This sounds like a fun moment, doesn’t it? An East End Sainsbury’s, staffed mostly by Bangladeshis.

A young Asian checkout operator, with pious beard and a crocheted Kufi Muslim skullcap, made a big deal out of serving a middle-aged white man who had included a bottle of vodka in his groceries. His wasn’t a discreet arm wave for the attention of a supervisor, it was a full-on hissy fit. At the sight of the vodka bottle he reared from his seat as if the conveyer had presented a freshly slaughtered pig’s head….The customer…was having none of it though. “What the bleedin’ ‘ell are you working in a supermarket for if you won’t handle booze?” he shouted, setting the queue to Defcon Two on the London racial tension scale…The hothead till worker’s protest was more testosterone than Taliban but he succeeded in making his point, loudly, in front of 18 female Muslim staff who won’t let their religion bother their job.

More testosterone than Taliban…that’s an interesting way of putting it. I have a feeling that’s a distinction without a difference. Taliban is testosterone, and vice versa. Taliban is all about men bullying women and telling them what to do and telling them they’re filthy and sexual and shameful, defective and wrong and above all subordinate – above all subject to being told what to do by anyone and everyone except themselves. The very first thing Islamists do when they get power is to start telling women what to do. They give one a nasty sense of the world being full of men wandering around fuming at how out of control women are.

Sainsbury’s, “keen to accommodate the religious beliefs of all staff”, now allows Muslim workers who object to alcohol on religious grounds to have a colleague take their place. The company didn’t see that such cack-handed posturing does Islam no favours, reinforcing a perception of an intolerant and unbending religion, which is not, I believe, where the majority of British Muslims are. Worse still is the atmosphere it creates within its own workforce. The craven attitude of Sainsbury’s creates a space the religious fanatics will use to bully their mostly female fellow workers, arguing they are not good Muslims if they choose to serve alcohol when they have the option not to.

Why isn’t Sainsbury’s keen to accomodate the religious or non-religious beliefs of people who want to buy one of the items on sale without any hassle or delay or display of shock-horror from some self-righteous bully at the till? And at that rate, what next? Muslim clerks in Waterstone’s allowed to refuse to sell atheist books or books by women or gays? Bus drivers allowed to refuse to let women on the buses? Muslim teachers in state schools allowed to refuse to teach girls?

Women women women – gotta keep them down, you know. If you don’t – sooner or later, they get up, and that won’t do.

Make sure they don’t go to school, and do it by threatening or killing them.

Buildings of two girls schools in the Kabal area of Swat were damaged by a powerful blast on the night of September 29th. Witnesses told Dawn that militants, who have been targeting women’s educational institutions for a couple of weeks, had planted an explosive device in the Government Girls’ High School…Recently, a string of explosions damaged some schools, including the Government Girls’ High School in Matta and the Government Girls Primary School in the Bedara area. An explosive device planted in the Government Girls High School in Qambar was defused by police a few days ago. Students of girls schools are in a state of fear and in some cases people have stopped sending their daughters to schools.

Kill the women who try to teach them, too – kill two birds with one stone. Haw haw haw, that’s a good one! Two birds, geddit? Two birds; killed; haw.

Almost all the girl schools at Lakaro sub-division of Mohmand Agency remained closed on Monday after the killing of one lady teacher by unknown miscreants and inability of the political administration to provide security to women staffers in the wake of threats to them…Some ten days ago the girl schools in Lakaro had received threatening letters from local Taliban warning them to avoid coming to school. Later, they were asked to perform their duties clad in Burqas. Majority of the teachers stopped performing their duties and the schools remained closed…However, the political authorities ignored the threats and avoided taking security measures for protection of the female teachers, which resulted in the tragic killing of one teacher, Khatoon Bibi, resident of Utmanzai, Charsadda.

Khatoon Bibi. Another martyr for education and women’s access to education. There are a lot of them. I hate the word ‘martyr’ because of all the revolting slobber about ‘martyrs’ who murder random people in buses and restaurants; but murdered teachers are genuine martyrs. We’ll miss you, Khatoon Bibi; the girls of Utmanzai and Ghazi Beg will miss you.

Hundreds of women staged a protest in front of the agency education office in Mohmand Agency headquarters Ghalanai on Monday against the threats received by female teachers in the area…The boycott of women teachers meant many schools in Safi, Haleemzai, and Khuvezai tehsils were closed…The administrations of eight schools in Aka Maroof and Sartilgram union councils have closed their schools for an indefinite period following a bomb attack on a girls’ higher secondary school in the Kabal area of Swat…Separately, around 100 people carrying weapons marched in Kabal bazaar and forcibly entered houses to bar residents from playing music. They warned the residents not to play music or they would break their television sets, radios and music players. They asked the residents to cooperate in rooting out “obscenity” from the area.

And since they were carrying weapons, I don’t suppose the residents felt able to reply ‘If rooting obscenity out of the area is your goal, obviously the first (and last) thing you should do is to remove yourselves.’

How very liberal.

Islam does judge actions. It tells Muslims that homosexuality is wrong, that stealing is wrong, that killing is wrong and that judging others is also wrong. But nowhere does it say that a homosexual or a thief or a murderer should be treated as anything less than a human being. What Muslims have done is mix the Islamic condemnation of actions with the person who has carried them out. This creates hatred and animosity – two feelings that Islam condemns.

Homosexuality is ‘wrong’ the way stealing is wrong and killing is wrong, because Islam ‘tells Muslims’ so. If Islam ‘tells Muslims’ that eating peaches, watching sunsets, sneezing, and reading poetry are wrong, will that mean they are wrong? Is it possible to have better reasons for thinking something is either wrong or not wrong than the fact that Islam ‘tells Muslims’ so? Would it be helpful if something told Abdurrahman al-Shayyal that treating homosexuality as comparable to murder is wrong? Would it be useful if something gave him the idea that command morality is only as good as the commands are?

