So if God, in Humpty Dumpty fashion, just means whatever any word-spinner says it means, then – why are we expected to heed it or obey it or respect it or not do stem-cell research because of it?

There is a ‘childish notion of an anthropomorphic God that is characteristic of the tribe, of the closed society’ and then there is the non-childish notion of a non-anthropomorphic God.

God exists in the word and through the word…God is a human concept. God is the name we give to our belief that life has meaning, one that transcends the world’s chaos, randomness and cruelty…God is that mysterious force—and you can give it many names as other religions do—which works upon us and through us to seek and achieve truth, beauty and goodness. God is perhaps best understood as our ultimate concern, that in which we should place our highest hopes, confidence and trust…God is better understood as verb rather than a noun. God is not an asserted existence but a process accomplishing itself. And God is inescapable. It is the life force that sustains, transforms and defines all existence.

Well that’s all quite pretty, but it is not what everyone means by the word ‘God’ – to say the least. It’s very odd to say that God is not this childish notion of a person, then matter-of-factly say that God is the name we give to our belief that life has meaning, as if that were common knowledge and universally accepted. I would go so far as to say that’s dirty pool.

It is by the seriousness of our commitments to compassion, indeed our ability to sacrifice for the other, especially for the outcast and the stranger, our commitment to justice—the very core of the message of the prophets and the teachings of Jesus—that we alone can measure the quality of faith. This is the meaning of true faith…Professed faith—what we say we believe—is not faith. It is an expression of loyalty to a community, to our tribe. Faith is what we do. This is real faith. Faith is the sister of justice.

Same thing. Very pretty, but idiosyncratic; does not reflect common usage or common knowledge; therefore, no basis on which to contest someone else’s account of the matter which more closely reflects common usage and knowledge (whatever other faults it may have).

Faith is not in conflict with reason. Faith does not conflict with scientific truth, unless faith claims to express a scientific truth. Faith can neither be affirmed nor denied by scientific, historical or philosophical truth…There is a reality that is not a product of rational deduction. It is not accounted for by strict rational discourse. There is a spiritual dimension to human existence and the universe, but this is not irrational—it is non-rational.

More Humpty Dumptyism with ‘faith’ along with some unnecessary decoration. There is an emotional dimension to human existence that it is fair to call non-rational, but as for a spiritual dimension to the universe – 1) I don’t know what that means and 2) I think it’s decorative windbaggery.

The danger of Sam’s simplistic worldview is that it does what fundamentalists do: It creates the illusion of a binary world of us and them, of reason versus irrationality, of the forces of light battling the forces of darkness. And once you set up this world you are permitted to view as justified military intervention, brutal occupation and even torture, anything, in short, that will subdue what is defined as irrational and dangerous.

That, on the other hand, I think is a defensible view, and it also doesn’t bother with idiosyncratic definitions or with decorative windbaggery. Argumentative writing is never improved by idiosyncratic definitions or decorative windbaggery; never.

Hitchens has a piece in that current Free Inquiry that I mentioned. It’s about the ‘fundamentalist atheist’ bromide that is making the rounds. He doesn’t find it altogether impressive. He doesn’t find it overwhelmingly persuasive, either.

All you need is to ignore the difference between someone who believes in, say, heaven and hell and someone who doesn’t. The first has a lot of work to do by way of providing anything that even looks like evidence. The second rests his case on the extreme improbability of any such evidence being adduced. Are these positions really describable as morally or intellectually equivalent? Or take the case of someone who believes in punishment for blasphemy or in prior restraint on those who might commit it. Is this the same dogma as the argument that says that religion, since it makes such huge claims, must expect to have them submitted to rigorous questioning?…The faithful believe that certain truths have been ‘revealed.’ The skeptics and secularists believe that truth is only to be sought by free inquiry and trial and error. Only one of those positions is dogmatic.

He got the phrase ‘free inquiry’ in there. I got it into mine, too. I must say, it’s something of an honour to write for a publication called ‘free inquiry.’

There’s something called the atheist two-step. Maybe so, but there is also a theist four-step.

