Oh my god Raif is out of prison.

Saudi blogger Raif Badawi – jailed and sentenced to 1,000 lashes for “insulting Islam online” – has been freed, his wife says.

“Raif called me. He is free,” Ensaf Haidar told AFP news agency from Canada, where she fled with the couple’s three children.

The blogger’s first 50 lashes caused a global outcry and he became an emblem of rights abuses in the country.

There has been no official Saudi comment on his release.

Mr Badawi’s son Terad also tweeted: “My father is free.”

But he’s still under a travel ban.

The NGO Reporters Without Borders said it would work to ensure he can join his family in Canada despite the ban.

Just let him go you miserable fiends.

W. H. Auden wrote a poem titled August 1968 in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia to suppress the Prague Spring.

The Ogre does what ogres can,
Deeds quite impossible for Man,
But one prize is beyond his reach:
The Ogre cannot master Speech.
About a subjugated plain,
Among the desperate and slain,
The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
While drivel gushes from his lips.

Cody Walker wrote at Kenyon Review in September 2016:

We depend on poets for this kind of expression, of course. A totalitarian regime communicates through jargon and claptrap; a poet (or a poet like Auden, anyway) fires back with rhyme and tetrameter. At the time, the fight doesn’t feel fair—but history has a way of declaring surprising victors. Jump forward to 1989: the occupation ends. As Christopher Hitchens remembers it, “Not a shot was fired, and not a skull was broken, but the system farcically evaporated in the face of a wave of literate and humorous and ironic and defiant words, uttered by novelists like Milan Kundera, playwrights like Vaclav Havel, and singers like the Plastic People of the Universe. Velvet has always struck me as a vapid word for this cultural revolution. If we must have a V, then verbal would be preferable.”

Poets, novelists, playwrights, singers…and comedians.

Anna asked in a comment:

Have you seen the pro-Nazi Azov battalion?

I hope this doesn’t turn out like when we helped the Afghanistans against the Russians in the 1980s and then some of them turned out to be terrorists.

Snopes on the Azov Battalion:

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the ensuing military violence and instability have mobilized far-right extremists, playing into Russian President Vladimir Putin’s propaganda about “neo-Nazis” running the country as justification for invading Ukraine.

In a speech given just before Russia launched its ongoing attack on Ukraine, Putin justified what he described as a “special military operation.” He stated:

Its goal is to protect people who have been abused by the genocide of the Kyiv regime for eight years. And to this end, we will strive for the demilitarisation and denazification of Ukraine, as well as bringing to justice those who committed numerous bloody crimes against civilians, including citizens of the Russian Federation.

Putin’s comments were misleading on more than one front. Besides falsely equating Ukraine’s national government with “Nazis,” Russia’s “special military operation” has turned out to be an all-out assault on Ukraine, including its civilians. 

As the Ukrainian military and ordinary citizens fought for their lives and the sovereignty of their homeland against the invading Russian force, various social media users shared posts about a group called the Azov Battalion.

The Azov Battalion is a real extremist group that became (and still is) a faction in Ukraine’s national guard, but to equate them with the “Kyiv regime” is to vastly overstate their size and influence.

To say that the Azov group is representative of Ukraine’s overall defense or government is false, because it makes up a small percentage of Ukraine’s total military defense, and Ukraine’s national government system is a democracy.

Like many European countries, Ukraine has political parties that range the spectrum from socialist to far right. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is Jewish and associated with centrist politics.

The US also has political parties all over the spectrum, very much including neo-Nazi and other far-right ones.

For comparison, Azov membership was estimated to be anywhere from 900 to 2,500 prior to the Russian invasion, while the Ukrainian standing military in total was composed of about 200,000 troops. It’s important to note here that these numbers are outdated, given that as of this writing, every facet of Ukraine’s defenses have recruited new volunteers in the ongoing effort to fend off the invasion.

