George Szirtes mentioned in a comment on that post Science and Religion that he has a blog, where he commented further on the subject we were discussing there. (It doesn’t have permalinks, so scroll down.) This subject interests me, and I agree with George on most of it. Especially some of it.

My contention is that the experience of listening to, say, Bach’s St Matthew’s Passion, strikes some people with the force of truth. It is not some verifiable truth about the existence or otherwise of God. The music doesn’t set itself out as proof of anything. The sense of truth arises because the music seems profoundly true to some element of human experience. In that sense – though not in the ‘grass is green’ verifiable sense – it is experientially true. Art without that notion of truth would indeed be airy-fairy.

Absolutely. Agree completely. Have no trouble whatever agreeing comepletely – am aware of no tension at all between that and my chronic suspicion of the truth-claims of religion – the factual truth-claims, the claims that there is a deity and that the deity is omnipotent and benevolent. I have zero problem being powerfully moved by powerful art – also by certain kinds of landscape, and the quality of the being moved seems to me to be pretty similar. (Eve Garrard has a terrific essay on the way we are transported by landscape and how mysterious that effect can be, in the current [just out] Philosophers’ Magazine.) My paradigm example is ‘Hamlet.’ To some extent I think I know why it moves us the way it does – I’ve dug into it somewhat obsessively, piling up mountains of notes, and I think I know some of how Shaksespeare did it; but only to some extent; for the rest, I just think it’s a kind of magic. Not literal magic, but something that isn’t really completely explicable. Or that is only explicable by saying it seems profoundly true to some element of human experience. Actually that is it, pretty much. Maybe it is explicable. The thing about ‘Hamlet’ is that it seems profoundly true to so many elements of human experience, all packed into three and a half hours – love, loss, regret, betrayal, doubt, loyalty, despair, irony, wit, lying, truth-telling – and an immense amount more. It’s not many plays that can do that. There’s something…exciting, exhilarating, a little alarming about digging into ‘Hamlet,’ because you keep feeling surprised. The more you dig the more you realize Shakespeare wove this web, the tightest most drawn-together web ever woven; that he laid all these little charges, that go off one after another, in every line – and you start to wonder, how the hell did he do that…

So I completely agree with George about that. It’s just that I don’t really think most religion belongs in the same category – because of the truth-claims about the deity. Religion without those truth claims is a whole different ball game, but that’s not what I’ve been talking about here all this time. And it’s not what Dawkins is talking about. (He says that, in one of the essays in A Devil’s Chaplain.)

That, I suspect, is hard for people of a stiffly rational temperament to understand. They look for some verifiable truth claim that they can refute. They think I am making a verifiable truth claim. No. What I am saying is that some truths, certain profound truths to experience, are not easily, if at all, verifiable.

But few if any rationalists that I know of would deny that. They don’t look for verifiable truth claims in everything. They do perhaps point out veiled truth claims that are lurking behind fluffy verbiage, like the kind we keep seeing in those soppy Guardian columns. But that fluffy verbiage is not the kind of thing George is talking about – so I think we don’t disagree all that much.

But we may disagree about the link between religion and uncertainty.

Uncertainty continues to exist: art and the religious instinct, I suggested, proceeded out of uncertainty. The uncertainty principle seems to me humane and ‘true’ in that it corresponds to our experience of life. It behoves even scientists and rationalists to be uncertain about that which they cannot know, because not everything is knowable by scientific method, only that which is verifiable / falsifiable.

But there again – they are. The scientists and rationalists I know are uncertain about that which they cannot know; it’s religious people who claim to know things they don’t and can’t know. And the religious instinct may have proceeded out of uncertainty – that seems quite plausible – but I’m not at all convinced most of it hung onto the uncertainty once it arrived at the religion. Some believers, true, will say that their beliefs are beliefs and that they know they’re not certain; but oh dear, what a lot of believers won’t say any such thing – and what a lot of them get indignant at people who don’t share their beliefs, which seems odd if they’re really uncertain about them.

Some brief notices. Daniel Dennett is going to be on Philosophy Talk on January 17 to discuss ‘Intelligent Design’.

Pharyngula has moved to here. Change your bookmarks!

David Luban has a terrific guestpost at Balkinization on what’s wrong (hint: everything) with an article in defense of broad executive power by Harvey Mansfield in the Weekly Standard.

The article is loaded with gravitas, and Mansfield obviously wants to sound deep. But the depth is all on the surface. Read with care, Mansfield’s arguments are profoundly silly.

There’s a lot of that about. People wanting to sound deep, and just being silly instead. A lesson for us all. (Except me, because I never want to sound deep. Rude, hostile, irritating, snide, but not deep.)

Let us now praise famous imams and representatives of various British Muslim organisations – every single one of them male, if I’m not mistaken. What a swell bunch – all two and twenty of them.

In light of the bizarre news that the Metropolitan Police is to “investigate” comments about homosexuality made by Sir Iqbal Sacranie, the secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, we, the undersigned, Imams and representatives of various British Muslim organisations, affirm that Sir Iqbal’s views faithfully reflected mainstream Islamic teachings…The practice of homosexuality is regarded as being sinful in Islam.

Yes, and in other religions too, as Ratzinger keeps anxiously pointing out, in case we might confuse him with someone else. So what? Who cares what is regarded as sinful in Islam or any other religion?

Of course the Imams and reps are right that the police investigation is bizarre – but it comes a little oddly from them, frankly. Some of them at least.

All Britons, whether they are in favour of homosexuality or not, should be allowed to freely express their views in an atmosphere free of intimidation or bullying. We cannot claim to be a truly free and open society while we are trying to silence dissenting views.

Well, that sounds good, but let’s not forget that Iqbal Sacranie himself remarked that death was too good for Salman Rushdie. Because? Because he had freely expressed his views in a novel. After he did that, an atmosphere not free of intimidation and bullying sprang into being, thanks to Sacranie and others like him. Were they not energetically engaged in trying to silence dissenting views? Has Sacranie ever disavowed that activity? Not that I’m aware of. It was just recently that he expressed the wish that the religious hatred bill could silence dissenting views like Rushdie’s.

Nick Cohen and Evan Harris noted the same irony, or hypocrisy.

The most encouraging reaction to news that the police were investigating Sir Iqbal Sacranie’s foul comments about homosexuality came from gay and secular leaders. Instead of revelling in the discomfiture of the fundamentalist head of the Muslim Council of Britain, they quite properly said that they believed in freedom of speech and that included Sir Iqbal’s freedom to be prejudiced and foolish.

So we did. Okay, okay, I’m not a leader – but I did quite properly say.