Reason talks to Flemming Rose.

I am going to write a book about the cartoon crisis and I am going to compare the experience of the dissidents in the Soviet Union to what has happened to people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Ibn Warraq, Salman Rushdie and Irshad Manji.

Threat threat threat threat threat – that’s what’s happened to them, and to a lot of other people. Often the threat has been carried out.

reason: Were you surprised by the reaction of those who argued not for unfettered free speech, but “responsible speech?”

Rose: Well, no. I think many people betrayed their own ideals. The history of the left, for instance, is a history of confronting authority – be it religious or political authority – and always challenging religious symbols and figures. In this case, they failed miserably. I think the left is in a deep crisis in Europe because of their lack of willingness to confront the racist ideology of Islamism. They somehow view the Koran as a new version of Das Kapital and are willing to ignore everything else, as long as they continue to see the Muslims of Europe as a new proletariat.

Somehow indeed – the discrepancy between the two K books is large.

Last year, I visited Bernard Lewis at Princeton and he told me: “Your case in unique in a historical sense. Never before in modern times, on such a scale, have Muslims insisted upon applying Islamic law to what non-Muslims are doing in non-Muslim country. It has never happened before. And you can’t really compare the Rushdie affair, because he was perceived to be an apostate.”…Those people who say, “you offended one billion people,” or “you offended a weak minority,” they lack the understanding of the raw power game that was at play here…Naser Khader, a Danish parliamentarian who was very supportive of me and stood up in parliament and said “I am very offended by those who insist on an apology to one billion Muslims, because I am not offended by these cartoons.” But, he said, I am offended by being lumped into this grey mass of “one billion Muslims.”

Exactly. Imagine being a Muslim, and having everyone think you’re such a baby that you get offended that easily. (I’m a baby, I get offended very easily, so I know what it’s like!)

I think Manuel Barraso, who has a background in an authoritarian regime, understood the situation better than others, like, for instance, Tony Blair and Jack Straw, who behaved disastrously…A lot of governments and opinion makers in Europe and the West were driving this line that we have offended one billion people and we should be ashamed of ourselves, free speech and but responsible speech… all this crap…But what really bothers me today—and this hasn’t been reported very widely—is that right after the cartoon crisis, the Organization of the Islamic Conference at the United Nations sponsored a resolution condemning the “ridiculing of religion.” It didn’t pass, but in March of this year the United Nations Human Rights Council, which is the highest international body in the world for the protection of human rights, passed a resolution condoning state punishment of people criticizing religion…[C]ountries like Russia, Mexico and China supported the resolution. And in this resolution, they call on governments to pass laws or write provisions into their constitutions forbidding criticism of religion. This would give a free hand to authoritarian regimes around the world to clamp down on dissidents.

Damn right, as well as to clamp down on all disagreement with religion, which would be global theocracy with a vengeance.

Mitchell Cohen in Dissent.

The left everywhere ought to be identified with both tolerance (this has not always been so) and with critical intelligence – the latter often means challenging religious precepts, ambitions and institutionalized power. The hard thing is to balance the tolerance and the criticism, to insist on pluralism but not to allow religion to privilege itself in the public realm. The left should always want people to think for themselves, but this cannot mean “you must be secular like me” since it also should not mean “you must be religious like me.”

That last sentence isn’t right. ‘Secular’ doesn’t mean not religious, it means not theocratic. Wanting people to think for themselves pretty much does mean ‘you must be not theocratic’ because theocracy is the end of thinking for oneself. Theocracy is about obedience and submission, and that’s not compatible with valuing thinking for oneself. You could change ‘secular’ to ‘atheist’ in that sentence, but then you would want to wonder why it’s a matter of ‘must’ rather than ‘should.’ Cohen is presumably talking about political persuasion and discourse, in which case, it seems unreasonable to say ‘this cannot mean “you should be atheist”‘ because political persuasion and discourse is all about shoulds; but it seems downright absurd to say ‘this cannot mean “you must be atheist”‘ because who would say that anyway and what would be the point?

This is an interview, so perhaps he just chose his words hastily – but all the same, we have to be careful not to concede too much. We do get to say ‘you must be secular’ and we do get to say ‘you should be atheist’; neither is illegitimate or comparable to saying ‘you must be religious.’

we cannot say often enough today that the modern liberal state was an act against civil wars created by societies dominated by religion; it is only as the domination of the public realm by religion ends that open, liberal, and social democratic (or socialist, if you prefer) societies become possible. When religious movements are triumphalist, when they believe that they can assert themselves inexorably in the public realm, liberal and social democratic values are jeopardized.

Exactly; that’s why we do get to say ‘you must be secular.’ It’s a precondition, like the First Amendment.

If I express my secular humanist ideas publicly, if I try to persuade fellow citizens of them, I must be open to criticism…But what happens when religious-political claims are open to the same challenge? If a Muslim friend, on the basis of his profound religious convictions, makes an argument for a law that is to govern me, shall I challenge his belief in Muhammad’s prophetic role? Anyone who knows some history knows it is likely to lead to religious wars. The alternative is to ask him (or her) to secularize the principles of argument.

As above. Expecting people to be secular does not entail expecting them not to be religious.

