I went into Bartell’s (a drugstore chain; think Boots if you’re in the UK, but not as nice) yesterday, and was skimming along an unfamiliar aisle when I stopped, amazed. There in front of me dangling from those little rods that packages dangle from, were packages of Foot Detox Pads. Kinoki Cleansing Detox Foot Pads, to be exact. They’re real! Sense About Science didn’t just make them up!

There were before and after pictures on the box: clean white pad, then grubby brown pad. Yes but as Sense About Science points out, the pads contain vinegar and herbs and they make the feet sweat: the brown is from moisture and vinegar and herbs, it’s not a nice brown smear of toxicity.

There’s a box on the back with a disclaimer.

Note: These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.

So it’s just some kind of mysterious ritual then. Okay.

Underneath the box is a different kind of advice.

It is best to consult a qualified alternative medicine professional or holistic practitioner to determine your personal detoxification needs.

Oh yes? What does that mean? What is a qualified alternative medicine professional? What is a qualified holistic practitioner? What do alternative medicine professionals and holistic practitioners learn during the course of their qualification training that teaches them how to determine anyone’s detoxification needs? Since biologists and chemists are unable to find any evidence of such a thing as a detoxification need, one has to wonder exactly what professionals and practitioners are trained to look for, and with what tools. Do they do sciency-looking taps and listens and probes? Do they produce sciency-looking instruments that are actually just mock-ups of some kind? It would be very interesting to know.

Update: I forgot to say, they cost $19.95. For some worthless bits of vinegar-soaked gauze!

Now this one I wasn’t even going to ask for, not yet, because it’s so early and there’s so much to do – but here it is anyway.

President Obama wants a fresh approach to toppling Robert Mugabe and is discussing with aides an unprecedented, US-led diplomatic push to get tough new UN sanctions imposed against the Zimbabwe regime.

They will have to put pressure on Russia and China to (at least) abstain from vetoing sanctions – but perhaps that’s not an insuperable obstacle now. Good luck.

A commenter has been telling us lately (but with no actual checkable references) that Obama is not all that intelligent because he got only Bs at Harvard. Since all the commenter has offered in response to a request for references is that somebody said that on a (nameless) BBC documentary last week, there’s no need to pay any attention, but in looking for something else I happened on an interesting piece about Obama’s student days from last February. There’s not much about having an average mind (there’s nothing, actually) and there is a fair amount of the other thing. Of course the reporter could be a raving fan and have simply thrown all the ‘average mind’ stuff into the trash can – but for what it’s worth, some people remember Obama as being quite clever.

Mr. Obama wrote that he learned of a transfer program that Occidental had with Columbia and applied. “He was so bright and wanted a wider urban experience,” recalled Anne Howells, a former English professor at Occidental who taught Mr. Obama and wrote him a recommendation for Columbia…Mr. Obama displayed a deft but unobtrusive manner of debating.“When he talked, it was an E. F. Hutton moment: people listened,” said John Boyer, who lived across the hall from Mr. Obama. “He would point out the negatives of a policy and its consequences and illuminate the complexities of an issue the way others could not.”…The professor, Roger Boesche, has memories of him at a popular burger joint on campus. “He was always sitting there with students who were some of the most articulate and those concerned with issues like violence in Central America and having businesses divest from South Africa,” he said. “These were the kids most concerned with issues of social justice and who took classes and books seriously.”

No mention of B grades, or of mediocrity. The memories could be fallible, they could be shaded by the present, but for what they’re worth, there they are. And at least that’s a checkable reference, which ‘a BBC 4 documentary last week’ is not.

Responsible, careful, sensible, loving parenthood.

Kara Neumann, 11, had grown so weak that she could not walk or speak. Her parents, who believe that God alone has the ability to heal the sick, prayed for her recovery but did not take her to a doctor. After an aunt from California called the sheriff’s department here, frantically pleading that the sick child be rescued, an ambulance arrived at the Neumann’s rural home on the outskirts of Wausau and rushed Kara to the hospital. She was pronounced dead on arrival. The county coroner ruled that she had died from diabetic ketoacidosis resulting from undiagnosed and untreated juvenile diabetes. The condition occurs when the body fails to produce insulin, which leads to severe dehydration and impairment of muscle, lung and heart function.

Severe dehydration and impairment of muscle, lung and heart function – meaning that was one sick kid, one very visibly, obviously, unmistakably sick kid, one suffering sick kid. And all her parents did for her was to pray, despite of course knowing perfectly well that there are such things as telephones and ambulances and doctors and medicines. For days and days they hung around with a sick, wasted, feeble child, and did nothing about it (prayer doesn’t count).

About a month after Kara’s death last March, the Marathon County state attorney, Jill Falstad, brought charges of reckless endangerment against her parents, Dale and Leilani Neumann. Despite the Neumanns’ claim that the charges violated their constitutional right to religious freedom, Judge Vincent Howard of Marathon County Circuit Court ordered Ms. Neumann to stand trial on May 14, and Mr. Neumann on June 23.