As Evan Harris, the Liberal Democrat MP, pointed out, the MCB has not returned the compliment. It’s all for freedom of speech when it comes to laying into gays. It also believes that the government has no right to ban the glorification of terrorism. When it comes to freedom of speech about religion, however, it’s a very different matter. At the height of The Satanic Verses affair in 1988, Sacranie said that ‘death was perhaps too easy’ for Salman Rushdie. This did not stop New Labour almost tripping over its feet as it rushed to embrace the MCB when it came to power in 1997. As well as knighting Sacranie, it responded to his lobbying by putting before parliament a law against incitement of religious hatred. In their attempts to keep this unelected homophobe in their big tent, New Labour is prepared to ignore its more liberal supporters – and the conclusively argued opposition of the House of Lords – and force the bill through.

So, we’ll all just have to keep on quite properly saying, over and over again. Monotonous but necessary.

I know it’s obvious, but this kind of thing gets on my nerves. I know it’s obvious, I know this is The Economist, but still.

When IBM announced an overhaul of its pension plan for employees in America last week, it joined a parade of employers that are shifting more responsibility for saving for retirement on to workers.

Shifting more responsibility. As if those slacker employees have been just flopping around expecting employers to spoon-feed them, because they’re such babies. As if pensions were not simply part of the agreed compensation package, like, you know, wages. If IBM announced an overhaul of its payment plan for employees, which consisted of reducing their salaries by 100%, would that be shifting more responsibility on to workers? Well, yes, that would be one thing to call it, but I can think of other things.

To the extent that this creates and encourages individual choice and responsibility, it is something to welcome rather than to fear.

Excuse me? I beg your pardon? A reduction in pay is something to welcome? A reduction in pay is something to welcome to the extent that it creates and encourages individual choice and responsibility? Is it? But if that’s true, why doesn’t everyone just decide to shift to a zero-pay system, thus creating maximum individual choice and responsibility? Starting with CEOs? They would welcome zero pay and zero pensions and zero stock options, surely – right? And so would people who write for The Economist?

And even leaving that aside, even ignoring the ludicrous and insulting equation of a pay-cut with an encouragement of frontier virtues, there’s another problem with this stupid kind of rhetoric. No matter how responsible one may be, if one works for low wages, one doesn’t necessarily have the spare money to do one’s own saving for retirement. And yes, even responsible people work for low wages; it happens. And since the entire economy depends on people who work for low wages, it’s hypocritical and shameless to blame those very people for working for low wages, and to ignore their existence when equating the absence of pensions with increased responsibility.

John Gray is often irritating, but this review in The Nation of Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism is not too bad. It also hooks up with some things we’ve been talking about lately in the discussions on comprehensive liberalism v political liberalism.

In Appiah’s view cosmopolitanism has two intertwined strands: the idea that we have obligations to other human beings above and beyond those to whom we are related by ties of family, kinship or formal citizenship; and an attitude that values others not just as specimens of universal humanity but as having lives whose meaning is bound up with particular practices and beliefs that are often different from our own.

Hmm. One has to wonder exactly what that means (so one will have to read the book in order to find out, won’t one). I suppose what it means is – it’s not enough to value others just as specimens of universal humanity; in order to value them properly, that is, realistically, one has to acknowledge that they have practices and beliefs that are often different from our own and that matter to them. In other words one has to realize that there may be some difficulty in this process of valuing others. One has to make one’s valuing of other people not conditional on their agreeing with oneself in every particular. That seems to fit, and it’s also worth pointing out. But at the same time – depending on just how much one is expected to value others, and in just what way – such an attitude may be in strong tension with other desirable attitudes or commitments. Others may have lives whose meaning is bound up with accusing children of witchcraft and then torturing them, for instance. We can value those other in the sense of wanting to change their minds, and especially their practice, rather than wanting to torture them back – but we probably don’t simply want to value them and let it go at that. We don’t want to value them as they are, and let them go on doing what they’re doing. So our ‘valuing’ others may be more or less weak, depending on the circumstances.

That’s the same problem we talked about in Respect One and Respect Two. It’s a pre-emptive way of thinking – and as such, it may often be a much worse idea than the merely formal valuing of others as specimens of humanity. We can’t really sign up to a blanket promise to value everyone whose practices and beliefs are different from our own, sight unseen, no matter what the practices and beliefs are. It depends. It depends on just how cruel, unjust, exploitive, violent, arbitrary and the like, the practices are. And since it does depend, the pre-emption implicit in that idea seems to be pretty much ruled out. We can’t really accept that pre-emption, because if we do, we may find ourselves expected to value mass murderers, or slave-owners, or exorcists. The idea seems to be quite similar to political liberalism, and tricky for just the same kind of reasons.

As a position in ethical theory, cosmopolitanism is distinct from relativism and universalism. It affirms the possibility of mutual understanding between adherents to different moralities but without holding out the promise of any ultimate consensus. There are human universals that make species-wide communication possible – and yet these commonalities do not ground anything like a single universally valid morality or way of life. Clearly this is a position that carries within it a certain tension. The idea that we have universal moral obligations is not always easily reconciled with the practices and beliefs that give particular human lives their meaning. Appiah recognizes this tension, and writes: “There will be times when these two ideals – universal concern and respect for legitimate difference – clash. There’s a sense in which cosmopolitanism is the name not of the solution but of the challenge.”

Just so. Appiah recognizes the tension (not surprisingly). One thing Gray says in that passage strikes me though. ‘There are human universals that make species-wide communication possible.’ Well – no, actually. Not species-wide. Male of the species-wide, but not species-wide. Because one of those beliefs and practices that we don’t all agree on, and a very widespread one, is the practice of not allowing women to take part in communication with the rest of the species at all. There are whole immense cultures where species-wide communication is not remotely a goal – where in fact the very opposite is the goal: where half the humans who make up that species are permanently sequestered and incarcerated and forbidden to talk to male non-relatives ever at all. Species-wide communication is therefore impossible in such cultures; it’s not even an idea or a dream or a goal, it’s more of an abomination. So from that point of view, cosmopolitanism is also not a value there; it can’t be. How can women be cosmopolitan while confined to quarters? They can’t; it’s a contradiction. So unless one is thinking of male cosmopolitanism only – which would be a pretty parochial kind of cosmopolitianism – there is a disabling tension right at the beginning. Real cosmopolitanism seems out of reach until that changes.*

However, human life contains goods and evils that do not depend on our opinions. To be at risk of genocide or subject to torture is an evil for all human beings whatever their beliefs. These evils are not culture-relative, and protection from them is a species-wide good. Once we recognize this, we cannot avoid speaking of universal human values; but this is not the same as having a universal morality…Value-pluralism undercuts the claims of all universal moralities, including liberal morality. Like Berlin in some of his writings, Appiah seems to want to celebrate moral diversity and at the same time endorse the universality of liberal values. The result is that he is constantly pulling liberal rabbits out of cosmopolitan hats.