But in 2020, journalist  Oleksiy Kuzmenko, writing for the Atlantic Council, presciently noted the potential problems the group posed for Ukraine domestically and on the international stage:

The Azov movement has long been a symbol of the far-right in Ukraine. It has risen to prominence over the past six years due to its role in the ongoing war against Russia, and has achieved levels of mainstream media exposure far in excess of the group’s minimal electoral support. This is not only a domestic issue for Ukraine. The far-right in general, and their apparent impunity, have significantly damaged Ukraine’s international reputation and left the country vulnerable to hostile narratives exaggerating the role of extremist groups in Ukraine. With awareness of right-wing terrorism now growing globally, the potential threat posed by the Ukrainian far-right beyond the borders of the country is attracting increasing attention.

The Ukrainian National Guard’s decision to tweet a brief video showing an Azov fighter coating bullets intended for Chechen Russian soldiers, who are Muslim, in pig fat, helped thrust the group into the global eye as the broader war unfolded.

Ukraine’s version of Lauren Boebert.

The Azov Battalion, sometimes referred to as the Azov regiment or Azov movement, grew out of the conflict with Russian-sponsored separatists in the eastern Ukraine region of Donbas that began in 2014. As Radio Free Europe reports, it was initially composed of volunteers known in Eastern Europe as “ultras,” or “hard-core, far-right soccer fans, including many violent hooligans.”

Like the ones who bashed their way into the US Capitol a year ago.

But they were effective against their pro-Russian enemies, earning Azov praise from Ukrainian officials, including former Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko. In November 2014 they became part of the National Guard of Ukraine. 

This has hardly been without controversy, because the group is widely viewed as consisting of violent extremists and white supremacists.

“The unit has denied it adheres to Nazi ideology as a whole, but Nazi symbols such as the swastika and SS regalia are rife on the uniforms and bodies of Azov members,” Al Jazeera reported in a March 2022 profile of the group. Its insignia strongly resembles a Wolfsangel, an ancient rune appropriated by Nazi Germany.

Former U.S. Rep. Max Rose, D-N.Y., tried unsuccessfully to get the group classified by the U.S. State Department as a foreign terror organization. The group has been accused of human rights abuses, while the violence in the region has been a magnet for foreign extremists to join Azov and learn combat skills.

Speaking to The New York Times, Ali Soufan, who heads the global intelligence and security firm Soufan Group, said, “Instability in Ukraine offers white supremacy extremists the same training opportunities that instability in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria has offered jihadist militants for years.”

For sources see the Snopes article. Author is Bethania Palma.

I saw this –

– so I stared a bit, trying to recall ever seeing any ads for “kill the racist” or “kill the homophobe” shirts, and then I Googled “official kill the terf shirt” and found, depressingly, that it’s not just the one company.

Then I Googled “official kill the racist shirt” and found…no match.

Masha Gessen tells us that Russians don’t know what’s happening, because they don’t have access to truthful reporting.

A majority of Russians get their news from broadcast television, which is fully controlled by the state. “This is largely a country of older people and poor people,” Lev Gudkov told me. Gudkov is the director of the Levada Center, which was once Russia’s leading public-opinion-research organization and which the state has now branded a “foreign agent.” There are more Russians over the age of forty-five than there are between the ages of fifteen and forty-four. Even those who get their news online are still unlikely to encounter a narrative that differs from what broadcast television offers. The state continues to ratchet up pressure on the few surviving independent media outlets, blocking access to their Web sites, requiring them to preface their content with a disclaimer that it was created by a “foreign agent,” and, ultimately, forcing them to close. On Thursday, the radio station Echo of Moscow and the Web-based television channel TV Rain, both of which had had their sites blocked earlier in the week, decided to stop operations. What the vast majority of Russians see, Gudkov said, are “lies and hatred on a fantastical scale.”

State television varies little, aesthetically and narratively, from channel to channel. Aside from President Vladimir Putin interrupting regular programming in the early hours of February 24th to announce a “special military operation” in Ukraine, the picture has changed little since before the war. There is no ongoing live coverage, no acknowledgment that what’s happening is extraordinary, even as Russian bombs fall on Ukraine’s residential areas and the Russian economy enters a tailspin. The news lineup, too, changes little day to day. On Thursday, the 7 a.m. newscast on Channel One lasted six minutes and contained six stories: a new round of Russian-Ukrainian peace talks in which Russia was eager to seek “common ground”; the “shelling of the Donetsk People’s Republic by the Ukrainian armed forces,” from which “twenty-five civilians have died.” …The next scheduled program is ‘Good Morning.’ ” There was no mention of Kharkiv or Kyiv, which had been bombed the day before….

