The Bishop of Lichfield explains about embryos.

It’s a very important part of our society and a very important part of the Christian faith that you should have respect for human embryos.

Is it? How does that play out in real life? Where in our society do we see respect for human embryos being performed or exemplified? What does it look like? What does it make happen? Do embryos enroll in school? Do they get promotions? Do they take part in athletic competitions? Do they win prizes? Do they run for office? In what situations do people get an opportunity to show respect for them, and what is it that the respect respects?

And in what sense is that respect a very important part of the Christian faith? Where does that come from? Where is it written? How long has it been the case? What is it based on? Anything? Did Jesus say anything about it? Did (even) Paul? Did Augustine? Tertullian? Aquinas? Luther?

To be blunt, I don’t think that is a very important part of the Christian faith, I think it’s a recently invented rule that some Christians have made an enormous fetish of for the simple reason that there is nothing much else they can make a fetish of because they’ve been superseded. We don’t need Christianity in order to work for human rights or equality or animal rights or justice or peace or benevolence. There is little room left for Christians to exercise moral scrupulosity, so they have to find little neglected corners that are neglected because they are in fact bogus. So the poor sad underemployed Christians trundle around finding embryos and cells to protect, since real people with real needs can be protected by atheists just as well as by theists. It’s sad for them. Soon they’ll be making ethical fusses about molecules and atoms.

If you stop obeying God you start to limit the rights of human beings and this is a case in point.

Oh really. Whereas people who do obey God never limit the rights of human beings, as we see every day. Well done, bishop.

Cancer Research and other charities are urging MPs to support the pre-embryonic cell research bill. But that doesn’t mean an end to bullshit.

Alan Johnson told Sky News: “I believe… once we have discussed all these issues and seen all the safeguards in the bill, that there will not be a split. But there will be an accommodation for those who have a particular sensitivity around this, including those whose sensitivity relates to their faith.”

Why? Why should there be an accommodation for ‘particular sensitivity’ about nothing? Suppose some people developed a fixed belief that sewage treatment violated the will of their deity? Should there be an accommodation for that? Why is there all this deference for completely absurd whacked-out meaningless beliefs for whose sake people try to prevent useful medical research?

Because it ‘relates to their faith’; I know. But that’s not a good reason.

Johnson did say the important thing though.

Mr Johnson said the bill tackles deadly and debilitating diseases. “For people out there suffering from Parkinson’s disease and motor neurone disease, this is not a question of some issue about the procedure through the House of Commons,” he told BBC News 24. “This is an issue about whether we can find the drugs that can cure their illnesses. So this is the heart of the matter.”

Yeah it is. Footling nonsense about the dignity of pre-embryonic cells is not.

More reckless irresponsible callous pro-disease intervention from Catholic clerics and MPs.

The Government is braced for further criticism today when the Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor signals that Catholic MPs should vote against the legislation…“There are some aspects, not all, of this Bill for which I believe there ought to be a free vote because Catholics and others will want to vote according to their conscience.”

Catholics and others will want to vote ‘according to their conscience’ to reject medical research on frivolous willful sanctimonious trivial grounds. ‘According to their conscience’ means pretending to think a pre-embryonic cell is the exact equivalent of a developed human being – and they seem to be proud of this, rather than hotly ashamed, which is what they should be.

Former cabinet minister Stephen Byers:

On some of these issues, like whether we should allow the creation of human-animal hybrid embryos, I remain undecided. There is a strong case that can be made on both sides of the argument: On the one hand the desire to be able to tackle diseases like MS and Alzheimers, on the other hand respect for the dignity and sacredness of all human life.

The second one is not a strong case – it’s an absurdity. You might as well talk about respect for the dignity and sacredness of all human eyelashes, or dandruff, or spit. Does Stephen Byers stage a funeral when his dentist pulls one of his teeth? Does he collect the stuff the dental hygienist scrapes off his teeth and keep it in a little shrine? Dignity and sacredness bullshit – suffering is important, artificial pseudo-reverence for human cells is just self-flattery.