There you go. It’s just not always possible to celebrate moral diversity and endorse universalism. Sometimes it has to be one or the other but not both.

*Update. Harry points out in comments that I misread that sentence. He reads ‘There are human universals that make species-wide communication possible’ to mean ‘that human beings are alike in fundamental (genetic etc.) ways, and that this universal human nature is what makes species-wide communication possible’ and adds that this is a central pillar in our belief in human rights, and a corrective to postmodern denial of universals. I think his reading is the right one, which means I think mine is the wrong one. Never mind.

‘Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum,’ Lucretius remarked* (that’s one of my few Latin tags. I failed Latin one year. You didn’t fail things in my school, it wasn’t done, but I managed it. I was quite good at failing things when I was fifteen) about what Agamemnon did to his daughter at the behest of a god (he killed her, that’s what, just to get a wind for sailing to Troy). What evil religion can persuade us to. He was right, old Lukers.

There’s this hajj business for instance. Brilliant. Make it a pillar of your religion that if you can make the trip to Mecca, you have to, once in your life. Keep that rule in place when the relgion it’s a pillar of goes from being that of some people in Arabia to being that of many people all over the damn planet, and when the population at issue goes from being – what? a few thousand? – to a billion or two. Then watch the fun. To make sure, arrange some bottlenecks along the way. Millions of people heading for a smallish place, all of them in a hurry – oh, oops, somebody tripped, oops, this fool behind me is pushing, oh shit I’m stepping on someone’s chest, oh hell oh hell oh hell I’m standing on someone’s face, I’m not having an easy time breathing myself –

Very spiritual, isn’t it. Uplifting. Meaningful. Millions of people throw stones at a pillar because ‘the devil’ once appeared there to Abraham – the story goes. Well that’s a good reason for everyone else to go there and throw a stone, and for them to do it on the same day. Yes, very good. Good thinking. And the police can’t do anything about it, because if they tried, there would be an even worse stampede. Well, god forbid anyone should just decide that the hajj is not an obligation after all and end the whole mess. I heard someone gently suggest something similar on the World Service – not even end it, but just maybe spread it out over the year perhaps? No, no, couldn’t do that. But it’s not an actual obligation is it? Yes, it’s an obligation, if you have the capacity, if you have the money and health, it’s an obligation. Oh.

And then there’s this pastor in Tottenahm. He’s very spiritual too.

A London-based pastor has been arrested on suspicion of inciting child cruelty following an investigation into allegations of witchcraft at an evangelical Congolese church in Tottenham. Dr Dieudonne Tukala, 46, from the Church of Christ Mission, is being questioned over claims that he diagnosed several children as “witches”, advising their parents to beat the devil out of them or send them back to the Democratic Republic of Congo so that he could pray for them to be killed…Dr Tukala was accused of telling one couple that their nine-year-old son was possessed. The boy’s father was jailed for five years at Snaresbrook Crown Court in November 2003 after branding his son with a steam iron and forcing chilli powder into his mouth “to drive the devil out”.

Branding his child with an iron. To drive the devil out. People trample other people to death in their eagerness to throw stones at a stone, in the belief that it has something to do with the devil, and other people burn children with irons and beat them, in the belief that they will drive the devil out. There are some things so stupid or so cruel that only religion can persuade people to do them.

Now you knew I would have to pitch a fit about this. So here, have a fit.

Western liberal democracy owes much to the Christian view that all have equal worth before God, which in our political system reads as democracy and equality before the law; and those ideals have often been applied because of religious faith, not in spite of it.

No it doesn’t. Or at least no one knows if it does or not. That’s just that confusion of correlation with causation again. The ‘Christian’ (and not exclusively Christian, and not thoroughly Christian either, given how many exceptions Xianity always managed to find to its supposed ‘view’ over the years) view that all have equal worth before God, and the idea of democracy and equality, just happened to be around in the same part of the world now and then. That doesn’t mean Xianity caused it. And really, is it likely? Has Xianity really been all that egalitarian all this time? Hardly.

The anti-slavery movement had religious motivations of the evangelical persuasion that Buruma fears.

We’re always hearing that – but slavery was justified by Christians in good standing for centuries before the abolitionists even existed, let alone got a foothold. So how much is that supposed to count for? Not all that much, I would say.

Simply bemoaning the fanatics and mourning the demise of liberal democracy gets us nowhere…Faith is important to many.

Yes it does get us somewhere. And anyway what are we supposed to do, applaud the fanatics and cheer the partial retreat (not demise) of secular liberal democracy? And faith is important to many – really?! Who knew? That changes everything.

But Buruma is wrong to regard evangelicals as fundamentalists, because he equates that term with fanaticism and intolerance rather than with trying to apply orthodox Biblical doctrine to today’s world.

Well there’s a distinction without a difference. Trying to apply ‘orthodox Biblical doctrine’ to today’s world is fanaticism and intolerance. What else would it be? Has this guy ever read the dang Bible?

Christianity and Islam – the two faiths Buruma mentions – motivate believers to share their world-views with others. That means they will always want to be in the public square, engaging in the debates of the day.

Yes, we know. Like Iqbal Sacranie, flailing around in his search for a rationalization for his dislike of gays, and falling back on the fact that it is what he learns from his ‘faith’ – as if that makes his nasty nonsense better instead of worse. It’s this wanting to be in the public square arguing for political views that have no justification whatever except the arguers’ ‘faith’ that is so damn dangerous. That, oddly enough, is why secularists oppose religion in the public square.

Yet another to add to the Guardian’s list of slobbering-on-religion articles. And just as lame and vacuous and stale as all the others. I’m beginning to think that people of ‘faith’ just really don’t have anything of value to say on the subject.

I listened to the replay of Iqbal Sacranie’s interview on PM yesterday, and it was just as silly and irritating as I expected. He so obviously had nothing relevant to say, he so obviously was simply expressing unthinking dislike, he so obviously was just floundering around looking for rationalizations, it was so obvious how empty they were. Er, they’re harmful, uh, stability, um, society, er, stable, you know, ooh, ah, um – they get diseases! That’s it. They get diseases – that’s scientific, that is. So you see what I mean. It’s obvious. But, er, we have to put up with it, because this is a democracy. But I sure don’t want to! And of course you can see why. It’s obvious. Stability. Harmful. Mutter mutter choke.’ Yes, all very elevating and enlightening.