Gudkov summed up the world view shaped by Russian television: “Russia is a victim, as it has been ever since the Second World War. The West aims to establish world domination. Its ultimate goal is to humiliate Russia and take possession of its natural resources. Russia is forced to defend itself.” Days before the full-scale invasion began, the Levada Center asked Russians who they thought was responsible for the mounting tensions in Ukraine. Three per cent blamed Russia, fourteen per cent blamed Ukraine, and sixty per cent blamed the United States.

The government has banned the words “war,” “aggression,” and “invasion” in reporting on its aggressive invasion of and war against Ukraine, with fines and closure for disobedience.

Most of Russia’s propaganda language is plainly Orwellian. After a few days, newscasts were consistently referring to the war as an “operation to restore peace.” On Tuesday night, when the TV Rain Web site was blocked, the channel was broadcasting a story about how the government, working through ad agencies, was offering to pay bloggers and TikTokers to post talking points about the war. “All posts should be accompanied by #LetsGoPeace and #DontAbandonOurOwn,” the offer began. Among the talking points: “We are calling for peace, and it’s unfortunate that these are the means we must use to achieve it.”

We had to destroy the village to save it.

Another ACLU ad on Facebook.

An anonymous donor has pledged to match all donations up to $200,000. Every dollar you donate right now will be doubled and immediately put towards our legal, advocacy, and organizing work that supports trans kids and their families.

“Supports” how though? What do they mean by support?

They’re “supporting” what they call “trans kids” by working to make sure they can get drastic, irreversible surgery or drugs or both. It’s not as clear-cut as they think that that equals “support.” It could be that the reality is that some or all such “kids” are caught up in a trend, and will regret this medical tampering with their path to physical adulthood. In addition to everything else wrong with this campaign, the ACLU is being shockingly reckless with the futures of a whole lot of teenagers.

Culture war:

Culture has long been a proxy in the assertion of power by one people over another. Recent egregious examples include the Chinese government’s attempt to suppress Uyghur religion, literature, music, even food, and Islamic State’s destruction of ancient monuments. In war, culture is a second front. At their most extreme, wars are about eradicating a people’s cultural memory altogether, wiping them from the slate as if they had never been.

…

In some ways, intentions are less important than effects, amid war’s messy reality. A missile strike in Kyiv that reportedly killed five people was seemingly directed at the television tower, but it lies close to Babyn Yar, the site of the massacre of 150,000 people during the second world war, including 30,000 Jews – a great irony given Mr Putin’s stated ambition to “denazify” Ukraine. An attack on the town of Ivankiv, 50 miles north-west of Kyiv, set afire the town’s Historical and Local History Museum, destroying precious works by the 20th-century folk artist Maria Prymachenko. The artist is an important symbol of Ukrainian art – and Ukrainian hope.

Three decades ago, war in the former Yugoslavia saw sacred and beautiful places such as Dubrovnik or the Mostar bridge and old town targeted, sometimes with the intention of erasing the evidence that people of another religion or ethnicity had once lived there. Whether or not sites like Babyn Yar and Ivankiv’s museum have been collateral damage rather than actual targets, the cultural front in war is never trivial. This is a conflict, like so many others, that’s not just about controlling territory – but owning narrative.

And trying to smash all evidence of a culture often backfires, as with the manuscripts from Mali. I’m betting Maria Prymachenko is now known to a lot more people outside Ukraine than she was before. The Bamiyan Buddhas were destroyed but their fame was amplified in the process. Trying to dominate a narrative is hampered by the fact that narratives can’t be bombed or torched out of existence.

One good thing:

A virtual gallery to showcase Mali’s cultural history has been launched, featuring tens of thousands of Timbuktu’s ancient manuscripts.

The manuscripts were smuggled to safety from Timbuktu after Islamist militant groups took control of the city in northern Mali in 2012.

