Ron Aronson points out that atheists and secularists get undercounted in the US.

Surveys regularly receive front-page coverage for reporting, as the 2008 Pew U.S. Religious Landscape Survey did, that nearly all Americans believe in God. The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life concluded that 92% of Americans are believers and that only 5% of Americans don’t believe in God…But something is wrong with this picture. It erases vast numbers of Americans…It encourages the sense that there are two kinds of Americans, the overwhelming majority who believe and belong, and those few do not believe, and are outsiders. But the conventional wisdom that nearly all Americans believe in God is wrong.

A senior fellow at Pew says the issue is: What does one want to know? Yes it is, so one wonders why so many people who run opinion surveys want to know that nearly everyone believes in something that can (at the price of radical oversimplification and obliteration of distinctions) be called ‘God.’

This is exactly the point, which suggests that depending on the purposes of the study — and how the questions are posed — religion can appear more or less widespread, and secularists can be made to virtually disappear or to appear as a major component of contemporary American life.

Why does it matter? Because secularists (to say nothing of atheists) get ignored in US politics and discourse, while religious influence over laws and institutions keeps growing. Even believers shouldn’t want God making the laws, because God is completely unaccountable.

Shelina Zahra Janmohamed has read The Jewel of Medina.

Muslims hold Muhammad, Aisha and other religious figures very close to their hearts, dearer to them than their own parents, and just as much to be respected, protected and defended.

What other religious figures? And how many of them? And in any case how very peculiar to hold long-dead people dearer than one’s parents, and also to consider them to need to be respected, protected and defended. They’re dead – they don’t need to be respected, protected and defended, and furthermore, as ‘religious figures,’ they shouldn’t be respected, protected and defended as a matter of right and duty; they should be closely watched, questioned, doubted, and if necessary disobeyed. This idea that long-dead ‘religious figures’ must be reflexively and unquestioningly respected, protected and defended is typical of the mental prisons that believers build for themselves, especially, it would seem, believers in Islam. That’s a dopy, truculent, defensive, sentimental, taboo-ridden view of the world, and it’s not a healthy view for grownups.

Muslims believe they went through enormous hardship in order to keep the spiritual message of faith intact, and in return wish to honour their contribution. This is to be carried out in a measured and peaceful manner, in keeping with the spirit of Islam that advises returning harsh words with good ones, and malice with mercy.

Really? Is that ‘the spirit of Islam’? If that is the spirit of Islam, can anyone name one Islamist country (one country largely ruled by sharia or by clerics or both) that demonstrates that? Because I can’t. I can’t think of one single country or part of a country (like northern Nigeria) where clerics run things that fits that description. Not one.

Many Muslims will indeed be offended by this book, and they should make clear why they feel hurt. If our society upholds the right to offend, then the right to be offended goes with it. But it is respect and empathy for their feelings that Muslims want, not fear.

Well of course ‘the right to be offended’ goes with the right to offend and with any other right anyone can think of. That’s a truism. The right to be annoyed, the right to be bored, the right to be mildly amused, and countless similar rights, are inviolable. But that of course is not the issue. The issue is the right to be offended and force other people to shut up as a result of that being offended – and that’s a whole different story. But naturally Shelina Zahra Janmohamed didn’t want to put it quite that bluntly – so she put it absurdly, instead.

Chet Raymo quotes Kenneth Miller on prayer:

Finally, any traditional believer must agree that God is able to influence the thoughts and actions of individual human beings. We pray for strength, we pray for patience, and we pray for understanding. Prayer is an element of faith, and bound within it is the conviction that God can affect us and those we pray for in positive ways.

Wait. If we pray for strength, patience and understanding and find (or believe we find) that we have more strength, patience and understanding, that could simply be because praying is a way we get ourselves to have more strength, patience and understanding. It’s true that in that sense ‘faith’ may well work – and that in order to work the faith may have to include the conviction that God can affect us – but that can be true quite independently of whether or not God actually exists or actually affects us. That may be all Ken Miller means by that passage…but it would be a good deal clearer if he pointed out that how much strength, patience and understanding we have is something that we ourselves can (in general) help to determine, and that all kinds of mental tricks and crutches and games can help with that process.