But. I don’t think it’s a police matter. Sacranie is a damn fool with a narrow mind, but that’s not a police matter either. He ought to wake up and learn to think properly, but I hardly think the police are going to teach him to do that. Not their job, is it. No, that’s our job – his fellow citizens of the world.

His (veiled?) threats against Rushdie are another matter. But those are not why the police were called. But he didn’t utter any threats, not even veiled ones (he said the death penalty was too good for Rushdie, that’s what – not all that veiled). No, his potential crime may have been a violation of section 5 of the Public Order Act. I wasn’t really aware of this act before…it’s rather interesting…

Scotland Yard’s community safety unit, which investigates homophobia and hate crime, is considering whether Sir Iqbal has broken telecommunications laws or the 1986 Public Order Act, which forbids the use of “threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress or thereby”.

You guys have an act that forbids the use of insulting words within the hearing of people likely to be caused distress thereby? Holy jumping Jesus! Are you crazy?! Were you all in a coma when that was passed, or what? Didn’t it cross anyone’s mind that those terms might be just ever so slightly broad and sweeping? That they might be just a tiny tiny tiny bit of an impediment to free speech? I mean – don’t you all use words every day, every hour, that are insulting (to something or someone somewhere) enough to cause someone somewhere possible potential distress? And who knows if she’s in earshot or not?! I know I do. I use words of that kind every hour, every moment – they are my life and breath and reason for existing. Imagine my surprise to find that they are illegal.

I must be missing something. There must be some reason this Act isn’t as ridiculous as it looks at first blush. I can’t think of what it is, but there must be. Either that or you were all on an outing to Preston that day, and missed it.

Some more on this question of comprehensive v political liberalism, and respect, and what is meant by it. G has been arguing for a more limited reading in comments, but I’m not convinced that the quoted passages fit such a reading.

One may sympathize…without feeling that he understands the type of mutual respect that is required in a pluralistic society. I agree with Rawls: such respect requires (in the public sphere at least) not showing up the claims of religion as damaging, and not adopting a public conception of truth and objectivity according to which such claims are false.

That seems pretty clear to me. Surely she’s not talking about leaving ‘our private differences over comprehensive conceptions of the good out of political discourse and negotiation, and certainly out of political institutions themselves’ there. Isn’t it pretty unequivocal? Such respect requires, at least in the public sphere, not showing up the claims of religion as damaging, and not adopting a public conception of truth and objectivity according to which such claims are false. She doesn’t say ‘in the political sphere at least’ – she says ‘public’. I take that to mean public talking and writing, not purely public political talking and writing – since she says the former and not the latter. Respect requires us not to adopt a public – not political, but public – conception of truth and objectivity according to which the claims of religion are false. Do public sphere and public conception actually mean political sphere and political conception in Rawlsian language? Maybe they do, I don’t know. But the multiculturalism essay was in the Boston Review, which is not a technical journal of philosophy – surely Nussbaum must have intended to use ordinary language there.

The autonomy question – as G said, ‘even this minimal notion of respect has a problem with conceptions of the good that advocate political subordination of others (women, ethnic groups, adherents to other religions, etc.), because respect for individual autonomy is so basic to political liberalism.’ But…

I think it is plausible to read [Okin] as endorsing a form of comprehensive liberalism, in which liberal values of autonomy and dignity pervade the fabric of the body politic…her view resembles the views of John Stuart Mill and Joseph Raz, who see the fostering of personal autonomy in all areas of life as an appropriate goal of the state. Such moral liberals can still recognize the intrinsic worth of religious liberty and thus respect the choices of religious believers – up to a point. But, given their view that autonomous lives are better than hierarchically ordered lives, they are bound to play favorites among the religions, using the state and its persuasive apparatus to wean people away from religions that do not foster personal autonomy – as John Stuart Mill explicitly urges in On Liberty, where he excoriates Calvinism…There can be little doubt that a Millean liberal state will show public disrespect for Calvinism in all sorts of ways and will make frequent pronouncements about human flourishing and human nature that go well beyond the core of the political conception.

So – valuing autonomy will cause the Millean liberal to show public disrespect for Calvinism in all sorts of ways – and surely I’m not reading uncharitably in thinking that Nussbaum is critical of such an outcome. In fact she sounds (to me) unpleasantly like all the would-be censors who are always zipping up and down telling us not to disrespect their cherished beliefs. Very unpleasantly, in fact. This passage (it’s on pages 108-109 of the Okin book) makes me more twitchy every time I read it.

She goes on:

The political liberal, by contrast, begins from the fact of reasonable disagreements in society, and the existence of a reasonable plurality of comprehensive doctrines about the good, prominent among which are the religious conceptions. By calling them reasonable, the political liberal shows respect for them and commits herself to a political course that is as protective of them as it is possible to be, compatibly with a just political structure.

I still don’t see how to read that other than as a condemnation of showing ‘public disrespect’ for religions in public discussions, and as something of a warning about putting autonomy ahead of a certain (rather peculiar) idea of respect.

PZ comments on ‘The Root of All Evil’ at Pharyngula.

Nobody should ever call Dawkins arrogant. On the scale established by American televangelists, by Christians in general, he is a timid model of bashful humility. Pit a man who works for his knowledge, who willingly tests and reviews it continually, against a mob who trusts in revealed knowledge dogmatically, and I’ll tell you who the arrogant ones are.

Well exactly. How it did irritate me, listening to that smug unctuous man telling Dawkins he is arrogant. What a joke! But it works, you know. It works all the time. The Limbaughs and O’Reillys never get enough of that (well they wouldn’t, would they – it works) ploy, calling any failure to submit to religious dogma ‘elitist’ and an ‘attack of people of faith’. So however upside down and backward it is, it just keeps going on and on and on.

There is a review-synopsis of the first show at this new blog, which I see some of you have already found via Pharyngula. I meant to link to it yesterday but [voice rises to shriek] I’ve been busy! But there it is now – with its name derived from Pope, just as (indirectly) B&W’s is.

The naming things is an issue for those that don’t believe there actually is a God or Gods but who don’t want to be seen as going beyond evidence and logic and claiming that there definitely isn’t a God or Gods (if only people would stop thinking atheism means this!), and the arrogance this is seen to entail (for a good little book on atheism, have a look at Julian Baggini’s ‘Atheism: A Very Short Introduction’; it’s cheap and easy to read quickly).

Same here. B&W is cheap and easy to read quickly. I take a lot of pride in that.

I gather that Brian Leiter is thinking about this subject too.