[T]he health minister Ben Bradshaw hit back at the bishops…Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions he said: “If it was about the things the cardinal referred to, creating babies for spare parts or raiding dead people’s tissue then there would be justification for a free vote. But it’s not about those things. He (Cardinal O’Brien) was wrong in fact, and I think rather intemperate and emotive in the way that he criticised this legislation. This is about using pre-embryonic cells to do research that has the potential to ease the suffering of millions of people in this country. The Government has taken a view that this is a good thing. The Government is absolutely right to try to push this through to the potential benefit of many people in this country.”

Suffering. Well you see suffering is not what they care about – what they care about is sacredness.

What was that that Dr. Mark Sawyer said?

“Most of these parents have never seen measles, and don’t realize it could be a bad disease so they turn their concerns to unfounded risks. They do not perceive risk of the disease but perceive risk of the vaccine.”

Yeah. Catholic clerics do something very similar and Catholic MPs follow suit. Cardinal Keith O’Brien, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh:

I believe that a greater challenge than that [man, woman, marriage, children – ed] even faces us – the possibility now facing our country is that animal-human embryos be produced with the excuse that perhaps certain diseases might find a cure from these resulting embryos.

The ‘excuse.’ Mark that. The ‘excuse’ that diseases might be cured as a result of embryo research – it’s just an excuse for researchers’ unholy desire to create embryos and then torture them or eat them or have sex with them or wear them as party favours in their hats. Or perhaps not. What does the archbishop think the real reason, as opposed to the excuse, is that researchers want to do research with embryos?

It is difficult to imagine a single piece of legislation which, more comprehensively, attacks the sanctity and dignity of human life than this particular bill. With full might of government endorsement, Gordon Brown is promoting a bill that will allow the creation of animal-human hybrid embryos…He is promoting a bill allowing scientists to create babies whose sole purpose will be to provide, without consent of anyone, parts of their organs or tissues.

No; not babies; of course not babies; obviously not babies; not babies, embryos. Bad archbishop. Tell the truth, archbishop.

This bill represents a monstrous attack on human rights, human dignity and human life.

Why? Why? Why? How? Why and how is this research an attack on human rights dignity and life? And what about the real, existing. sentient, conscious people who suffer from horrible diseases that could be cured with this research? Why does the archbishop worry about the insentient unconscious embryos instead of the real people with horrible diseases? He might as well worry about a fingernail clipping; it makes as much sense. Why does the archbishop worry about the wrong thing? Why does the archbishop huff and puff with moral outrage over the wrong thing? What is the matter with him? What is the matter with all of them? Why do they get it so backward, and make such a virtue of it?

Oh, so this is where ‘respect’ for ‘beliefs’ gets you.

While many parents meet deep resistance and even hostility from pediatricians when they choose to delay, space or reject vaccines, they are often able to find doctors who support their choice…“I don’t think it is such a critical public health issue that we should force parents into it,” Dr. Sears said. “I don’t lecture the parents or try to change their mind; if they flat out tell me they understand the risks I feel that I should be very respectful of their decision.”

Why? Why does Dr Sears feel he should be very respectful of parents’ stupid, misinformed, dangerous to their child and other children decision? What exactly is it about a decision of that kind that Dr Sears feels he should respect? Its selfishness? Its irresponsibility? Its lack of evidence? Its ignorance? Its cluelessness? What is there to respect? If the parents told him they let their child rollerskate on the freeway, would he respect that? Why respect a decision not to vaccinate?

In a highly unusual outbreak of measles here last month, 12 children fell ill; nine of them had not been inoculated against the virus because their parents objected…Every state allows medical exemptions, and most permit exemptions based on religious practices. But an increasing number of the vaccine skeptics belong to a different group — those who object to the inoculations because of their personal beliefs, often related to an unproven notion that vaccines are linked to autism and other disorders.

‘Personal beliefs’ that are not religious beliefs (which I don’t think should be ‘respected’ on medical issues anyway) but just plain old beliefs, and wrong ones at that. That’s a stupid reason for an exemption.

“The very success of immunizations has turned out to be an Achilles’ heel,” said Dr. Mark Sawyer, a pediatrician and infectious disease specialist at Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego. “Most of these parents have never seen measles, and don’t realize it could be a bad disease so they turn their concerns to unfounded risks. They do not perceive risk of the disease but perceive risk of the vaccine.”

