you see at the bus stop.

Well exactly, and obviously; yet the man seems to be weirdly oblivious to this glaring fact. One can see how he would get to be that way, of course, what with all the ridiculous ‘specialness’ that surrounds royals – but if he were actually as clever as he thinks he is, he would have been able to figure it out at some point before age 60.

If not for that fortuitous journey through a royal womb, Charles Windsor’s “wise” arguments would be gathering dust in the reject bin at certain newspapers’ letters pages. If his advocates didn’t keep praising him as “a public intellectual” I wouldn’t be rude enough to point it out, but Charles Windsor is a strikingly stupid man. Every time he has been put into a competitive situation where he is judged according to objective criteria, he has been a disaster…And what of his arguments? They are garbled, uninformed, cliché-ridden repetitions of what the last person who spoke to him said. His very sympathetic biographer Dimbleby admits that his staff “were uncomfortable with his tendency to reach instant conclusions on the basis of insufficient thought”…What do these “interventions” really consist of? Charles Windsor scorns modern science, attacking it for its “lack of soul” and for “playing God”. So he uses his position to attack qualified life-saving professionals who earned their position, like the General Medical Council – and says he knows better.

Precisely. That’s the bit that really gets up my plebeian nose – the thinking he knows better than people who have actually done the training as opposed to simply reading an article in Quacks’ Gazette.

‘This is Islamic justice, British style’.

The woman in black wanted an Islamic divorce. She told the religious judge that her husband hit her, cursed her and wanted her dead. But her husband was opposed, and the Islamic scholar adjudicating the case seemed determined to keep the couple together. So, sensing defeat, she brought our her secret weapon: her father. In walked a bearded man in long robes who described his son-in-law as a hot-tempered man who had duped his daughter, evaded the police and humiliated his family. The judge promptly reversed himself and recommended divorce. This is Islamic justice, British style.

Well obviously ‘justice’ is the wrong word there. Obviously that word should be in scare-quotes, or followed by ‘hahahaha,’ or a headline in The Onion. ‘Justice’ you call it – when men get together and decide a woman’s fate while ignoring the woman herself; when ‘the Islamic scholar’ is determined to ‘keep the couple together’ no matter how disgustingly the man treats the woman; when the woman is doomed to a life of degradation and loathing unless she has her father handy and he sides with her. That’s not justice. That’s a bad cruel joke, that’s what that is.

But Shariah has been rejected in the West as well. The Canadian province of Ontario had allowed rabbinical courts and Christian courts to resolve some civil and family disputes with binding rulings under a 1991 law. But when the Islamic Institute on Civil Justice there tried to create a Shariah court, it was attacked as a violation of the rights of Muslim women. As a result, Ontario changed the entire system in 2006 to strip the rulings of any religious arbitration of legal validity or enforceability.

Yeah – thanks largely to the tireless efforts of our friend Homa Arjomand.

“We always try to keep the marriages together, especially when there are children,” said Hasan’s wife, Shakila Qurashi, who works as an unofficial counselor for women. If the husband beats her, she should go to the police and have a divorce, Qurashi said. “But if he’s slapped her only once or something like that,” she said, “and he admits he has made a mistake and promised not to do it again, then we say, ‘You have to forgive.’ “

Bastards.

Congress is having fits trying to figure out what to do about the big 3 US carmakers. Let them sink? Give them billions and billions and billions of dollars? Retool them to make buses and repair bridges? No that last one isn’t a real proposal, at least not that I know of. Barbara Mikulski’s is real though.

Mikulski did not call for the $25 billion worth of federally guaranteed loans that Reid is seeking. Instead, she offered her own proposal costing $8 billion: tax breaks for those buying cars between now and the end of next year.

That’s the stupidest thing I’ve heard in – a day or two anyway. What a good idea! Give people tax breaks to encourage them to buy bad dangerous oversized gas-guzzling pedestrian-flattening planet-destroying cars!