I am wondering whether any readers know of literature making the case for toleration of religion qua religion. What has struck me in reading the literature is that while religious toleration is often a paradigm case for discussions of toleration, the arguments for it are not specific to religion: arguments from autonomy and well-being would equally well encompass toleration of many other kinds of belief that are not religious in character…What I’m wondering is whether there are other articles that try to argue why religion in particular should be tolerated, arguments that make claims appealing to distinctive features of religious belief and practices. Or as Macklem frames the question: “What is it that distinguished religious beliefs from other beliefs, so as to make them worthy of distinctive, perhaps superior constitutional protection?” That, to my mind, would be an argument for religious toleration.

It looks as if there aren’t very many, and as if those there are aren’t very good. Which won’t surprise us much, I should think. It is apparently just what I’ve been saying for a long time: it’s just an unargued, assumed, longstanding, habitual asymmetry that everyone takes for granted but that doesn’t have much justification. Religion is a special case. Yes, but why? Dunno – it just is.

Let’s consider what Nussbaum says, again. From the earlier comment:

But to claim that freedom of speech promotes truth in metaphysics and morals would be to show disrespect for the idea of reasonable pluralism, and to venture onto a terrain where one is at high risk of showing disrespect to one’s fellow citizens. Mill is totally oblivious to all such considerations. He has none of the delicate regard for other people’s religious doctrines that characterizes the political liberal…In On Liberty he does not hesitate to speak contemptuously of Calvinism as an ‘insidious’ doctrine…One may sympathize…without feeling that he understands the type of mutual respect that is required in a pluralistic society. I agree with Rawls: such respect requires (in the public sphere at least) not showing up the claims of religion as damaging, and not adopting a public conception of truth and objectivity according to which such claims are false.

What does ‘respect’ mean there? What is the mutual respect that is required in a pluralistic society, and that requires us not to show up the claims of religion and not to adopt a conception of truth and objectivity according to which such claims are false?

Respect means at least two different things, I take it. One, it means basic civility, politeness, the right way to treat people; decency, good behavior, not shoving people or spitting on them or calling them rude names. It doesn’t require thinking the people are nice people, or interesting, or right about anything – it doesn’t require any opinion of them at all. That’s not the point. The point is that the default mode for how to treat people, unless they’re approaching you at speed with a sharp sword or trying to take your lunch and eat it themselves, is to be civil. That’s respect one; respect two is quite different. It’s cognitive, and substantive, and involves judgment; it has content, it’s about something, it’s earned in some way. That means it can’t possibly be universal, or automatic, or a default mode for how to treat everyone; or mandated, or expected or demanded. But Nussbaum seems to be demanding respect two in addition to or even instead of respect one. Well, that’s ridiculous. And not only ridiculous, but surely a recipe for mental abdication and vacuity. I don’t see how one could even begin to implement such a program without giving up thinking of any kind. Especially given that last terrifying clause – ‘and not adopting a public conception of truth and objectivity according to which such claims are false’. Eh? Such respect requires us not to adopt a public (B&W is public) idea of truth in which such claims are false and wrong? Well then respect requires us to adopt no conception of truth at all! To just bag the whole idea!

Respect one is a good thing, but Nussbaum’s expansive idea of universal entitlement to respect two and its entailing the non-disagreement with religion, seems to me to be an intellectual nightmare.

So, a couple of days ago, turning over and over in my mind this much-vexed subject of belief and respect and faith and religion and whether we are or are not allowed (‘allowed’ in the broadest sense, not the most literal one) to criticise them – I re-read an essay of Martha Nussbaum’s that has puzzled me in the past, and behold, it puzzled me all over again.

The essay is packed full of statements that puzzle me – the margins are riddled with question marks. I’ll give just a sample.

Even if one were convinced…that all religion is superstition, and that a comprehensive secular view of the good is correct, we do not show sufficient respect for our fellow citizens when we fail to acknowledge that they reasonably see the good differently…So it is hard to see how we can respect the bearers of such convictions and yet not respect the choices they make to lead traditional religious lives.

We do not show sufficient respect for our fellow citizens when we fail to acknowledge that they reasonably see the good differently? So – we have to acknowledge – in advance, without questioning in particular – that our fellow citizens reasonably see the good differently, in order to show them sufficient respect? That’s an odd idea.

By calling them [comprehensive doctrines about the good – OB] reasonable, the political liberal shows respect for them and commits herself to a political course that is as protective of them as it is possible to be, compatibly with a just political structure.

Well, yes, no doubt. By calling everything that anyone thinks or says ‘reasonable’ one does show respect – but at the price of calling everything that anyone thinks or says ‘reasonable’. The trouble with that idea is that not everything that anyone thinks or says is in fact reasonable. I’ve noticed that on more than one occasion.

Political liberalism [in contrast to comprehensive liberalism; this is a distinction from Rawls – OB], the type of liberalism I would defend, seems to me far more able…to accomodate the very great value of citizens’ religious freedom…by calling the conceptions ‘reasonable,’ it gestures toward the many contributions religions have made, and continue to make, to the goodness of human life.

But why would one want to gesture toward those instead of toward the opposite? Why would one want to gesture toward the contributions rather than toward the diminutions and deprivations, the subtractions and denials, the removals and excisions, the narrowing and stifling and stunting, the frightening and bullying, the dominating and tyrannizing? And then, another question, why would one want to perform such gesturing by calling the conceptions ‘reasonable’ when one in fact thinks they are the very opposite of reasonable? Why should one decide ahead of time, as a matter of principle, to call any conceptions ‘reasonable’? Why doesn’t one rather wait until one has learned what the conceptions are, and thought about them? Why doesn’t one then call them reasonable if they are reasonable and unreasonable if they are not? Why does Nussbaum think we should put the need to ‘respect’ our fellow citizens (and it’s highly debatable whether such an approach even does respect people, but that’s a separate question, which I want to pick at later) ahead of our need to evaluate conceptions on their merits?

I’ve talked about this before. I don’t understand it now any better than I did in June 2004. So I was pleased to note how Barbara Forrest’s contribution to the Kitzmiller comments starts:

One of the greatest gestures of respect for one’s fellow Americans is to tell them the truth. To do otherwise is the height of disrespect.

Well exactly. Surely ‘respecting’ people by firmly deciding in advance to assume that their conceptions are, sight unseen, reasonable, is – no respect at all. It’s just a caucus race, it’s just Lake Wobegon. All have won, all shall have prizes, all conceptions are above average. With respect like that who needs contempt?

If you want to hear some thoroughly silly reactions to Dawkins on God, listen to the latest Saturday Review.

First you get a bit of soundtrack, of the cheery perky dense evangelical telling Dawkins what’s what.

