Good old Iqbal Sacranie. One can see why the BBC and similar are always so eager to ask the MCB for its opinion on matters to do with ‘the Muslim community’.

Sir Iqbal said of civil partnerships: “This is harmful. It does not augur well in building the very foundations of society – stability, family relationships. And it is something we would certainly not, in any form, encourage the community to be involved in.”

Why? Why doesn’t it?

He said he was guided by the teachings of the Muslim faith, adding that other religions such as Christianity and Judaism held the same stance.

Yes, they do. A cardinal was saying so just the other day. So what? Why should anyone care? Why is that supposed to be a reason? We don’t want religious pseudo-reasons for public policy, we want real reasons, based on actual arguments. But we don’t get them – not from people who think their ‘faith’ is reason enough. That’s because they don’t have any. All they ever manage to come up with is meaningless hand-waving about the family.

Cardinal Keith O’Brien criticised Westminster over civil partnerships and the Scottish Executive over changes to the laws on uncontested divorce…He argued that alternative lifestyles were “undermining values which for generations have been treasured”. The cardinal claimed that the family remained “the basic social unit” to be recognised, protected and promoted as the most vital building block of society. He told his congregation: “When our lawmakers condone and endorse trends in society which are ultimately ruinous of family life we are entitled to question their motivation and condemn their behaviour.”

But why are civil partnerships ultimately ruinous of family life? Why do they not ‘augur well in building the very foundations of society – stability, family relationships’? Why? Because – what – married straight people will look around them and see (how?) that some gay people have civil partnerships, and – what? Be filled with despair and rage and bitterness and a sense of futility, and wonder why they ever bothered, and turn their children over to an orphanage or out onto the streets, and run off to Tahiti and Hoboken respectively, there to become layabouts and pickpockets? Or what? Straight people will contemplate the existence of civil partnerships and decide not to get married themselves because, I mean, after all, it’s obvious – ? Or what? What is the problem? Why does civil partnerships for gay people have any effect on marriage or ‘the family’ whatsoever? Hey – suppose somebody informed us all that, contrary to previous scientific opinion, ostriches and geckoes have formal, legal marriage, just like human marriage, right down to the new dishes and the arguments over who has to wash them. Would that make humans stop getting married and become pirates instead?

Sacranie does make an effort, to cobble together some sort of argument other than ‘because God,’ but he doesn’t do much of a job of it.

Asked if he believed homosexuality was harmful to society, he said: “Certainly it is a practice that in terms of health, in terms of the moral issues that comes along in a society – it is. It is not acceptable.”

The moral issues that comes along in a society. Right. Which ones? Why is it not acceptable? Other than hand-waving?

Not to mention, of course, to revert to the cardinal for a moment, the redolent irony of celibate priests fussing about the family. If you’re in such a sweat about the family, you prosing chump, why don’t you go have one? And if you don’t want to have one, why are you nagging everyone else about the family ‘as the most vital building block of society’? What do you mean by it?

Creeping theocracy, that’s what it is.

No, it’s not particularly astonishing that Deborah Lipstadt doesn’t think Iriving should go to prison. Yes she has every reason to find him extremely irritating, but that doesn’t straightforwardly necessarily translate to thinking he ought to be locked up – and it’s a bit stupid to think or pretend to think it does. Don’t we all find countless throngs of people extremely irritating without thinking (except for the odd passing whim) that they ought to be locked up? I know I do.

Lipstadt has spent years exposing the arguments of Nazi sympathisers. She warns historians must “remain ever vigilant” against those who say the Holocaust was a hoax, “so that the precious tools of our trade and our society – truth and reason – can prevail”. The showdown came in January 2000 when she stood accused of libel for describing Irving in a book as “one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial”; he accused her of “vandalising” his legitimacy as an historian. The 32-day trial became a legal debate on the history of the Nazis – and the nature of truth itself.

Which is why truth matters. You can’t sort these disagreements out without figuring out – to the best of everyone’s ability – what the truth is. If truth and reason don’t prevail, you just get competing force. Whoever has the biggest fist wins.

Mr Justice Gray witheringly described Irving as anti-Semitic, racist and a Holocaust denier who had “deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence”.

Why does that ring a bell? Oh yes, Judge Jones – he said the Dover school board played silly games with the evidence too.

However, in the case of the Holocaust, Lipstadt says she recognises a case for laws in the lands that formed the heart of the Third Reich. “Germany and Austria are not so far past the Third Reich. So I can understand that the swastika symbol, Mein Kampf, Holocaust denial, being a neo-Nazi and all the rest have a certain potency there that they would not have in the United States,” she says…Lipstadt says the reason she is generally opposed to outlawing Holocaust denial is not because she fails to recognise how deeply offensive it is but because such laws tend to turn cranks into martyrs.

There’s that confusion again – in Brendan O’Neill, not in Lipstadt. The point is not, or not just, that Holocaust denial is offensive or even deeply offensive but that it is – possibly – dangerous. I think that’s why Lipstadt used the word ‘potency’. Being a neo-Nazi has a certain potency in Austria, surely, because it is seen as at least threatening as well as offensive. At least threatening, and possibly actually dangerous. Get the labels right.

Well, there’s one good thing. Maybe, maybe, maybe, now at last the news media will start calling bribery ‘bribery’ instead of ‘fundraising’ and ‘campaign contributions’. That would help. I don’t know, maybe the Beeb is different, maybe they’ve been calling it bribery at least some of the time all along, but US news media sure haven’t. It’s been driving me stark staring mad for years, hearing NPR reporters blithely referring to fundraising when what they’re talking about is simply solicitation of bribes, and campaign contributions when what they’re talking about is simply monetary payments to powerful elected officials in the expectation of favours in return. The whole incredible shocking disgusting deeply corrupt mess has been treated as normal and routine and therefore okay by our supposedly adversarial, liberal, suspicious, investigative, activist news media. Why? Why? Why? I seriously don’t understand it, and never have.

Surely it must look grotesque from the other side of the pond. We not only elect ignorant buffoons, we elect them by means of endemic bribery! They can’t even get elected without bribery. Everybody knows the equation – we hear it all the time – tv ads are expensive, you can’t get elected without tv ads, so obviously the only possibility for an aspirant to elective office is to demand large sums of money from people who have large sums of money. Gee, what a great system. It means we end up with corporate lobbyists actually writing legislation. [bangs head on desk]

But maybe the Abramoff thing will finally make it so obvious what a cesspool it all is that – oh, who am I trying to kid. No it won’t.