I am struck at how parts of the extreme left apologize for Islamic extremism in ways reminiscent of how an earlier generation found ways to apologize for Stalinism. The objects excused are different but the patterns of apologetics are sadly similar. It shows that there really is something I once called ‘the left that doesn’t learn.’ But there are others – liberals and conservatives – who haven’t learned either, or who suffer memory lapse when it comes to all the persecutions and religious wars in the fabric of Western history and seem to forget the historical importance of the domestication of religion within a liberal democratic framework. There has been excessive indulgence of aggressive political religiosity, whether it is the self-righteous Christian right in the U.S., belligerent political Islamism in the Mideast and beyond, or the fanatical religious nationalism of the Israeli settler movements.

So he’s pretty much saying ‘you must be secular’ (and not at all saying ‘you should be atheist’). That one sentence must have been an aberration.

Did Ian Buruma write this in ten minutes, or what? It’s all over the place.

It has become fashionable in certain smart circles to regard atheism as a sign of superior education, of highly evolved civilization, of enlightenment. Recent bestsellers by Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and others suggest that religious faith is a sign of backwardness…

Oh get over it for Christ’s sake. Is there no end to the market for people complaining about this overwhelming flood of atheist books that add up to all of five which is as a grain of sand to a beach compared to the flood of theist bestsellers? There certainly doesn’t seem to be. Is this the top item in The Lazy Editor’s Handbook or what? ‘If nothing else occurs, get some windbag to have a tantrum about the uncontrollable torrent of atheist bestsellers.’

Can religion also be a force for good? asks Buruma, dopily. Noooo – religion can never ever ever be a force for good, not nohow. Duh. Of course it can – we don’t need to be told that ‘sometimes religion can be a force for good’ – we know that.

But it’s too late, Buruma has to tell us.

[W]atching Burmese monks on television defying the security forces of one of the world’s most oppressive regimes, it is hard not to see some merit in religious belief.

You don’t say. And watching Saudi religious police send schoolgirls back into a fire to burn to death because they’re not ‘dressed properly,’ it is hard not to see some merit in atheism. So what?

[T]he monks and nuns took the first step; they dared to protest when most others had given up. And they did so with the moral authority of their Buddhist faith. Romantics might say that Buddhism is unlike other religions, more a philosophy than a faith. But this would be untrue. It has been a religion in different parts of Asia for many centuries, and can be used to justify violent acts as much as any other belief. For evidence, one need only look at Sri Lanka, where Buddhism is lashed onto ethnic chauvinism in the civil war between Buddhist Singhalese and Hindu Tamils.

Um, okay, but I thought you were saying religion is sometimes a force for good? What’s the subject again?

[T]he moral power of religious faith does not need a supernatural explanation. Its strength is belief itself, in a moral order that defies secular or indeed religious dictators. Active resisters to the Nazis during World War II were often devout Christians. Some sheltered Jews, despite their own prejudices against the Jews, simply because they saw it as their religious duty. Faith does not have to be in a supernatural being. The Nazis were resisted with equal tenacity by men and women who found strength in their belief in communism.

Oh, okay, so you’re not talking about religion after all, you’re talking about belief, including belief in communism? Only, I thought you were talking about religion, because that’s what you said at the beginning.

Despite the horrific violence of Islamist fanatics, it should not be forgotten that the mosque too can be a legitimate basis for resistance against the mostly secular dictatorships in the Middle East today. In a world of political oppression and moral corruption, religious values offer an alternative moral universe. This alternative is not necessarily more democratic, but it can be.

Or not. Usually not. So your point is…?

Nevertheless, faith has an important role to play in politics, especially in circumstances in which secular liberals are rendered impotent, as in the case of Nazi occupation, communist rule or military dictatorship.

Oh, man – now I’m really confused.

Liberals are most needed when compromises have to be made, but not as useful when faced with brute force. That is when visionaries, romantics and true believers are driven by their beliefs to take risks that most of us would regard as foolhardy. It is, on the whole, not beneficial to be ruled by such heroes, but it is good to have them around when we need them.

Yes no doubt, but you were talking about religion, remember? Remember the beginning of your article? It’s not that long – you could have checked back once or twice while you were writing it. You started out with a dopy whinge about atheist bestsellers #17,985, then you asked if religion can sometimes be a force for good. How did you end up with romantics and heroes?

Dang – I wish I’d been Buruma’s editor for that piece; I would have thrown it back and told him to re-write it. Actually, I would have just said No thanks; it’s banal at best and incoherent at worst. Try harder next time.

Funny what a hard time people have getting this.

Oddly, some of the people commenting on the UCU decision on the Engage website have expressed disappointment that the boycott proposal has been defeated through legal means rather than by a popular union ballot. This is a puzzling response. The Jim Crow laws in the United States were overturned in the 1950s and 1960s through Supreme Court decisions and civil rights legislation, rather than by popular referendums in southern American states. The civil rights movement did not attempt to argue with segregationists to give up their misguided commitment to discriminatory practices. It invoked legal authority in order to compel them to respect the human rights of African Americans. In a liberal democracy the rights of individuals and minorities against racist exclusion are ensured by legal guarantee. They do not depend upon the consent of groups who refuse to acknowledge these rights as indefeasibly binding.

In fact it’s not so much funny as alarming. The more people don’t get that, the more at risk we all are – unless we can be absolutely sure we’re not a member of any possible minority at all; and who can be absolutely sure of that? And anyway we’d still be at risk, because we’d be at risk of persecuting other people, which is hardly an improvement on being persecuted oneself.

It’s so basic. Democracy is not the same thing as justice or human rights or fairness or equal treatment or compassion or anything like that. It doesn’t imply them or presuppose them or (necessarily) bring them about. The majority is not always or automatically right, and it’s certainly not always fair or merciful or scrupulous. Sometimes laws are better than the popular will – that’s one reason laws exist.

I’ve found Giles Fraser irritatingly woolly in the past, but he’s not woolly on the subject of the Anglican cop-out. He’s very sheared indeed. Nary a punch is pulled.