So they killed their child, by refusing to get her medical help which would have saved her life, and they’re defending themselves by talking about their ‘religious freedom.’ They’re not lying on the ground banging their heads and wailing, they’re not crying aloud ‘How could we have been so stupid and callous?’, they’re not sobbing and telling their dead daughter how sorry they are – they’re insisting on ‘religious freedom.’ Freedom to what? Freedom to watch your 11-year-old child become unable to walk or breathe or move or speak and do nothing to help her because you have the freedom to believe that ‘god’ will rescue her even though you refuse to avail yourself of the actual tools to help her? That’s a pretty strange sort of freedom to defend, especially after such an outcome.

“The free exercise clause of the First Amendment protects religious belief,” the judge wrote in his ruling, “but not necessarily conduct.” Wisconsin law, he noted, exempts a parent or guardian who treats a child with only prayer from being criminally charged with neglecting child welfare laws, but only “as long as a condition is not life threatening.” Kara’s parents, Judge Howard wrote, “were very well aware of her deteriorating medical condition.”

Well that’s great! Wisconsin law allows parents to treat a sick child with only prayer as long as the sickness is not life threatening! So mere suffering or pain is not reason enough to make medical treatment mandatory. How disgusting. The ‘religious freedom’ of parents is more important than the relief from suffering of their children? Brilliant.

Investigators said the Neumanns last took Kara to a doctor when she was 3. According to a police report, the girl had lost the strength to speak the day before she died. “Kara laid down and was unable to move her mouth,” the report said, “and merely made moaning noises and moved her eyes back and forth.”

Yet her parents still did nothing.Like the Oregon parents who ‘were charged with criminally negligent homicide in the death of their 16-year-old son, who died from complications of a urinary tract infection that was severely painful and easily treatable.’

As Lucretius said (as I’ve quoted before), tantum religio potuit suadere malorum.

Another one, from last July.

Police in Atlanta have been investigating the death of a 25-year-old Pakistani woman, who was allegedly murdered by her father in the name of family honor. She wanted out of an arranged marriage, but her father thought a divorce would bring shame to the family.

And he also thought that the ‘shame’ that Sandeela Kanwal would ‘bring’ to the family was more significant than her life was. He thought the ‘shame’ was so important that it justified murdering his own adult daughter. Instead of thinking of it as something regrettable and painful but as a speck of dust compared to the value of his daughter – he thought the opposite – he thought his daughter was worth much less than this comparatively trivial shame. That’s an incredibly ugly fact, which never seems to get enough attention in the coverage of these things. He thought a fundamentally social, neighbor-heeding feeling was more important than his own daughter was; he thought it was so important that it motivated him to strangle her to death with a bungee cord – all so that the neighbors wouldn’t snigger at him.

“He admitted to actually taking the life of his daughter,” says Sgt. Stefan Schindler, a 13-year veteran of the Clayton County Police Department. “And the reason he took his daughter’s life,” says Schindler, “by his own words was that she wasn’t being true to her religion or to her husband.”…Schindler says Rashid told him that killing his daughter was a right given to him by God — and that God would protect him.

So ‘God’ is someone who wants women to be killed for wanting to leave men they never chose for themselves in the first place. In other words, yes Virginia, God does hate women.

Shahid Malik is a local representative of Atlanta’s Pakistani population and one of the very few willing to speak about the Rashid case. “This thing hurt the Muslim community, Pakistani community,” he says. He says that the killing has nothing to do with Islam, but that Rashid has little education and comes from a small village in Pakistan where tribal traditions are strong…”Whatever this case is or not, this is not an honor killing,” he says. “It is not based on Pakistani law. Chaudry Rashid loved his daughter.”

No he didn’t. People need to stop saying that. People who love their daughters don’t murder them; people who murder their daughters don’t love them. You don’t get to do both. You don’t get to murder your daughter and still pretend you loved her.

Begner hopes the state doesn’t make this about Islam or ethnicity. This death could have happened, he says, in any culture, with any family.

Well anything could have happened, but is it likely? Is it customary ‘in any culture, with any family’ to murder an adult daughter because she wants to divorce a husband who was not her choice to begin with? I don’t think so.

Wo, what’s that?! Oh – it’s a blast of fresh air.

President Barack Obama has called for the US to become energy independent, saying its reliance on foreign oil and global warming posed threats…Mr Obama ordered the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to review its refusal of a waiver which had previously allowed California to set its own – stricter – vehicle emission and fuel efficiency standards. He said California had taken bold moves in implementing the standards. Mr Obama said: “The days of Washington dragging its heels are over. My administration will not deny facts. We will be guided by them.”

Cue the Hallelujah chorus! And Aretha Franklin singing The Star-spangled Banner! And Springsteen doing Eyes on the Prize and Seeger doing We Shall Overcome! Cue them all, cue everyone singing at once – cue the rocks and the trees, cue the stars and the little green frogs; from every mountainside, lift up your voices and sing –

My administration will not deny facts. We will be guided by them.

Welcome back to the reality-based community, all. Enjoy your stay.

I was excited and exhilarated to see this article.

Educators and policy makers, including Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, have said in recent days that they hope President Obama’s example as a model student could inspire millions of American students, especially blacks, to higher academic performance. Now researchers have documented what they call an Obama effect, showing that a performance gap between African-Americans and whites on a 20-question test administered before Mr. Obama’s nomination all but disappeared when the exam was administered after his acceptance speech and again after the presidential election.