Yes I know thousands of jobs are at stake, but other things are at stake too, and as everyone keeps awkwardly noticing, the US car industry is flailing partly because it makes such bad stupid cars. I think we should go all free market on their ass and say the invisible hand has spoken, go make tinker toys.

You don’t say.

Atheists “are talking to a very small slice of the population,” said Mathew Staver, a leading Christian conservative and law-school dean. “In some ways, they’re really just talking to themselves.”

Well no kidding. And what does Mathew Staver think theists are doing? In some ways, all groups are just talking to themselves; and in other ways not. But at least atheists aren’t also just talking to an imaginary friend, and we’re also not constantly invoking an imaginary friend when talking to other people, unlike some people I could name.

In rural Chambersburg, Pa., one Christian group responded to an “Imagine No Religion” billboard with a giant sign of their own, asking: “Why Do Atheists Hate America?”

Let’s sponsor a giant sign asking: ‘Why do theists ask such stupid questions?’

“Atheists can act very much like Christian fundamentalists from time to time,” said James Webb, president of the Community of Reason in Kansas City, which includes both believers and skeptics. “It’s important not to be in-your-face with people.”

Well, it depends what you mean by ‘in-your-face’; it also depends on how in-your-face theists are being; it also depends on what theists are doing to people. It depends on a lot of things. Sometimes it’s important to be in-your-face with people.

[L]eading activists say nonbelievers tend to be just as wary of organized atheism as they are of organized religion — making it tough to pull together a cohesive movement. “A pastor can say to his flock, ‘All rise,’ and everyone rises. But try that in an atheist meeting,” said Marvin Straus, co-founder of an atheist group in Boulder, Colo. “A third of the people will rise. A third will tell you to go to hell. And a third will start arguing….That’s why it’s hard to say where we’re going as a movement.”

And that’s why atheists are a more fun group. (Plus I don’t think one third will rise; I think none will rise. Who would say ‘all rise’ and apropos of what? The entry of the judge? No. The entry of the Head Atheist? That’s a somewhat anomalous concept, and even if it weren’t, who rises for the Head Atheist? Even if Dawkins parachuted in for a surprise guest visit, I don’t see anyone saying ‘all rise’ – and I can imagine no response to such a suggestion but noisy hoots of laughter.)

You know, human rights are risky. Equality is risky. Freedom is risky. That is to say, movements to gain or restore or promote those things are risky. Tyrants and exploiters and authoritarians don’t just smile politely and go home – they fight back. Being tyrants and exploiters and authoritarians, they fight dirty. That’s why they’re being fought in the first place. So people who are attempting to promote or gain more equality or rights have to consider the fact that they may be putting other people at risk, because they usually are.

The Civil Rights movement (in the US in the 50s and 60s) had that problem. We tend to forget this now, but it was a huge issue at the time. Plenty of black people in the South were deathly afraid of the whole thing, and with good reason. So there was a moral issue: is it right to put other people in danger in struggling for rights? Is it right to take risks of that kind, risks that are risks to non-participants as well as participants?

There’s no slam-dunk answer to that. There are a lot of ifs. If one knew for certain ahead of time that the struggle for civil rights would trigger a genocide, then the answer would probably be no (or no, not yet). If one thought it very likely that there would be reprisals – some people would still say no, others would say yes, and that’s what happened, and few people (as far as I know, and die-hard racists apart) now think it wasn’t worth it.

Why? Why is it worth it?

Perhaps because, as La Pasionaria said, it is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.

That’s a very rhetorical slogan, and yet, it’s not just rhetorical. It’s not good to live on your knees. It’s worth some risk in order to bring about a situation in which no people are made to live on their knees.

Charles’s vanity and delusion are being taken out for an airing again. He

has told confidants he would like his role to “evolve” so that his knowledge and experience are not wasted once he inherits the crown.

What knowledge and experience? What knowledge and experience does he have that would be ‘wasted’ if he didn’t use his accident of birth to publicize them? His knowledge and experience about GM crops? About alternative medicine? About architecture? What special unique irreplaceable knowledge and experience does he have on those subjects?