The deal that the archbishop has brokered with the Episcopal church in New Orleans protects the unity of the church by persuading US bishops that the church is more important than justice…For all the high-sounding rhetoric about how much they value gay people, the church has once again purchased its togetherness by excluding the outsider…OK, so no one has died here…[O]ught we not to get a bit more perspective? No: the struggle for the full inclusion of lesbian and gay people in the life of the church is a frontline battle in the war against global religious fascism. Robert Mugabe has called homosexuals “worse than dogs and pigs”. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s government denies that gay people exist in Iran, and hangs the ones it finds. The Anglican Archbishop of Nigeria thinks homosexuality “evil” and “cancerous”. There can be no compromise with any of this, irrespective of whether it is backed up by dodgy readings of holy texts or not.

No compromise? But what of diversity? What of their culture? What of respect? What of sensitivity? The hell with all that, says the Vicar of Putney; well done.

Many know that the logic of the New Orleans deal is the logic of unity through exclusion…[T]his whole sorry business is as visceral as a group of playground kids coming together to slag off the [child] with the unfashionable haircut or funny accent. Finding someone to point the finger at is the best way of bringing people together. Global Christian cohesion is being achieved by a church that is defining itself against some representative other – in this case, a short, rather geeky gay bishop with a bit of a drink problem. He is a scapegoat straight from central casting. The sad truth is, the issue of homosexuality isn’t splitting the Anglican communion: it’s uniting it like never before…The Rt Rev Gene Robinson, Bishop of New Hampshire, has brought people together: hands across the ocean, united in homophobia. It was the Episcopal church that held out longest against unholy unification. But in agreeing to these terms, they too have now bent the knee to the will of the collective bully.

Of course, much of the point of religion is the logic of unity through exclusion – but I won’t nag the Vicar about that today.

Nice.

The ordeal of ill-fated Irshad Bibi, who suffered burns in an acid attack by her husband, seems far from over despite generous offer by an NGO as her very own people blocked her way to accept the help and go for the treatment…[H]er family and relatives stopped her from going to Islamabad for treatment at the expense of the NGO on the plea that “such organisations have the reputation of committing immoral activities and they will use her also for their nefarious designs”…A resident of the area to which the victim belonged defended the family’s stance, saying: “The NGOs are involved in un-Islamic activities and it is a sinful act to get treatment from them”.

Therefore, Irshad Bibi should simply be left untreated. Good thinking.

[Irshad Bibi] said Mukhtar Mai had telephoned her and expressed sympathy with her. “I am very thankful to her. I am also thankful to the media and the NGO which has extended me help”. Sobbing out her ordeal, Irshad Bibi said she wanted to visit her parents and asked her husband, Ajmal, to send her to their place. “Ajmal, however, stopped me saying he will give me good news and at night he came and repeated that he had a big surprise for me. The next moment he threw acid on my face and dragged me to a room from where he fled”…She said when she cried out for help, one of the neighbours telephoned her parents and her father reached the house after two hours, broke open the lock and took her to Sanwan hospital.

So her lovely husband not only threw acid in her face, he also locked her in afterwards. Now that’s what I cal uxorious.

Irshad said her husband would routinely beat her and whenever she spoke to her parents about her domestic life they placated her by saying that “a married woman has to live and die at her husband’s house”. She said her hand was given to her husband in ‘watta satta’.

Right. This is the arrangement. A married woman has to live and die at her husband’s house, having been given to the husband by other people with no right of refusal for herself. That’s a fair arrangement. It kind of reminds me of something else…now what is it…it’s right on the tip of my tongue…come on, think…oh yes: slavery.

Michael Ignatieff says something in his article on ‘Getting Iraq Wrong’ that ties up with this discussion of belief and intuition we’ve been having.

Having taught political science myself, I have to say the discipline promises more than it can deliver. In practical politics, there is no science of decision-making. The vital judgments a politician makes every day are about people: whom to trust, whom to believe and whom to avoid. The question of loyalty arises daily: Who will betray and who will stay true? Having good judgment in these matters, having a sound sense of reality, requires trusting some very unscientific intuitions about people.

I’ll buy that. That is one place where intuition mostly does work a lot better than reasoning – which is not surprising, because people aren’t reasonable, so trying to make judgments about people by using reason just…doesn’t fit. That’s another thing that The Curious Incident illustrates so beautifully, of course. Christopher is good at logic and he hasn’t got a clue about people. To understand about people you have to be all sloppy and organic and random and sentimental and selfish and generous and hundreds of other messy non-logical things. You have to have all sorts of feelings and impulses and reactions in order to know how they work in other people; you can’t learn them, you have to have them. You’ll probably still get people wrong all the time, but at least you’ll have a shot. Without all the sloppy soppy unreasonable stuff, it’s hopeless.

There are some excellent things in parts of God is not Great*. I thought I would give you a sample.

Pp. 175-6:

…it is only in the reported observations of Jesus that we find any mention of hell and eternal punishment. The god of Moses would brusquely call for other tribes, including his favourite one, to suffer massacre and plague and even extirpation, but when the grave closed over his victims he was essentially finished with them unless he remembered to curse their succeeding progeny. Not until the advent of the Prince of Peace do we hear of the ghastly idea of further punishing and torturing the dead…[T]he son of god is revealed as one who, if his milder words are not accepted straightaway, will condemn the inattentive to everlasting fire. This has provided texts for clerical sadists ever since, and features very lip-smackingly in the tirades of Islam.