They contain centuries of African knowledge and scholarship on topics ranging from maths to astrological charts.

“Central to the heritage of Mali, they represent the long legacy of written knowledge and academic excellence in Africa,” said Dr Abdel Kader Haidara, a librarian known for smuggling the manuscripts out of Timbuktu, who was also involved in the project.

The site is called Mali Magic and from a quick look it is pretty damn magic. It’s music and art and dance as well as manuscripts.

Joke on the Islamist groups: they succeeded in spreading the culture of Mali more widely instead of shutting it down. Oopsie.

Chip chip chip chip away.

It’s not young people. Boys don’t miss school because of period poverty.

Say the word. The word is “girls.” It’s not blasphemy or porn; we can say it. Girls.

To be fair, they do know how to say it.

But they should say it every time they talk about girls – they should never veil the word “girls” behind “young people.”

Suzanne Moore on the strange mystery of what the word “woman” means:

I guess it would be funny if the consequences of this evasion were not so deadly serious. On Woman’s Hour – on International Women’s Day – the redoubtable Emma Barnett asked Anneliese Dodds a simple question.

You know the one – “wossa woman?”

Dodds prevaricated for what seemed like hours. Stuff like: “Well, I have to say that there are different definitions legally around what a woman actually is. I mean, you look at the definition within the Equality Act, and I think it just says someone who is adult and female, I think, but then doesn’t see how you define either of those things.”

How about defining them the usual way, and defining women that way too? Wouldn’t that solve the problem in a stroke? Granted, “adult” really is more social than physical, and varies according to purpose and circumstances, but “female” is just as precise as “male,” and you don’t see people drawing back in horror and confusion when asked what a man is.

Barnett tried again. “What’s the Labour definition?” Dodds answered “Oh, I think, with respect, Emma, I think it does depend what the context is, surely. I mean, surely that is important here?” 

And yet, does the definition of “man” depend on what the context is? If “man” doesn’t then why does “woman”? Maybe the definition of woman is “blob that doesn’t even have a word to describe itself.”

Trans activism and lobby groups like Stonewall and Mermaids have been phenomenally successful in persuading corporations, institutions and political parties to adopt a language in which the word “woman” is verboten as it may “trigger” someone who feels themself to be a woman, even though they have male anatomy.

But not the word “man.” There is nothing like the same level of taboo and coercion around the word “man” as there is around “woman.” It’s almost as if the whole thing is just another way to keep women down.

Susan Smith of For Women Scotland testifying on the proposed Hate Crime and Public Order Bill:

I echo what Lucy Hunter Blackburn said powerfully and from the heart. The heart of the issue is that women in Scotland are furious and frightened by some of the implications of the bill not least because, the other week, a series of amendments were proposed, none of which seems to cross a line to being hateful, yet parliamentarians stood up and denounced them as shocking and “transphobic” for including phrases such as

“there are only two sexes”.

We have a real issue that, although there are reasonable person tests in the bill, there are also people who are determined to use the bill to enforce compelled speech. There are also people, some of whom are office bearers in political parties in Scotland, who have stated clearly online that they will use the bill to criminalise and attack women. They are openly discussing that and we know that they are doing so.

The Scottish Government has said that the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women needs to be at the heart of everything that it does, but I am not sure that we will be able even to talk about CEDAW if some of those people report women for having discussions about sex-based rights. Certainly, political parties in Scotland have managed to draw up definitions of bigotry that claim that it is bigotry to talk about people’s biology or use the wrong pronouns. Where does that leave a woman who is facing a rapist on the stand and the rapist has decided to identify as a woman that week? People are saying that that will have no effect. They are talking about putting misgendering into the bill; there are also all the definitions that political parties are accepting. That goes hand in hand with those issues.

As Lucy Hunter Blackburn said, we have a situation in Spain in which it is not a hate crime to hang an effigy of a real woman in the town square, but it is a hate crime for a woman, who was tortured under Franco, to say that women should have sex-based rights. That is happening under similar laws. There is no provision in the bill for sex; we now learn that there was never going to be and that the working group will not even consider it.