I was flicking through tv stations the other evening and happened on Martin Sheen looking earnest, so I paused to hear what he had to say – expecting pleasant murmurs about Obama or urbane skepticism about McCain, I suppose. But no – what I got was some irritating Catholic boilerplate about Washington state’s Initiative 1000, which allows doctors, under certain very limited careful circumstances, to give terminal patients drugs with which to end the misery. Martin Sheen’s against it. This makes me angry. It makes me angry because it shouldn’t be anyone else’s business. No one is offering to force assisted suicide on anyone. The point of the initiative is to make it available (with level upon level of safeguard) to people who need it. I don’t consider it moral for people to interfere with other people’s reasonable wishes in that way. I consider it intrusive, and presumptuous, and a horrible officious superstitious interference with desperate needs. It makes me angry. I do not look forward to needing such drugs myself and being unable to get them because the Catholic lobby has succeeded in persuading people that it is ‘against God’s will’ to cut short the period of terminal illness. I bitterly resent religious bullies telling everyone else what to do on the basis of a non-existent deity who gets to decide what diseases we get and how long we have to let them torture us. We have no reason to think that god exists, and we don’t think it exists, and we don’t think that if it did exist it would have the right to force us to suffer longer than we can put up with merely because our suffering is ‘God’s will,’ so we really really don’t want people who do believe it exists forcing its putative will on us. We want them to fuck off and mind their own business.

But they won’t, of course – they think everything is their business. Nobody is trying to tell them (or anyone else) to resort to assisted suicide, so why they feel so ready to tell other people not to is somewhat beyond me – but they are.

Opponents of a Washington State assisted-suicide ballot initiative say hastening the deaths of terminally ill patients is “playing God.” The initiative, which if approved would allow physicians to prescribe lethal doses of medication if requested by terminally ill patients, is against God’s will, faith-based groups say…Washington’s Roman Catholic Church has been the initiative’s most visible opponent…Rev. Paul Pluth, pastor of St. Anne Catholic Church in Seattle, said by taking a utilitarian view of life, the measure “cheapens life, demeans life and debases life’s worth to merely an equation with obvious utility and usefulness.”

That’s just obscurantist pious self-congratulatory verbiage. It doesn’t mean anything, it’s just a pretext for trying to force everyone to obey Catholic ‘teaching.’ Assisted suicide for the terminally ill no more cheapens or demeans life than gay marriage cheapens or demeans marriage. Catholics want to force unwilling people to suffer at the hands of a torturing god – and they think they are Better People for doing so. Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum, as Lucretius so wisely put it.

Anthony Grayling spoke at the Ex-Muslims conference and tells us how it went.

The conference was opened by the head of the Iranian Secular Society, Fariborz Pooya, and addressed by the extraordinary and courageous Maryam Namazie, spokesperson of the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain, who subjected Islamism – political Islam – to scrutiny, arguing that it serves as an agency of Islamic states with serious implications for the lives, rights and freedoms of individuals, many of whom have left their countries of origin precisely to escape the repressive political and social climates there…A source of frustration for many is that they are lumped into “the Muslim community” whose self-elected spokespeople are more representative of the Islamic states that many in their “Muslim community” have fled: which is why the Council of Ex-Muslims makes a point of calling itself this, to reinforce the point that not everyone who was born into a Muslim community has to be permanently forced into homogenised membership of it.

Yes, which is why it’s irritating to see Brian Whitaker’s comment (October 16 at 11:01 a.m.).

I really can’t see much point in this organisation. It’s too much in the Hirsi-Manji mould to have any credibility among Muslims – who, after all, are the people it’s supposedly seeking to influence. I suspect it will achieve nothing more than stirring up the usual prejudices.

Oh is that so – then why did my friend Maryam invite my friend Gina Khan to attend, and why was Gina so pleased to be invited? And as for the ‘Hirsi-Manji mould’ – Manji is a Muslim, as is Gina. Why is Brian Whitaker assuming ahead of time that there are no reformist liberal Muslims? That’s rather stupid and one-eyed, isn’t it? Maybe he’s the one ‘stirring up the usual prejudices.’

Among those who spoke were Ibn Warraq, Joan Smith, Richard Dawkins, and the founder of Germany’s Council of Ex-Muslims, Mina Ahadi, a woman as extraordinary and admirable as Maryam Namizie. It is a speaking fact that the lead in these eminently important and courageous movements is taken by women…

How I wish I could have gone. Did any of you go? Tell us about it if so.

One of those speaking at the conference, my friend Ibn Warraq, recently edited a book on apostasy in Islam, which combines a scholarly overview of doctrines on apostasy in the various schools of Islamic law, with a collection of powerful personal testimonies by those who came to leave Islam either for another faith or none. It was interesting to compare the accounts there given with those in Louise Anthony’s book Philosophers Without Gods, which collects similar accounts by ex-Christians and ex-Jews. The personal cost in family and community terms of rejecting the doctrines of any of these religions is very similar; only in Islam does the danger of being murdered for doing so remain.

(I reviewed the Ibn Warraq book for Democratiya).