None, right? Do correct me if I’m wrong – but as far as I can tell, the answer is none. He has strong opinions on the subjects, but so do lots of people. He has perhaps spent lots of time or some time reading and otherwise gathering information about them – but so have lots of people. What he has not done is get systematic training in any of them, which lots of people have done – so why does the world need his amateur ‘knowledge’ when it already has access to professional knowledge? What is this special irreplaceable knowledge and experience he has that it would be a pity to waste if he became king?

There isn’t any. His status doesn’t replace professional training, and his amateur dabbling doesn’t either. Nobody needs Pris Chos laying down the law about GM food or homeopathy because there are already thousands upon thousands of people who can do that much better than he can. I’m a great fan of autodidacticism, being an autodidact myself, but that doesn’t mean that I think the world needs amateur agronomists or amateur medical researchers. If Charles really wanted to be an influential expert in one of these fields he should have gotten the appropriate training to do so. It’s incredible arrogance and the most literal kind of elitism to think that his royal birth somehow makes that supererogatory.

It’s not a newsflash that Karen Armstrong is not one of the clearest thinkers in the world – but nevertheless the opening sentence of her sermon on compassion at Comment is Free set me back a little.

The practice of compassion is central to every one of the major world religions – but sometimes you would never know it.

But sometimes you would never know it – good one. Did she write this while taking a bath and watching Celebrity Big Brother, or what? But more to the point is the fundamental and pathetic incoherence of the basic thought: the practice of compassion is central to every one of the major world religions, and yet oddly enough in real life the very opposite is enacted daily and hourly. Hum hum hum. So in what sense is it central then? Eh? Eh? If sometimes we would never know it, how does Armstrong know it? If sometimes we would never know it, in what sense is it fucking true?

It’s not true. It’s flattery. It’s a greasy smear of flattery for a nasty institution that perpetrates stupid or vicious cruelties everywhere you look.

Instead, religion is associated with violence, intolerance and seems more preoccupied by dogmatic or sexual orthodoxy.

It seems more preoccupied by dogmatic or sexual orthodoxy because it is. Armstrong perhaps wants to persuade it to better by heaping coals of fire on its head – but she shouldn’t talk nonsense in the process.

So the whole UN really is infected with this ‘defamation of religion should be banned’ virus.

United Nations General Assembly President Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann said on Tuesday that the world body should ban defamation of all religions and disagreed that such a move would impinge upon freedom of speech. “Yes, I believe that defamation of religion should be banned,” he said in response to a question at a press conference to highlight the interfaith conference at the UN headquarters. No one should try to defame Islam or any other religion, he said, adding: “We should respect all religions.”

Well now how would you go about banning ‘defamation’ of religion without impinging on freedom of speech? How would anyone? You might as well say ‘Yes, I believe that defamation of capitalism [or socialism, or monetarism, or economics, or photography, or mushrooms, or rabbits] should be banned’ and disagree that such a move would impinge upon freedom of speech. It makes the same amount of sense. And another thing – there is a difference between saying that no one should try to X and saying that X should be banned – a big and very important difference. It’s more than a little depressing that a guy (a priest, as he is) who is UN General Assembly President doesn’t get that distinction, or perhaps doesn’t think it matters. It’s a little depressing that the UN General Assembly President thinks the UN should ban kinds of speech that the UN General Assembly President doesn’t like.

So much for Austin Dacey’s recent work at the UN. So much for other protests.

But oh well, not to worry – King Abdullah is on the case.

Maybe King Abdullah, by articulating the central Muslim value of religious pluralism on the world stage, will find the citizens of his Kingdom demanding that he implement it at home.

The central Muslim value of religious pluralism? The…what?

Where? Where is that the case? Where is religious pluralism a central Muslim value? Malaysia? No. Pakistan? No. Somalia? No. Afghanistan? Now you’re just being silly. Saudi Arabia? Be serious. Where, then? And if the answer is ‘nowhere,’ what reason is there to think that religious pluralism is in fact a central Muslim value? There could be such a reason, or reasons; it could be the case that it is such a central value but that the ruling elites have all turned their backs on it; but I want a reason to think so before I will go ahead and think so.