1) There is a god. 2) It is good. 3) It wants us to be good in a particular way. 4) We have reliable knowledge of 1-3.

In a way 4) can be seen as the clincher – the least likely of all and the most dangerous of all. It’s 4) that produces these bastards dropping cement blocks on the faces of teenage girls and shooting women government ministers in the head and executing ‘apostates’ and ‘blasphemers.’ If only people could be content to believe 1-3 and realize that 4) is just out of the question, and deadly as well as presumptuous – the world would be a much better place.

The ‘community’ trope turns up yet again and confuses the issue yet again.

Cities and towns across the northern Indian state of Punjab are shut in response to a general strike called by the Sikh community…Sikhs are demanding an apology from the leader of a religious sect who appeared in an advert dressed like one of the Sikh religion’s most important figures. Sikh community leaders say it is an insult to their religion. Last week, thousands took to the streets. One man was shot dead in clashes that followed.

How can a general strike have been called by the Sikh community? What does that mean? What are we meant to understand by it? It’s annoying because it makes the report harder to understand than it would otherwise be. It makes it sound as if all Sikhs called the general strike, when for all we know it could be a small minority of Sikhs that called it. It could also be a large minority, or half or a small or large majority, but calling it ‘the community’ disguises and obfuscates all that and leaves the impression that all Sikhs think alike on the subject. For all we know there are huge numbers of Sikhs furiously rejecting the whole idea of calling a general strike because of some footling insult. It’s actually more insulting to ‘the Sikh community’ to pretend all Sikhs think alike than it is to dress up as a guru.

At least the article does later note that there’s a lot of working up going on.

Some analysts say Sikh leaders, angry at the direct intervention by the DSS in the elections, seized the opportunity to whip up popular sentiments of their community against the sect. They say the latest conflict threatens to lead to a polarisation of the communities and the dispute could trigger widespread unrest.

In one sentence the DSS is a sect, in the next it’s a community. Ho hum.

So petty tyrannical spiteful controlling interfering clerics get their way and yet another woman is prevented from working, living her life, having ordinary grown-up interactions, having fun, expressing joy and exuberance. The world is made just a little safer for narrowness and deprivation and general nothingness.

Pakistan’s Minister of Tourism has handed in her resignation after coming under criticism from a hardline Islamist cleric for hugging her parachute instructor after completing a jump in France, an official said on Tuesday. Nilofar Bakhtiar, one of three women ministers in the Pakistani cabinet, made the parachute jump in March to raise money for victims of an earthquake that killed 73,000 people in Pakistan in October 2005. Shortly afterwards, Pakistani newspapers published a photograph of her giving her para-jumping instructor a hug, and a pro-Taliban cleric issued a decree calling on the government to sack her for “obscenity”.

To people who think like that, everything women do is obscene; women themselves are obscene; their mere unconcealed existence is obscene. They scream obscenity from every pore. Every hair follicle, every joint, every muscle, every flake of skin is throbbing and dripping and shuddering with obscenity; every sound, every movement, every inhalation and exhalation; every thought, every act, every word; it’s all, all steeped in sex and filth and obscenity. There are not enough hours in the day for them to persecute and punish women for being so obscene. But they do what they can.

Look –

The new Free Inquiry.

Twelve-year-old girls are treated like dirt, and so are eighty-five-year-old women.

India alone has almost 40 million widows. Traditionally Hinduism frowns on widows remarrying and many have their social and economic power eroded too…Vrindavan is a pilgrimage town now home to thousands of destitute widows. Ashtabala Mundo is one of thousands of widows who have been driven by poverty to the holy town. She was married off when she was still a baby and widowed when she was still a child. “We have to come and sing here morning, noon and night and for all that I only get is $10 a month,” she said. “By the time I’ve paid the rent, I can’t afford to buy cooking oil. So I often go all day without a hot meal,” Mrs Mundo said. The women line up, after singing for several hours, to receive a cup of rice and a few teaspoons of lentils. It isn’t much.

No – a cup of rice and a few teaspoons of lentils is not much for several hours of anything. Making rosaries, singing, anything.