Ted Haggart: ‘We fully embrace the scientific method, as American evangelicals – and we think, as time goes along, as we discover more and more facts, that we’ll learn more and more about how God created the heavens and the earth – ‘

Dawkins points out that the evidence shows the earth to be 4.5 billion years old, Haggart says (perkily, cheerily), ‘You know what you’re doing?’ and explains that he’s paying attention to just part of the scientific community, and that maybe in a hundred years ‘your grandchildren will laugh at you.’

‘You want to bet?’ Dawkins asks, sharpish.

‘Sometimes it’s hard for a human being to study the ear or study the eye and think that happened by accident.’

‘I beg your pardon, did you say “by accident”?’

‘Yeah.’

‘What do you mean “by accident”?

‘That the eye just formed itself somehow.’

‘Who says it did?’

‘Well, some evolutionists say it.’

‘Not a single one that I’ve ever met.’

[Sarcastically wondering]: ‘Really?!’

‘Really.’

[More wondering]: ‘Ohh.’

‘You obviously know nothing about evolution.’

‘Or maybe you haven’t met the people I have.’ [laughs] ‘But you see – you do understand – you do understand that this issue right here, of intellectual arrogance, is the reason why, people like you, have a difficult problem with people of faith – ‘

See what I mean? He has a considerable nerve, this Haggart guy, telling Dawkins that he, Dawkins, is arrogant, when he’s just been lecturing him on a subject of which he does obviously know nothing. ‘That the eye just formed itself somehow.’ He has no clue what he’s talking about, but that doesn’t stop him from insisting on his ridiculous point. Isn’t that a tad arrogant?!

Then after the listen, all three guests rant and fume and gibber. George Walden talks about ‘jackboots stamping on the few Christians who are left’ and ‘stamping on the faces of Jews and Catholics’. Then Fay Weldon gets worked up: ‘He had an emotion, which is that science and religion are fundamentally opposed, and he cannot come to terms with the fact that they may not be.’ Walden complains, ‘He doesn’t deal with faith, he deals with religion – and faith is a big serious thing.’ Tom Sutcliffe – he was the only sensible one there – pointed out, ‘His specific point in the first programme is that faith is the problem – the belief in things without as it were physical or substantial evidence is the central problem.’ Then Weldon, outraged, says, ‘Well it’s outrageous, what is he going to put in its place, science?’ ‘Yes!’ says Sutcliffe, slightly exasperated. Weldon is flummoxed. ‘He’s going to look at the stars and say – ‘ [stupid baffled laugh] ‘I mean how is he going to explain them away?’ Then Paul Farley quotes William Burroughs, ‘No job too dirty for a scientist.’ In short it was quite a display of hostility to science and reason on the part of right-on intellectuals. But it does seem (to me anyway!) to bear out the claim that criticism of religion inspires a special intensity of outrage, even among non-believers. And even in the UK.

The Herald on Dawkins on religion on channel 4.

This new two-part documentary, which begins on Channel 4 tomorrow, asserts that there is no safe or defensible middle ground between science and religion, its thesis being that even the moderate followers of Islam, Judaism and Christianity are deluded, defective and potentially dangerous…It is in this capacity that Dawkins travels to various theological flashpoints…challenging a full range of beliefs and their advocates. And for an ambassador, he is not particularly diplomatic. The programme takes its cue from a statement Dawkins made immediately after September 11, 2001: “[Religion is] lethally dangerous nonsense. Let’s now stop being so damned respectful!”

Well, we’ve tried diplomacy, and what has it gotten us? Only more and louder demands. Only an ever-stronger and more entrenched sense of entitlement, to an infinite quantity of respect. So the hell with it.

While Pastor Haggard, for example, may have a point when he counter-accuses Dawkins of “intellectual arrogance” on camera, he does himself no favours by later throwing the film crew out of his Christian-industrial mega-compound.

I don’t think Pastor Haggard does have a point, as a matter of fact. I heard the soundtrack from that particular bit on Saturday Review, and it seems to me Pastor H was the arrogant one. He made a silly pronouncement about evolution – about the eye or the ear evolving ‘by accident’ – which showed he had no understanding of what he was pronouncing about. Dawkins said as much – and Haggard called him arrogant. Well how silly! How completely inane! Yet again – this kind of thing doesn’t fly in other areas, and we know it doesn’t, but as soon as people clutching prayer books turn up, all the rules change. We don’t wander into operating rooms and tell neurosurgeons that it’s really hard to believe they’re going to be able to repair the aneurism that way. We don’t stroll into the pharmacological factory and start querying the recipes. So why does Pastor Haggard think a zoologist is being ‘arrogant’ in telling him he doesn’t understand evolution? Which of them is more likely to know something of the subject? But Pastor H is a godbotherer, so it’s ‘arrogant’ to tell him he’s clueless and confused and ignorant.

Producer Alan Clements will accept credit for the original “uneasy and timely idea” of making a documentary about the apparent “rise of faith and retreat of reason in modern society”. He stands by the finished product 100%. “I think these are important films,” says Clements, “and programmes like this need to be made and watched.”…This is, then, for better or worse, a programme that lets Dawkins be Dawkins. His views, already well known, are expressed here with often electrifying clarity. He deconstructs such “fairy stories” as the assumption of the Virgin Mary with witty, angry and rigorous academic passion.

Isn’t a little clarity on this subject a welcome relief? We hear more than enough mumbling about deep piety and devout faith and pious depth and faithful devoutness – isn’t a little of the other thing useful for clearing our heads?

Dawkins describes all religious faith as “a process of non-thinking”…What, though, does he actually hope to achieve with these programmes, in this country? He must know that audiences will respond according to the polarities of their own faith or lack of it. True believers will be affronted, while the typical, liberal Channel 4 viewer will have their non-belief validated.

No, I don’t think you know that. I don’t think anyone does, or can. It’s likely that many people will be in one of those two categories, but no one knows how many people will think about what is being said, perhaps for the first time in their lives. We do sometimes change our minds about things, we do sometimes listen and hear, we do sometimes take in new ideas and new evidence, we do sometimes see things in a new light. It’s not useful to write that possibility off in advance. One never knows.

“But I think a fairly substantial number of people haven’t really given it a lot of thought, and only vaguely think of themselves as Christian. This programme just might open some eyes to the fact that you don’t have to believe this stuff, that it’s OK to be an atheist. It’s a bit like being gay 30 years ago, when it was necessary to consciously come out of the closet. I’m hoping that I may sway people in that middle category, who might be shaken into thinking about it.”

Just so. It’s not possible to tell what eyes will be opened. (Consider the massive impact Carl Sagan had with ‘Cosmos’. These things happen.)