Pp. 203-4:

It ought to be possible for me to pursue my studies and researches in one house, and for the Buddhist to spin his wheel in another. But contempt for the intellect has a strange way of not being passive…[T]hose whose credulity has led their own society into stagnation may seek a solution, not in true self-examination, but in blaming others for their backwardness…A faith that despises the mind and the free individual, that preaches submission and resignation, is ill-equipped for self-criticism.

Page 282:

Religion even boasts a special branch of itself, devoted to the study of the end. It calls itself ‘eschatology,’ and broods incessantly on the passing away of all earthly things. This death cult refuses to abate, even though we have every reason to think that ‘eartlhly things’ are all that we have, or are ever going to have.

Worth at least a selective read.

*There are parts where I disagree with Hitchens, and other parts I haven’t read yet because they look to be familiar territory.

Interesting. I’m told that Why Truth Matters was scheduled to be discussed on Classic FM this evening, on Newsnight. I don’t know though, I tried the Listen Again button but although I got the player and clicked on the sound button, I couldn’t get it to play. In the unlikely event that anyone is interested, there it is. (In the even more unlikely event that anyone would like to transcribe it for me, do feel free!)

Update: dear kind Arnaud did a transcript for me. (Or perhaps he simply made it up; it’s certainly pleasing enough to be a fantasy.) Merci, Arnaud.

John Brunning: Well next stop, Chris, a book on a subject I know is dear to your heart.

Chris Powling: Very much so. It’s called Why Truth Matters. It’s by Ophelia Benson & Jeremy Stangroom. Now, they are a couple of philosophers and they are taking on a subject which I have been turning in my mind for many years now. 25 years ago I took an allegedly, once again that very useful word, literature course which turned out actually to be about cod philosophy. We were talking about deconstructionism and postmodernism and relativism and all these “-isms”, most of which I suspected at the time were codswallop. So do Ophelia and Jeremy, thank goodness, and in WTM they are establishing the case for good, old-fashioned rationality. You need to get your facts right, you need to get your logic right and you need to put the two together in a valid argument. About time too, say I.

John Brunning : So not just a fascinating but also an important one, you’d say?

Chris Powling : I think it’s hugely important because of course what it does, really, is challenge the lazy notion that we can all construct our own truths and they are all equally valid, that a religious fundamentalist for instance is as likely to be right as an Oxbridge philosopher, which I think is an absolute nonsense, a complete nonsense and they expose it for what it is. What this book is, I think, is a redevelopment of that old 18th century enlightenment which had rather gone out of fashion. It’s good to see it back.

Rape is used as a weapon of war. Cath Elliot thinks bishops and their churches ought to ponder that fact a little more deeply.

What the bishop and his church fail to understand is that forcing a woman to continue with a pregnancy against her will is a continuation of the violence against her. It doesn’t matter how much empathy and support is on offer, at the end of the day it is the woman, not the church, who is faced with the reality of an unwanted child…When they occur as part of an armed conflict, forced pregnancy and forced maternity are regarded as war crimes and are breaches of the Geneva convention.

But no matter – there’s always someone around to give them a nice soothing pat, so that’s all right then.

Why should Amnesty now leave its traditional focus and take up a position supporting abortion? It is not a hands-on welfare body dealing with cases on the ground. Those women who have suffered the horror and indignity of rape will not be short of pastoral care from a range of humanitarian groups.

So no problem about forcing them to carry and bear a child implanted in them by their attacker. They won’t be short of pastoral care, so that takes care of that.

Unborn children also have human rights. In a country like ours, in which almost 200,000 unborn growing children are killed every year, there should be a debate about abortion. It has to be and is a very serious moral issue, not just for Catholics.

There are no ‘unborn children’; there’s no such thing as an unborn child; mawkish language-manipulation is no substitute for argument. Notice the bluntness where it serves the purpose and the triple mawkish denialism where it suits that purpose – unborn growing children are killed. No; foetuses are aborted; not the same thing as killing growing children. If it’s such a serious moral issue, then address it seriously, not with tricks.

And it’s not all that serious anyway. It’s worked up, rather than serious. A serious moral issue is what happens to women and girls in DRC and Darfur, not what happens to foetuses. Get your priorities straight.

But with the Vatican’s example at hand, how can Catholics get their priorities straight?

The gravity of the problem comes from the fact that in certain cases, perhaps in quite a considerable number of cases, by denying abortion one endangers important values to which it is normal to attach great value, and which may sometimes even seem to have priority. We do not deny these very great difficulties. It may be a serious question of health, sometimes of life or death, for the mother…We proclaim only that none of these reasons can ever objectively confer the right to dispose of another’s life, even when that life is only beginning.

Even if it’s a question of life or death for the mother. She has no right to choose her own life over that of an embryo or a foetus. Furthermore –

The movement for the emancipation of women, insofar as it seeks essentially to free them from all unjust discrimination, is on perfectly sound ground…But one cannot change nature. Nor can one exempt women, any more than men, from what nature demands of them.

Really? What if nature demands of them that they get infected by a virus or a bacterium, and die? Can one not exempt women, or men, from that demand? Do all Catholics abstain from all medical treatment? What if nature demands of them that they be cold because it’s cold, or wet because it’s raining, or hungry because there’s no food nearby? In other words what a stupid smug selective sonorous bit of claptrap. Tell that to the women in the Democratic Republic of Congo gang-raped by a bunch of soldiers – tell them that’s nature’s demand and that no one can exempt them from it. Then go empty the Vatican’s bank account to fund hospitals in DRC to repair all the fistulas that leave the women incontinent and stinking and shunned by their families and friends.

Jean has a post about belief at Talking Philosophy*. I find myself unconvinced, and I’m curious as to what other people think.

The idea is that ‘faith’ in the sense of belief without evidence is okay, and it’s belief in belief that is pernicious.

