We should not apologize to these reactionary forces.… Read the rest
News From Middle East Women
Feb 26th, 2006 | Filed by Ophelia BensonU.K: victim of honour killings; Iran: young woman sentenced to die for killing attacker; much more.… Read the rest
Pizza Jillionaire to Build Catholic Town in Florida
Feb 26th, 2006 | Filed by Ophelia BensonAbortions, pornography and contraceptives will be banned in Ave Maria; ACLU plans to sue.… Read the rest
Ken Should Have Been Sent to Sensitivity School
Feb 26th, 2006 | Filed by Ophelia BensonIf only the tribunal had a sense of irony.… Read the rest
Nick Cohen on Larry Summers
Feb 26th, 2006 | Filed by Ophelia BensonMisreporting what he said was part of the pressure that got him out.… Read the rest
Are Threats Non-violent?
Feb 26th, 2006 | Filed by Ophelia Benson”Because they attack property, and never life, the ALF is a non-violent organisation; non-violence is their core value.’… Read the rest
Oxford Researchers Speak Out Against ALF
Feb 26th, 2006 | Filed by Ophelia BensonOn a direct action website ALF announces attacks on anyone linked to the university.… Read the rest
Bad Language
Feb 25th, 2006 10:49 pm | By Ophelia BensonI suppose you saw that shockingly bad review by Leon Wieseltier of Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell in the NY Times last Sunday? It’s so awful I keep blinking with surprise when I read it. It’s not just that it’s incompetent, as Brian Leiter points out, it’s that the tone is so unpleasantly abusive, spittle-flecked, bad-mannered. It is, to use a pompous term that nevertheless seems to fit, inappropriate.
… Read the restFor a sorry instance of present-day scientism, it would be hard to improve on Daniel C. Dennett’s book…In his own opinion, Dennett is a hero. He is in the business of emancipation, and he reveres himself for it…Giordano Bruno, with tenure at Tufts!…Dennett is the sort of rationalist who gives
Affirmation is not Denial, and Vice Versa
Feb 25th, 2006 7:19 pm | By Ophelia BensonAnd then, more straightforwardly, there’s more of the confusion about free speech, in which people compare unlike things and then stand back triumphantly and say ‘See?’ No, we don’t see, because the two cases are different, not the same, so there’s nothing to see.
… Read the restIn the past few months, Europe has been flexing its muscles as a guarantor of freedom of expression – both in the Danish cartoons of Muhammad, and before that in its criticism of the trial of the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk for raising the subject of the Turkish genocide of the Armenians in the early 20th century. What a delicious irony that a Europe so sniffy about Turkish justice when it came to Pamuk should
Here, Then There, Then Somewhere Else
Feb 25th, 2006 6:14 pm | By Ophelia BensonLot of people around saying weird things today. Is there something in the water?
Andrew Brown for instance. He seems to change direction with every paragraph, and much of what he says in the process seems snide and silly.
… Read the restIt is hard being an atheist with a sense of proportion. No one in this country will persecute you and it’s not really very hard to disbelieve in God, but the temptation to strike attitudes in front of the universe persists…Thus, Daniel Dennett writes early in this book: “I for one am not in awe of your faith. I am appalled by your arrogance, by your unreasoning certainty that you have all the answers” – and he’s not talking about
John Cornwell Reviews Breaking the Spell
Feb 25th, 2006 | Filed by Ophelia Benson‘Religion persists because it is evidently human to believe in something beyond what one can perceive.’… Read the rest
Cartoons Offend and Beheadings Don’t?
Feb 25th, 2006 | Filed by Ophelia BensonBeware: graphic.… Read the rest
Suspended Prison Sentence for Insulting Koran
Feb 25th, 2006 | Filed by Ophelia BensonApparently ‘insulting’ religion is illegal in Germany.… Read the rest
How to do Pseudo-shakespeare Biography
Feb 25th, 2006 | Filed by Ophelia BensonIgnore the plays and mess around with codes instead.… Read the rest
Hindu Group Offers Reward for Beheading Artist
Feb 25th, 2006 | Filed by Ophelia Benson‘Those who are endangering religion and nation, should be eliminated for everyone’s good.’… Read the rest
How to Make a Pseudo-point
Feb 25th, 2006 | Filed by Ophelia BensonTriumphantly compare Pamuk to Irving as if the two were parallel instead of opposite.… Read the rest
Andrew Brown Reviews Daniel Dennett
Feb 25th, 2006 | Filed by Ophelia BensonNot very coherently.… Read the rest
Florida County Selects Diluted Biology Textbook
Feb 25th, 2006 | Filed by Ophelia BensonPublisher Holt, Rinehart and Winston edited several sections at the request of the Discovery Institute.… Read the rest
Letter to the New York Times
Feb 25th, 2006 | By Daniel DennettThe New York Times has opted not to publish this letter from Daniel Dennett, so B&W is pleased to make it available. Judith Shulevitz’s review is here.
Thanks to Judith Shulevitz [“When Cosmologies Collide,” NYTBR January 22] for unwittingly exposing the serious flaw in Michael Ruse’s attempt to distinguish the science of evolution (of which he approves) from the more far-reaching implications of “evolutionism,” which he characterizes as “a metaphysical world picture.” Since she grants that those who expound “evolutionism” “may well be right” in the cosmological implications they see flowing from contemporary biology, she recommends teaching “evolutionism in religion class, along with creationism, deism and all the other cosmologies that float unexamined through our lives.” By the same … Read the rest
Inverted Colonialism
Feb 24th, 2006 7:43 pm | By Ophelia BensonConsider Azam Kamguian in Ibn Warraq’s Leaving Islam, for instance. Page 216.
The very fact that people are forced to abide by laws based on something some god or prophet is reported to have said somewhere is a form of mental violence.
Page 219.
… Read the restWhen I came to the West in the early 1990s, I was faced with the fact that the majority of intellectuals, mainstream media, academics, and feminists, in the name of respecting ‘other cultures,’ were trying to justify Islam by dividing it into fundamentalist and moderate, progressive and reactionary…For people like me, the victims of Islam in power, it was suffocating to listen to and have to refute endless tales to justify the terror and bloodshed