They ignore the real risk and fret about the bogus one. And Dr Sears feels he should be very respectful of that. Whatever.

Interesting.The producer of ‘Expelled’ interviews Richard Dawkins, Eugenie Scott, and PZ Myers for his movie, having misled all of them into thinking it was a movie about the conflict between ID and science as opposed to a pro-ID movie. Then he throws PZ out of the theatre before a screening of the movie. (He would have thrown Dawkins out too, of course, had he recognized him there in the line with PZ, but he didn’t, which certainly makes a good joke.) First he interviews PZ for the movie, then he expels him from the theater before he has a chance to see the movie he is in. I think Mark Mathis needs to take a refresher course in PR.

There was one school of thought in 2006 that said the Danish cartoons were deliberate provocations, just as there was a school of thought in 1989 that said Salman Rushdie knew perfectly well he was being offensive in The Satanic Verses and more or less deserved whatever he got. Flemming Rose (the Jyllands Posten editor who commissioned the cartoons) says they were not. In reply to Wolf Blitzer’s question ‘Was it your intention when you asked for these 12 cartoons to provoke a response, to incite, if you will, a reaction among Muslims?’ he said

Of course not. I was focused on the question of self- censorship, and I did not pay much attention to the reactions of Muslims. But I recognize that in the aftermath, in this developing story, a lot of Muslims had expressed their grief and anger. And I’m apologizing for that. That was not my intention. But at the same time, I cannot apologize for the publication itself. I apologize for the feelings it has caused. But if I apologize for the publication, I thereby am saying that I have — we did not have the right to do this, that this was wrong. And as you said, we have behaved within the boundaries, both on Danish law and Danish customs, traditions of satire and humor. We did not transcend anything in terms of Danish culture, tradition and law.

Before that Blitzer asked him if, knowing what he knows now, he would do it again.

You know, these cartoons, they grew out of a concrete context. We had a story to cover, five, six cases of self-censorship. And we decided to cover it in an unusual way, by not telling it but showing it. But, in fact, I do not — I do not accept the premise of your question, and I think it is like asking a rape victim if she regrets wearing a short skirt at the discotheque Friday night.

Flemming Rose also wrote an article on the subject in the Washington Post.

Childish. Irresponsible. Hate speech. A provocation just for the sake of provocation. A PR stunt. Critics of 12 cartoons of the prophet Muhammad published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten have not minced their words. They say that freedom of expression does not imply an endorsement of insulting people’s religious feelings.

That was two years ago, but the same charges are still being recycled.

I commissioned the cartoons in response to several incidents of self-censorship in Europe caused by widening fears and feelings of intimidation in dealing with issues related to Islam. And I still believe that this is a topic that we Europeans must confront, challenging moderate Muslims to speak out. The idea wasn’t to provoke gratuitously — and we certainly didn’t intend to trigger violent demonstrations throughout the Muslim world. Our goal was simply to push back self-imposed limits on expression that seemed to be closing in tighter.

Is that a legitimate goal, or mere provocation for the sake of provocation? I would say it’s the first.

As a former correspondent in the Soviet Union, I am sensitive about calls for censorship on the grounds of insult. This is a popular trick of totalitarian movements: Label any critique or call for debate as an insult and punish the offenders.

Well exactly – label any critique an insult and thus illegitimate, and better yet, get compassionate people to take your part, and thus close down disagreement. It’s a good wheeze, and it works a lot more easily and more often than it should.

The editor of The Irish Catholic, Gary O’Sullivan, says ‘the Church should apologise to and seek forgiveness from people it has hurt.’ The Church? Hurt people? Oh surely not.

Commenting on Cardinal Seán Brady’s call on people to return to confession, Mr O’Sullivan warned that many feel it is the Church that needs repentance before they will darken its door again…Among the past wrongs he challenges the hierarchy to apologise for are frequent hellfire and brimstone sermons promoting a false God of fear and punishment, clericalism lacking any Gospel humility, and preaching about Limbo and the burden it placed on suffering mothers. Mr O’Sullivan wonders if the bishops will also apologise ‘for the way clerics spoke about sin and the unnecessary guilt it placed on people’s shoulders, the excessive piety which allowed a rich and rational faith to descend into folk religion and superstition, or for turning a blind eye to corruption among politicians and the elite of our society while excessively concentrating on the minor infractions of the poor’.