We have very little trust in this Government and very little trust that the bill will not be used to target, harass and attack women. We need stronger provisions and for women to be protected. As we go into an election and the Government is still determined to push through the GRA, we are very concerned that women who argue against it—and argue for the law as it stands—will be criminalised. We need up-front reassurances now. We need to know that we can talk about women, adult human females and two sexes, and about sex being immutable, because we are not getting any reassurance.

Women are angry. There are thousands and thousands of very, very frightened women. The convener said that he was frightened by the implications of some of the objections to the amendments; consider how frightened women are. I am sorry to be so emotional about it, but it is difficult and traumatic, and it has been a horrific experience for a lot of vulnerable women. Thank you for inviting us back and hearing us. Please remember to listen to women.

Please do.

H/t Night Crow

Trump’s plane had an engine failure last weekend and had to make an emergency landing. Therefore, naturally, he is begging people to give him money to make a new one, which he absurdly calls “Trump Force One.” I can think of better words than “force” in that name.

“I have a very important update on my plane, but I need to trust that you won’t share it with anyone,” wrote Trump in the newly released email. “My team is building a BRAND NEW Trump Force One.”

He needs to trust that the people on his mailing list won’t share it with anyone, so that’s why he sends it out to his mailing list. Does he think they’re that stupid?

Updating to add the prompt for this post:

The National (Scotland) reports:

A RADICAL new report has recommended world-leading misogyny laws should be introduced in Scotland to protect women and girls from male violence.

Baroness Helena Kennedy was tasked with investigating how the Scottish justice system deals with misogyny in January 2021, with the results revealed in the report Misogyny – A Human Rights Issue. 

But what are women? What are girls? What is misogyny? How can they introduce any laws to protect women and girls when they don’t know what women and girls are?

The group defined misogyny as a “way of thinking that upholds the primary status of men and a sense of male entitlement, while subordinating women and limiting their power and freedom.”

But what are women? What are men? How can men subordinate women when women can become men? Surely the women just say “You can’t do that to me, I’m a man.” It would be transphobia to say no you’re not.

The report added that conduct based on misogynistic thinking can include, “a range of abusive and controlling behaviours including rape, sexual offences, harassment and bullying, and domestic abuse.”

You’d think, but that’s true only if people are stuck being women or men, as opposed to being able to identify out by saying some words. If the borders are porous, then all this rape and bullying and domestic abuse happens to both sexes (and genders). Human sex is soup, and nobody can tell who is what is which.

Kennedy explained that one of the main issues in Scots law is getting convictions for crimes such as rape and domestic abuse, and that one of the main reasons women don’t feel comfortable reporting violence committed against them is because the justice system is “imbued with misogyny” and a change of perspective is needed across all levels – police, judiciary and government.

You know, from that, you’d think she really does know what a woman is. But that can’t be right can it? They’re not allowed to know in Scotland.

However, the findings ruled out the addition of “sex” as a characteristic to existing hate crime legislation as misogyny is so deeply rooted in society that a more fundamental set of responses is required.

Oh, I see, that makes sense. The problem is so deeply rooted that they mustn’t add it to the long list of protected characteristics, instead they must gaze longingy into the middle distance hoping for a solution.

War crime.

A maternity hospital in the southern port city of Mariupol has been hit by a Russian air strike, Ukraine says.

It doesn’t get much more blatant than that. Bonus: they did it during an agreed ceasefire.

Mariupol has been surrounded by Russian forces for several days, and repeated attempts at a ceasefire to allow civilians to leave have broken down.

“The whole city remains without electricity, water, food, whatever and people are dying because of dehydration,” Olena Stokoz of Ukraine’s Red Cross told the BBC, adding that her organisation would continue trying to organise an evacuation corridor.

I would like to see Putin in the Hague.

Updating to add: Other heads of state have done bad things, so disregard the above.

An endorsement.

Scottish Government to women (on International Women’s Day): sucks to be you.

You can see how important this is. It’s about how easy it will be for the cops in Scotland to haul women off to the police station because they defend their rights. It’s about whether women in Scotland will have any freedom at all to talk about their rights when purported “trans rights” are in competition.