Nothing of what was discussed at this important and moving conference was anything but real: real lives subjected to death threats, discrimination, coercion and stigmatisation – and all because the people involved think for themselves, a right that the rest of us take for granted and, when it is threatened, jealously guard.

Brian Whitaker please note.

This FAIR thing is really terrible. Look at the ‘Dirty Dozen’ for instance. They’re an obnoxious crew, most of them, but FAIR just gives a quote from each without saying what is wrong with it, and it is simply not always self-evident that anything is wrong with it. (The motives of the people saying it may be deeply suspect, but that doesn’t mean that what they say is false, and I don’t think it always is false. It’s not clear what FAIR thinks.) For example David Horowitz (whom I do not admire at all, and who I think often argues unfairly to say the least) says there are 150 Muslim students’ associations which are arms of the Muslim Brotherhood. And…? Does FAIR know that that’s not true? I think at least some Muslim students’ associations in the US do have connections to the MB. Anyway if FAIR does know that it’s not true, it should say so – it shouldn’t just assume that it’s self-evidently not true. Why would it be?

And what Robert Spencer says is not self-evidently false either. Islam is a universalizing religion, it does hold that sharia should be universal, and it does at the very least disapprove of non-believers. The first sentence of the Daniel Pipes quotation has a whiff (or more) of racism, though in context it may be distanced (and I suspect that it is). But the second sentence, unfortunately, is at least arguably true.

FAIR seems to take it as simply axiomatic that Islam is 1) entirely benign and 2) off-limits to criticism, and thus to take it as also axiomatic that anyone who disagrees with 1 or 2 or both is acting from racist motives and also factually wrong. But it is entirely possible – in fact, easy – to think Islam is not entirely benign without having any racist motives at all, and thus to think that Islam is in urgent need of criticism, still without any racist motives. Racists and reactionaries and missionary Christians do confuse the issue, of course, but FAIR ought to be able to make the necessary distinctions.

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting tackles what it (inaccurately and tendentiously) calls ‘Islamophobia’.

The term “Islamophobia” refers to hostility toward Islam and Muslims that tends to dehumanize an entire faith, portraying it as fundamentally alien and attributing to it an inherent, essential set of negative traits such as irrationality, intolerance and violence.

Why should a ‘faith’ be humanized to begin with? ‘Faiths’ are not human, so why is it wrong to dehumanize them? It isn’t wrong; that’s just a rather stupid and unthinking bit of rhetoric. The rest of the sentence (and the rest of the report) simply assumes that it is wrong to portray a religion as having ‘negative’ (meaning bad) traits without first determining whether or not the religion does in fact have bad traits. Imagine talking that way about criticism of other sets of ideas and practices – for instance sets of ideas and practices that FAIR (rightly) thinks are bad. Imagine talking that way about the ideology of the KKK, or Jim Crow laws, or apartheid, or Serbian nationalism. Wouldn’t it seem rather stupid to try to rule out investigation in that way? In short, FAIR seems not to have entertained even the possibility that Islam does in fact have a set of bad traits such as irrationality, intolerance and violence.

This of course is not to mention the obvious fact that ‘Islamophobia’ in fact means hostility toward Islam and not hostility toward Muslims and that it is a bit of underhanded trickery to conflate the two.

Andrew Brown is also eloquent on the subject.

The whole point about the net is that, like books, it gives people a shared space and a shared experience that is not physical. If I sit in an internet cafe – or even, God forbid, an office – and talk to someone on the net, I am far closer to the person to whom I am talking than to the noble workers on each side of me, who would never dream of emailing gossip in the middle of a working day. When I read a book, I am communing with the author, and perhaps with all the
other readers, not with anyone else in the railway carriage.

This is one of the exciting things about books (and the net), and turning libraries into youth clubs is one way to make that fact harder to discover.

Learning outside school is an essentially solitary process, too. It requires concentration; it may not require silence all the time – I often find it helpful to read or work in a cafe – but when studying needs outside stimulus, you take the book away from the library, a service they already offer.

The libraries don’t need to provide the noise for you. Noise is easy to find; quiet is not, especially for people who don’t have money.

What is particularly cruel and futile about the Burnham plan is that it destroys the one thing that libraries offer which no amount of internet cafes, Starbucks or even skating can offer: the place where poor students can find the calm they need to try to teach themselves things that are genuinely hard to learn. Middle-class or richer children, or children at good schools, can always find a place to be quiet and study with concentration. But there must be lots of people for whom a library is the only free public space outside a church where you can hope for calm; and the reading matter in church pews tends to be depressingly limited.

Library students everywhere please take note. (They won’t though – they hated this article as well as the Indy one.)

Someone who works at a public library and is ‘studing an MSc in Information and Library Studies’ at a University was terribly irritated by that piece on libraries the other day.