What I keep saying. It’s not just the horrible physical abuse, it’s the foul sadistic mental torture, the threatening and frightening and consigning. Bad, bad, very bad.

How religion makes people better.

The chairman of the Yesha rabbinical council and chief rabbi of Kiryat Arba, Rabbi Dov Lior, on Wednesday issued a halakhic ruling stating that it is forbidden by Jewish law to employ Arabs or rent homes to them…Lior said that “since this is a matter of endangering souls, it is clear that it is completely forbidden to employ them and rent houses to them in Israel. Their employment is forbidden not only at yeshivas, but at factories, hotels and everywhere.”

Ah well if it’s a matter of endangering souls, then there’s no more to be said. Clever of this god fella to have created good people and bad people and to have told the good people not to employ or rent homes to the bad people – clever of him to have created a set of people to be mistreated by another set of people. Nice arrangement. Pleasant. Amiable. Kind-hearted.

And what was that about Oradour again…?

Recently, several rabbis led by Rabbi Lior have issued a precedent setting halakhic ruling that Israel must shoot civilian populations in areas from whence attacks on Jewish communities originate.

Oh right; that was it.

Attorney Einat Horvitz from the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism said in response to the interview that “we view with great concern the wave of calls against Arabs since the terrible terror attack. This is an ever growing phenomenon of racist incitement that distorts Judaism and is also illegal. We call upon the attorney general to shake off his apathy and take action to enforce the laws that prohibit these calls.”

Best of luck with that.

So, another industrial school. How sweet.

Haut de la Garenne has a darker past. It opened in 1867 as an industrial school for young people of the lower classes and neglected children…The gruesome secrets escaping its imposing stone walls today are ugly and deeply disturbing: stories of beatings, rape, torture, imprisonment of children…The prison-style solitary confinement cells contained just a bed and a potty. Le Monnier, 43, says: “It made you feel depressed, lonely and degraded.”…Turner recalls being hit over the head with pillows filled with boots and shoes. “You’d go to bed and pow, they’d get you,” Turner says. “Times change. It was acceptable back then. It wasn’t just me, it was a lot of the children, most of the children.”

That’s just the impression you get from Goldenbridge, from the testimony of the nuns as well as that of the children – it was acceptable back then. It’s scary to contemplate the kinds of things that have been acceptable in the past.

Former victims say they were chained and physically abused in underground cellars. Based on this information police began searching Haut de la Garenne. Human bloodstains, a pair of shackles and a large concrete bath were discovered in a bricked-up cellar last month. Officers reportedly found a message scrawled on a wall saying: “I’ve been bad for years and years.” Police also discovered part of a child’s skull together with a girl’s hair clasp, a button and a piece of fabric buried in a stairwell. Jersey’s deputy police chief Lenny Harper, the officer in charge of the inquiry, says the discovery of a trapdoor into the cellar corroborates what victims told police. It leads down into a complex of at least four cellars.

Oh, Christ. And the former victims are being threatened, and corrupt cops and pols are trying to discredit the inquiry.

“There is no doubt allegations were made by children in the past and they were simply not dealt with the way they should have been; that includes the police, the social services and everyone else.”

That’s Haut de la Garenne.

A little more on Yelena Shesternina.

Jyllands-Posten, a little-known Danish newspaper, managed to cause an uproar in the whole world with just one publication. Its cartoons depicting Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) offended 1.5 billion people. Islamic traditions prohibit the publication of any images of people, not to mention the prophet. As a result, massive protests swept the Muslim world, and in some countries Western diplomats had to go home within 24 hours…About 50 people fell victim to pogroms and demonstrations.

Wrong. She has her facts wrong. She left out several very important points, points which make her ‘argument’ look ridiculous. J-P did not manage to cause an uproar in the whole world with just one publication or to offend 1.5 billion people. It took the protests by the OIC and then, months later, the road show of the imams with the three extra cartoons including the fake one of a guy in a pig snout to do that. It took all that before ‘massive protests swept the Muslim world’ and people were killed. It’s amazing how many people get all this completely wrong. It’s extraordinary how many people get it all wrong and on the basis of a fundamental misunderstanding of what happened, scold the cartoonists for getting people killed over a mere nose-thumbing joke, while saying not a word about the energetic malice and trickery of the imams. It’s almost as if they think the imams are not such bad guys while the cartoonists are deplorable.