Many of the widows who flock here have nowhere else to go. Hindu widows are not supposed to remarry. With little social or economic status, many become destitute. We met Nirmala Dasi, a frail 85-year-old, begging at the temple gate. When she spoke, she dissolved into tears. “I’ve been too ill to sing at the temple for the last three days so I haven’t had a thing to eat. You don’t get anything unless you go there.” We were soon surrounded by widows with sad stories to tell. “I spend almost everything I get on a room I share with four others. I’ve no relatives, or I wouldn’t be here,” said Mithila. “It’s so cold here, I’m always freezing.”

No further comment.

Young people are so spoiled these days. They just want to fritter away all their time in school when they could be sold into slavery I mean ‘marriage’ to pay off their fathers’ gambling debts. Why, when I was growing up, four year old girls were sold so their fathers could buy an ice cream cone, and they were thankful for the opportunity. Kids are so selfish now.

Shabana, a pretty Afghan teenager with a modern haircut, was 12 years old when she was forced to marry a man 38 years her senior to settle her father’s 600-dollar gambling debt. Two years later, she is unhappy and angry. She doesn’t like her husband, 52-year-old farmer Mohammad Asef. “He is wild – he destroyed my hopes,” she said in their humble mudbrick home in the northern province of Balkh, speaking out only when Asef went into another room to take a call. She doesn’t get on with her husband’s first wife, who is aged 42 and lives with them. And she is disgusted with her father. “He sold me,” she told AFP.

Hopes? Her hopes? What hopes could she have, the ungrateful little brat? To get an education? To decide for herself whether and when to marry or not, and whom to marry or not? What to do with her life? Pfffff. She’s a girl; girls don’t get to hope things like that.

“When I came back, my father-in-law had gambled away all the harvest,” he said. “He promised me to get my money in one month but he couldn’t find it. I knew he wouldn’t because he is a very poor man. It was about 600 dollars. When he couldn’t find the money, I married his 12-year-old daughter in compensation.”

Well, obviously. Because if a man owes another man a lot of money that he doesn’t have, obviously it’s the nearest twelve-year-old girl who is the compensation. Obviously twelve-year-old girls aren’t people (let alone people with hopes, people who ought to be in school), they’re livestock, with a cash value, to be sold whenever their fathers are a little short of the ready.

Shabana, who likes to wear jeans and read novels and newspapers, was taken out of school. Now she spends most of her time doing chores in the simple house for which Asef cannot yet afford doors. The illegal practise of exchanging girls to settle debts, including those owed to opium farmers, or to settle disputes between clans persists around the country…[M]en hold sway and often break the law with impunity, including by marrying underage girls or using them to settle debts or feuds…Between 60 and 80 per cent of all marriages are believed to be ‘forced’ – a term that covers a range of practises including marrying off girls to repay debts or without their consent, according to the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission. This is one of the main factors behind girls and women running away from home or committing suicide, including by setting themselves alight by dousing themselves in fuel and igniting it with a match.

I can’t see why. Why would a normal right-thinking young girl not want to leave school in order to move in with a 52-year-old man and his wife to be the man’s sex toy and to spend most of her time doing chores? I can’t see anything unappealing or irksome in such a prospect, can you?

To be able to afford his own wife, Abdul Raheem, also from Balkh province, says he wants to marry off his 12-year-old sister as soon as he can. The family of the woman he has set his heart on wants 6,000 dollars for her. Raheem, who earns 60 dollars a month as a cleaner in a police station in Mazar, has saved 2,000 dollars. “It’s very difficult for me to find 4,000 dollars,” he said. But if he could marry off his sister, “then I can marry my girlfriend,” he told AFP.

Well, whatever works for you, Abdul Raheem. Enjoy your $6000 dollar wife, and give my regards to your sister.