And people wonder why some of us saw some point to Nader. Which is exactly my point. Endemic corruption has become so normalized and routinized that putative liberals and leftists don’t even think it’s a reason not to vote for someone.

I’ve been reading Judge Jones’s decision. It really is a great read, you know. So I think I will occasionally share selected favourites with you.

Page 25.

The only apparent difference between the argument made by
Paley and the argument for ID, as expressed by defense expert witnesses Behe and
Minnich, is that ID’s “official position” does not acknowledge that the designer is
God. However, as Dr. Haught testified, anyone familiar with Western religious
thought would immediately make the association that the tactically unnamed
designer is God, as the description of the designer in Of Pandas and People
(hereinafter “Pandas”) is a “master intellect,” strongly suggesting a supernatural
deity as opposed to any intelligent actor known to exist in the natural world.

I love that ‘tactically unnamed.’ Also love the bit about ‘any intelligent actor known to exist in the natural world.’ He’s right. ‘Oh gosh let’s see, a master intellect, who designed the universe, who could that be, hmm hmm hmm, it’s right on the tip of my tongue, I just can’t think of the name – ‘

Still 25.

Although proponents of the IDM occasionally suggest that the designer
could be a space alien or a time-traveling cell biologist, no serious alternative to
God as the designer has been proposed by members of the IDM, including
Defendants’ expert witnesses.

No serious alternative. Some very funny ones, but no serious ones. Quite true.

So there’s this creationist ‘Zoo Farm’ place in Somerset.

A donkey was led in and the presenter traced a marking on its back. Did we know that the domesticated donkey has a dark cross marked on its back, he asked us casually, whereas the wild donkey doesn’t? Did the cross not remind us that the donkey carried Jesus? In retrospect, I was intrigued by my shock at this mild evangelical interjection, a reaction that reflects a more general antipathy towards creationism. Anthony Bush hopes “to give people permission to believe in God”, by disputing the truth of Darwin’s theories. However, the prospect of a religious world-view having any authority fills non-believers with dread.

Well exactly. And that’s not just some random weird reaction, some vague distaste, some reflex dislike. Non-believers have every reason to be filled with dread at the prospect of a religious world-view having any authority. Because authority is just exactly the very thing that a religious world-view should not have. That’s the heart of the issue, isn’t it. Yes, people are at liberty to believe anything they feel like believing, but no, it does not follow that they therefore have the right to force their belief on anyone else. If religious world-views have authority, that means they are – necessarily – being forced on everyone else. And that just won’t do. You can’t demand that other people believe things for which you can give no other grounds than ‘faith’. You can believe it yourself, but you can’t enforce it on others. To do that, you have to have better grounds than mere ‘faith’ or belief – you have to have evidence. Non-believers do indeed dread world-views that disregard or distort and misrepresent (or outright falsify) evidence in order to coerce people into subscribing to said world-views. There is something in us that profoundly resents that, and experiences it as an insult and intrusion and presumption. That’s because it is.

And so there’s Philip Pullman.

His books have been likened to those of J. R. R. Tolkien, another alumnus, but he scoffs at the notion of any resemblance. “ ‘The Lord of the Rings’ is fundamentally an infantile work,” he said. “Tolkien is not interested in the way grownup, adult human beings interact with each other. He’s interested in maps and plans and languages and codes.”

Yup. Infantile. Very like The Wind in the Willows in a lot of ways, only not as good.

When it comes to “The Chronicles of Narnia,” by C. S. Lewis, Pullman’s antipathy is even more pronounced. Although he likes Lewis’s criticism and quotes it surprisingly often, he considers the fantasy series “morally loathsome.” In a 1998 essay for the Guardian, entitled “The Dark Side of Narnia,” he condemned “the misogyny, the racism, the sado-masochistic relish for violence that permeates the whole cycle.”

I like Lewis’s criticism too, and don’t find it particularly surprising that Pullman quotes it often. It’s too bad Lewis didn’t stick to what he did best.

Well, yes. It’s an obvious thought, isn’t it. One of the first that occurs to us, in fact. If the Designer is so damn intelligent, why aren’t we better? Why isn’t everything? I mean, is this supposed to be optimal? You’re kidding, right?

Far be it from me to kick an idea when it’s down, but I do wonder whether proponents of ID have really thought this through…Because if we were designed by God, it wasn’t on one of His better days.

Yeah you could say that.

Why would an intelligent designer equip each of us with an appendix — an organ whose sole purpose is to become infected and periodically explode? If this was Intelligent Design, then it implies the designer hates us the way many interior designers hate the people who actually live in their creations.

Right so the appendix is kind of like a cook or server spitting in your soup. That and one or two other glitches I can think of. Backs, colons, cholesterol, knees. And if we asked giraffes or hummingbirds or snakes or worms, they might have a few items to throw into the pot too. Maybe snakes and worms would actually like to have arms and legs, you know? Ever thought of that? No, neither did the oh so clever designer, either, apparently. Unless it did, and witheld them to be mean.

Remember, if we are the products of an Intelligent Design, there’s no excuse for such design flaws. It would be like buying a new car and finding out someone had forgotten to include brakes. I wouldn’t call that Intelligent Design.

Well, exactly. I wrote an essay for TPM Online a couple of years ago that says much the same thing.

It’s all such a ramshackly arrangement, really. Who set this up? A little more imagination wouldn’t have been a bad idea. Some bigger thinking. Quite a lot more generosity, scope, long-term planning wouldn’t have come amiss. Following things through, realizing implications, seeing where all these pathetic contrivances were going to lead – you’d think that would be part of the job, quite frankly. To be brutally honest, one wonders if whoever did this even had an engineering degree. Degree, hell, one wonders if the poor bungler ever even took a single class. Maybe it was an eight o’clock, is that it? Sleep too attractive, so the result is we have to put up with these ridiculous bodies that break so easily, that get stiff and slow and then stop altogether, that ooze and drip all sorts of foul smelly liquids, that have to be fueled every few hours and turned completely off for nearly a third of every day, that get too cold or too hot, tired or sick, frightened or sad, angry or deranged? That come with throats that get sore, lungs that fill with fluid, guts that malfunction, teeth that rot and crack? And of course there’s no warranty. In short, one or two design flaws, wouldn’t you say? Rather obvious design flaws? I mean, what were they doing? Working with their eyes shut? Did they not test the product? Did they just slap something together and then ship without even checking it, or what? It’s not as if these things are subtle, or hard to detect. It’s not as if they don’t show up right away, is it.