Shesternina of course also doesn’t say a word about the plot to murder Kurt Westergaard. I think that’s a tad deplorable.

Consider Oradour. 642 people were murdered by a German battallion there on June 10 1944, after Sturmbannführer Adolf Diekmann was told that a German officer was being held by the Resistance in Oradour (in Oradour-sur-Vayres, that is, which is not Oradour-sur-Glane; it was the latter that got it in the neck).

[T]he Wehrmacht regarded members of all resistance movements as guerilla terrorists who would strike quickly before merging back into civilian life. As such, reprisals were indiscriminately violent. Oradour, indeed, was not the only collective punishment reprisal action committed by German troops: other well-documented examples include the Soviet village of Kortelisy (in what is now Ukraine), the Czechoslovakian villages of Ležáky and Lidice (in what is now the Czech Republic), the Dutch village of Putten, Serbian towns of Kragujevac and Kraljevo and the Italian villages of Sant’Anna di Stazzema and Marzabotto. Furthermore, the German troops executed hostages (random or selected in suspect groups) throughout France as a deterrent.

So. There’s clearly a moral quandary here if you’re in the Resistance (and presumably if you’re not in the official Resistance but you help it when the occasion offers). You know with certainty that your activities put random guiltless people at risk. You know with certainty that any real success you have will result in anguish for a lot of people who are not the aggressors but the bystanders; in death for some and grief for others. Everything you do as part of the maquis has a high moral cost.

Of course, it’s also true that doing nothing has a high moral cost too. If you do nothing and the Germans win, the outcome will not be an end to the killing of innocents. You’re in a situation in which anything you do has a high moral cost. You’re in a nightmare.

So the Resistance in some sense is responsible for the collective punishment of other people. But in what sense? Is it responsible in the same way, albeit to a lesser degree, as the Wehrmacht? Or is it responsible in some different way. Does it make a difference who is doing what to whom, and for what reasons, and in what context? It seems to.

Try a thought experiment. Suppose a newspaper publishes some satirical cartoons about neo-Nazism, the BNP, and other far-right nationalist and/or anti-Semitic groups. One cartoon has Hitler wearing a military cap in the shape of a crematorium labeled Auschwitz, with smoke rising out of it. Nothing much happens, then after a few months a couple of neo-Nazis travel around Europe with the cartoons plus three new ones, one of which is Hitler in drag being sodomized by a donkey – no, by a Jewish donkey. The neo-Nazis show this collection to other neo-Nazis, and with persistent effort get them worked up enough to go out into the streets and cause riots. Some people are killed in the riots. Death threats are made against the cartoonists. A group of neo-Nazis is arrested for plotting to murder the cartoonist who drew the Hitler cartoon; the cartoonist and his wife are forced to leave their home, then told to leave the hotel they move to; the cartoonist’s wife is told to stay away from her job at a kindergarten.

Would you say that the cartoonists put other people at risk by drawing the cartoons? Would you call the cartoons trivial exercises of the right to free speech? Would you say the deaths were predictable and that the cartoonists’ action led to the deaths and therefore they are accountable? Would you say it’s not precisely as if they had done that thing, but the weight of it is on their shoulders? Would you point out that the vast majority of people think neo-Nazis are violent people, that that’s just conventional wisdom, and that the cartoons just reinforce it, instead of saying something brave and new and eye-opening? Or would you think that we don’t want neo-Nazis telling us what we can and can’t draw, can and can’t publish, can and can’t laugh at? Would you think that the neo-Nazis who worked people up to rioting and the rioters themselves were to blame while the cartoonists were not, on the grounds that the cartoonists had in fact done nothing wrong? Would you cringe at the very idea of blaming the cartoonists?

Yelena Shesternina in the Kuwait Times gives us all a damn good scolding.