And another thing. If we think that we can justify the belief that our senses are a reliable guide to reality by appealing to our belief that God exists because a good God would not allow us systematically to be deceived – then what about the rest? If a good God would not allow us systematically to be deceived, why would a good God allow us to have such incomplete senses? Why would a good God not arrange for us to have exhaustive senses, that sense everything that can be sensed? Why are there senses that we don’t have? Why are the senses that we do have so limited? Why are there senses that animals have that we don’t have? Why can’t we hear that high note that dogs can hear? Why can’t we echolocate the way bats and dolphins can? I want to know.

I’ve been thinking of objections to this – to the reply to the reply to the claim that belief in God is no more a “faith position” than is empirical science because our belief that our senses are a reliable guide to reality cannot be justified. One reply to that is we all assume our senses are a reliable guide to reality, while belief in God is an extra; reply to that reply is

if we accept (ii) [there is a God], then (i) [our senses are a reliable guide to reality] is no longer an assumption. We can justify it by appealing to (ii) (in the style of Descartes – a good God would not allow us systematically to be deceived). So, each belief involves an equal amount of “faith”.

Stephen asked for comments. I said

It seems to me we have to accept both (ii) and (iii) for (i) to be no longer an assumption. (ii) was “there is a God”; (iii) is “the God there is is good”. So the amounts of faith aren’t equal; (ii) and (iii) are at least double (i).

I’ve been thinking of (iv), (v), (vi) and so on – actually I thought of a couple of them at the time but wanted to keep it simple, not to say stark. But it takes a lot of steps to get from ‘there is a God’ to ‘a good God would not allow us systematically to be deceived, therefore our senses are a reliable guide to reality,’ doesn’t it? You could just change (ii) to ‘there is a good God’ in an attempt to eliminate (iii), but it would be cheating, since the game is counting items believed in order to compare quantity of faith needed for theism and atheism. So those are two, and then there are more. (iv) the good God there is had and/or has something to do with the way our senses are. (v) the good God there is that had something to do with the way our senses are has no way reliably to inform us about itself, despite having had something to do with the way our senses are. (vi) the good God that did these confusing things is not bothered by the fact that there is a convincing alternative explanation for the fact that our senses are a mostly reliable guide to reality. (vii) the good God that arranged this even more confusing situation is not bothered by the way we carry on.

The items you have to believe seem to keep multiplying, and the more of them there are the less sense they make, yet they can’t be eliminated. (Can they? No doubt I’m missing something, or everything, but I don’t see how they can.)

I like it when people fix little problems that most of us don’t even notice.

Iran plans to make special bicycles designed for women that will be compatible with Islamic regulations and not expose their body movements while riding, the newspaper Iran reported. The new bicycle would have a cabin to cover half of a rider’s body…Women in Iran are obliged to wear scarves and long gowns to hide their hair and body contours. Female athletes must also follow this rule and participate in sports wearing scarves and gowns. The clergy considers women’s body movements made while riding a bicycle to be provoking to men and not compatible with social rules.

I know what they mean, don’t you? Women’s body movements are provoking to men – and they keep doing it. Ever noticed that? They just never stop. They keep making body movements – the sluts. They walk here and there – they cough – they breathe. They eat food – they laugh – they turn the pages of books. They type, they drink coffee, they put their socks on. How are men supposed to be able to go about their lives with all that going on?! Women should either hold completely still – or be completely covered up – or ideally both.

That of course is especially true of any movement involving the arms, because of course movement of the arms reminds everyone of sex. Also especially true of movements of the head, because sometimes the head moves around during sex, also because you can put things in it. And triply or quadruply true of the – gulp – the – gasp – the – choke – legs. The legs the legs the legs. Legs, legs, leggggs – oh god help me. Legs. You know. Sex. Sex has legs in it. Because they’re up around you, and because of what’s between them. Actually legs should be against the law, if you think about it. Really. Legs – they’re filthy, they’re obscene, they’re disgusting. They should all be cut off! At birth! Women’s anyway. Not men’s of course. No need for that – just poke women’s eyes out, instead. Cut off their legs, poke out their eyes, make them wear tents when they walk around and little houses if they’re ever insane enough to try to ride a bicycle. The little house will of course make that impossible, so no more problem. No more women on bicycles with their legggggs going up and down, up and down, up and down – ohhhhhhh.