Yeah…

I started thinking about things like that some time last spring, when I finally accepted that Obama wasn’t just a charismatic but basically random candidate. I started thinking about them even more once his nomination seemed more secure, and then during and after the convention, and then during the rest of the campaign. But I avoided thinking about them too much, because they prompted too much longing, and I was too afraid of disappointment in the end.

I was thinking about millions of children all over the country, in East St Louis and Detroit and Fresno and Philadelphia, Mississippi, and what it could mean for them to see Barack Obama in the White House. I was thinking about a potential Obama effect. I was thinking about Thurgood Marshall and the ‘colored doll’ –

In the “doll test,” psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark used four plastic, diaper-clad dolls, identical except for color. They showed the dolls to black children between the ages of three and seven and asked them questions to determine racial perception and preference. Almost all of the children readily identified the race of the dolls. However, when asked which they preferred, the majority selected the white doll and attributed positive characteristics to it. The Clarks also gave the children outline drawings of a boy and girl and asked them to color the figures the same color as themselves. Many of the children with dark complexions colored the figures with a white or yellow crayon. The Clarks concluded that “prejudice, discrimination, and segregation” caused black children to develop a sense of inferiority and self-hatred.

That haunting, painful study played a role in Brown v Topeka Board of Education and thus in the end of ‘separate but equal’ as a legal fiction and segregated schools in the US…So it seems pretty obvious that a hyper-intelligent, eloquent, impressive black person in the White House would enable children to select the black doll and attribute positive characteristics to it. This study seems to bear that out.

Not that we didn’t already know that (but it’s nice to have the data). We knew it up one side and down the other. We knew it all over the place for the past week – and a beautiful thing it is. I still have Wednesday’s New York Times hanging around, because I like looking at it – it has the Obamas taking up nearly all of the front page, walking down Pennsylvania Avenue with enormous smiles on their faces. They look…extraordinary. Any doll would give its left arm to look that good.

Bill Moyers talked to Patricia Williams and Melissa Harris-Lacewell on Friday. He reminded Harris-Lacewell that when he talked to her last spring she said Obama couldn’t win. I remembered that, once he mentioned it, and I remember the despairing pang it gave me. Harris-Lacewell beamed acknowledgement, and then talked about the intense sense of connection to this country that she felt for the first time in her life. Same here. Same here, same here, same here. One feels as if old wounds and old divisions really do have a good chance of being healed. (I know that sounds soppy – but it’s not sheer airy-fairy fantasy – see the doll experiment!) Furthermore…for the first time in my life I know what it’s like to feel ‘patriotic’ – the idea is suddenly no longer alien. I sang along with Aretha on Tuesday (and I wanted to wear her hat). I suddenly realized today that I don’t even mind American flag pins any more – I don’t have to any more – because they don’t stand for things I hate any more. Now they stand for closing Guantanamo and banning torture and respecting the rule of law.

On a more prosaic but still not altogether trivial level, I also no longer have to cut the sound whenever the BBC or NPR cuts to the president talking; on the contrary, I get to listen with actual pleasure.

The great thing about religion, you know, is that it teaches people humility.

The Vatican has condemned President Obama’s move to restore US funding for family planning clinics abroad that give advice on or carry out abortions. One Vatican official warned against the “arrogance” of those in power who think they can decide between life and death.

That’s terrific, isn’t it? An ‘official’ of an authoritarian moth-eaten hidebound reactionary gang of priests calls a guy elected in a landslide ‘arrogant’…What does the Vatican ‘official’ think the Vatican is if not arrogant? Humbly obedient to god, no doubt, being conveniently blind to the fact that it’s hard to obey someone who never communicates, and that what the Vatican chooses to pretend is what god commands is actually what the Vatican commands – that the Vatican selects its own laws and then pretends they are god’s laws. It’s a common practice, a familiar con-game, but that doesn’t make it any more acceptable.

And don’t forget the arrogance of the Vatican as ‘those in power who think they can decide between life and death’ by ordering people not to use life-saving condoms during an Aids epidemic.

In an interview published in an Italian newspaper on Saturday, senior Vatican official Monsignor Rino Fisichella urged Mr Obama to listen to all voices in America without “the arrogance of those who, being in power, believe they can decide of life and death.”

Mr Obama does listen to all voices in America, including that of Rick Warren, which I and others consider one voice too many; but really…how obtuse does a senior Vatican official have to be not to realize and keep constantly in mind that he is ‘in power’ and that the Vatican and its officials emphatically ‘believe they can decide of life and death’? Do they never embarrass themselves with this kind of brazen absurdity?

Some people are a little dubious about the, what shall I say, the emotionality surrounding the recent transition of power in the US. Our friend KB Player for instance.

Eyes fixed on the horizon? And with the inspirational statesman look? That was pseudo poetic bombast. As an outsider, I felt faintly embarrassed, and thought that a quick cup of tea with the Queen, a few words in front of Downing Street while the old incumbent leaves by the back door carrying a suitcase, that’s the way to do it. Democracy is a good thing, but it doesn’t need to be turned into a religion.

Some doubt was expressed in comments at Talking Philosophy but we ended up in more or less the same place. Anyway I asked myself (and not for the first time, being a suspicious type, and also being aware that since I make a habit of puncturing sentimentalities and pieties I sort of have to be cautious with my own) if I should be more skeptical. Am I making a messiah out of Obama?