I even mentioned the car without brakes. (Well it is an obvious example, isn’t it, so that’s not surprising.)

It is hard not to get exasperated. It’s all so obvious. A child could have noticed. (Maybe it is a child?) It’s not just the bodies, though they’re bad enough, it’s so many other things too. This place we’re given to live, for instance –

I mean, it has such potential. Don’t get me wrong. Of course I realize that, I’m not stupid, I’m not blind, I know about the good bits. I’ve stood and marveled at the oceans with the best of them. Sunsets, stars, mountains, waterfalls, flowers, fruit – all lovely, yes, I know. I admire it all as much as anyone. But so what? Does that mean the not-so-good parts are not a problem? Do we usually think about things that way? ‘Well this shirt is a lovely colour so I really don’t mind that it’s full of holes. This car has excellent tires so it’s okay that the brakes don’t work.’ No I don’t think so, I think we want all the parts to work, thank you very much, not just some of them. Is that so much to ask?

And why can’t we fly? And live forever, but hibernate for awhile when we get bored? And make some kind of electric ray shoot out of our heads so that all the cell phones within a quarter of a mile would stop working? And if we wanted not to have hair on some particular part of our bodies where there was hair, just decide not to have it there and be done with it? And go deaf whenever we wanted to, and stop being deaf whenever we wanted to do that? And have a filter so that we would hear what we wanted to hear and not hear what we didn’t want to hear? And live underwater if we feel like it? And see in the dark? And be invisible? And have our own climate control dial built into the backs of our hands?

Intelligent designer ha. Just ha. Inattentive designer. Inept designer. Inclined to do sloppy work designer. In for a nasty shock if it expects me to give it a round of applause designer.

Did you listen to Gene Sparling telling the story of seeing the Ivory Bill? Do, if you haven’t – it’s a real treat. Apart from anything else he’s funny as hell, in a marvelously relaxed leisurely drawling way. I first heard it by accident, I turned the radio on at random and in the middle, so didn’t know what it was at first, some guy talking about being out in the woods and what a remarkable place it was, I wasn’t paying much attention until he started talking about a bird – and then when he said ‘I thought “that’s the biggest pileated woodpecker I’ve ever seen”‘ I was galvanized and began paying very close attention indeed.

And it’s not just a good story, it’s also interesting epistemologically. It’s kind of a black swan story, kind of a story about falsification, and the difficulty or impossibility of being sure of a negative. It’s about the fact we’ve talked about here more than once: the fact that not having found X does not necessarily mean there is no X to find. It could mean that, but it could just mean you haven’t found it. And it can be very very difficult to know which.

Because Sparling wouldn’t let himself think he’d seen what he suspected he’d seen, at first – in fact for quite awhile. Why? Because he didn’t want to be ridiculed as a loony, a Big foot finder, an alien abduction believer. And he thought he couldn’t have seen what he thought he’d seen. But actually, on consideration, the possibility that it was what he thought it might be except that it couldn’t be (because Ivory bills are extinct, he said solemnly, they’ve been extinct my whole life) is really not nearly as far-fetched as either Big foot or alien abductions. And Big foot, in turn, is not as far-fetched as alien abductions. So there’s a scale of far-fetchedness here: 1, 2, 3.

Here’s why the Ivory Bill possibility is not in Big foot territory, at least in my view. 1) It was last seen in the ’40s, which is only six decades ago – not a very long time. 2) There are some swampy hard-to-navigate places in its old range where people wouldn’t have seen it if it had been there. Those two things are enough, really. Not to make it likely that it wasn’t extinct after all, but to make it not absurd. As Sparling was persuaded. The only mention he made of the bird he saw at first was a posting to a message board of his canoe club, where it was his custom to post notes on trips. He said he’d seen a very odd pileated woodpecker, which was very large, and had the black and white colouring on his wings reversed. People in the know would know what that meant – but he didn’t say it in so many words. And that’s all he said and all he intended to say – but another canoe club person emailed him and said ‘Gene, you have to do some research on this, you have a responsibility.’ So he did. And what’s interesting is that the research told him what he hadn’t known: that the bird’s known range included Arkansas, where Sparling had seen his bird; he had thought it didn’t, that the range was in Texas but not Arkansas. Once he learned that, the possibility seemed less outlandish – so he went ahead and risked being seen as a wacko.

But there it is, you see. No one had seen an Ivory Bill since the ’40s – but there were Ivory Bills there, all the same. No one knew there were, but there were nevertheless. That’s how it is.

Yes, truth does matter, but it can be a hard slog sometimes convincing people of that. An American studies teacher offers some illustrations.

O’Brien violates old novelistic standards; his book is both fictional and autobiographical, with the lines between the two left deliberately blurred. My students adored the book and looked at me as if they had just seen a Model-T Ford when I mentioned that a few critics felt that the book was dishonest because it did not distinguish fact from imagination. “It says right on the cover ‘a work of fiction’” noted one student. When I countered that we ourselves we using it to discuss the actual Vietnam War, several students immediately defended the superiority of metaphorical truth because it “makes you think more.” I then asked students who had seen the film The Deer Hunter whether the famed Russian roulette scene was troubling, given that there was no recorded incident of such events taking place in Vietnam. None of them were bothered by this.

Well I’m bothered by the fact that none of them were bothered. I’m not surprised, but I’m bothered. It’s funny, too, because we’re always being told how ‘media-savvy’ the current generation is (we’ve been being told that for several generations now, I think), and how good they are at seeing through the ploys of hidden persuaders. I’ve never believed a word of it, and Weir’s account hints at why. I’ve talked to too many people who are serenely unbothered by falsehoods in historical movies, who say cheerily that movies are movies, they’re not supposed to tell the truth, that’s not their job, their job is to entertain, if a rewriting of history makes the movie more entertaining, then that’s what the moviemakers have to do. Everybody knows it’s just a movie, is usually the clincher. But that’s bullshit, of course. Just because everybody ‘knows it’s just a movie’ doesn’t mean everybody doesn’t also ingest some (or all) of the falisfications and believe them ever after.