Uh, excuse me. I – um – I have a chill. I have to go now – time for prayers.

Fresh Air replayed an old interview with Jerry Falwell yesterday, in which Terri Gross asked one very good question, in fact the crucial question. Unfortunately it went right past or over Falwell; he either pretended not to get it, or really didn’t get it. Gross made one attempt to press the point, to straighten him out and thus get him to answer the real question rather than a bogus one, but it didn’t work, and she didn’t press it further. I wish she had, because it’s absolutely central. I wish everyone would press this question. As a matter of fact, come to think of it, it’s the same question (in a different form) that Dawkins asked of the homophobic preacher in ‘The Root of all Evil?’, and he too did not press it, and again, I wished he had, for the same reason. We’ve got to learn to keep pressing this question until we get a real answer – we’ve got to stop accepting non-answers and letting it go at that.

What question. This one. She asked if he ever had any doubts, then to explain her meaning further she pointed out that he had opposed the Civil Rights movement until about the mid-60s, when he changed his mind. He cut in to say that God had taught him; Gross cut in to say that she wasn’t asking him to defend his former views, that wasn’t the point, the point was that they had been one thing and then he changed his mind, so did not that lead him to think he could be wrong about something in the same way now? A blindingly obvious and essential question – and it simply went right past him and flopped harmlessly into the dust. It was immensely frustrating – because it gets to the heart of what is wrong with people like Falwell, and what is dangerous about their influence and power, and what is wrong with theocracy in general – and he not only didn’t answer, he seemed not even to understand it.

It’s so basic. If you got it wrong about Civil Rights, if God showed you that you’d been wrong and you changed your mind – how can you possibly know that you’re not wrong about (say) homosexuality or feminism now? What possible conceivable reason can you have for thinking you know that? What is it about what you know now that makes it fundamentally different from what you knew in 1959?

Nothing, Dr Falwell. Not one thing. What you think you know and what you think your God wants you to say is just your own entrenched opinion, just a human opinion like any other, mine, hers, his, theirs; it’s not God’s, it’s not God-endorsed, it’s not cosmic, it’s not Absolute, and it’s certainly not immune from error. That’s why people like you, who apparently can’t even allow that idea house room, are so damn dangerous. That’s why we hate you and fear you: because you’re not just wrong, you’re impervious to correction or argument or persuasion, and not only that but proud of it. Despite knowing and acknowledging that you have changed your mind in the past, you dress up your current opinions as God’s laws and make a virtue of refusing to doubt them. You’re a horror show, you and your gang.

This is distasteful.

Laura and I are deeply saddened by the death of Jerry Falwell, a man who cherished faith, family, and freedom…Jerry lived a life of faith and called upon men and women of all backgrounds to believe in God…

Well, that’s one (major) reason atheists of the assertive type (for want of a better term) (even Anthony Gottlieb calls us ‘militant’ atheists, which I think is both pejorative and inaccurate, and unbecoming to a philosopher) get exasperated with theists of the assertive type. We don’t think grown-up people ought to ‘call upon’ people to believe in God, because there is no good reason to think ‘God’ exists, so calling upon us to believe in God amounts to calling upon us to abandon rational thought, and we don’t think that is a good or justified call.

Then there’s the alliterative faith, family, and freedom triplet; Bush’s idea of virtue. He said something similar at Miami Dade College a couple of weeks ago; similar but with an important difference:

At Miami Dade, you know firsthand the contributions that immigrants make to our country. You see every day the values of hard work, and family, and faith that immigrants bring.

Freedom swapped for hard work. Well duh – that’s what immigrants are for: to work hard at crap jobs for crap pay with crap benefits and crap protections; naturally Bush talks up hard work when talking to an audience of immigrants, despite not being famous for working hard himself. Hard work, family, and faith: the ideal package for a docile labour pool. And the core duo, faith and family, are the basic reactionary program: one the enemy of free independent critical thought, the other a code for hostility to freedom, independence and autonomy for women. No doubt it never crossed Bush’s mind that there is a tension between the valorization of ‘faith’ and freedom; that faith in some ways limits and interferes with freedom; and especially that some people who ‘live lives of faith’ and ‘call upon people to believe in God’ decidedly use ‘faith’ as a weapon to smash any freedoms they don’t like. But it should have. It’s ludicrous to say Jerry Falwell cherished freedom.