That’s certainly possible, for obvious reasons – I really do admire him, to a very unusual and intense degree. I’m not accustomed to admiring public figures (much less presidents) in this way, in fact to be perfectly honest I have no precedent at all for my attitude to Obama. That is almost a guarantee of a susceptibility to mistakes and blindness.

I’m not so deluded that I think his plans for health care are any good though. Maybe I’ll use that as a meter – I’ll just keep checking myself – ‘Do you think “affordable health care” is meaningful or possible? No? Good; still functioning.’ I wish he hadn’t invited Rick Warren to do the invocation…but on the other hand, Michelle Goldberg pointed out that the outrage about Warren’s homophobia has caused him to remove some of the concrete signs of it, so perhaps the invitation has forced him to do better.

Ah, the hell with it, it’s not worth it; I still think Obama shouldn’t have invited him.

I wish we could ditch all the God-talk. I’m very glad he included non-believers, but I still wish we could ditch the God talk. But…(this is where things get really sinister) I don’t mind it as much as I would from someone else, or as much as I did from Bush or Clinton. Have I lost my mind? Partly, maybe – that is, the euphoria of the whole thing motivates me to bury my normal reaction so that I can go on being euphoric. That’s not what you’d call sound intellectual practice – so that’s a fair cop. I’m giving Obama a break that I wouldn’t give other people. (Fortunately, it makes no difference to him or to them – I don’t want to come over all self-important here! I’m just exploring how this stuff works, from the inside; I’m not saying What I Think Matters.) But some of that is because the God talk trails with it the old civil rightsy rhetoric. I wouldn’t want to be without The Promised Land or All God’s Children or (perhaps least of all) ‘Thank God almighty, we’re free at last.’ That’s in spite of the fact that in any other context that line would irritate the hell out of me, because stricly speaking it’s absurd – thanking god for freedom and just politely ignoring the previous four centuries. In any other context I would rudely ask why god gets the credit for the good stuff and none of the blame for the bad stuff; I would ask why, if god could free the slaves, god didn’t just prevent them from being enslaved in the first place. But – in the civil rights context, I don’t. If I had the choice, I would keep all the presidential language secular, but since I don’t…I feel inclined to turn a blind eye. That’s a double standard. Nolo contendere.

Now we’ve got that out of the way…well it’s the old Wordsworth line, you know, bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. Yes I know it’s soppy, but I do not care – I want to be soppy. I’ve never seen anything like this. None of us have. You don’t know what it’s like (well you do if you live here and it’s affected you too, but otherwise, you don’t) – you don’t know what it’s like to have all but everyone in the damn country feeling ecstatic and elevated and (cough) well I don’t know how else to put this, kind of united.

I can even explain one reason, one of many. For eight years we’ve lived with the unhappy awareness that everyone outside the US thinks of it as Bush country – with a few dissenters perhaps but at its core, Bush-like. Now it becomes apparent that the US is much more Obama country than it ever was Bush country.

Another reason is that the bliss (to call it that) was unalloyed by compromise. This was not hooray the firstblackpresident who is not otherwise so terrific – this was not (for instance) Al Sharpton. There was absolutely no need to think ‘well this is a great First but we had to compromise to get it…’ – so one could wallow with a clear conscience. Obama is a lot more talented than the usual white pol, not less so, so the First is more than legitimate.

And perhaps best of all – I have earnest hopes that the fashion for falling-down prison pants will die an abrupt death.

It’s always nice to get some spiritual advice, don’t you think? A Melbourne imam gave his male followers some of that a few years ago, in a lecture titled ‘The Keys to a Successful Marriage.’

He said under Islamic law, as described in a koranic verse, it was a man’s right to demand sex from his wife whenever he felt like it. “If the husband was to ask her for a sexual relationship and she is preparing the bread on the stove she must leave it and come and respond to her husband, she must respond,” Mr Hamza told his male followers on the video sermon. He then mocked Australia’s criminal laws, which required consent for sex to be lawful. “In this country if the husband wants to sleep with his wife and she does not want to and she hasn’t got a sickness or whatever, there is nothing wrong with her she just does not feel like it, and he ends up sleeping with her by force…it is known to be as rape,” Mr Hamza said. “Amazing, how can a person rape his wife?”

Well quite – one might as well call it beating a hammer if you use it to pound in a nail, wives being much the same kind of thing as a hammer and husbands being, as Mr Hamza indicates, persons. A man is a person, and his wife is an object owned by the person, so obviously a person can’t ‘rape’ an object – what a silly idea. Amazing.

“First of all advise them,” he said. “You beat them … but this is the last resort. After you have advised them (not to be disobedient) for a long, long time then you smack them, you beat them and, please, brothers, calm down, the beating the Mohammed showed is like the toothbrush that you use to brush your teeth.
You are not allowed to bruise them, you are not allowed to make them bleed.”

No, you’re only allowed to beat them, but fortunately you are allowed to do that much, because you are always right and they are always wrong, or if not, it doesn’t signify, because your will is the only one that counts, and theirs is mere disobedience. That’s fair, surely? It must be, because Islam is justice.