The article is awash with dismay over the move to allow library users to eat, drink and, heaven forbid, actually talk. Interestingly, they talk about the ’silence rule’- a concept that is completely alien to either myself or just about any other person I have encountered who works in a public library.

Ah, is it indeed. Why?

Don’t bother asking; the library student never says. It’s such an absurd, outdated, stuffy, elitist, stupid idea that it’s simply self-evident what’s wrong with it. Which is interesting, because one would think (or hope, forlornly) that people who work in libraries would have at least a glimmer of an idea why people who frequent libraries would value silence while they do it. But apparently not.

If these people have their way, the public library would be nothing more than a physical manifestation of all that was bad about the 1950s. Time moves on, society changes, customers needs change. Libraries must, therefore, change.

Why? Again, the student doesn’t say. Society does change, of course, but why that means libraries now have to be raucous instead of quiet is not clear, nor is it clear why ‘customers’ need noise in place of quiet. But then of course we are not students of Information and Library Studies, so naturally we do not understand.

[O]ne thing is for certain, things need to move forward. There should not be enforced silence (we don’t and it certainly isn’t noisy, despite what the critics might assume), there should be an attempt to make the library a cool place to hang out…and, above all, the library should be open and welcoming to everyone, regardless of who they are. Elitism will kill the library service. Eradicating the old-fashioned perception of libraries might just save it.

‘It certainly isn’t noisy’ – well I wish that were the case in the public libraries I know, but it isn’t. I don’t ‘assume’ they’re noisy, I know damn well they are because I use them. I use them, but I don’t consider them ‘open and welcoming to everyone’ – I don’t consider them welcoming to people like me who want to be able to read and think in libraries. They are welcoming to people who want to make noise, they are welcoming to people who want to treat the library like an auxiliary living room or a part-time kindergarten, but they are not welcoming to people who want to use the library as a library.

Why does future librarian assume that being open and welcoming to everyone requires being noisy and raucous? Why does future librarian assume that everyone wants noise and raucousness all the time and everywhere? Why does future librarian not think it is possible to be open and welcoming to everyone by offering quiet in one place and noise in others? Coffee shops are open and welcoming to everyone but they don’t serve fish or provide Balkan dance troupes. Rock concerts are open and welcoming to everyone but they don’t provide quiet and desks and books. Why can’t libraries be open and welcoming to everyone in a library way instead of a different way? Library student doesn’t say, and neither do the three commenters, one of whom has worked in libraries for 25 years. Which is depressing for the future of libraries. Apparently what one learns when one studies ‘Library Studies’ is that libraries should be abolished while (inexplicably) retaining the old name.

I saw library student’s post via a post at Tom Morris’s place. He is eloquent on this subject.

On page 301 of C S Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion John Beversluis has a lovely passage from Mill. At the end Mill gives what I have long thought of as the Huck Finn response, but Huck seems to have derived it from Mill, so I will attribute it to Mill in future.

From Mill’s Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy:

‘If in ascribing goodness to God I do not mean what I mean by goodness; if I do not mean the goodness of which I have some knowledge, but an incomprehensible attribute of an incomprehensible substance, which for aught I know may be a totally different quality from that which I love and venerate – and even must, if Mr. Mansel is to be believed, be in some important particulars opposed to this — what do I mean by calling it goodness? and what reason have I for venerating it? If I know nothing about what the attribute is, I cannot tell that it is a proper object of veneration. To say that God’s goodness may be different in kind from man’s goodness, what is it but saying, with a slight change of phraseology, that God may possibly not be good? To assert in words what we do not think in meaning, is as suitable a definition as can be given of a moral falsehood. Besides, suppose that certain unknown attributes are ascribed to the Deity in a religion the external evidences of which are so conclusive to my mind, as effectually to convince me that it comes from God. Unless I believe God to possess the same moral attributes which I find, in however inferior a degree, in a good man, what ground of assurance have I of God’s veracity? All trust in a Revelation presupposes a conviction that God’s attributes are the same, in all but degree, with the best human attributes. If, instead of the “glad tidings” that there exists a Being in whom all the excellences which the highest human mind can conceive, exist in a degree inconceivable to us, I am informed that the world is ruled by a being whose attributes are infinite, but what they are we cannot learn, nor what are the principles of his government, except that “the highest human morality which we are capable of conceiving” does not sanction them.; convince me of it, and I will bear my fate as I may. But when I am told that I must believe this, and at the same time call this being by the names which express and affirm the highest human morality, I say in plain terms that I will not. Whatever power such a being may have over me, there is one thing which he shall not do: he shall not compel me to worship him. I will call no being good, who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow-creatures; and if such a being can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go.’