Just to make the confusion complete, Bush tells us that ‘Freedom is God’s gift to every man, woman, and child.’ No it isn’t. It isn’t God’s gift to me, for instance. Some people choose to attribute freedom to God, but that doesn’t make the attribution accurate. It’s irritating that Bush blathers about religious freedom and in the same breath imposes his imaginary God on all of us. It’s not just believers who want and who get to have freedom; atheists are entitled too, but you’d never know it to hear the godbotherer in chief.

German minister of state Hermann Groehe defended the right to convert to another faith — a right not recognized in some Muslim countries. “It is unacceptable that up until now laws in some countries threaten those who want to convert with the death penalty,” said Groehe, without naming any countries.

Yes, but again, it’s not just conversion from one religion to another religion that is threatened (and sometimes rewarded) with the death penalty, it is also rejection of religion itself – yet Bush and Groehe are not reported to have mentioned that.

President Asif Ali Zardari of Muslim Pakistan said there was “nothing more un-Islamic” than discrimination, violence against women and terrorism, but also denounced hate speech against Islam in countries he did not identify.

Ah…there is nothing more un-Islamic than violence, is there. That would explain why Zardari’s wife was murdered by…You Know Who.

As you may have seen, Edmund Standing has started a blog, amusingly called ‘I kid you not’ as a compliment to Sarah Palin. Okay not a compliment exactly. Palin has been saying things again, as Edmund notes.

Then there’s the whole down to earth ‘mom next door’ persona. Palin, it should be remembered, proudly announced herself to the Republican National Convention as ‘just your average hockey mom’…So, we have a woman who calls herself ‘average’, thinks some ‘God’ or other gives her career guidance, is completely ignorant of evolutionary biology and the history of the world, and conducts political interviews while cooking moose for her ‘guy’…And this woman wants to become President of the most powerful nation on earth. Sam Harris had it nailed just prior to the election when he rightly noted that average isn’t good enough.

No it damn well isn’t – and one of the many joys of the recent election is that for once (and very very belatedly) that particular bit of nonsense not only didn’t work, it did a great deal to destroy the Republican ticket. It pleased ‘the base’ but it was finally one too many for the undecideds and independents and Republicans with enough nous to walk and chew gum at the same time. It wasn’t only Sam Harris who noted that average isn’t good enough, too – Jon Stewart has noted the same thing on more than one occasion, and John Cleese (yes, really) had a good time noting the same thing on Olbermann a couple of days before the election. Yes really – I was so wound up about the election by that time that I was reduced to watching little bits of Olbermann and Maddow. Anyway Cleese said what I always say, which is that I want somebody who’s so smart I’d be scared to open my mouth in his or her presence. I don’t want average, I want stellar. Average is easy to get, stellar isn’t; let’s go for the rare and the best.

Another excellent blog is Richard Wilson’s ‘Don’t Get Fooled Again’, which is the title of his book, which I’m reading.

Check them both out; tell your friends.

This is a familiar subject, but you know how it is – there’s always more to say.

About what? About religious law, religious obligation, religious duty, religious requirements, religious teachings, religious commandments.

Motl Brody of Brooklyn was pronounced dead this week after a half-year fight against a brain tumor, and doctors at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington say the seventh-grader’s brain has ceased functioning entirely. But for the past few days, a machine has continued to inflate and deflate his lungs. As of late Friday afternoon, his heart was still beating with the help of a cocktail of intravenous drugs and adrenaline. That heartbeat has prompted Motl’s parents, who are Orthodox Jews, to refuse the hospital’s request to remove all artificial life support. Under some interpretations of Jewish religious law, including the one accepted by the family’s Hasidic sect, death occurs only when the heart and lungs stop functioning. That means Motl “is alive, and his family has a religious obligation to secure all necessary and appropriate medical treatment to keep him alive,” the family’s attorney wrote in a court filing this week.