Mr Hamza told his followers not to get carried away and become too physical with the beatings. “This is just to shape them up, shape up woman – that is about it,” he said. “You don’t go and grab a broomstick and say that is what Allah has said,” Mr Hamza said to sporadic laughter from his flock.

Oh, ha ha, that’s so funny, ha ha – of course you don’t, who would be so crude and vulgar as to do that? No no, you just hit them on the arms or legs, that’s all.

Mr Hamza runs the Islamic Information and Services Network of Australasia on Sydney Rd, Coburg, which offers spiritual advice, prayer facilities and boxing, karate and gym classes for Muslims.

Spiritual advice is it – yes very spiritual. Highly impressive and thoughtful and elevated, too – but at the same time, charmingly easy to understand. When a man wants to fuck, his wife has to be fucked, and if she refuses, the man can forcibly fuck her, or beat her and then forcibly fuck her, or if he’s really kinky, forcibly fuck her and then beat her. See? No complicated theological niceties, no chatter about ontology or the ground of being, just the man’s right to fuck his wife whenever he wants to; the root of all piety.

Mr Hamza yesterday stood by his comments and blamed controversy over them on a hidden Zionist agenda run by the media. Questioned about his teachings, Mr Hamza said a wife was allowed to be hit on the hand or leg, but “of course, not on the head”. He said if a Muslim wife disobeyed her husband, such as continuing to go out when requested not to, she was able to be subjected to moderate physical punishment. Mr Hamza also reiterated his belief that women should submit to sex when husbands required it. Asked whether it was impossible for a man to rape his wife under Islamic law, Mr Hamza said either male or female partners should be able to demand and receive sex.

And the poor and the rich are both allowed to sleep under bridges. Can’t say fairer than that, can you.

The joys of sharia again.

Islamic authorities in the northern Nigerian city of Kano have told organisers of a planned protest by divorced women to cancel the event. The head of the Sharia police, or Hisbah, said the planned protest was an “embarrassment”, and is “un-Islamic”…Women’s rights activists say divorced women are often thrown out of their homes, lose custody of their children, and many end up destitute. The Director General of the Hisbah…said the idea of street protests was “un-Islamic” and “morally wrong”. “Never in the history of Islam have women taken to the street to press for their demands,” he said.

Well of course they haven’t, because they haven’t been allowed to, but that is not a reason for continuing to not allow them to. It’s just a long history of oppression and coercion, which is not the same thing as a reason.

The Hisbah are in charge of policing the morals of Muslims to make sure they are “Sharia-compliant”…One of their duties is to reconcile quarrelling spouses and prevent divorce. But divorce in polygamous northern Nigeria is very common.

That is, the dumping of unwanted women by men in polygamous northern Nigeria is very common; the dumping of unwanted women who are thrown out of their homes and left destitute and without their children. But sharia forbids women to protest this, and the Hisbah are in charge of forcing all Muslims to be ‘Sharia-compliant’. It’s a nice racket for the men, not so nice for the women. Ho hum.

Once again the Anglican church drops the mask.

In a paper published on Monday, the Church will voice concern over how the [Human Rights Act] is being interpreted and claim that it has been used by secularists to advance a liberal agenda.

Yes…as opposed to a theocratic agenda. And a theocratic agenda would be better because?

Leading Church figures have claimed that there has been an overemphasis on equality legislation at the expense of faith groups…[Christians] have complained that law has failed to allow them freedom of their beliefs. The Church paper suggests that Christians should be wary of resorting to human rights legislation, which it claims has become a “tool of secular liberalism”.

Instead Christians should resort to religious law, which of course cannot be a ‘tool of secular liberalism’ because religious law is authoritarian, dogmatic, unaccountable, unarguable, based on unwarranted beliefs, unconcerned with justice or equality or freedom, and inherently oppressive. Naturally that is much better than poxy old secular liberalism, which viciously wants equal rights for everyone. What could be more loathsome than that?

“The language of human rights, interpreted as the basis for the State’s relationship to faith, is not one with which all Christians can be comfortable. It is all too easy to adopt the tools of secular liberalism as if they straightforwardly reinforce our case against secularism’s deficiencies…It is part of the calling of the Established Church never to be ‘domesticated’ by the administration of the day.”

In other words, it is part of the calling of the Established Church to consider itself above the law, and to do everything it can to defy it and encourage its members to defy it. In other words is part of the calling of the Established Church to pretend that the non-existent laws of a non-existent deity should and do trump the laws of flawed but more or less accountable elected representatives.

“The uncomfortable truth is that a purely secular account of human rights is always going to be problematic if it attempts to establish the language of rights as a supreme and non-contestable governing concept in ethics.”

Because the only supreme and non-contestable governing concept in ethics is that of a hidden (and non-existent) god as interpreted by an unaccountable elite of priests who pretend to know what the hidden non-existent god thinks is right and that whatever that god thinks is right, is right, whatever any pesky secular liberal may say about rights or justice.

Don’t let anybody try to tell you that the Anglican church is ‘liberal’ – it’s no more liberal than Rick Warren is.

Heresy Corner quotes David Deutsch, a theoretical physicist and computer scientist at Oxford, on the ‘anthropic principle’ as an argument for the existence of god.