That is (surely) the only honourable position to take. We should not call any being good, who is not what we mean when we apply that epithet to our fellow humans. If we do we simply risk approving tyranny and cosmic sadism. We should not risk that.

I read a funny story in II Samuel 6 today. (I was reading about what a shit god can be. There’s this bit in II Samuel 6 where David and some friends are transporting the ark of the covenant somewhere in a cart, and Uzzah put his hand on the ark to steady it because the cart was shaking – so god killed him. That makes a lot of sense – Uzzah tries to help and god kills him for it. Nice guy. David gets cold feet then and puts the ark in storage, not wanting to get smited, then he runs some experiments and confirms that god helps people who have the ark [apart from Uzzah, but that’s not explained] and hurts those who don’t [reason not explained] so David is happy again and throws a party.) David dances in his underpants in front of the ark and Samuel’s daughter Michal sees him from a window and disdains him in her heart. And she tells him so. ‘Some king you are,’ she says. ‘You danced in your underpants in front of your servants’ girlfriends. What a schmuck.’ David says ‘God likes me better than he likes your father so ha.’ And Michal never had any children, so that (it is implied) was God’s ha.

I’m writing a review of C S Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion by John Beversluis. It’s a gripping read, at least if you’re interested in argument and belief and arguments for belief in god and the problem of evil and theistic epistemology and the difference between rhetoric and argument. Beversluis shows carefully and in detail what is wrong with Lewis’s various claims. It’s a gripping read if you’re interested in reasons for believing things, and if you’re not interested in that, you ought to be; everyone ought to be.

The most gripping chapter, in my view, is chapter 10, ‘C S Lewis’s Crisis of Faith.’ Beversluis argues (and shows, I think) that in his despair after his wife’s death Lewis (without admitting it) gave up his Platonist view of morality – that good is prior to god and good because it is good, not because god loves it – and was stuck with the Ockhamist view that the good is whatever god damn well says it is, no matter how horrible we think it is.

Beversluis points out (p. 291) that the Ockhamist view is philosophically untenable but also more compatible with the biblical God than the Platonist view is. There are a few people in the bible, like Job, who question god’s goodness from a moral point of view, but they’re ‘glaring exceptions to the standing rule that God is to be obeyed no matter what – that is, no matter how flagrantly his commands violate moral rules including the Ten Commandments.’ He cites some nasty examples (God stops Abraham from killing Isaac, but he doesn’t stop Jephthah from killing his daughter). Then he points out (p 292) that the Ockhamist god, ‘who is not good “in our sense,” is the god of ‘the vast majority of orthodox Christians, most of whom have never heard of the Platonist alternative and, when told about it, typically reject it out of hand. Orthodox Christians unhesitatingly believe that obedience to God is absolute and unconditional – that he is to be obeyed simply and solely because he is God.’

This is an interesting and deeply depressing thought.

You may (or may not) have noticed that I’ve been posting more parochial US-political stuff than usual, lately, and you may (or may not) have wondered why. I mostly ignored the subject in 2004, and during the endlessly long primary process from 2006 on; why have I stopped ignoring it now?

Well, partly, frankly, just because I find Obama more interesting – more worth paying attention to – than any Dem candidate in decades. I think Obama is better than McCain on several dimensions – a better human being, a better candidate, a better potential president. A lot better. To that extent my posting could just reflect plain old political bias. But another part has to do with the flagrant dishonesty of the McCain-Palin campaign, which interests me. It interests me that Republicans pretty much always stoop to dishonesty, and Democrats don’t to the same extent.* Lots of Dems get angry at Dem campaigns because they don’t fight dirty enough. But – fighting dirty is a bad thing. The McCain-Palin campaign is a revolting spectacle. It interests me that there seems to be no braking mechanism, no floor, no point at which they just can’t stomach it any more. I realize they want to win, but I assume they also want to be able to live with themselves. Yet there is no floor. There is (as with good old Joe McCarthy) no shame.

However that may be – the prosecutor’s letter to the Times is interesting.

As the lead federal prosecutor of the Weathermen in the 1970s…I am amazed and outraged that Senator Barack Obama is being linked to William Ayers’s terrorist activities 40 years ago when Mr. Obama was, as he has noted, just a child. Although I dearly wanted to obtain convictions against all the Weathermen, including Bill Ayers, I am very pleased to learn that he has become a responsible citizen. Because Senator Obama recently served on a board of a charitable organization with Mr. Ayers cannot possibly link the senator to acts perpetrated by Mr. Ayers so many years ago.