Far from everyone in the West has learned a lesson from the first cartoon war in 2005, when Jyllands-Posten, a little-known Danish newspaper, managed to cause an uproar in the whole world with just one publication. Its cartoons depicting Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) offended 1.5 billion people. Islamic traditions prohibit the publication of any images of people, not to mention the prophet.

What lesson was everyone in the West supposed to learn from the first ‘cartoon war,’ do you suppose? That if some people decide to over-react in a deranged, disproportionate, violent, and unpredictable manner, then all the rest of us should thenceforth be afraid to say anything about anything, and act accordingly?

And then…what are we supposed to do about the fact (if it is a fact) that ‘Islamic traditions prohibit the publication of any images of people’? Close down all publication of images of people anywhere in the world? But lots of traditions prohibit lots of things (some of which necessarily contradict each other); are we all supposed to obey all of them? If so we might as well be newts, or toadstools. There’s no point in having a mind if you’re forbidden to use it.

It is time for the politically correct Europe to come to its senses and stop defending its democratic principles at all costs. The value of human life overrides any liberties, even freedom of expression. If the ultranationalist shows his movie, there may be dozens of victims (I’m not talking about his life). Or are the Europeans ready to sacrifice dozens of Muslim lives so that Wilders can enjoy freedom of expression?

So…if the ultranationalist shows his movie, dozens of Muslims will be killed? Why would that be? Why would it be Muslims who would be killed? Is Shesternina trying to imply that the movie will inspire people to rush out and kill dozens of Muslims? Maybe so – at the beginning of her piece she said that ‘About 50 people fell victim to pogroms and demonstrations’ – without saying ‘pogroms’ by whom against whom. Maybe she wanted to make us think there were ‘pogroms’ of Muslims by non-Muslims – but that’s not what happened. So what exactly is the causal mechanism that will result in dozens of Muslims being killed as a result of Wilders’s free expression? She doesn’t say. No; she just says pc Europe has to come to its senses and stop defending its democratic principles at all costs. Well what a pretty thought. Overboard with the democratic principles, because Islamic traditions prohibit the publication of any images of people. Understood?

Well I learned something new today.

Abstinence-only education funding has a long history of bipartisan support. There are three ways that the programs are funded in the United States…CBAE has the most stringent rules. To receive money from the fund, a sexual-education program must teach an eight-point set of guidelines, which include lessons such as: “Sexual activity outside the context of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects.”

That’s the something new that I learned – I was unaware that sexual activity outside the context of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects. Were you aware of that? Is it common knowledge?

Well to tell the truth I have to admit that I still don’t know it. Sexual activity outside the context of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological effects? That it would not be likely to have inside the context of marriage? Is it? Like what? And what is it about marriage that prevents such effects? Or does it prevent them? Are the nice people at CBAE just not telling us that sexual activity inside the context of marriage is just as likely to have harmful psychological effects? Or more likely? Are they being tricky?

Who knows. Therefore, to be on the safe side – rent a movie instead.

Remember I told you about that Women’s Studies list I subscribe to? This week there’s been a busy discussion of ‘spirituality’ – but without ever bothering to actually say what that is. That makes for an extremely peculiar discussion, when people chat away about something that seems to change shape dramatically for each person. On Monday, after quite a few of these shape-shifting discussions, I asked what it meant. I got an answer, too.

I think that there are multiple definitions of “spirituality.” While
some might define it as religion by another name, others see it as
quite different from organized religions, or even belief in “higher
powers.” I would argue that spirituality & religion can be quite
different. Anzaldua’s theory of spiritual activism offers an
important alternative to religious spirituality, as do holistic
perspectives and social-justice theories of interconnectivity.

Then several book titles, concluding with ‘Interconnectivity is key.’ I had no more idea what the word meant than I had had before. For two days I read more messages that were along the same lines. Then there was one yesterday…

Spiritual practitioners can be activists: activist mysticism, activist prophecy.
Spirituality can be practiced by oneself and in community–chanting, praying;
speaking in private and in public, writing and publishing from a position that
promotes love, justice, and joy. And, very importantly, not simply talking the
talk but walking the walk, in other words, being a spiritual activist in every
moment of one’s life. This requires a soul-and-mind-inseparable-from-body
consciousness: it extends beyond intellectual concepts, beyond any kind of body
work, any regular attendance at a temple, church, or mosque.
Soul-and-mind-inseparable-from-body is a term that I use throughout my writing,
which is spiritual, intellectual, erotic, and very much of and from the body.