I do not believe that the ‘fine-tuning’ of physical constants provides any sort of argument for the existence of God or anything else supernatural. That is because if the constants had been set intentionally by supernatural entities, then the intentions of those entities must themselves have been at least as ‘fine-tuned’ when they set the constants, and that fine-tuning would remain unexplained. Hence that supernatural hypothesis does not even address the fine-tuning problem, let alone solve it.

More generally arguing for supernatural explanations on the grounds that the current scientific explanation for something or other is flawed or lacking is always a mistake. There are two main reasons for that. One is that there are always unsolved problems. But they get solved. Science continues to make progress even (or especially) after making great discoveries, because the discoveries themselves reveal further problems. Therefore the existence of an unsolved problem in physics is not evidence for a supernatural explanation any more than the existence of an unsolved crime is evidence that a ghost committed it.

The second reason is that supernatural explanations are always empty explanations. That is to say, ‘the gods did it’ is invariably a bad explanation because, as you can see, to invoke that explanation I didn’t even have to say what it is they did. It could ‘explain’ anything whatsoever and hence actually explains nothing.

That second one is very compelling, I always think. ‘The gods did it’ is an absolutely crappy explanation, because it can mean anything or everything or nothing – and as Dr Deutsch indicates, if it can mean anything or everything, then it means nothing – it’s just a gesture. It might as well be X. X did it. Okay…well that gets us precisely nowhere; now let’s try to dig a little deeper.

Wendy Kaminer has some thoughts on ‘vain and unctuous right-wing pastor Rick Warren’ (what an elegant way of putting it).

Obama justified appointing Warren as his inaugural invocator-in-chief as a gesture of inclusiveness. Warren’s own notion of inclusion has its limits, considering his belief that millions of his heretical fellow citizens are going to hell.

Quite, and that’s certainly one reason I find the man rebarbative.

[D]espite Warren’s extreme social and religious conservatism – reflected in his denouncement of stem cell research, reproductive choice and homosexuality, and his belief that only good Christians are bound for glory…- he is widely regarded as a moderate evangelical by the mainstream press and centrist intellectuals.

And that’s the problem – he defines rabid conservatism downwards. Religious lunacy has gotten so rancid and off the map here that a guy who believes in hell and the ‘sinfulness’ of homosexuality is seen as ‘moderate.’

Warren described God’s positions on social programmes and war as ‘debatable’ for ‘Bible-believing Christians’, but he singled out as ‘non-negotiable’ five issues that should determine the votes of good Christians: abortion rights, stem cell research, gay marriage, cloning, and assisted suicide. In a subsequent 2005 email exchange with Warren, I wondered why God was clear about his ‘non-negotiable’ positions on the Culture War but equivocal about war and social programmes: ‘Does God really care more about gay marriage than the obligation to alleviate human suffering?’, I asked. Not surprisingly, I received no response.

Just what I wonder.

How ridiculous – how pathetic. Stem-cell research, gay marriage, cloning are ‘non-negotiable’ and everything else is more trivial. What a tiny-minded man he must be if he really thinks those are the five worst crimes in the world.

We see a pattern here, don’t we – the Vatican thinks cracker-damage is more serious than genocide, Rick Warren thinks stem-cell research and gay marriage are among the worst things. These people have a hideously warped sense of morality – which is not new, but they do keep performing it in public…

Kaminer and Warren had a brief correspondence after she wrote a critical piece about him, in which she called his book ‘childish and platitudinous and questioned his commitment to religious pluralism and civil liberty for all.’

A few months later, on the occasion of Yom Kippur (which I do not observe), I received an email from Warren assuring me of his personal love and friendship, and seeking my forgiveness ‘for any ways that I may have ever unknowingly hurt you. Your article showed a lot of hurt by, and fearfulness of, what you think I represent … I want you to know that I would like to be your friend. I thank God for you, for your talent at writing, and I ask you, on this sacred day, to forgive me.’…He concluded by assuring me that I was in his prayers and his heart: ‘I respect you, thank God for you, and I am praying for God to bless you this new year. With love in my heart for you.’

Have you ever read anything quite so sickening?

Warren didn’t know me…I have no love in my heart for him, or other people I have briefly or never met. But Warren, it seems, is more like a benevolent deity, who doesn’t simply harbour indifferent goodwill towards others but loves them – loves us all, despite our sins and failings. In fact, Warren’s email to me was apparently a variation of a Yom Kippur form letter that he sent to Jewish journalists. In any case, I didn’t see myself anywhere in his extravagant protestations of love for me and requests for forgiveness; I saw a reflection of Warren’s self-image.

And very cloying and disgusting it is, as well as effrontery in someone who sorts people into sinners and the other thing for the arbitrary reasons that Warren does. Sanctimony and bigotry: a nasty combination.

Religious bastards are not limited to the Vatican, of course.

Saudi Arabia’s most senior cleric was quoted Wednesday as saying it is permissible for 10-year-old girls to marry and those who think they’re too young are doing the girls an injustice. “It is wrong to say it’s not permitted to marry off girls who are 15 and younger,” Sheik Abdul-Aziz Al Sheikh, the country’s grand mufti, was quoted as saying. “A female who is 10 or 12 is marriageable and those who think she’s too young are wrong and are being unfair to her,” he said…”We hear a lot about the marriage of underage girls in the media, and we should know that Islamic law has not brought injustice to women.” The mufti said a good upbringing will make a girl capable of carrying out her duties as a wife and that those who say women should not marry before the age of 25 are following a “bad path.”