A person who was willing to believe nothing “on faith” would have a rather scanty store of beliefs. He or she would be missing some beliefs I take to be very important. For example—the belief that every human being matters. Exactly why does everyone matter? No doubt you could say a few intelligent things about it, but you’d soon find yourself not quite sure what the basis for the belief is.

I argued that moral commitments are different from beliefs about the world (and that I take belief that God exists to be a belief about the world); others argued that things are not so simple. I brought up Francis Collins.

I suppose I do think Francis Collins is blameworthy in some sense for interpreting his experience of the waterfall as a reason to believe in Jesus. I suppose my thinking is that surely he wouldn’t accept a non sequitur like that in genetics, so it seems blameworthy to accept it elsewhere, and especially blameworthy to try to use it as a public argument in a book.

Jean agreed with that, but considered it not relevant.

This is really about cognitive virtue and vice–how to manage your own set of beliefs, what to let in without full reasons, what not to let in. “Waterfall, therefore Jesus.” That certainly seems like bad mental self-management. Smart religious people surely have something a bit more intelligent going on in their heads. (In my experience there are tons of those…including some very smart, wise and authentic rabbis I know…)

But if so, what? Isn’t that the point? Not about their heads in general, of course, but on the subject of belief that God exists – the point is that some people just have a gut feeling that God exists and that that’s okay. But is there much of a difference between a gut feeling and ‘Waterfall, therefore Jesus’? Well there is of course the fact that Collins put that in a book, and I think the claim is about personal beliefs rather than proselytizing ones. But all the same…the problem with just assuming that smart religious people have something more than ‘waterfall’ is that that perpetuates the default respect for religion, and that perpetuates religion’s ability to keep on convincing people because it’s been going on so long and so everywhere that surely there must be something to it. It’s the Ponzi scheme aspect. We’re skeptical about new religions and cults, but the ones that have been around for centuries, that’s different, because, well because they’ve been around for centuries. But they’ve only been around for centuries because they’ve been getting away with it; so we keep letting them get away with it because they’ve been getting away with it. At some point that begins to seem like a not very good reason.

It’s not (of course) that I think people who just have a gut feeling that there is a God should be punished, but it is that I’m (obstinately perhaps) unwilling to agree that that’s cognitively okay or on all fours with other beliefs we have without being able to give good arguments for them.

*I wish I could contribute to Talking Philosophy, but I can’t; I’m not invited. The door is barred against me. The powers don’t want me polluting its crystalline purity with my – whatever: stupidity, probably.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown talks better sense this time.

You hear these outpourings of grief and hopelessness a lot these days. Ignorance is not bliss, it is oblivion, wrote the American novelist Philip Wylie. Ill-educated, volatile, easily led, despised by millions, Muslims the world over are falling into that void, into oblivion. Some are and will be annihilated by external foes and enemies within, including the demon cheerleaders inside the heads of suicide bombers, but many more will be consumed by their own terror of the modern world.

There is discrimination, she notes, but there is also self-limitation.

In nearly all universities in this country, including the elite establishments, there are cells of well organised Muslim obscurantists who entice or bully fellow Muslim scholars seeking to liberate their minds. They write to me, bright and ambitious students who feel spied on, coerced, hounded and tormented because they do not wear a hijab, or are seen meeting diverse mates in the student union bars, or choose “haram” subjects such as creative writing, art, drama or even European languages. One young Muslim woman at the LSE actually had a novel snatched from her hand, and says she was then held and harangued by her hijabi assailant who left a bruise on her arm. I pity both. What makes a university undergraduate this appallingly afraid of fiction? Who got into her head to distort it so?

Maybe she read Infidel? Ayaan Hirsi Ali talks about the subversive power of reading novels there – including merit-free romance novels. She felt liberated and inspired by the good stuff and even by the schlock. Page 69:

We imagined the British moors in Wuthering Heights and the fight for racial equality in South Africa in Cry, the Beloved Country. An entire world of Western ideas began to take shape…Later on there were sexy books: Valley of the Dolls, Barbara Cartland, Danielle Steele. All these books, even the trashy ones, carried with them ideas – races were equal, women were equal to men – and concepts of freedom, struggle, and adventure that were new to me.

Page 79:

In school we read good books, Charlotte Brontë, Jane Austen, and Daphne du Maurier; out of school, Halwa’s sisters kept us supplied with cheap Harlequins. These were trashy soap opera-like novels, but they were exciting – sexually exciting. And buried in all of these books was a message: women had a choice.

Page 94:

Inwardly, I resisted the teachings, and secretly I transgressed them…I continued to read sensual romance novels and trashy thrillers, even though I knew that doing so was resisting Islam in the most basic way…A Muslim woman must not feel wild, or free, or any of the other emotions and longings I felt when I read those books. A Muslim girl does not make her own decisions or seek control. She is trained to be docile. If you are a Muslim girl, you disappear, until there is almost no you inside you.

Pity the poor LSE hijabi, training herself to be docile, to disappear, to have no self inside her; and hope the novel-readers prevail and take their sisters with them.

I’ve just read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. I know, I know, you all read it two years ago, where have I been – well I meant to read it but didn’t get to it, but I spotted it at the library the other day and grabbed it.

Absolutely extraordinary novel. Shockingly readable, for one thing, in the way thrillers are supposed to be but mostly (for me) aren’t, and also fascinating in multiple ways.

Consider item (or entry or chapter) 181 for instance. It starts ‘I see everything’ then goes on to enumerate the detail with which Christopher does indeed see and notice, if not everything, at least a great deal more than non-autistic people do.

That is why I don’t like new places. If I am in a place I know, like home, or school, or the bus, or the shop, or the street, I have seen almost everything in it beforehand and all I have to do is look at the things that have changed or moved.