In other words, poor Motl Brody is a corpse, and the corpse is kept breathing by a machine, but ‘some interpretations of Jewish religious law’ say that in fact he is alive because of this machine-made breathing.

His brain has died entirely, according to an affidavit filed by one of his doctors. His eyes are fixed and dilated. His body neither moves nor responds to stimulation. His brain stem shows no electrical function, and his brain tissue has begun to decompose…Jeffrey I. Zuckerman, the attorney for Motl’s parents, says they have been “utterly shattered” by the hospital’s actions. He stressed that the family’s demand for continued life support was based on their obligations under religious law, not an unrealistic hope that their boy will recover…”We respect the family’s beliefs, and have tried since the patient’s arrival in June to work closely with them in a spirit of mutual respect,” the hospital said in a written statement.

What’s interesting here (as often before) is the special status of putative ‘obligations under religious law’ and the deference that is automatically given to them even when there is the attempt to disregard them. The hospital is perhaps socially required (so to speak) to say ‘we respect the family’s beliefs’ even though the beliefs are grotesque enough to ‘oblige’ the family to keep a corpse with a decomposing brain breathing on ‘life support.’ What’s interesting is that there is no other kind of law (at least none that I can think of) that would work that way. What other kind of law could a lawyer cite in this situation? ‘His family has a [____] obligation to secure all necessary and appropriate medical treatment’ – what could you put in that space that would work? I can’t think of a damn thing, can you? Only ‘religious’ law and ‘religious’ obligation can get people to ‘respect’ and defer to this kind of perversity. And the parents in question are apparently being downright truculent about it.

Motl’s mother and father, Eluzer and Miriam Brody, haven’t been to the hospital since July. The medical center says its requests to speak directly with them have been rebuffed, and in recent days, hospital employees “have been inundated with harassing and threatening calls” regarding the case.

So Motl suffered without his parents from July to November, yet those same parents think they have a ‘religious obligation’ to keep his corpse artifically breathing while his brain rots away. Baffling.

Hey don’t forget, if that smelly guy grabs your jacket, give him your cashmere sweater too. If somebody belts you in the face, say thank you. Forgive people seventy times seven. Be generous, and more than generous. Like those super-nice people who worry about art works.

Christians have warned of a backlash of art world vandalism, following a decision to halt a private prosecution of a Gateshead gallery which exhibited a statue of Jesus with an erection…Christian Emily Mapfuwa…said the show…was offensive to her faith and instructed her lawyers to seek a private prosecution against the gallery…Mapfuwa’s supporters warned [the CPS decision] could lead some people to destroy similar art works. Her solicitor Michael Phillips said: “Although it is right to say that there was no actual disorder, there was potentially such disorder, which was evidenced to the CPS in the witness statements provided. In particular one witness felt like smashing the object. The decision is simply not in accordance with the facts and is unsustainable.”

Ah. Christian Emily Mapfuwa was offended so she instructed her lawyers to seek a private prosecution against the gallery; a witness felt like smashing the object, therefore the gallery was guilty of creating a risk of disorder. So…any time anyone is ‘offended’ by something, if a witness can be found to testify to feeling like smashing the object, it will then become the case that the ‘offensive’ something is at fault. Then no one anywhere will ever be allowed to say anything ever. Sounds promising.

Christian Voice national director Stephen Green said…”[T]here were those at the Baltic Centre who wanted to take matters into their own hands and I have warned Anita Zabludowicz that her statue will not survive being put on public display again. If the CPS wanted to give the green light to blasphemous art their decision may paradoxically have the opposite effect. With the threat of destruction hanging over it, the Zabludowicz statue is now locked away by its wealthy owners and is unlikely to see the light of day again. The same will go for any other blasphemous works of so-called art. Put simply, Christians won’t tolerate insults to Jesus Christ. However, I do hope that the art world will discover some respect for Christian religious beliefs and for the person of Jesus Christ.”

To put it another way, the CPS wanted to go on allowing free expression in the usual way and Stephen Green and other Christians are determined to use threats of violence to prevent that. ‘Respect’ is unlikely to be what the art world will be discovering more of as a result.