In other words they’re politely asking for the promised Notes, and getting no response.

Finalised? The notes are finalised? So what happened to that promised that MBM and others would be included?

So there you go. “Yes yes yes bitches we’ll keep you posted on what we work out. Kidding, no we won’t.”

It’s just breathtaking.

Apparently “queer” people have been denied access to the outdoors?

I’ll be darned. I could have sworn it was just for cis, straight, middle class “folk.” (What are “middle class folk” anyway? Is that similar to middle class peasants and middle class working stiffs?)

PN explains:

Ailish had personal reasons for setting up Queer Out Here. They grew up in the Yorkshire countryside where a love for the outdoors was practically mandatory. After university, and a period in which they stopped exploring the outdoors, Ailish “rediscovered it and found how beneficial it was for my mental health and wellbeing”.

…

But they were also keen to challenge what they see as a lack of equality around access to the outdoors.

A lack of equality around access to the outdoors…like, the doors are all locked from the outside? That can’t be right, we would have heard. Are there checkpoints between us and the outdoors at which “queer” people are told to turn around and go back? If there are why have I never seen them, let alone been asked to show my papers?

“I think a lot of people do feel that the outdoors is only for certain types of people,” Ailish says. “People think it’s for middle class, white, heteronormative families, or there’s there’s the really outdoorsy people who’ve got all of the gear, which can be really expensive.”

Nope, sorry, I don’t believe a word of that. Nobody thinks the outdoors is reserved for “heteronormative” families. Some people probably think it is reserved for people who like to go outside and get moving, but the word for that is “laziness,” not a lack of equality around access to the outdoors.

There’s also a “macho” side to the outdoors – plenty of people take on extreme challenges. The idea alone can be alienating for queer people.

Nope, I don’t believe that either. Yes, some people climb mountains, but what does that have to do with other people going for walks? Nothing. Not one thing. The fact that some people like to climb mountains can’t possibly be “alienating for queer people.” That’s a stupid, whiny, self-indulgent claim. It’s a dire symptom of Pink News’s need to fill its pages.

Among those who might not find that atmosphere particularly welcoming are trans and non-binary people. Ailish was thinking specifically about the trans and non-binary community when they set up Queer Out Here.

Why? Why would trans and non-binary people not find that “atmosphere” welcoming? What “atmosphere”? There is no “atmosphere,” there’s only a claim that the idea that some people take on challenges is “alienating.” Well it’s not. That’s a bogus claim.

This is how it all works, isn’t it – start with a childishly absurd unsupported claim and then weave a giant superstructure on top of it, and a wall of abuse and bullying all around it. Progress!

“We do have loads of trans and non-binary people that come on our walks, and that feels so powerful and empowering when we’re all walking together in a big group in the Peak District and in these rural areas where we don’t see groups of people that look like us all the time. There’s something that feels quite political and powerful about that.”

Except that’s not true, is it. The groups of people do look like all these loads of trans and non-binary people. The photos with the story make that very obvious – they all look like people out for a walk on a chilly day. They don’t have a special glow, or extra limbs, or rainbow bubble-wrap over their heads.

It gives too much away, this story. It reveals the pathetic truth that much of this nonsense is about young people who want to be Special, and are too dim or feeble to become Special by actually doing something. “Look at me, I went for a walk while Queer!!”

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on The problem was dogma.

The problem with this whole discussion as I see it is that beliefs are just taken as a given rather than the outcome of some cognitive process in their own right, even if it’s just accepting what you’ve always been told. My main problem with faith-based religion (and its secular equivalents) was always the part about leaving the most important questions in life – questions with real-world consequences and implications for the way we treat others – up to blind faith in the first place. I don’t think it’s any kind of excuse or mitigating circumstance to be doing the right thing as we see it if the way we see it is based on unjustified beliefs, we never made any honest effort to find out what’s objectively true (rationalizing a fixed, pre-determined conclusion doesn’t count as an “honest effort”), and were unwilling to even consider the possibility that our beliefs were wrong. “I am going to think and act as if this were true no matter what and let others pay the price for my unjustified beliefs. And if that means hating others, treating them as lesser beings, even subjecting them to violence, then so be it. That’s their problem! Not only am I willing to bet their rights, their dignity, even their lives on the correctness of propositions I have no real reason to believe, but I’m unwilling to refrain from doing so, and no amount of logic or evidence is ever going to prevent me!”