That’s a deeply interesting observation all by itself – and it’s just one piece of the four page entry.

But most people are lazy. They never look at everything. They do what is called glancing, which is the same word for bumping off something and carrying on in almost the same direction, e.g., when a snooker ball glances off another snooker ball. And the information in their head is really simple.

Then he describes what we see or notice if we’re in ‘the countryside,’ and it’s all generalities – grass, some cows, some flowers, a few clouds, a village, a fence; then he gives just a sample of the detail with which he sees the same thing. It’s fascinating because in one way (or perhaps several ways) our way is the ‘right’ way or at least better, and obviously so – just for one thing he doesn’t enjoy the process, it’s overwhelming; that is, as he says, why he doesn’t like new places. But in another way clearly he has a powerful ability that we just don’t have. We’re lazy. We don’t think of it that way of course, and rightly so, in a sense – we’re not lazy, we’re selective, and we need to be; most of the time we need to select out excess detail and just take in generalities. But – it is at least interesting to think of it as lazy.

Christopher concludes 181 with

And that is why I am good at chess and maths and logic, because most people are almost blind and they don’t see most things and there is lots of spare capacity in their heads and it is filled with things which aren’t connected and are silly, like ‘I’m worried that I might have left the gas cooker on.’

We’re lazy and we’re almost blind; we don’t see most things.

My first impulse when I read that was to think yes but our mental lives are much richer because our minds can wander and we can imagine and daydream. But then my second impulse was to second-guess that thought, to realize that yes that kind of mental life seems preferable and richer to us because that is the kind of mental life we have (and thus prefer); and Christopher does find much of the world intensely aversive. But all the same, it’s a trade-off. We’re not good at logic, which means we’re not good at various kinds of highly useful thinking.

My next thought was that probably many people think of other people who do value reason and logic as being like Christopher – skilled (if they are) but profoundly impoverished. Not that I didn’t know that, of course, it’s just that that passage is a brilliant illustration of it.

And the whole novel is full of things like that. That one is perhaps my favourite, but there are lots more. An amazing book.

Peter Tatchell asks some pointed questions.

The Islamic Republic of Iran has executed three more Arab political prisoners…There have been no protests from Britain, the EU or the UN. The UN’s silence comes on top of the truly appalling vote by UN Human Rights Council to abandon its monitoring of human rights abuses in Iran…While condemning Israel for abusing the Palestinian people, Arab states are silent about the abuse of fellow Arabs by the Iranian regime. The anti-imperialist left is also mute. Why the double standards? Palestinian Arabs get the support of progressives and radicals everywhere; Iranian Arabs get no support at all. They swing from nooses in public squares like cattle hanging in an abattoir. Does anyone care? Ahwazi Arabs accuse Tehran of Persian chauvinism, racism and ethnic cleansing, as I previously revealed in Tribune. The response to that article from some Islamists, left-wingers and anti-war activists was to denounce me as racist and anti-Muslim. But how can it be Islamophobic or racist to defend Arab Muslims against Tehran’s persecution?

Ummmmmm…because by criticizing Iran you are playing into the hands of the neocons who want to bomb the bejeezus out of it? Yeah, that’s it. The neocons, pleased with the triumph in Iraq, want to carry on the good work in Iran, therefore – therefore, I say – Iran’s repressive reactionary government can do no wrong, and anyone who says it can is (of course) racist and anti-Muslim – not to mention ‘Islamophobic.’

Quite rightly, most Arabs do not support a US attack on Iran. Military intervention would strengthen the position of the hardliners in Tehran; allowing President Ahmadinejad to play the nationalist card and, using the pretext of defending the country against imperialism, to further crack down on dissent. Many Ahwazis believe the route to liberation is an internal “people power” alliance of Iranian socialists, liberals, democrats, students, trade unionists and minority nationalities.

And outsiders can give moral support and publicity, just as they did with apartheid.

Some anti-war leftists refuse to condemn the Tehran dictatorship and refuse to support the Iranian resistance; arguing that to do so would play into the hands of the US neocons and militarists. I disagree. Opposing imperialism and defending human rights are complementary, not contradictory.

Yeah. Third Camp, you see. It opposes both US militarism and Islamism.

As we saw, Matthew Nisbet cites Paul Kurtz as someone whose lead he is following when he says things like ‘Messages must be positive and respect diversity…[M]any scientists not only fail to think strategically about how to communicate on evolution, but belittle and insult others’ religious beliefs.’ A helpful commenter on his Kurtz post pointed out a recent editorial by Kurtz in Free Inquiry – from the February/March 2007 issue, it was.

The fact that books by Dawkins and Harris have made it to The New York Times best-seller list has apparently sent chills down the spines of many commentators; not only conservative religionists but also some otherwise liberal secularists are worried about this unexpected development. We note that the people now being attacked are affiliated with FREE INQUIRY and the Center for Inquiry. The editors of FREE INQUIRY, of course, are gratified that the views espoused in these pages have received a wider forum. What disturbs us is the preposterous outcry that atheists are “evangelical” and that they have gone too far in their criticism of religion.

Really? The public has been bombarded by pro-religious propaganda from time immemorial—today it comes from pulpits across the land, TV ministries, political hucksters, and best-selling books…Until now, it has been virtually impossible to get a fair hearing for critical comment upon uncontested religious claims. It was considered impolite, in bad taste, and it threatened to raise doubts about God’s existence or hegemony. I have often said that it is as if an “iron curtain” had descended within America, for skeptics have discovered that the critical examination of religion has been virtually verboten. We have experienced firsthand how journalists and producers have killed stories about secular humanism for fear of offending the little old ladies and gentlemen in the suburbs, conservative advertisers, the Catholic hierarchy, or right-wing fundamentalists.