Mediawatchwatch, from whom I lifted this story, has pungent commentary.

Of course one reason I was so pleased about the recent election is that it’s such a nice victory for elitism. About time.

Barack Obama’s election is a milestone in more than his pigmentation. The second most remarkable thing about his election is that American voters have just picked a president who is an open, out-of-the-closet, practicing intellectual.

Damn straight. A blatant, unashamed, undisguised, unapologetic intellectual, who doesn’t pretend to be thicker than he is in order to reassure the envious or the threatened or the hostile. Staggering, isn’t it?

Compare the ineffable Charles Murray, asked what he thinks of Sarah Palin:

I’m in love. Truly and deeply in love…The last thing we need are more pointy-headed intellectuals running the government.

So the more unthinking and incurious and ill-informed the better? Why, exactly?

Ah but that’s the kind of question that pointy-headed intellectuals ask.

As you may have seen in News the other day, David Colquhoun provides excerpts from ‘a lengthy set of notes for a first year course on “The Holistic Model of Healthcare”…from the 2005 course at Thames Valley University’ (along with a link to the whole thing). It’s fascinating stuff – and it raises a familiar question.

[T]he subject of Wholistic Nutrition transcends the area of human understanding for which science, alone, is appropriate. The reason is that it is ‘vitalistic’. It recognises the presence in all life forms including the human body, of subtle (or ‘etheric’) energy forces not easily measurable by the physicist’s equipment. It shares that position with the ‘energy medicine’ disciplines such as homoeopathy, traditional acupuncture and spiritual healing. It follows an approach to those subtle energies that is embodied in the discipline and philosophy of naturopathy. Vitalism is the notion that life in living organisms is sustained by a vital principle that cannot be explained in terms of physics and chemistry. This vital principle, often called “the life force”, is something quite distinct from the physical body and is responsible for much that happens in health and disease.

The question is familiar (around here) because I keep asking it. If there are subtle energy forces not easily measurable by the physicist’s (or anyone else’s) equipment, then how do Wholistic Nutritionists or Vitalists or anyone else know they are there or anything about them? It’s just like the god question. We’re always hearing that god transcends science and is completely different and can’t be measured by our mere scientific equipment. Okay, but then what equipment can it be measured by? Nobody ever says. In the god case some people do say it can’t be measured by any equipment, but then they still don’t say how they know it’s there. They pretend they say (it’s ‘experience’; one just knows; it’s an interaction), but they don’t.

But so then how do the Vitalists know any of the things they claim to know and pronounce on with such confidence? What is the source of all the palaver in the Thames Valley University course notes? There’s a grotesque disconnect between the frank declaration of Zero Knowledge at the outset and the abundant unbashful proliferation of truth claims in the rest of the document.

There is a kind of admission of the problem:

At the root of most hoIistic therapies lies the belief that all life is animated by a subtle force. We call this the Life Force. You either believe it or you do not. It cannot exactly be proved at the moment and the belief is not in accord with the yardsticks that we call ’scientific’, The belief is a little akin to the belief in God or in spirits or ghosts, and yet at the same time it is not, because the Life Force is by no means so remote from us.

You either believe it or you do not, but we will go right ahead and give medical advice as if we had something more than ‘belief’ backing up our whacked ideas.

As mentioned above, toxic foci (deposits) in the body show up in the iris of the eye. The iris is arranged so as to encompass a complete ‘map’ of the body. with all the organs and systems laid out upon it. Hence the location of a toxic deposit in the iris shows the iridologist its position within the body. The toxins may appear as colours, spots. blobs and smears in particular places in the iris, or as darkened areas.

Uh…right. Bye now.

Now for something more serious. Something intolerable.