He didn’t put that last very well – he meant something like ‘the fact that Obama served etc cannot possibly link him etc’ – but we get the drift. There are two issues here. One, Ayers has changed; he is not the guy he was in 1968. Two, Obama was a child when Ayers was the guy he was in 1968. It’s just not morally respectable to ignore those two facts in order to pretend that Obama is now a fan of what Bill Ayers was in 1968.

The thing is – I can perfectly well imagine conservatives and Republicans that I would disagree with but still respect. Well I should hope so – it’s not that hard! And it would be pretty absurd to be unable to respect anyone one disagreed with. But all the same, there it is; I can. But I can’t respect these people; it seems to me they have covered themselves in ordure. I find that interesting.

*Do correct me if I’m wrong – seriously.

And another thing. That disdainful remark that ‘The word chatter might strike fear into the heart of traditionalists’ is worthy of Sarah Palin. It strikes fear into our hearts because we think libraries should be places where we can read and think and study. We think that is what they are for, and that that ability is and always has been a good thing. We don’t think removing it is doing anyone a favour. We think there should be places where people can play and make noise and places where they can be quiet and think. We don’t think all places should be like libraries, we just think libraries should be like libraries. Why do people like Burnham think all places should be anti-libraries? Why can’t we have more than one kind of thing? Why can’t we have noise and clatter in these places and quiet in those? Why do we have to eliminate quiet and thought and study?

Libraries are ‘out of touch’.

Andy Burnham, the Secretary of State for Culture, will today launch a consultation on changing the face of libraries which he believes are out of touch…Noise bans will also be reviewed…”The popular public image of libraries as solemn and sombre places, patrolled by fearsome and formidable staff is decades out of date, but is nonetheless taken for granted by too many people,” he will say, adding that the sector would have to “think radical” to modernise.

Too many for what? Why should the sector modernize? Why does Burnham (apparently) think it’s a bad thing that libraries are out of touch?

If you ‘save’ or ‘preserve’ or ‘rescue’ libraries (or anything else) by turning them into their own opposites, then what is it that you have saved or preserved? What, in short, is the point? What is the point of modernizing or transforming or changing the face of libraries by turning them into something altogether different? Why not just forget all about libraries? It would surely be cheaper.

In Camden, north London, the council will lift a ban on mobile phones in its libraries this month and users will be allowed to bring in snacks and drinks…A spokesman at the Department of Culture, Media and Sport said the Government wanted to transform the atmosphere of libraries to make them more similar to Waterstones stores.

Why? Why not have two different kinds of things instead of just one thing? Or why not save public money by selling libraries to Waterstones and letting them make the former libraries more similar to Waterstones stores?

[Burnham] suggested that the traditional “silence” in libraries be reviewed and opening hours extended. “Libraries should be a place for families and joy and chatter. The word chatter might strike fear into the heart of traditionalists but libraries should be social places that offer an antidote to the isolation of someone playing on the internet at home.”

Why? Why should libraries be a place for families and joy and chatter? There are already lots of places for families and joy and chatter (also families and irritation and chatter). There are shops and community centers and sports facilities and parks and living rooms and gardens and stadiums and McDonalds – there are lots and lots of places. Why do libraries have to stop being what libraries are good at being and be something else instead, when the something else is already abundant and easy to find?

The reason seems to be (at least I can’t think of any other) a vague background idea that libraries are a good thing and so people should be motivated to come into them. But the background idea that libraries are a good thing can’t have been thought about with any care, because the reason they are a good thing is that they provide things (books and a place to read and study and think about them) that are incompatible with motivating people to come into them by making them places where it is impossible to read and study and think about books. Do you see what I’m getting at here? You might as well try to motivate people to come into museums by filling them with mounds of rotting garbage. You might as well try to motivate people to go for hikes in the mountains by transforming the mountains into replicas of Las Vegas. You might as well try to motivate people to play tennis by removing the net and the boundary lines.

My library would bring a smile of delight to the Secretary of State for ‘Culture.’ We’re way ahead of him here in Seattle. My library is very much a place for families and joy and chatter; what it’s not is a place where it’s possible to read or think or study. It’s a fucking zoo. It’s one big room, divided into areas but with no walls, so all the noise is freely available for the hearing. The children’s section (which is surrounded by adult books) provides toys as well as books, including wooden toys, which fill the air with clatter. Everyone talks in an unsubdued voice, and many people talk in a frankly loud one. Children run around screaming with gay abandon. It’s like a pleasantly-run summer camp; what it’s not like is a library.

Everyone I know detests this situation, but we’ve all given up complaining about it. It’s official policy. This is all the more bizarre because there is a community center two blocks away, packed with recreational opportunities. Why the library too has to function as a day-care center and all-purpose rumpus room is beyond our understanding, but so it is. It is official policy. ‘Libraries should be social places.’