And I couldn’t contain myself any longer, I had to ask again, at more length.

So what exactly is spirituality? It seems to be more or less everything. It’s chanting, it’s praying, it’s speaking in private and in public, it’s writing and publishing from a position that promotes love, justice, and joy. What exactly is it about all those activities that makes them spiritual? And what is it that being spiritual makes them? Being a spiritual activist extends beyond intellectual concepts, beyond any kind of body work, any regular attendance at a temple, church, or mosque…so it’s everything and at the same time it’s beyond everything. How does it manage that? And what, exactly, is it? What is it for writing to be spiritual, intellectual, erotic, and very much of and from the body?

What does it mean to be a mystic in the world, what does it mean to be at once a social and a spiritual activist? In what sense are human beings divine? What does it mean to be numinous? What does ‘to be human is to be numinous’ mean?

It all sounds very resonant and deep, but it seems to have no actual meaning at all.

I can’t help thinking that feminism needs rigor a lot more than it needs hand-waving about spirituality. It’s so easy to dismiss women if they get identified with woolly empty pretty feel-good verbiage.

There was an attempt…

Anyway, if “spiritual” generally has any meaning, I think it’s often used
something like this: a transcending of the self in its narrowest, most
egotistical manifestations — fear, selfishness, delusion, alienation from
oneself, from others and from the universe.”Spirituality” might involve a
certain metaphysics, or at least metaphysics of the person. Or it might be
understood more psychologically.

There was also another list of books. So this morning I replied:

I have to say – from everything I’ve seen so far, it appears that no one knows what it is. Certainly no one has said what it is. If it takes a *whole book* to say what it is, maybe it’s not a very useful term? Maybe it’s just feel-good fuzz? If a term is useful, it’s generally possible to define it (in under 60,000 words). If a term can’t be defined, can it really do anything other than obfuscate?

That inspired a retort (perhaps the clearest thing said in the whole discussion).

Maybe it depends. Maybe the term is useful for
some people but not for others. (While for some,
the term “spirituality” might obfuscate, for
others, the term might really resonate.) I would
suggest that part of spirituality’s definition is
its slippery nature, its inability to be easily
pinned down and neatly defined.

Well that’s all very well, but the trouble is, these people are academics. They teach, in universities; their subject is an academic discipline; yet they feel quite cheerful about using words that mean everything and nothing, and they make a virtue of vagueness. And not only are they academics, they are feminist academics. Fucking hell. How did academic feminism get turned into Advanced Wool-gathering? Why do feminists think it’s feminist to make a parade of refusing to think?

It’s enough to make one despair.

And from another front on the ‘shut up about religion’ campaign, there is the Organisation of the Islamic Conference and its efforts to get everyone in the whole world to respect Islam.

Islamic states are bidding to use the United Nations to limit freedom of expression and belief around the world, the global humanist body IHEU told the U.N.’s Human Rights Council on Wednesday…[T]he IHEU said the 57 members of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) were also aiming to undermine the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights…Ambeyi Ligabo, a Kenyan jurist, said in a report to the Council limitations on freedom of expression in international rights pacts “are not designed to protect belief systems from external or internal criticism.” But this argument is rejected by Islamic states, who say outright criticism – and especially lampooning – of religion violates the rights of believers to enjoy respect. The IHEU statement and Ligabo’s report came against the background of mounting success by the OIC…in achieving passage of U.N. resolutions against “defamation of religions.”

The rights of believers to enjoy respect – the new rights of the 21st century. The ones that make no sense, the ones that inherently contradict themselves, the ones that make all the real rights impossible, the ones that undermine themselves more the more they succeed. We respect people who can bear disagreement, we don’t respect petulant bedwetters who demand protection from disagreement. Well done OIC, making it clearer and clearer with every ‘success’ why Islam is so undeserving of respect.

Another bishop heard from.