Television, like the society from which it broadcasts, has found it expedient to display ever greater tolerance, indulgence and relativism in regard to lifestyle choices, particularly matters of faith. For this reason, Dawkins’s eminently reasonable argument may come across as almost radical in its forcefulness. “Yes it will,” he says. “Because you’re simply not allowed to attack someone’s religion. You can attack their politics or their football team, but not their faith. I think it’s very important that this should be seen as complete nonsense. Why shouldn’t people be required to defend their religion?…I think moderate religion makes the world safe for extremists, because children are trained from the cradle to think faith in itself is a good thing. So then when someone says it’s part of their faith to kill people, their actions need no further justification, and are almost respected as such.”

Exactly. We’re constantly bombarded with that silly idea that faith in itself is a good thing. How can we resist except by resisting?

There are some oddities in this piece on books about how to read Derrida and Marx.

The assumption of Granta’s How to Read series is that readers will go on to read at least some of the works discussed. Including this author in a series of this sort, aimed at a “general reader”, invites an interesting question: should one read Derrida? Is his work important, something with which any intelligent person should be familiar? In the grand scheme of things, perhaps not, but the question is complicated. What might it mean to say that an author is important, not just in a particular field, but for society as a whole?

What, indeed? Surely it’s fairly obvious that one has to figure that out in order to offer a reasonable answer to such a question. Isn’t it? Isn’t a question like ‘is Derrida’s work important?’ one that pretty much demands consideration of what is meant by ‘important’? Doesn’t one have to start by saying ‘Well what are we talking about here? Important to whom? Important for what purpose? Who wants to know?’ Words like ‘important’ are pretty obviously contextual rather than self-evident, aren’t they? Or am I confused.

In How to Read Derrida, Penelope Deutscher, a philosophy professor at Northwestern University in the United States, explains that deconstruction, the idea most closely associated with Derrida, is a way of reading that focuses on hidden contradictions, “deconstructing” the text, and often confounding the intentions of the author. This applies to radical and alternative ideas as well as established ones…To suggest that people should read Derrida, then, is to warn against simplistic or one-sided ideologies, and insist that “things are more complicated than that”.

Okay, but – is Derrida the only writer that’s true of? Are there other people who fit into the sentence ‘to suggest that people should read [__], then, is to warn against simplistic or one-sided ideologies, and insist that “things are more complicated than that”‘? Is Derrida the only writer who has ever warned against simplistic or one-sided ideologies, or pointed out that things are more complicated than that? If he’s not (and I’m hinting that I think he’s not), then is it quite true to say that to suggest that people should read Derrida, then, is to warn against simplistic or one-sided ideologies, and insist that “things are more complicated than that”? If someone – say, Derrida – is only one of many people who have said X, then is it clear that a suggestion that one should read Derrida is a suggestion that X? I’m not sure it is.

But, whatever satisfaction we may derive from Marxism’s power to explain, if Marx’s work is merely another text to be read it loses much of what he intended. For theory to “grip the masses”, as Marx put it, there has to be at least the foundation of a mass movement for it to address. Without such a movement, theory lacks direction, discipline even. Consequently, the obscurity of contemporary philosophy as exemplified by Derrida and his followers is not a purely intellectual phenomenon. Disconnected from political engagement, reading lacks urgency, and how we read, and what, becomes almost arbitrary.

Wait – what? Disconnected from political engagement, reading lacks urgency? It does? Not at my house it doesn’t! Not unless ‘political engagement’ is interpreted almost insanely broadly. Disconnected from engagement of any kind, one might say, reading lacks urgency, but then that’s pretty much a tautology – and there are more kinds of engagement than the political. Lots more. So – I beg to differ.

And there’s always dear Madeleine Bunting. How fondly I look back on her musings about how much happier ‘African’ lives are than those in the creepy dreary alienated consumerist West. How the people in the Democratic Republic of Congo must have chuckled if any of them were in a position – what with being so busy starving and being ill and dying and all – to find a Guardian and read her essay.

Conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo is killing 38,000 people each month, says the Lancet medical journal. Most of the deaths are not caused by violence but by malnutrition and preventable diseases after the collapse of health services, the study said. Since the war began in 1998, some 4m people have died, making it the world’s most deadly war since 1945, it said.

Yes but at least they’re not all trivial and consumerist, and that’s what counts. Anyway, she has a stupid piece on religion and ‘atheism’ (her version), taking off from Richard Dawkins’s Channel 4 show on religion as the root of all evil. I haven’t seen the show, so can’t (and won’t! not if it was ever so) comment on Bunting’s take on that. But that still leaves lots to comment on.

His voice is one of the loudest in an increasingly shrill chorus of atheist humanists; something has got them badly rattled…Behind unsubstantiated assertions, sweeping generalisations and random anecdotal evidence, there’s the unmistakable whiff of panic; they fear religion is on the march again.

Well gee, why would we think that, do you suppose? Are we all crazy and delusional and dribbling with paranoia? How could anyone possibly fear that religion is on the march again right now, and how could anyone object if it were?

That lack of empathy also lies behind Dawkins’s reference to a “process of non-thinking called faith”. For thousands of years, religious belief has been accompanied by thought and intellectual discovery, whether Islamic astronomy or the Renaissance. But his contempt is so profound that he can’t be bothered to even find out (in an interview he dismissed Christian theology in exactly these terms).

Yes but the fact that religious belief has been accompanied by thought and intellectual discovery (Bunting accidentally put that well) doesn’t mean that religious belief was useful or helpful or (certainly) causative of that thought and intellectual discovery, it just means it was there at the same time. It could be a correlation rather than a cause. So the fact that the two ways of thinking were sometimes in the same room doesn’t in the least contradict what Dawkins said. And after all, he’s right – ‘faith’ is by definition a process of non-thinking. That’s what the word means. Religious believers will say as much when their guard is down – that faith is not about believing things that are supported by evidence, anyone can do that; faith is about believing without evidence. In other words, non-thinking.

It’s also right for religion to concede ground to science to explain natural processes; but at the same time, science has to concede that despite its huge advances it still cannot answer questions about the nature of the universe – such as whether we are freak chances of evolution in an indifferent cosmos (Dawkins does finally acknowledge this point in the programmes).