So didja watch the debate? I’m not a huge fan of ‘debates’ (they’re not real debates, of course), but I watched some of Biden-Palin (enough to see that she was doing much better than I’d expected or wanted) and I watched most of last night’s. I thought McCain was godawful. Awkward, stumbling, unconvincing, unimpressive – and nasty with it. ‘That one’ – it’s all over the place now, but why shouldn’t it be? His hostility and contempt are creepy. Of course, this is the guy who called his (second) wife a cunt in front of a reporter.

Anyway – this ‘Not Presidential’ thing really makes me sick. What is that supposed to mean? Too smart? Too poised? Too calm? Too knowledgeable? Too good at thinking on his feet? Too skilled at talking without a script? Too thoughtful? No, he can’t mean any of that, can he? So what does he mean? It’s very hard not to suspect that he means just what he appears to mean. It’s very hard not to conclude that there is no low too low – so hard that I have no intention of trying. I think he’s stopping as low as he possibly can, and that that’s very low.

The idea itself is completely stupid, you know. How many US presidents have been ‘presidential’? Very damn few. Truman? Nixon? Bush? Come on. Even some of the better ones haven’t been ‘presidential.’ Johnson was widely considered an embarrassing hick in the wake of the prince of Camelot, but actually he was a good one domestically – but he warn’t ‘presidential.’ Obama in fact strikes me as being more ‘presidential’ than anyone since Roosevelt. McCain, on the other hand, strikes me as a snake.

The pope and Sarkozy have been dissing secularism lately. Agnès Poirier defends it.

To speak of positive secularism is to imply that there are two kinds of secularism, one good, the other bad. The supposedly good one, put forward by the Pope and his acolyte Nicolas Sar kozy, is a secularism that would allow politics to mingle with religions. One which would, for instance, turn a blind eye to sects and their actions, one which would accept that people be treated differently according to their faiths, one which would blur the frontiers between the public and private spheres…What the Pope and president pretend not to know is that there is no positive or negative secularism (laïcité in French). Secularism is neutral…Secularism abstains from favouring one religion over another, or favouring atheism over religious belief. It is a political principle that aims at guaranteeing the largest possible coexistence of various freedoms. From a strictly legal perspective, secularism is extremely positive: it creates a universal freedom to believe or not to believe, and protects individuals from any public interference in their belief, provided that their belief or lack of it does not disturb the peace. As the philosopher Catherine Kintzler wrote in the French weekly Marianne: unlike religion, secularism creates freedom. What religion has ever recognised the rights to believe and not to believe? What religion has promoted the physical emancipation of women? What religion accepts what believers would deem to be blasphemous words?

Of course, religion refuses to settle for freedom – it wants freedom (for itself) along with dominion.

Oliver Kamm is brisk with Charlie Gere.

Charlie Gere…expresses unabashedly and succinctly a view that has increasingly made its way into the mainstream of public debate and ought to be derided out of it again…Of course it’s “not a problem” in public policy to offend anyone’s sensitivities, because people’s mental states are no business of government. If government set itself the task of alleviating mental anguish, then there would be no inherent limit to the powers that government might claim. The only proper response in public policy to those who say their deepest beliefs have been slighted and who complain of the offence they’ve been caused is: too bad, but you’ll live; and in the meantime there is no restitution to which you’re entitled, because you have suffered no injustice.

Well, quite. And as Kamm indicates, the idea that you have suffered an injustice, along with the effort to remedy that injustice, would entail massive interference with various freedoms and vocations that we all (probably including the offended among us) value highly. Anything that anyone says can be considered an offense to someone’s sensitivities, and the only way to be certain of never offending anyone’s sensitivities would be for no one to say anything ever, in fact would be for everyone to drop dead immediately. There’s such a thing as too much caution, and it leads to the dead end of doing and saying nothing at all.

Gere replies in the comments.

These limits [on speech] are cultural determined and in this case simply do not take into consideration matters of considerable sensitivity to Muslims.

No, nor on matters of considerable sensitivity to Mormons, or Raelians, or Branch Davidians, or Trekkies, or Wiccans, or anyone else, and thus people are allowed to say things without wondering whether the things might offend one or two or ten of a million groups or groupuscules. How odd that Charlie Gere apparently wishes it were otherwise.

In fact he later says he does.

[W]hat I want is something that is probably impossible, that is neither a PC dictatorship nor a situation in which the support of free speech risks alienating whole sections of the community.

He wants a situation in which the support of free speech stops short of risking ‘alienating whole sections of the community’ – which means (whether he realizes it or not) he really does want no one to say anything, at least anything more provocative than ‘the cat sat on the mat.’ All speech ‘risks alienating whole sections of the community.’