Ah, a good upbringing will make a girl capable of carrying out her duties as a wife; so the important thing in this subject is whether the girl can be useful to the man or not, it’s not what is good for the girl. And how exactly will a good upbringing make a ten year old girl capable of being penetrated by an adult man? Is part of a ‘good upbringing’ for a girl having her vagina mechanically enlarged, say by the slow introduction of cylindrical objects in graduated sizes? And if it is, that doesn’t make a girl of ten or eleven capable of giving birth without damage, so how does a good upbringing help there? It doesn’t – but doubtless the mufti just meant that a good upbringing brings a girl up to know so thoroughly and without question that she is an inferior, a nothing, an object that belongs to whatever man she is handed over to at age ten, that she will not utter a peep about any of this.

“Our mothers and before them, our grandmothers, married when they were barely 12,” said Al Sheikh, according to Al-Hayat.

No doubt, but that is not in itself a reason to go on making girls get married at that age forever, and Al Sheikh’s defensive nostalgia for his mommy and his granny is not a reason to impose slavery on all girls forever. But clerics of course are not expected to think.

The Vatican is different from you and me; it has an eccentric way of ordering its priorities – a way so eccentric that it passes human understanding.

It has this secret tribunal, you see, which it has only now decided to open to the public, or rather to that portion of the public known as ‘the faithful.’ This secret tribunal ‘handles confessions of sins so grave only the pope can grant absolution.’ Ooh – the pope’s a busy guy, so they must be some truly grave sins then. (But then, ‘sin’ is a silly idea, and the Catholic church’s ideas of what sin is are also silly – but still, the pope is a busy guy, so they’re not going to get things too backward, surely.)

By lifting the veil of secrecy surrounding the tribunal’s work, the Vatican hopes to emphasize the fundamental role the sacrament plays in saving souls, the Vatican’s No. 2, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, said in a paper delivered at the conference. “Today it seems as though the sense of sin has been forgotten,” he said.

The sacrament saves souls, and if souls are not saved, bad things happen, though the bad things happen to souls, not bodies, so whether what happens has anything to do with actual burning or not is not altogether clear, at least not to me. But that’s okay, because people who believe it are bound to be scared in some way, and that’s the important thing. It’s very worrying when the sense of sin has been forgotten, because then people don’t have this pervading but nebulous sense of anxiety and worry and dread in case they are commiting ‘sins’ without knowing it.

Confessions of even the most heinous of crimes and sins — such as genocide or mass murder — are handled at the local level by priests and their bishops and are not heard by the tribunal. Its work involves those sins that are reserved for the pope — considered so serious that a local priest or bishop is not qualified to grant absolution, said Cardinal James Francis Stafford, an American who heads the Apostolic Penitentiary. These include defiling the Eucharist, which Catholics believe is the body and blood of Christ. Stafford said this offense is occurring with more and more frequency, not just in satanic rites but by ordinary faithful who receive Communion and then remove the host from their mouths and spit it out or otherwise desecrate it.

Read that carefully. Then read it again. Then again. The Catholic church actually thinks that spitting out a cracker is a more serious ‘sin’ than genocide or mass murder.

I thought I already knew how horrible the Vatican is, but it just isn’t possible to know, is it; they keep so much of their horribleness a secret. I should have known – I did know they put Montaigne’s book on the Index partly because he was against torturing heretics before killing them, and said so – I did know how they treated Irish children until shockingly recently – I did know they tell credulous people that condoms don’t work. And yet, I still didn’t know. They take spitting out a cracker more seriously than genocide. And they mean it.

Denialism and death threats.

A new book defending vaccines, written by a doctor infuriated at the claim that they cause autism, is galvanizing a backlash against the antivaccine movement in the United States. But there will be no book tour for the doctor, Paul A. Offit, author of “Autism’s False Prophets.” He has had too many death threats…[Offit] is also the co-inventor of a vaccine against rotavirus, a diarrheal disease that kills 60,000 children a year in poor countries.

So…Paul Offit collaborated on the invention of a vaccine that if implemented can save the lives of at least 60,000 children a year in poor countries – and yet ‘antivaccine activists’ think he’s evil and some think he should get death threats. That’s odd.

“[A] few years ago this ceased to be a civil scientific discourse and became about crucifying individuals,” said Dr. Gregory A. Poland, chief of vaccine research at the Mayo Clinic, who says he has had threats against his children.

Vaccines prevent lethal diseases – yet people get so angry about a non-existent link between vaccination and autism that they want to kill or at least threaten people who are working on vaccines. That’s deranged.

Of course, having grown up in a world where lethal contagious diseases, apart from AIDS, are no longer commonplace, they don’t know what it’s like to live with the constant risk and sometimes reality of cholera, typhoid. TB, polio – and measles. But if they’re going to become activists on the subject, then they ought to find out what it’s like. It’s not all that difficult.

Many doctors now argue that reporters should treat the antivaccine lobby with the same indifference they do Holocaust deniers, AIDS deniers and those claiming to have proof that NASA faked the Moon landings.

In other words reporters should treat the antivaccine lobby like whack jobs.

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. Excuse me – I can’t help it.