If all these tv generations are so media savvy, why have they apparently never heard of propaganda? The Triumph of the Will is just a movie too; so what? People tell lies during wars and the lead-up to wars; lies about what the North Vietnamese did or did not do mattered a great deal in the real world; Weir’s students should have been bothered.

I mentioned John Sayles’ use of composite characters in the film Matewan. They had no problem with that, though none could tell me what actually happened during the bloody coal strikes that convulsed West Virginia in the early 1920s. When I probed whether writers or film makers have any responsibility to tell the truth, not a single student felt they did.

Matewan is a good example. There’s a very good book about this whole subject, called Past Imperfect, in which a number of historians and other scholars (Steve Gould for instance) discuss the veracity or lack of it in a number of movies. John Sayles and Eric Foner talk about Matewan – and much as I like Sayles, I think he’s wrong about this and Foner is right. I think movie makers do have a responsibility to tell the truth – partly because movies are so very powerful, and have such searching and longlasting effects on our mental furniture.

My O’Brien class came through when I taught the concept of simulacra, showed them a clip from the film Wag the Dog and then asked them to contemplate why some see disguised fiction as dangerous. (Some made connections to the current war in Iraq, but that’s another story!)

Anybody who doesn’t see disguised fiction as dangerous is mad as a hatter, if you ask me.

La lutte continue, as the saying goes – the struggle continues. Education can be a slow process, and as we’ve seen in the US lately, it can turn around and march smartly backwards. People can make resolute, determined efforts to become more ignorant than their parents, and to make their children more ignorant than they are themselves. People can also make resolute efforts to have it both ways – to live on technology and the safety and comfort it brings, while at the same time scorning the rational ways of thinking that technology depends on. There’s something a little contemptible about that – but so it goes.

James Colbert has been on the frontline of America’s culture wars for 20 years but his hoped-for final victory of reason over faith is not yet in sight. Now an associate biology professor at Iowa State University, he has found since he started teaching that about a third of the students beginning his introductory course are creationists, in many cases with no knowledge of evolution at all.

That’s students at university level, in a country which has laws about mandatory education for all children through the age of sixteen – yet a lot of them manage to slip through with no knowledge of evolution at all. Because education can go backwards.

While trying to tread softly to avoid offending their sensibilities, he has increasingly had to defend his faculty and scholarship against what he sees as a far greater threat – the incursion into science faculties of backers of “intelligent design”, the belief that evolution is so complex that some higher force must be behind it.

That’s a threat? Science faculties being infiltrated by ‘backers’ of unscience? Of nonscience, of antiscience? Gosh, how could that be a threat?

Prof Colbert says most scientists ignored such arguments as coming from a lunatic fringe until August when President George W Bush backed teaching i.d. alongside evolution. Alarmed at what he saw as the growing influence of some i.d. supporters in the science faculty, Prof Colbert drafted a petition condemning “attempts to represent intelligent design as a scientific endeavour”. In response more than 40 Christian faculty and staff members signed a statement calling on the university to uphold their basic freedoms and to allow them to discuss intelligent design.

‘Calling on the university to uphold their basic freedoms’ – meaning what? Their basic freedom to teach nonsense? Is that a basic freedom, and is it a basic freedom that they have? Does a French teacher have a basic freedom to teach a mixture of Farsi, Tagalog and gibberish and call it ‘French’? Does a history teacher have a basic freedom to teach that Hitler fought the battle of Trafalgar in 1217 and thereby won the freedom of Papua New Guinea? Does an engineering teacher have a basic freedom to teach that precision really isn’t all that important when it comes to bridge building, lighten up a little? Do teachers have a basic freedom to teach any old balderdash to their captive students? I would have thought they didn’t. And then, there is surely a difference between ‘discussing’ intelligent design and claiming that it is a scientific endeavour, and there is also a difference between condemning something and forcibly removing someone’s freedom to do it. In short, the Christian faculty and staff members seem to be resorting to the much too familiar tactic of claiming to be oppressed and repressed and unfairly treated.

But – we keep endlessly circling back to this – education is education. It’s not education if it traffics in falsehoods, it’s something else. Educators don’t have a ‘basic freedom’ to teach any old fool thing they feel like teaching. They have academic freedom, yes, but it’s not infinite or absolute – it doesn’t cover outright raving. Once a teacher starts dribbling and talking to phantoms, the issue of freedom is overtaken by the issue of competence. Or at least it should be.

There’s an intense discussion going on at Panda’s Thumb, on a thread of PZ’s that links to the comments by Dawkins and Dennett here – and now a new comment by Paul Kurtz. It’s that ‘should we shut up about religion or not?’ question. No we certainly should not, is my view, you will be calmly unamazed to hear. I tried to say it there only to be told I wasn’t allowed to comment. Because – what? I’ve been banned? I don’t think so, I think it must be a kink of some sort. Anyway I thought I wouldn’t waste my comment, so I’ll put it here. (At least I’m allowed to, here. It’s my Monopoly game and I can put ten hotels on Boardwalk if I want to.)

Well, another way of adding up the score is to point out how much deference to religion and religious beliefs there has been in US public discourse in the past few decades, and then noticing where that has gotten us. The expression ‘give them an inch and they’ll take a mile’ leaps to mind. The more atheists and rationalists and defenders of the Enlightenment defer and bow and keep silent about religion, the more aggressive and truculent and self-pitying religious believers seem to get. Why is that? Could it be, say, a sense of entitlement? If so, could it be time to give up on that approach and get real?

That seems to me to be how it is. We’re always hearing that forthright atheism will frighten a lot of people off, and maybe it will, but what has the opposite done? It seems to me it’s given a hell of a lot of people the idea that there is just no such thing as enough respect for and deference to ‘faith’. If no deference is ever enough (short of actual conversion and joining the godpesterers, and I won’t do it, I won’t I won’t I won’t) then why not give it up and tell what we take to be the truth? At least that way, we get to tell the truth, instead of doing all this creepy smirking tiptoeing around and apologizing for not believing fairy tales.