Ostracised, vulnerable and frightened, she wandered the streets in south-eastern Nigeria, sleeping rough, struggling to stay alive. Mary was found by a British charity worker and today lives at a refuge in Akwa Ibom province with 150 other children who have been branded witches, blamed for all their family’s woes, and abandoned. Before being pushed out of their homes many were beaten or slashed with knives, thrown onto fires, or had acid poured over them…Many of those branded “child-witches” are murdered – hacked to death with machetes, poisoned, drowned, or buried alive in an attempt to drive Satan out of their soul. The devil’s children are “identified” by powerful religious leaders at extremist churches where Christianity and traditional beliefs have combined to produce a deep-rooted belief in, and fear of, witchcraft. The priests spread the message that child-witches bring destruction, disease and death to their families.

And the priests get rich on ‘exorcisms.’

The exorcism costs the families up to a year’s income. During the “deliverance” ceremonies, the children are shaken violently, dragged around the room and have potions poured into their eyes. The children look terrified. The parents look on, praying that the child will be cleansed. If the ritual fails, they know their children will have to be sent away, or killed. Many are held in churches, often on chains, and deprived of food until they “confess” to being a witch. The ceremonies are highly lucrative for the spiritual leaders many of whom enjoy a lifestyle of large homes, expensive cars and designer clothes.

The ‘spiritual leaders’ – even in a piece like this the flattering labels are pasted on. ‘Spiritual,’ forsooth – spiritual in what sense?

Michael Binyon in The Times slobbers over Charles for being interested in lots of religions.

[N]o monarch since the Stuarts has taken an intellectual interest in religion, and none has devoted time and respect to other faiths. The Prince, however, counts bishops and moral philosophers, rabbis, priests and Islamic scholars among those whom he regularly meets and with whom he discusses the spiritual dimensions of life in Britain today.

Find the odd one out. Got it in one. What are ‘moral philosophers’ doing in that mob? Does this beezer think moral philosophy is a ‘faith’?

For him, the concept of faith — any faith — is important in the crusade against the rising tide of secular materialism and scientific reductionism, both of which he detests.

Ah, does he. He prefers the tyrannical rule of an unreachable unaccountable unknowable god, does he. Well that makes sense in a way, of course, given that he too represents a silly anachronistic semi-magical form of government.

The other day ‘hanmeng’ said in a comment on ‘God-talk as an unstated norm’ that the bible is Obama’s favourite book and later quoted from a keynote address he gave in 2006. The quotation was worrying – especially this bit –

[W]hat I am suggesting is this – secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square. Frederick Douglas[s], Abraham Lincoln, Williams Jennings Bryant [Bryan], Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King – indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history – were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause. So to say that men and women should not inject their “personal morality” into public policy debates is a practical absurdity.

I was going to dispute that, but reading the whole address I found that Obama did some of the disputing for me. He doesn’t mean what that passage in isolation would seem to indicate that he means.

Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God’s will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.

Well – that’s what I was going to say, and he’s already said it, in the same address, so I don’t need to bother. I had already thought he knew that, must know that, being 1) sensible and 2) a Constitutional scholar; but the quotation worried me. But if all religious people understood and agreed to that principle, we would all have a lot less to worry about.

I was going to say that it’s all very well to talk about Douglass and King, but they are not the only reformers in American history who were motivated by their religion and use religious language. Fred Phelps and Randall Terry are a couple more; so are throngs of people who opposed everything Douglass and King stood for. It always irritates the bejesus out of me when opponents of secularism cherry-pick their reformers and movements in order to defend the place of religion in politics, as if Christian defenders of slavery and segregation had never existed. I was prepared to give Obama a damn good scolding for doing that, but he doesn’t really do that (although I think he ought to have mentioned the anti-Douglasses, since he brought it up). He doesn’t really do that and, more important, he doesn’t shy away from stating the principle involved.

Gene Robinson states it too.

The Anglican church’s first gay bishop and the United States’ first black President-elect discussed in depth the place of religion in the state. Bishop Robinson said: “He and I would agree about the rightful place of religion vis-a-vis the secular state. That is to say, we don’t impose our religious values on the secular state because God said so. Our faith informs our own values and then we take those values into the civil market place, the civil discourse, and then you argue for them based on the Constitution. You don’t say to someone, you must believe this because this is what God believes.”

Quite.