I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way – all of them who have tried to secularize America – I point the finger in their face and say ‘you helped this [9/11] happen.’

AIDS is the wrath of a just God against homosexuals.

I listen to feminists and all these radical gals. … These women just need a man in the house. That’s all they need. Most of the feminists need a man to tell them what time of day it is and to lead them home.

Timothy Noah issued a slightly less emollient press release.

God, they say, is love, but the Rev. Jerry Falwell, who died May 15, hit the jackpot trafficking in small-minded condemnation…On news of Falwell’s death, McCain said in a statement, “Dr. Falwell was a man of distinguished accomplishment who devoted his life to serving his faith and country.” Nonsense. He was a bigot, a reactionary, a liar, and a fool.

And public officials should not be pretending otherwise. Fred Phelps is not a peppery but essentially decent guy; Pat Robertson is not a lamp unto our feet; and Jerry Falwell was not a man of distinguished accomplishment. Tell the truth, you schmucks.

The Wolfowitz Matter is fairly enthralling. The level of narcissism and self-absorbtion that must be involved rivets the attention.

Wolfowitz effectively blamed Riza for his predicament as well, saying that her “intractable position” in demanding a salary increase as compensation for her career disruption forced him to grant one to pre-empt a lawsuit…The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, said some board members hope a strong statement of dissatisfaction would persuade the Bush administration to withdraw support for Wolfowitz. But the White House views the stakes as larger than control of the World Bank, said a senior administration official, with U.S. resolve and power on the line — in particular the longstanding right of the United States to name the head of the institution.

‘Resolve’ – they’re big on resolve in this administration. Well they would be, wouldn’t they – given how incompetent they are, given their inability to take advice or listen to people not in the magic circle, given their insistence on putting political hacks with no relevant experience in crucial, often highly technical jobs – how could they not value ‘resolve’? That way stupid, venal, greedy, mindless mistakes become tests of character, which they always pass with flying colours simply by being obstinate and refusing ever to admit error. What a good wheeze. Merit, ability, experience, knowledge, good judgment, all go out the window, because all that matters is resolve and power. Great! Terrific! They can’t find their own rumps in the dark, but they’re resolute and thuggish; perfect! Just what one wants running 1) the US and 2) powerful international institutions. Spiffy.

“Mr. Wolfowitz placed his own personal interests in opposition to the interests of the institution,” the report found. “In so doing, he undermined the legal safeguards the institution had in place to protect itself from the harm it has unfortunately now come to experience.” The report reserved its sharpest judgment for the public struggle Wolfowitz has waged to save his job in recent weeks, criticizing the bank’s probe in the press. “It has turned an internal governance matter into an ugly public relations campaign,” the report said, asserting that in unleashing “public attacks,” Wolfowitz “denigrates the very institution he was selected to lead.”

Well but that’s because it’s not about the World Bank, it’s about Paul Wolfowitz. Let’s get our priorities straight, shall we?

There’s some funny stuff in this piece by Anthony Gottlieb on the new atheist books.

In some religious research, it is not necessarily the respondents who are credulous. Harris has made much of a survey that suggests that forty-four per cent of Americans believe that Jesus will return to judge mankind within the next fifty years. But, in 1998, a fifth of non-Christians in America told a poll for Newsweek that they, too, expected Jesus to return. What does Harris make of that? Any excuse for a party, perhaps…Harris takes at face value a Gallup poll suggesting that eighty-three per cent of Americans regard it as the Word of God, and he, like Dawkins and Hitchens, uses up plenty of ink establishing the wickedness of many tales in the Old Testament. Critics of the Bible should find consolation in the fact that many people do not have a clue what is in it. Surveys by the Barna Research Group, a Christian organization, have found that most Christians don’t know who preached the Sermon on the Mount.