So good luck to PZ. I’d stand shoulder to shoulder with you, but silly old PT won’t let me.

It’s time this kind of story got more attention than putative alienated [male] yoofs.

…a quiet revolution spreading among young European Muslim women, a generation that claims the same rights as its Western counterparts, without renouncing Islamic values. For many, the key difference is education, an option often denied their poor, immigrant mothers and grandmothers. These young women are studying law, medicine and anthropology…In the crowded immigrant suburbs ringing Paris, the scene of recent riots mostly led by young Muslim men, high school teachers say girls are the most motivated students because they have the most to gain.

Which is probably part of why they’re not the ones out setting fire to buses with people on them. Another part may be that many of the aggrieved yoofs setting the fires are the very people the studious girls want to escape.

In interviews in France, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands, young women repeated this belief like a mantra: studying offers an escape from the oppressive housing projects, from controlling young Muslim radicals and from strict social codes enforced by fathers and brothers.

Escape from controlling male relatives, basically.

At the Islamic University of Rotterdam, a small group of theology students, most of them speaking Dutch but all tightly veiled, chatted after classes about the need to end the social segregation of men and women. “In class, we sit anywhere we choose,” said a student who gave her name only as Aisha. “In the mosques, we don’t want to sit in separate or hidden spaces.”

And maybe eventually they’ll also be able to escape that tight veiling – which is, of course, simply a portable social segregation of men and women, a portable separate and hidden space.

As educated Muslim women assert themselves, they appear to be forging a strand of Euro-Islam, a hybrid that attempts to reconcile the principles laid out in the Koran with life in a secular, democratic Europe.

Best of all would be not to have to worry about reconciling the principles laid out in the Koran, but a hybrid Euro-Islam is much better than a non-hybrid.

Women are also often at the forefront of liberal tendencies among Muslims, publishing critiques and studies about the obstacles and abuses women face. In Germany, Seyran Ates, a Turkish-born German lawyer, and Necla Kelek, a Turkish-born sociologist, have recently published books that have been read widely on the oppression of Muslim girls by their own families…As Muslim women take advantage of democracy and civil liberties in Europe, the question remains whether the impact of an educated minority will be continually blunted by the arrival of often poorly educated young brides from North Africa, Pakistan, Turkey and the Middle East. And as Europe rethinks its faltering integration policies, the place of Muslim women is a new target of scrutiny. Critics, including immigrants themselves, argue that in the name of respecting other cultures, Europeans have allowed the oppression of Muslim women in their midst.

Just so. That ice floe is beginning to break up, but slowly.

There’s a stupid new meme kicking around. I saw it a few days ago – last week sometime, I think – in some newspaper ramble about poor persecuted religion. I nearly mentioned it then, but it was a small point, and I didn’t end up getting to it. But it needs to be stamped out – because it is so stupid and back to front and deceitful. And typical in that. It’s one of the favourite tactics of religious whiners, turning things upside down so that they get to accuse rationalists of the faults and flaws and feeblenesses that really belong to religionists. Like the deadeningly familiar ‘[insert non-religious idea here] is just another religion’ ploy. The new one turns up in yesterday’s Letters to the Times. A police chaplain, Reverend Bob Green (there’s something risible in that – Reverend Bob – thoughts of Blackadder are hard to suppress), is the whiner this time.

While only 10 per cent attend church in the UK, 70 per cent consider themselves Christians, according to the 2001 census. It could be said that the former are spiritual Christians and the latter cultural Christians, but both categories, I hope, would want to confront the secularists’ agenda of dumbing down faith in whatever shape or form it manifests itself.

There it is. The idea that criticism of and resistance to ‘faith’ is an agenda of ‘dumbing down’. Okay – how do you ‘dumb down’ ‘faith’? That’s a serious question. It seems to me to be a complete, brazen oxymoron. ‘Faith’ is already dumbed down, of its nature. ‘Faith’ – in the sense meant here, in the sense the Rev is using, which is a euphemism for religion – is simply another word for dumbing down – for believing something in the absence of good evidence. Now…that’s not always a bad thing, as the fans of both ‘faith’ and religion love to point out. Having faith in people, for instance, even in the absence of good evidence that the people deserve it, can be a very good thing, sometimes the best thing. (Other times not. It all depends.) Having faith in people in general, in the world, in the future, in hope, in progress, and the like, all can be good things (or not – it depends). But in the particular sense in which the Rev means it, it entails belief in the truth-claims of religion in the absence of good evidence. Those truth-claims are mostly quite preposterous – Jesus didn’t really die, he was resurrected, he is God and also God’s son, God is omnipotent and omniscient and benevolent – you know the preposterous bits I mean. So it is absurd, and deceptive, and less than honest, to call the ‘secularists’ agenda’ ‘dumbing down’. Down from where? Where is there to go down from? What is the lofty point of intellectual mountaineering that ‘faith’ has established and secularists want to descend from? What can Rev Bob possibly mean by ‘dumbing down’? Anything? Anything at all? Even so much as a shred of anything? I have to wonder.

Well, there was a surprise. I opened the mailbox this afternoon and what was sitting on top but the Continuum catalogue. Continuum Philosophy 2006, it says. Ooooh, thought I, all excited. Jeremy mentioned a few weeks ago that he’d got one in the post, but I thought I wasn’t going to get one. But now here it was. I was excited because JS told me our book was featured. I liked that idea.

So, after a suitable interval, after doing various things and going up and down various flights of stairs and getting everything just so, I found a pair of scissors under a pile of books and papers (piles of books and papers are a permanent feature around here, like Norway and the fjords) and cut open the plastic wrapping and pulled out the catalogue. Then I turned to the first page, then I turned to the next page (page 3, that is), and that page is called ‘Highlights,’ and there, you’ll be startled to hear, is Why Truth Matters. Right there, on the page called Highlights. Page 3. Not page 64, which has the Works of George Berkeley, but page 3. Fancy. Then I turned to page 5, where the book also is, along with a couple of books by JS and Julian. Then I felt pleased. Then I went back to page 1 and read the ‘Dear Reader’ thing from the editor – and found that she mentioned the book there too. It and another book ‘explore controversial topics in a way that will inspire and stimulate.’ Oh, does it? I thought. How nice. Then I closed the catalogue – and blinked. I hadn’t noticed before, and JS hadn’t mentioned it so perhaps he never did notice, but the picture on the front of the catalogue is from the cover of our book, and not anyone else’s. No title or names, but it’s our cover art. It’s a very beautiful picture, too. They sent it for approval months ago, and we both liked it a lot. It looks lovely on the cover of the catalogue.