For skeptics have discovered that the critical examination of religion has been virtually verboten. Exactly. This is what I’m saying.

Science columnist William J. Broad, in a piece published earlier this year in the Times…, criticized both Daniel C. Dennett and Edward O. Wilson (another Center for Inquiry stalwart)…Broad faults E.O. Wilson for writing in an earlier book (Consilience) that “the insights of neuroscience and evolution . . . increasingly can illuminate even morality and ethics, with the scientific findings potentially leading ‘more directly and safely to stable moral codes’ than do the dictates of God’s will or the findings of transcendentalism.” Broad remonstrates against such views, maintaining that they exhibit “a kind of arrogance,” and he likewise recommends that scientists declare a truce in their critiques of religion. To which I reply that it is important that we apply scientific inquiry as best we can to all areas of human behavior, including religion and ethics. I fail to see why it is “arrogant” to attempt to do so.

Because…because…well because it alienates fellow citizens.

We note that the National Review and the Jewish Forward are also worried by “militant secularists” who question established religions—they were objecting to an advertisement the Center for Inquiry/Transnational ran on the op-ed page of The New York Times (November 15, 2006), headlined “In Defense of Science and Secularism.” We think it appropriate to defend the integrity of science and the importance of secularism at a time when both are under heavy attack…But why should the nonreligious, nonaffiliated, secular minority in the country remain silent? We dissenters now comprise some 14 to 16 percent of the population. Why should religion be held immune from criticism, and why should the admission that one is a disbeliever be considered so disturbing?…Given all these facts, why should the criticism of religion provoke such an outcry?

Read the whole thing, as the saying goes. It’s very unNisbetesque.

As we saw, Nisbet quotes Paul Kurtz on the need to be for things as well as against things. ‘It is what you are for that counts, not what you are against!’ I agree with that – and I’ll tell you some of the things I’m for.

I’m for free inquiry – open, fearless, unashamed, uninhibited inquiry. That means inquiry that is not expected to be deferential to majority opinion or belief; inquiry that follows the evidence wherever it goes without worrying about what the neighbours or bosses or ‘moderate believers’ will think.

I’m for telling the truth, on the whole, especially in public discourse. (That means no, I’m not for telling people they’re ugly or boring or fat or old, even if they are. I’m not for telling cruel personal truth, but that’s a different subject, and not relevant here.) I’m for telling the truth more than I’m for manipulating or wheedling. I realize – and realize more since reading The Political Brain – that that doesn’t always work in politics, but that’s one reason I wouldn’t want to go into politics: because I am for telling the truth more than I am for manipulating or wheedling.

I’m for progress, and change, and reform, including in thinking. I think all of those are impeded by the idea that the majority must not be ‘offended’ and that therefore certain ideas are taboo or sacrosanct.

I’m for thinking, and for universal freedom to think – freely, fearlessly, without inhibition.

I’m for knowledge, and learning, and evidence, all of which require free inquiry in order to flourish.

I’m for treating people as sensible grownups who can bear to have their ideas challenged without going into meltdown. That means I’m against treating people as fragile idiots who have to be protected from disagreement.

I’m for honesty in public discourse, which entails making reasonable efforts to address questions and objections rather than ignoring them in favour of repeating the original (questioned) claims.

See how affirmative I can be?

Matthew Nisbet answered my question about Paul Kurtz by transcribing some of a Point of Inquiry interview of Kurtz. Kurtz does indeed say things along the same lines as what Nisbet says. There are differences, but there are also large similarities. I was skeptical about that yesterday, and Nisbet did indeed provide the requested link as well as doing some transcribing.

GROTHE: …I take it that you wonder how effective evangelical atheists are if all they are talking about is atheism?

KURTZ: I think they have had a positive impact, and I know most of the leaders, and they publish in Free Inquiry…so they have had positive impact, of course they are criticizing religion. However, that is not enough. One has to go beyond that! You can’t talk about abstract atheism, or merely a negative attitude. It is what you are for that counts, not what you are against! So I think on that point, one must affirm a positive humanist morality.

The emphasis is different from Nisbet’s, and the hostility to ‘New Atheists’ is (not surprisingly) not there, but he is talking about (broadly) the same subject. (It’s one that JS and I don’t agree with – we found ourselves saying ‘we’re atheists, we’re not humanists’ quite often at C f I – and that JS amused himself by roundly attacking in his last lecture, thus forfeiting his chance at a standing ovation like the one Julian got; but that’s not the issue here.)

Now we’ve got that straight, what about what Nisbet is saying? It doesn’t grow on me. It makes me bristle, and the more I contemplate it, the more bristly I get. This is no doubt one of those fundamental moral intuitions, one of those emotional reactions that I then attempt to consider rationally. What is it that I dislike so much?

The dishonesty, basically. The secrecy, the manipulativeness, the ‘shhh.’ The whole idea that scientists should be quiet about something they take to be true because if they’re not quiet they are likely to alienate an unknown number of potential political allies.

Even if Nisbet is right about the empirical question of the potential alienation, it doesn’t follow that he’s right about what to do about it. I think his goal of ‘bringing diverse publics together around common problems’ by urging scientists to refrain from challenging the truth claims of religion is antithetical to free and open inquiry. Of course it’s true that free inquiry always risks angering or alienating some or many people who don’t like what free inquiry turns up – but that’s why it’s called ‘free inquiry.’ If we decide in advance to shackle it in deference to pre-existing beliefs, then it’s not free inquiry anymore. The Center for Inquiry, if it heeded Nisbet’s advice, would have to change its name to The Center for Cautious Limited Deferential Inquiry. I think that would be a bad thing.