Boy I get sick of that trope. It’s not clear that science can’t at least offer a plausible answer to that particular question, and in any case, religion can’t answer it any more than science or anything else can – and probably less. It can’t ‘answer’ such questions because all it does is say what it wants to say, and let it go at that. Excuse me, but that’s not an answer. Religion doesn’t have to check its answers against anything, it doesn’t have to have them peer-reviewed, it doesn’t have to do the maths, it doesn’t have to present them to audiences of restless ambitious rivals eager to show them wrong. It just says. That’s not an answer, that doesn’t count. Whenever people say that, with such an air of bovine triumph, we have some serious non-thinking going on. Because what they mean when they say ‘science can’t and religion can’ is that science can’t because it does have to check, it does have to meet certain criteria, and religion can because it doesn’t – because it doesn’t have to do anything at all other than run off at the mouth. Science ‘can’t’ because reality provides constraints and limitations and requires work, religion ‘can’ because fantasy doesn’t do any of that. So what is so impressive about this ridiculous idea that religion can answer all these deep questions?

Nothing. It’s an imbecilic line of argument, it’s sheer naked emperor. Must try harder, Madders.

The Economist tells us that racism and resentment haven’t gone away, they’ve just gotten more complex. Oh good. Old-fashioned white-on-black racism is old hat; now the happening thing is Caribbean children resenting Somali children and Sikhs resenting Muslims. So much more diverse and multiculti that way.

Kirk Dawes, a black former police officer who now runs a mediation service in Birmingham, commends the way in which the police and the council have purged overt racists from their ranks. But he criticises the way both have relied on “community leaders,” especially those of a fiery type, as interlocutors with ethnic minority groups. “There is a belief that those who shout the loudest can best solve the problems within their community,” Mr Dawes says. Some of those community leaders were prominent in the protests against Asian shopkeepers in October, which later turned violent.

And were based on rumours anyway, and perhaps even worse, were based on a very peculiar, unpleasant, (racist, surely) way of thinking of ‘Asians’ as essentially one body, so that if a few Asians do something, it makes sense to boycott all Asian businesses, or all Asian businesses in a given area. ‘Community leaders’ aren’t always the clearest thinkers around – probably because this community thinking is not a very clear kind of thinking.

Birmingham’s Asians are more pointed in their criticism. The police, they say, were so keen to avoid offending black sensibilities that they allowed the protests to run out of control. They also failed to shut down a pirate radio station that purveyed hostility against Asians. In that, the police may have been following lessons learned in the past. An attempt to silence a similar station in the 1980s had sparked rioting.

There, you see how tricky free speech can be? You can’t win. You try to silence a station and that sparks rioting; you let a station babble away, and that sparks rioting.

If only people would act sane or at least minimally decent of their own volition; but that’s probably too much to hope.

I love the hairdresser thing, don’t you?

In a splendid return to form, Demos has silenced rumours that it is all thunk out with a proposal that hairdressers be invited to shape local government policy…”Our research has led us to conclude that hairdressers are the most authentic voice on the high street,” says Demos’s Sam Hinton-Smith, “and that they should be given a formal role in urban policy-making.” Not only that. Hairdressers “act as counsellors and social workers”.

The most authentic voice on the high street – really? More authentic than the voice of the fishmonger? The traffic warden? The shopper for dinner and a newspaper and some lightbulbs and a DVD? The panhandler? The market surveyor? The random pedestrian? The non-random pedestrian? The inebriated teenager? The vomiting inebriated teenager? Who is to say which is more authentic? Who, ah, who?

Already there have been protests from street-cleaners arguing that, being both dirtier and closer to the high street, they have a superior claim to being its “most authentic voice”.

Well exactly. And people who actually lie down in the high street and take little naps are even closer.

How authentic is a dialogue that may be inspired, principally, by a need not to offend the person standing close to your face with a pair of sharp scissors (and a disinclination to spend an hour in awkward silence)? Would the conversation remain so relaxed if clients knew their confidences about boyfriends, shoes and minor operations would be translated, come break time, into a raft of initiatives for the delivery of local services?

Oh, come on. If you look at it in the right way, a dialogue inspired by a need not to offend the person standing close to your face with a pair of sharp scissors is the most authentic kind of dialogue there can possibly be. Very existential, very coalface, very gritty and real and down to brass tacks. Not like all this artificial effete superficial dialogue we have as a matter of choice with people who don’t have sharp things in their hands – that’s for sissies.

Words fail me. Human garbage. Rock bottom.

Suspected Taliban militants have beheaded a headteacher in central Afghanistan, the latest in a string of gruesome attacks on teachers working in schools where girls are taught. Armed men burst into the home of Malim Abdul Habib in Qalat, the capital of restive Zabul province, on Tuesday night. They dragged him into a courtyard and forced his family to watch as they cut off his head, said Ali Khel, a local government spokesman…Hundreds of students attended his funeral yesterday. “Only the Taliban are against our girls being educated,” Mr Khel said.

Well there – that’s why they’re human garbage. They dedicate their lives to preventing girls from getting an education – what a noble goal! What a splendid way for grown men to spend their time – zipping around the countryside with guns murdering teachers who have the gall to teach girls – and making the family watch is a pretty touch, too.

The Taliban insurgency has taken a brutal twist in the past year with militants avoiding shoot-outs with American troops – which they usually lose – in favour of targeted assassinations of teachers, aid workers and pro-government clerics. Last month gunmen pulled a teacher in Helmand province from his classroom and shot him at the school gate after he ignored orders to stop teaching girls. The violent tactics, which are concentrated in the southern provinces where a British-led Nato force is due to assume control next spring, appear to be working. Nabi Khushal, the director of education in Zabul, told the Associated Press that 100 of the province’s 170 registered schools had been closed over the past two years, mostly in remote areas, due to deteriorating security. Only 8% of the pupils are girls, he said.

100 out of 170. Well how nice. One of the poorest countries on earth, and the schools are closing because men who hate all females are killing people. Spiffy. It’s enough to make you sick.

Aha. Natalie Angier and I are on the same page, so to speak.

Among the more irritating consequences of our flagrantly religious society is the special dispensation that mainstream religions receive. We all may talk about religion as a powerful social force, but unlike other similarly powerful institutions, religion is not to be questioned, criticized or mocked. When the singer-songwriter Sinéad O’Connor ripped apart a photograph of John Paul II to protest what she saw as his overweening power, even the most secular humanists were outraged by her idolatry, and her career has never really recovered.

Not this cookie – I wasn’t outraged. (Well, I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but if I had been, I would have cheered.) John Paul 2 had way too much power and used it to do appalling things.

“Society bends over backward to be accommodating to religious sensibilities but not to other kinds of sensibilities,” says Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist and outspoken atheist. “If I say something offensive to religious people, I’ll be universally censured, including by many atheists. But if I say something insulting about Democrats or Republicans or the Green Party, one is allowed to get away with that. Hiding behind the smoke screen of untouchability is something religions have been allowed to get away with for too long.”

Exactly. Me, Angier, and Dawkins – a small club, but a good one. Yes okay you can be in it too.