Oh, I’ve just noticed – it’s on the inside back cover, too – the book is. God, it’s everywhere. Very good, that. Especially with such a beautiful cover. Yes I know you can’t judge by that, but I always do anyway.

I suppose the people at Continuum must think it’s not too horrendously bad, if they’ve done all this featuring. That’s surprising, isn’t it. But there it is.

And another thing. That idea that Dennett mentioned in the Spiegel interview.

…the idea that it takes a big fancy smart thing to make a lesser thing. I call that the trickle-down theory of creation. You’ll never see a spear making a spear maker. You’ll never see a horse shoe making a blacksmith. You’ll never see a pot making a potter. It is always the other way around and this is so obvious that it just seems to stand to reason.

That’s the idea that ‘Intelligent Design’ is all about, of course. The argument from incredulity – we just can’t believe that something as complex as a cell could have turned up without being designed. The argument from nonexplanation – natural selection just can’t explain how something as complex as a cell, and birds and flowers and humans, could have turned up without being designed. But what’s odd about that, along with the regress problem, is the way it goes backwards. It goes farther and farther and farther away from explanation, rather than getting closer and closer and closer to it. Which means surely that it’s not all that credible or explanatory itself – in fact it’s less so.

What needs explaining is all this apparent design. The human mind, cells, eyes, all that. Find a watch, must be a watchmaker, all that. Okay so what kind of designer would that be? Quite a proficient one. Right? Quite skilled. To design all this, it has to be quite a lot more skilled than anyone we’ve ever met or seen or heard of. And to be that much more skilled, it has to be quite a lot more complex. In fact – you could say that it’s simply incredible that it could be for instance made of the same basic constituent parts that we are made of, and yet be able to design us and everything else. It has to be so immensely skilled and complex that we can’t even really imagine its skill and complexity – we can only fling vague superlatives in its direction.

Well, okay, so you see the problem. If it’s that complex, then how do we explain it? We explain our complexity by pointing to it, and then we explain its complexity x [vast number of your choice] – how? If the problem is, if the source of incredulity is, that a complex thing needs explanation other than brute natural processes, then whatever made the complex thing that needs explaining, needs explaining a trillion or so times more than the complex thing at the first level. Oh dear. And the problem doesn’t stop there, because the next thing up will be more complex again, and so on with every level we go up. It’s not just a regress, it’s a regress that gets astronomically more insoluble with each step. If you need a big fancy smart thing to make this world, what kind of big fancy smart thing must you need to make that big fancy smart thing? Very big fancy smart indeed. So big fancy smart that you might as well give up, since otherwise the process just keeps on going forever, and makes no kind of sense. Of course we’re all at liberty to think that’s exactly how it is, if we want to – that there is an infinite series of infinitely big fancy smart things that have designed each other all the way down. But as for calling it an explanation – I don’t think so.

Well great. Just great. Wonderful. Brilliant. Meera’s in India right now, and she was going to be presenting a paper at a science conference. Well, I hope to hell it wasn’t this one!

A gunman has burst into a science conference in the southern Indian city of Bangalore, opening fire and injuring at least five people, police said. The gunman escaped after firing his automatic rifle at the Indian Institute of Science…The victims were said to be scientists and laboratory technicians attending the conference.

Good move. Well done, gunman – that’s the ticket. Don’t want any pesky scientists cluttering up the place in India, do we. No – what possible use could scientists and lab technicians be in India?!

God damn it. I hope all the injuries are superficial. I hope millions of Indian schoolchildren, outraged by this assault on the hope of a better life, are fired with determination to become scientists themselves, and proceed to do exactly that – thus thwarting the plans of obscurantist thugs everywhere.

Well isn’t B&W up to date. Yes, it is. No sooner do I find Daniel Dennett’s comment on the Kitzmiller decision in my email and rush to post it, than I find a Spiegel interview with Daniel Dennett on evolution and ID.

Spiegel asks why evolution is so particularly troubling to religious people, compared with other scientific theories.

It counters one of the oldest ideas we have, maybe older even than our species…It’s the idea that it takes a big fancy smart thing to make a lesser thing. I call that the trickle-down theory of creation. You’ll never see a spear making a spear maker. You’ll never see a horse shoe making a blacksmith. You’ll never see a pot making a potter. It is always the other way around and this is so obvious that it just seems to stand to reason.

And then pesky Darwin gummed up the works.

And he shows, hell no, not only can you get design from un-designed things, you can even get the evolution of designers from that un-design. You end up with authors and poets and artists and engineers and other designers of things, other creators — very recent fruits of the tree of life. And it challenges people’s sense that life has meaning…We are the only species that knows who we are, that knows that we have evolved. Our songs, art, books and religious beliefs are all ultimately a product of evolutionary algorithms. Some find that thrilling, others depressing.

Spiegel asks about Michael Ruse…

Michael is just trying to put the implications of Darwin’s insights into soft focus and to reassure people that there is not as much conflict between the perspective of evolutionary biology and their traditional ways of thinking.

Then they get on to the implications for religion and the deity.

One has to understand that God’s role has been diminished over the eons…When God is the master of ceremonies and doesn’t actually play any role any more in the universe, he’s sort of diminished and no longer intervenes in any way.

Spiegel offers the usual bit of boilerplate. ‘Natural science talks about life whereas religion deals with the meaning of life.’

Yes but does it? (I would have said had I been there, elbowing Dennett aside in my impatience to talk.) Does it really deal with the meaning of life? If so, how? If none of its truth claims are true, then what does it bring to the discussion of the meaning of life, or the dealing with it, that non-religious ideas can’t bring? That’s what no one who offers that bromide ever really seems to explain. At least not that I see.

So then Spiegel says the thing about moral standards – the other bit of boilerplate.