Charlie Gere is back; he seems to be enjoying himself.

I unreservedly and completely condemn any form of violence committed by anybody who believes they have been offended. That of course includes those who are offended by criticisms of the freedom of speech.

Okay. Good. Gere condemns violence committed by people who are offended by criticisms of the freedom of speech. Well naturally; don’t we all. Only…can anyone think of any? I can’t. I can’t, with however much furrowing of brow, think of any violence committed by people who are offended by criticisms of the freedom of speech. Can you? Do let me know if anything comes to mind.

What seems to have happened is that “freedom of speech” – rather than the various freedoms and limitations of speech and the ongoing and indeed never-ending negotiations involved in their continued existence – just becomes a tenet of a western fundamentalism that thus shows itself to be little better than those fundamentalisms it is held to be superior to.

Well, no. Even though I do in fact agree that freedom of speech is often used in a too sweeping and absolutist way which does simply ignore the limitations which are universally (or all but universally) accepted; even though I have in fact engaged in arguments on just this subject over the years, and been rewarded with uncomprehending stares in return; I have to point out that the conclusion that Gere draws doesn’t follow. Free speech is not absolute or unlimited, but it doesn’t follow from that that free speech absolutism is a fundamentalism that is ‘little better than those fundamentalisms it is held to be superior to.’ It could be a fundamentalism and still be superior to other fundamentalisms. It’s not absurd to claim that some fundamentalisms are worse than others, and that some are better. An obstinate unquestioned belief that it is imperative to be kind is better than an obstinate unquestioned belief that it is imperative to be cruel. One could multiply examples indefinitely.

What other conclusion can one draw from Rohan Jayasekera, associate editor of Index on Censorship…describing Theo van Gogh, the filmmaker murdered recently in the Netherlands, as a “free-speech martyr”, and thus turning his murder into a form of passive violence on his behalf[?]

…What? Describing Theo van Gogh as a ‘free speech martyr’ is a form of passive violence? What the sam hill does that mean? What is passive violence? And what is violent in any sense about calling van Gogh a free speech martyr? (It’s rhetorical and sentimental, but that’s another matter.)

Is this a case of defining deviancy downwards or something? Playing with terms in such a way that party X is made to be Just As Bad as party Y even though that is in fact obviously not the case? Y murdered van Gogh for being ‘offensive’; X called van Gogh a free speech martyr; they’re both as bad as each other! Really?

Charlie Gere is probably a rising star. Fasten your seat belts.

Sami Moubayed on Aisha and ‘double standards’.

The book has so far appeared in Serbia, with a provoking illustration of Aisha on the cover (in Islam it is forbidden to portray the wives of the Prophet, known as the “Mothers of Believers”).

The fact that something is ‘forbidden in Islam’ doesn’t mean that it is forbidden in general, and in fact for the rest of us it is not forbidden to portray the wives of the Prophet, nor is it ‘provoking’ to do so. This seems to be widely misunderstood – but the fact is, the laws and rules and taboos of Islam are not binding on everyone in the world. We are allowed to ignore them.

It is equally startling how people like Sherry Jones would wish to add insult to injury, and bad feelings, with her book on Aisha.

No, actually, it is startling how uninformed Sami Moubayed is about the subject of his article; that is exactly what Sherry Jones does not wish to do. He might have found that out before saying that about her – especially since saying that could, in this ludicrous situation, put her in increased danger.

I cite the example of David Irving…Irving showed that Hitler was a rational, intelligent leader and human being whose main motivation was to increase the prosperity of Germany…By the 1980s, Irving was banned from entering Austria…He defied the ban and tried to go but was arrested in Austria. In court he tried to change discourse, but Austrian authorities did not believe him and at the time of writing he still languishes in jail.

No he doesn’t. He was released a few months into his sentence.

It is a funny world with funny double standards indeed. To make things easier for everybody – especially the oversensitive millions in all faiths – it is safe to say that critical issues such as the Holocaust and Islam become red lines that should not be crossed. In saying that, we can assume that Jones, Benedict and Irving all committed mistakes.

No. Not comparable. For the forty millionth time: Holocaust-denial is not comparable to (say) writing a novel about Aisha. That’s not to say that Holocaust-denial should be illegal, it is just to say that the funny double standards are not double standards. (The right double standard would be, for instance, to deny that a massacre happened at Srebrenica.)

Offending others for the sake of free speech should not be tolerated.

Yes it should. If not offending others becomes the criterion for free speech, as many have pointed out, there will be no free speech at all. That would not be a minor crimp, it would be obliteration.