Cool. Bible is Word of God, but who cares what’s in it? That’s the spirit! So if God actually dropped in for a beer and a handful of Doritos, nobody would look up from Maximum Exposure to say ‘how do’ and ask what the divine plan actually is? If God parted the heavens and announced in a loud voice that it was time to listen up and take heed, everybody would just say ‘yeah, yeah’ and take no further notice? If there were a CD with what eighty-three per cent of Americans regarded as the actual voice of God singing ‘It Had to Be You,’ would they not bother to listen? What a very pleasing thought.

And there’s a dreamy incoherence in their conviction that moderate forms of religion somehow enable fundamentalist zeal and violence to survive. Are we really going to tame the fervor of an extremist imam’s mosque in Waziristan by weakening the plush-toy creed of a nondenominational church in Chappaqua?

Well if you put it that way…

Joan Smith considers the Shambo question.

The temple has been served with a notice insisting that he be put down, prompting outrage among representatives of the country’s Hindus, who consider cattle sacred and claim that slaughtering the infected animal would be an affront to their religion. “It strikes at the very core of our beliefs,” said Ramesh Kallidai, the secretary general of the Hindu Forum of Britain…[I]n 1935, when a voluntary testing scheme was introduced for cattle, 50,000 new cases of human TB were recorded annually in this country and 2,500 people died from a form of the disease passed on through cow’s milk. That’s why testing was made compulsory in 1950, along with a raft of other measures designed to prevent transmission between cattle and humans. The low incidence of the disease in recent years is in large part due to the measures adopted in the past century.

So there you have it: ‘the very core of our beliefs’ versus the public health. The public health should trump the beliefs.

One of the myths promulgated by believers – a sacred cow, if I might use that term – is that there is no conflict between science and religion. Nothing could be further from the truth, as this sorry tale demonstrates, and I’m beginning to wonder whether there are any limits at all on the demands by different faith groups for special treatment.

I can answer that. No, there are no such limits. Fasten your seat belts.

Nick Cohen takes a critical look at sectarianism.

The old sectarian leaders [Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley] looked like a pair of exhausted warlords, who, after 30 years of a pointless conflict, were content to settle for a division of the spoils. There was no hint of a common political culture, no shared understanding of the principles of secular democracy, just a truce between bosses in which each left the other free to run his fiefdom and the quangos and ministries which went with it. A bus ride through Belfast should convince doubters that the Good Friday Agreement created partition and called it peace. The walls that went up to separate Catholics from Protestants in the Seventies have not been torn down. There are more of them now than ever. Catholics travel for miles to avoid a Protestant leisure centre and Protestants go out of their way to avoid a Catholic newsagent.

Doesn’t that sound lovely? Just like Baghdad, and Darfur, and Kashmir, and Kano, and Trincomalee, and Istanbul, and all the other dulcet harmonious fragrant bits of the globe where people devotedly hate each other for being in the wrong Whatever?

Mutual loathing ought to have been combated by breaking up Northern Ireland’s segregated schools…For all the praise given to them, just 5 per cent of Northern Ireland’s pupils attend integrated schools today…[T]he overwhelming majority of Ulster’s children can go from four to 18 without having a serious conversation with a member of a rival creed. They mingle only when they reach the workplace because, oddly, the religious discrimination on which the education system rests is illegal at work.

Yeh that is odd – because whatever it is that makes religious discrimination a bad idea at work – bad enough to make it illegal – is also what makes it a bad idea at school; only more so because children are more credulous than adults.

Down with sectarianism, up with universalism.

Good.

The South Asia Media Commission has condemned the harassment of Tasneem Khalil, an investigative journalist in Bangladesh, and sought an explanation and apology from the authorities…The four men took Khalil, 26, to the Sangsad Bhavan army camp, outside the parliament building in Dhaka. He was released on Friday night after more than a daylong grilling…“We are very much worried about Tasneem Khalil’s safety. He is being harassed too often,” N Ram, the chairman, and Najam Sethi, the secretary general of the commission, said in a statement welcoming Khalil’s release. “The Bangladeshi military should desist from such arbitrary actions which are being closely watched by the outside world,” they said in the statement issued by SAMC coordinator Husain Naqi.