If that’s what religion does, then I don’t think it is such a silly idea. But it doesn’t. Religions at their best serve as excellent social organizers. They make moral teamwork a much more effective force than it otherwise would be. This, however, is a two-edged sword. Because moral teamwork depends to a very large degree on ceding your own moral judgment to the authority of the group. And that can be extremely dangerous, as we know.

Indeed we do.

At B&W he put the matter this way:

Gods have been given many job descriptions over the centuries, and science has conflicted with many of them. Astronomy conflicts with the idea of a god, the sun, driving a fiery chariot pulled by winged horses – a divine charioteer. Geology conflicts with the idea of a god who sculpted the Earth a few thousand years ago – a divine planet-former. Biology conflicts with the idea of a god who designed and built the different living species and all their working parts – a divine creator. We don’t ban astronomy and geology from science classes because they conflict with those backward religious doctrines, and we should also acknowledge that evolutionary biology does conflict with the idea of a divine creator and nevertheless belongs in science classes because it is good science.

The deity is just going to have to find other work. If steelworkers and blacksmiths have to, why shouldn’t the deity?

I think that what the expert scientists may have meant was that the theory of evolution by natural selection in no way conflicts with, nor does it deny, the existence of a divine . . . prayer-hearer, or master of ceremonies, or figurehead. That is true. For people who need them, there are still plenty of job descriptions for God that are entirely outside the scope of evolutionary biology.

There’s also the thing about turning up on cinnamon rolls and old pieces of cheese on toast. That’s good honest work, and the deity is just the right person to do it.

This again. I seem to have this argument every ten days or so. The issues are just never framed properly – instead they’re framed evasively and euphemistically, and how can anything be discussed properly when the air is clouded by evasion and euphemism? I ask you.

What argument? The free speech one. The one that swirls around the thought that free speech is not about the easy cases but about the hard ones. One version of that is the discussion of hypocrisy and double standards, as in Mark Steyn’s inaccurate whinge about Hampstead big guns who ‘lined up’ to defend Rushdie but wouldn’t (according to Steyn) line up to defend Lynette Burrows, and as in this one about Orhan Pamuk and David Irving. Why are people making free speech noises about Pamuk and not about Irving?

Two European writers have recently fallen foul of European governments for expressing their views about genocide. Both are threatened with trial and imprisonment for something they said or wrote. Yet one is supported by EU politicians and the international literati – who have rallied around to defend him from censorship and to champion the right of writers to speak freely – while the other has been ignored, or even told that he got what he deserved.

Yes. That’s true as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough. It leaves a great deal out. It oversimplifies – drastically. The two writers didn’t say or write the same thing, about the same subject, in discussing the same genocide, with the same implications. That paragraph tries to make it look as if they did, but they didn’t. Just saying ‘for expressing their views about genocide’ and ‘for something they said or wrote’ is not good enough. You might as well say both Martin Luther King and Timothy McVeigh went to jail for protesting against the government. You might as well say that both Osama bin Laden and Irshad Manji are controversial. Both are true statements, but incomplete – to put it mildly.

This is bad news, because when it comes to free speech it’s all or nothing: we either have it or we don’t. And if we were to have free speech for one writer but not for another, then we wouldn’t have free speech at all.

Is that true? It seems to me to be quite untrue. It seems to me to be a rather stupid oversimplification, and unargued besides. Why is free speech all or nothing? Why do we either have it or not? Why can’t we have it in some things and not in others? As in fact we already do – for good or ill, or both. And why do we not have free speech at all if we have it for one writer but not another? What if one writer’s entire output consists of exhortations to murder certain groups of people? If that writer does not have free speech, does it follow that none of us do? I don’t offhand see why.

Brendan O’Neill does finally get around to saying that the two writers ‘could not be more different’. But then –

Yet their cases are the same: both could be incarcerated, not for physically harming another person or for damaging property, but for the words they spoke; both could have their liberty removed because they expressed views that the authorities – in Turkey and Austria – decree to be distasteful.

But that is not the point. That just evades the real point, which is much less easy to deal with. And that’s what is so irritating – free speech absolutists are so predictably apt to do that: to evade the real difficulties in their position by resorting to adjectives like ‘distasteful’ – or controversial, offensive, shocking, objectionable, or the like. As if the only issue were emotional reactions. But that is not the only issue, and it’s very dishonest to shove the real issue behind the sofa and hope no one will notice. Austria doesn’t make Holocaust denial illegal merely because it is ‘distasteful’ but because, rightly or wrongly, they think it is dangerous. Obviously there is plenty of room for argument on that: it’s an empirical question as well as a question of principle, and there’s a lot to say. But that is the issue, not anything so silly and trivial as distaste.

A tag by Norm. Sevens.

Seven things to do before I die:

1) Go to Italy. 2) Write a book. 3) Participate in electing a rational, non-corrupt, thoughtful, educated, articulate, disciplined adult as president of the US. 4) Refrain from running a marathon. 5) Convert the pope to atheism. 6) Read all those books I should have read by now and haven’t. 7) See women achieve full and ineradicable human rights and equality everywhere on the planet.

Seven things I cannot do:

1) Play the cello. 2) Rock-climb. 3) Let it go. 4) Chinese calligraphy. 5) Help it. 6) Fly. 7) Keep things tidy.

Seven things that attract me to blogging:

1) It’s like writing in a notebook except that people read it. 2) The rate of injury is lower than in rock-climbing. 3) It’s international. 4) It’s much less fatiguing than running a marathon. 5) It’s a way to get attention for things I think should get attention. 6) Blogging is a form of essay-writing, and I think essays are an undervalued medium. 7) It’s a good way to irritate people who hate blogs.

Seven things I say often:

1) You just can’t get it right, can you Basil. 2) She only does it to annoy, because she knows it teases. 3) Well they would, wouldn’t they. 4) Ice cream, Mandrake? Children’s ice cream? 5) That’s not what I said. 6) Hang up. 7) No.

Seven books (or series) that I love:

1) Hamlet 2) Lucky Jim 3) King Lear 4) Emma 5) Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-glass 6) Memories of a Catholic Girlhood 7) Wuthering Heights

Seven movies I watch over and over again:

Actually I don’t, but I can come up with a few that I would if I did, I think…1) Dr Strangelove. 2) The Loneliness of the Long-distance Runner. 3) Bringing Up Baby. 4) Lone Star. 5) Little Dorritt. That’s about it – and I’m not sure I would watch them over and over; I think there’s a limit. I used to be able to do that but now I get bored quickly.