The Rt Rev Patrick O’Donoghue, Bishop of Lancaster, told MPs that books critical of the Catholic faith should be banned from school libraries…Fiona McTaggart, the Labour MP for Slough, said she was extremely concerned that Catholic sixth-formers would be denied access to great works of fiction as well as non-fiction if the bishop’s ban were implemented…But Bishop O’Donoghue defended his stance. “I think there has to be a vetting of material given the age range of children in schools,” he said. “There is certain material that you do not put in front of them.”

Such as for instance books critical of the Catholic ‘faith.’ You don’t put those in front of children in schools; God no; in front of them you put books uncritical of the Catholic ‘faith.’ Because why? Because you want them to be indoctrinated in the Catholic ‘faith,’ that’s why. You want schools to be an arm of The Church, not educational institutions where people learn to think critically.

Does the BBC call in someone from the MCB to write some of its news articles, or what?

The Danish cartoonist behind drawings satirising the Prophet Muhammad has urged a Dutch lawmaker to air an anti-Islam film despite Muslim outrage…Mr Westergaard’s cartoons in a Danish paper triggered riots by Muslims in many countries in 2006.

Where to begin? Kurt Westergaard wasn’t ‘behind’ all the Motoons; he drew one of them, that’s all. And there’s the unqualifed censoriousness of ‘anti-Islam film’ – the silent but obtrusive assumption that Islam should be immune from opposition. And then the usual, indeed obligatory, distortion in which the cartoons ‘triggered riots’ as if the cartoons were to blame, along with the repetition of the claim that the cartoons, plural, were Westergaard’s work. And then there’s the absence of any mention of the fact that Westergaard is under active death threat. Look at the article, look how far down the page you have to go before that little item is mentioned. Damn near the end, that’s how far. Long before you get to that, you get to more unsubtle blaming of Westergaard for drawing a cartoon.

Mr Westergaard was one of 12 cartoonists behind the Prophet Muhammad drawings, but he was responsible for what was considered the most controversial of the pictures. The caricature – originally published in the Jyllands-Posten newspaper in 2005 – featured the head of Islam’s holiest prophet with a turban depicting a bomb with a lit fuse.

Islam’s holiest prophet. Got that? The BBC wouldn’t want you to miss the point, now – this was Islam’s holiest prophet that this terrible Danish fella drew a cartoon about. Not just any old prophet, but Islam’s holiest prophet. Is your skin crawling? Is your hair standing on end? Are you flushing with rage?

The cartoons were later reprinted by more than 50 newspapers, triggering protests in parts of the Muslim world in 2006.

That ‘trigger’ word again – twice in one article. You do get it, right? It’s the cartoons’ fault, and the more than 50 newspapers’ fault. No mention – I repeat, no mention – of the Danish mullahs who trotted the cartoons around various Middle Eastern countries, doing their large bit to ‘trigger’ things; no mention – not a word – about the fake ‘cartoon’ with the pig snout, which probably did more to ‘trigger’ things than the 12 cartoonists and all of Denmark combined. It was the mullahs themselves who put that cartoon in – but they don’t come in for all this scolding and glowering from the BBC. Why not? Why is the BBC in such a hurry to wag its nasty inky finger at Westergaard while letting the mullahs completely off the hook?

Christian Jago (potentilla) died this morning. I’ve been missing her steadily since she got too ill to talk with us any more. Her brisk clarity and bluntness were a regular tonic (as the saying goes). Jean has a post at Talking Philosophy with several quotes. Here’s one that I found over here. (The database has 139, which seems like a kind of wealth.)

Connections between Rod Liddle’s opinions and logically defensible positions are largely random, IMHO. So saying he got this one right is very charitable of you, Ophelia! As TG points out above, he is a kind of auto-contrarian. (Also a churchgoer, if that’s relevant).

And here’s another…which is very apt. I did an uncharacteristic (soppy) post when Hansa, the young elephant, died suddenly last June. I was an elephant keeper at that zoo for a couple of years, and I knew Hansa’s mother and the rest of her herd very well; it was heartbreaking when she died. There are forty very kind comments on that thread – and Christian’s is the first. I ended the post by saying “I heard of a headstone inscription on the radio once: ‘It is a fearful thing to love that which death can touch.’ It is.” Christian’s reply, in its entirety, was:

It is. But ‘better to have loved and lost……” Commiserations.

Indeed, Christian. Much better. Adios, amiga.