Yes they are – by Human Rights Watch, by Reporters Without Borders, by the Committee to Protect Journalists, by too few (in this case) mainstream media outfits, and – by internet busybodies like us: by Sunny and Sonia and others at Pickled Politics, by Richard at Philosophy Etcetera, by Cam at Sculpin, by John at Obscene Desserts, by Harry’s Place, by Drishtipat, and by many more. This is good. I have no idea if it made any difference or not – for all we know the military always intended to administer a daylong grilling and then let Tasneem go – but as a general principle it seems useful to focus laser-like attention on this kind of activity. Whatever theocracies and military dictatorships may say about their indifference to what the rest of the world thinks, it seems reasonably safe to assume they would prefer to fly under the radar.

I’m a little uncertain about the politics of linking to a Pakistan paper on this subject, given the history between Bangladesh and Pakistan (just as I’m cautious about using Indian media as sources on Pakistan, and vice versa), but it was the only paper I saw that had the report, and the South Asian Media Net looks legitimate and useful. But do take all that into account.

I saw a few minutes of a Bill Moyers tv thing last night that included some chat with a fresh-faced young person who had just graduated from something called (unpleasantly) ‘Regent University’ – it’s apparently run by Pat Robertson, and includes John Ashcroft on its faculty. The fresh-faced young person told the camera that she believes in Absolute Truth. ‘Not grey, not relative, Absolute Truth, which is God’s truth.’

Nothing surprising there, of course, but all the same I wondered (as I often do) how she knows. How does she know? How does she know what God’s truth is?

She doesn’t, of course, but that’s what’s interesting, because she thinks she does. Why does she think that?

Largely or entirely because she’s had little opportunity to think anything else, I would guess. But all the same it is a little bit interesting that it tends not to occur to people to wonder how they know what they think they know. I don’t think it occurred to me much when I was her age (and I had much better opportunities that way, I imagine). On the other hand it could be argued that it ought to have occurred to her, because she was full of her plans to go out and tell everyone else what she knows, and urge them to know it too, and persuade them to be like her by her example of being good and living a good life. She had missionary plans, teaching plans, evangelical plans; therefore, perhaps, she had some duty to think about the material she was planning to teach, and whether she had any real reason to think it’s true, and any real right to try to get other people to think it’s true. Perhaps she had some duty to wonder, if God’s truth is Absolute then God must want us to know what it is, and if God wants us to know what it is, why doesn’t God tell us all what it is in such a way that we cannot make a mistake? A duty to wonder not in the sense of trying to think of the most plausible explanation that will leave her idea of God intact (God wants us to be free; too much evidence might be bad for us; God wants to woo us; God has told us but we turn away because we are evil; the fool hath said there is no God), but in the sense of really thinking about the question. It is a real question. If it’s so absolute, and it belongs to God, why doesn’t everyone know it, with no questions at all?

I have no immediate plans to enroll at Regent University in order to find out.

Let’s do a thought experiment. Suppose a 24 hour period during which every heterosexual copulation on the planet resulted in conception and then, 48 hours later, spontaneous abortion. Would that be a tragedy?

Then suppose a 24 hour period during which every infant born between 48 and 72 hours earlier, died. Would that be a tragedy?

It seems to me that people who think an embryo is just as important as a neonate would answer yes to the first. But what I wonder is, why? Why would that be a tragedy? More particularly, to whom would it be a tragedy? Can something be a tragedy to no one and still be a tragedy?

The problem is that no one would know about the first event. (Bracket people who are trying to conceive and fail on this particular occasion, for the sake of argument, because that’s a separate issue.) No one would know it had happened, including, obviously, the microscopic cluster of cells it happened to. If no one knows about it, and it has no effect on the outside world (thus being unlike a tree falling in the forest unheard by any humans), in what sense can it be a tragedy?