I’m skipping the last one, because I’m too shy.

What was that we were saying about theocracy?

More than half the secondary schools in Wales inspected in the past four years break the law by failing to pray every day, a BBC survey has revealed. All state schools should hold an act of worship each day, either for all pupils in assembly or as a class-based prayer…The 1944 Education Act promised lessons for children up to the age of 15, created grammar, technical and secondary modern schools – and also placed worship at the heart of school life. The 1988 Education Reform Act strengthened the legislation, further defining worship in schools as wholly or mainly of a broadly Christian character.

Well there’s liberty of thought for you. There’s being treated like potential future rational autonomous beings. There’s education. There’s respect for reason and science and probabilities.

There’s an odd illustration on the page – of a looming crucifix with light from church windows flooding in on it. It’s no doubt meant to look inspiring, or something, but in the context it looks far more threatening than inspiring. It looks like a bloody great bludgeon, is what it looks like.

But Archbishop of Wales Barry Morgan said instead of changing the law, schools should have more support to enable them to provide worship.

Provide. Provide. Do you mark that. Man I get tired of religious tyrants resorting to pious sanctimonious self-flattering euphemisms for what they’re doing. They’re not providing worship, they’re forcing it on people. Say what you mean, you archepiscopal bastard. Since it’s not optional, ‘provide’ is the wrong word. Tying someone down and stuffing cheeseburgers down her throat is not ‘providing’ lunch, is it.

It’s not just the hard religious sell in acts of worship, it’s asking questions about the meaning of life. It’s asking questions about what it means to live in a society where you respect others. Now all those, it seems to me, are religious virtues – tolerance, forgiveness, compassion.

Oh really – those are religious virtues, are they. Living in a society where you respect others, tolerance, forgiveness, compassion. Why? Why does it ‘seem to you’ that those are ‘religious virtues’? What reason can you possibly offer for such a stupid idea? Do you seriously think that atheists universally have no truck with such virtues? Or that all religious people are saturated with them? (Talk to the ‘Rapture’ crowd and then explain to us how full of forgiveness, compassion, tolerance and respect for others they are. I can’t wait.)

It would be idiotic to leave out faith in God in a school when that’s part of our society and when it’s part of the Christian foundation of this country

No it wouldn’t. For one thing, lots of things are part of your society that are left out in school. Same for things that are ‘part of the Christian foundation of this country’. And for another thing, ‘faith in God’ can be part of your society and part of the Christian foundation of your country and still be entirely mistaken. School is primarily for education, and it’s not educational to force people to ‘worship’ an entity that there is no evidence for. It’s no more educational to force people to ‘worship’ a deity than it would be to force them to ‘worship’ Cinderella or Elmer Fudd or Zeus.

In a statement on Friday, Welsh Education Minister, Jane Davidson, said she expected “all schools to meet their obligations under the law”. She added: “All registered pupils attending a maintained school should take part in collective worship and it is the head teacher’s duty to secure this. The systems are in place to identify any shortcomings and to ensure that the appropriate action is taken.”

And that’s that.

Some more Pharyngula.

He’s exactly right about one thing: all the people on his little enemies list say terrible things about religion. Speaking for just myself, I don’t like it at all—I think it’s a bad idea to afflict a society with an institution dedicated to opposing critical thinking, the acceptance of dogma, and belief in unsupported and frankly, ludicrous claims. I’m going to express my detestation often and without reservation here, as the others in that list have done in their own venues. So? Is this an opinion we are not allowed to have? Does it make us unfit to speak on science or philosophy? Is it more offensive than the frequently stated and rarely questioned Christian opinion that we unbelievers are damned to spend all of eternity suffering in agonizing torment?

Well, yes, of course this is an opinion we’re not allowed to have. We know that. We also know that it’s less legitimately offensive than the opinion that we’re all going to fry, and that that’s just too damn bad, because it’s Be Kind To Theists century. Get used to it, as the saying goes.

I was talking yesterday in ‘Abdication not the Way to Go’ about this asymmetry between religion and non-religion. It’s a real problem, you know, because it handicaps one side and gives a boost to the other. Quite unreasonably. The inhibition or taboo on challenging religion – ‘other people’s cherished beliefs,’ you know – doesn’t operate at all in the other direction. No one ever has the smallest hesitation in challenging rational, secular, non-theist beliefs on grounds of tolerance or sensitivity or kindness or respect or diversity. The presumed touchiness and ‘sensitivity’ of believers is not matched by presumed anything of non-believers. (And nor should it be. Who wants to be such a delicate flower that she can’t stand to hear her ideas or beliefs challenged? Yet apparently believers are perfectly happy to be thought of that way – in fact they get very indignant and outraged if you don’t think of them that way. Odd.) This means that one side has an immense advantage and the other side has an immense handicap. One side is awarded a large shield or wall, and the other side has its weapons taken away.

And the joke is that this is precisely backward, in the sense that the first party has the weaker case – that is, the worse case, qualitatively. It’s not that it’s disabled or handicapped, injured or damaged, so that we ought to give it an advantage out of fairness – it’s that it has no standing, no warrant, no evidence, no good argument. It ought not to be given extra compensatory help – but it is. This second problem is rooted in the first, which is nonsensical. It amounts to: because the ‘faith’ team has no evidence and no good arguments, it feels stupid when challenged, therefore the reason team is required not to challenge it – so the faith team gets to make its unwarranted assertions unimpeded.

Do a thought experiment: put that in other contexts, and see how ridiculous it is. X declares that aliens from another galaxy are living among us and that the income tax and national health are alien inventions, and that we should execute all the aliens immediately to save ourselves. The rest of us are strongly discouraged from challenging this assertion, because X has no evidence, these are X’s personal subjective opinions.

If it doesn’t fly in normal everyday contexts – in courtrooms, laboratories, newsrooms, police stations – why does it fly anywhere? Especially given the fact that these supposedly personal subjective beliefs and opinions are allowed to influence, shape, determine public policy and law? Why are religious beliefs exempt from challenge? What is the justification?