The Pope has instructed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, formerly the Holy Office of the Inquisition, to draw up a new handbook to help bishops snuff out an explosion of bogus heavenly apparitions. Benedict XVI plans to update the Vatican’s current rules on investigating apparitions to help distinguish between true and false claims of visions of Jesus and the Virgin Mary, messages, stigmata (the appearances of the five wounds of Christ), weeping and bleeding statues and Eucharistic miracles.

Well yes, certainly, of course; one can quite see why he would. Only…is it really, actually, genuinely possible to distinguish between true and false claims of visions and stigmata and the like? Or are they much of a muchness? Oh no, surely they have a method; they can’t be just gesturing at the air.

[A]nyone who claims to have seen an apparition will only be believed as long as they remain silent and do not court publicity over their claims. If they refuse to obey, this will be taken as a sign that their claims are false. The visionaries will then be visited by a team of psychiatrists, either atheists or Catholics, to certify their mental health while theologians will assess the content of any heavenly messages to see if they contravene Church teachings.

Ah good! That’s a good method – that should definitely weed out the bogus claims, because Church teachings are the infallible checking mechanism for telling Up from Down, gold from dross, wheat from chaff, wine from vinegar, and heavenly from not so good.

If the visionary is considered credible they will ultimately be questioned by one or more demonologists and exorcists to exclude the possibility that Satan is hiding behind the apparitions in order to deceive the faithful.

Yes but…how does that work? What questions are there that demonologists and exorcists can ask that would reveal Satan hiding behind the apparitions? Isn’t Satan clever enough to answer their questions in such a way that they can’t spot Satan hiding? Oh well, I shouldn’t ask such questions, demonologists and exorcists are professionals and they have techniques and tools and skills that they learned and got degrees in, so I’ll just bow deferentially and go eat lunch.

The Vatican is in TRUB-BLE . The Dutch Foreign Minister is going to YELL AT IT. It might have to GO TO BED WITHOUT ANY DESSERT. HA ha ha HA ha.

The Vatican envoy to the Netherlands, we learn with enormous pleasure this weekend, is about to receive a well-deserved arse-kicking from Dutch Foreign Affairs Minister, Maxime Verhagen…[T]he envoy – Monsignor François Bacqué – has been called to a meeting to explain the Catholic Church’s stance on sexuality and marriage, and answer charges the Church opposes gay rights…LifeSiteNews said that, in December, the Vatican was attacked in the international press for refusing to endorse the UN motion claiming to “decriminalise homosexuality”…The Vatican’s representative at the UN, Archbishop Celestino Migliore, said in December that although there was agreement that persons with homosexual inclinations should not be subject to arrest or other forms of unjust discrimination, the motion would lend support to the movement to create homosexual “marriage” or other legal recognition for homosexual unions.

And therefore the Vatican is content to keep the criminalization of homosexuality, in other words the Vatican has presumptuous intrusive trivial unwarranted objections to homosexual marriage and therefore it wants homosexuality to go on being a crime. In other words the Vatican prides itself on being pointlessly bigoted and having contempt for human rights.

The Vatican also opposed the use in the document of expressions such as “gender identity” and “sexual orientation,” saying they are not defined in international law but are only cultural concepts promulgated in the media and the homosexualist political movement.

Ah! Ah yes – so they are! Whereas the Vatican’s concepts are…what, exactly? They’re not concepts but truths engraved in nature? Edicts ratified by the seldom-seen but always groveled-to absentee deity? Well no doubt the Vatican would like to think so, but guess what, the Vatican’s rules and regs and refusals and foot-stampings are ‘only cultural concepts’ too, promulgated in the Vatican press office and the Catholic political movement. They’re made up. They’re not based on anything. They’re bullshit. I oppose the use of such expressions as “Holy Father” and “Holy See” and “Vatican envoy” because they’re just cultural concepts promulgated by a bunch of reactionary obscurantist deeply mistaken men in robes.

So is the BBC a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Church of England or god’s favorite offspring or what? What’s it playing at?

The BBC has been forced to apologise to an acclaimed psychologist and writer after editing her derogatory comments about religion so that a radio programme broadcast “the opposite” of what she had said…[Dorothy] Rowe, best known for her work on depression, had attempted to comment on the subject proposed by the programme’s producer: “Why so many people want to believe in God and search for faith.” But she was aghast to hear how her words were eventually used…She said the interview “sounds like I am giving unqualified praise to religious belief. There is no mention of what I talked…about at length, that religious belief can cause immense misery. I often summarise this with: ‘The church keeps me in business’.”

What happened…someone’s foot slipped and all the critical parts got accidentally erased?

The row has provided ammunition for secular critics who accuse the BBC of using its programmes to promote religion. Terry Sanderson, president of the National Secular Society, who was interviewed for the same programme as Rowe, said: “I gave a long interview, but when I listened to the finished product it contained just a couple of very brief soundbites from me which were not representative of the thoughts I had expressed…This programme was the most blatant piece of religious propaganda I have heard for a long time.”

Sad, isn’t it. The god-huggers want the rest of us to shut up about god, so they start distorting the evidence, so we get more irritated than we were before, so we make more noise, so they even more desperately want us to shut up, so they distort the evidence in even more brazen (and stupid) ways, and round we go.