There are (I suppose this was inevitable) some skeptics now claiming that people are rejoicing at Obama’s election because he’s black – which is true in one way but false in another. The way it’s true is probably obvious enough; the way it’s false is that 1) that’s not the only reason and 2) we would have been rejoicing anyway. Obama’s being black is neither necessary nor sufficient for the rejoicing. Here’s why. Suppose a Sarah Palin who was black – identical to Palin in every other way, but black. A very different, much smaller, and much more delusional crowd would be rejoicing. Suppose an Obama who was white – identical to Obama in every other way, but white. We would still be rejoicing – although a huge element of the actual rejoicing would be missing.

There are some people sneering at the emotionality. Fuck’em. Seriously. I’m as skeptical as the next person, I too like to be cautious with my admiration and respect (let alone affection), I too am aware that sentimentality is risky for clarity of thought. But I do not think this particular example of mass enthusiasm is irrational. It’s emotional, but it’s not irrational.

It’s funny…I wasn’t really prepared for how emotional it turned out to be. I’m not the only one. I never really allowed myself to imagine what it would be like, because like so many people I was so afraid it wouldn’t happen – I was trying to minimize the disappointment. So when it happened – so abruptly – it was like being knocked down by a wave. What can I tell you? It was no ordinary moment. It just wasn’t, and for so many reasons – not all of which were to do with race.

It’s interesting that it was very little about race until that moment. That aspect was left mostly in the background (including in coded messages from the opposition, of course) during the campaign, but then the moment the election was announced, that aspect zoomed into the foreground and took over for the evening. Good. The campaign was run on the merits, then once it was over, we could go ahead and celebrate the symbolism. Aided by the echoes of King’s mountaintop speech – not that there was much need for aid.

What can I tell you? We don’t get many moments like that. I can’t think of any like it. The sneerers can go write condolence cards to Sarah Palin.

Wow.

The Independent, or at least Arifa Akbar in The Independent, reports on attacks on a London art gallery but also, four words in, cites ‘inflammatory images.’ The art gallery was attacked but it had been quite naughty.

A gallery showing inflammatory images of veiled Muslims, including a bare-breasted woman partially clad in a burqa, is under police surveillance after being attacked earlier this week.

But the images are not ‘inflammatory’ unless people decide they are. It is open to people not to see them as inflammatory.

I don’t want to push that thought too hard. I don’t want to claim that it’s universally applicable – I don’t want to claim that nothing is genuinely malicious and aggressive unless someone decides it is. I don’t believe in applying Stoic reasoning to everything. I just want to make the drearily familiar claim that some kinds of speech and expression are genuinely racist or sexist or in some other way an attack on people as a group, and that others are not, and that we shouldn’t confuse the two, and that confusing the two is a way to undermine all kinds of rightly-valued freedoms and capabilities.

Maple, from Sussex, has upset the Islamic world before. An exhibition by her earlier this year showed Muslim women in provocative poses, including one suggestively sucking on a banana.

There again. Maple hasn’t ‘upset the Islamic world’; the ‘Islamic world’ or rather a very small fraction of it has chosen to be upset. It has no real or legitimate reason to be upset.

Mokhtar Badri, the vice-president of the Muslim Association of Britain, said that while he thought the exhibition provocative, he defended freedom of expression and condemned any violence inspired by the display. “I urged the gallery and the artist to respect the community in the area, but if Muslims see the work and dislike it, it is completely wrong to use any violent expression of that,” he added.

Good that he condemned violence, but urging the gallery and the artist to respect the community in the area in fact just reinforces the message that galleries and artists have to creep around whatever ‘area’ they happen to be in and find out what all the local prejudices are and then ‘respect’ them, which in the case of Sarah Maples of course would have meant simply not showing her paintings at all. (And would the Indy have refrained from calling the images ‘inflammatory’ if the gallery had been in Chelsea or Hampstead or Cheam? I doubt it.) Urging the gallery and the artist to respect the community is a kind of first small step in the direction of overt coercion and eventually violence – which is not to say that Badri should be censored, just that he is wrong.