William K. Clifford’s classic article on “The Ethics of Belief” is, of course, essential reading in this regard.

In my militant atheist days I often made myself unpopular (among accomodationist types) for a somewhat different reason than Sastra. I was repeatedly told that the specific contents of specific beliefs don’t matter, because (A or B):

A. Nobody actually believes any of that stuff anyway (“That’s just an excuse for what people would be doing anyway. Without the religion they would invent some other excuse” etc.).

B. People aren’t motivated by what they sincerely belive to be true about God or the afterlife. (“Nobody actually cares if they face an eternity of bliss or an eternity of torture after death, because all that matters to people is getting the best deal out of secular society during the few decades they spend on earth”)

I strongly suspect A is wrong, but in the absence of telepathic powers, it’s hard to say for sure. I’m confident that B is bullshit though. And this is where I wholeheartedly agree with Sastra. While I too have issues with Sam Harris I think he hits the nail on the head on this point. The specific contents of specific beliefs do indeed matter. As Voltaire famously put it “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities”, because then they can also make you believe the kind of absurdities that would make the atrocities seem perfectly justified, even the only morally defensible thing to do. The problem with faith-based religion (or dogmatic belief systems in general) as I see it is that it allows people by the millions to think and act as if such absurdities were true whether they are in fact true or not. The fact that not all religious beliefs are equally harmful in practice is irrelevant with respect to the deeper problem, i.e. the part about leaving the most important questions in life up to blind faith in the first place. Almost every problem I have with religion-like movements ultimately comes back to the part about believing things for the wrong reasons* (as you pretty much have to do to believe in God, since no other reasons are available). The same kind of wrong reasons that gave us Jainism (a religion of total pacifism, or at least so we’re told) also gave us Jihadism.

*This is were I disagree with those atheists who say things like “I have nothing against faith, I’m only against organized religion”. If I could chose between a world without unjustified beliefs and a world without churches, I would chose the former any time. If we could get people to stop believing things for bad reasons the harmful ideas of religion would die a natural death, and whatever good ideas are in the mix don’t need the bad reasons to stay alive. If people still wanted to go to church for community and support, I wouldn’t really mind. If we could have a “religion” without unjustified beliefs, it would probably rank very low on my list of concerns. And with unjustified beliefs even secular ideologies have the potential to become the stuff of nightmares.

JKR is clearly all in, and for the long haul.

HAhahahahahahaha that’s a good one.

Yep, all in.

Originally a comment by Sastra on A kind of Turing test.

In atheist forums I often promoted an unpopular opinion: the religious were no less ethical than we were. On the whole, they share the same values and moral goals. Even the Nazis didn’t really differ in their sense of right & wrong, or commitment to fairness, from the people they persecuted.

Because change what you thought were the facts, and you change what’s right and wrong. If God was a God of Love and homosexuals subvert the Loving Natural Order, thus harming not only themselves but leading whole nations into damnation, then gay marriage is wrong. And fighting against it is right. It does no good to see my opponents as wicked, immoral, demonic, or cruel if I would do the same thing if I believed what they believe. The problem was dogma, ideology. The problem with the religious was religion.

Sure, there’s a disturbing portion of psychopaths and people who really are cruel. But if there’s a position that’s popularly held it’s very unlikely indeed that it’s believed only by the sort of people who enjoy torturing others. Look at the facts they’re working from: what looks like a moral problem may be a problem in reasoning.

When I made this case I noticed that, over time, fewer and fewer people agreed with me. It used to be a standard position in skepticism and a respectable position in atheism. But the more emphasis placed on social justice, the more the religious were seen as reveling in hatred. Till it became… like it is now. Dark vs Light, Good vs Evil, the Saved vs the Damned. It’s come full circle. We’re not just like the religious — we’re like religion.