Month: April 2011

  • Jill Lepore on Ben Franklin’s sister

    Bright but uneducated, married early, constantly pregnant. She wanted more and never got it.

  • Despised is despised

    I sometimes see indignation about claims that atheists are a despised minority, on the grounds that other despised minorities had it much worse. That was one of Karla McLaren’s many claims.

    As you may recall, this word [“accommodationist”] was first used by black Americans in the Voting Rights era against people who were seen as being too subservient and too accommodating to whites. I could write a whole ‘nother post about how interesting it is for atheists to imagine that their struggle is similar to that of African Americans.

    But not everyone considers the comparison obviously wrong.

    Long after blacks and Jews have made great strides, and even as homosexuals gain respect, acceptance and new rights, there is still a group that lots of Americans just don’t like much: atheists.

    That’s the first line of the piece. Well: is it false?

    It seems to me to be obviously not false. The air is thick with complaints about atheists, considered as a group and considered guilty as members of the group. This is not to say that atheists are as despised as any other group, nor is it to say that they are as badly treated as any other group. It’s just to say that they are despised as a group. It’s funny, in a way, that it’s often the very people who are calling atheists names are the ones scorning the idea that atheists are despised. McLaren is a good example of that, too. A torrent of atheist-bashing plus a smug dismissal of the idea that atheists get bashed.

    As with other national minority groups, atheism is enjoying rapid growth…designed to overcome the understandable reluctance to admit atheism have found that as many as 60 million Americans — a fifth of the population — are not believers. Our nonreligious compatriots should be accorded the same respect as other minorities.

    I’ll look forward to that.

  • Mugabe in Rome for “beatification” of JP2

    Hoping it will rub off on him?

  • Blood of pope JP2 to go on display

    It will be used for his “beatification” tomorrow. The blood is from his body, so it is a “relic of the first degree.”

  • Why do Americans still dislike atheists?

    “Our nonreligious compatriots should be accorded the same respect as other minorities.”

  • Assisted suicide abroad puts families in legal limbo

    Eric MacDonald knows all about that, CTV British Columbia reports.

  • The savage shaming stunning sullying gleeful fist

    I got in a slight brawl with Chris Stedman at Facebook just now. I’m a brawler…but then so is Chris, in his way, only he thinks he isn’t.

    He started a thread about “shock horror that atheists sometimes compare the atheist movement and the civil rights movement.” There was lots of obliging shock-horror from his friends – oh yes that is shocking and horrible; that kind of thing. I blew my nose and then commenced brawling, by saying it’s not about saying atheists have it as bad as blacks, it’s about pointing out similarities in the way the movements and the backlashes against them play out. We brawled for awhile, then he had to go get a haircut, but just before that he revealed that he doesn’t see any hostility in Karla McLaren’s guest post at his place.

    Now that surprises me. It doesn’t surprise me that he thinks I’m a pain in the ass, of course, but it does surprise me that he thinks that post is hostility-free. Really?

    the Four (Dennett excluded) have put those ideas forward at the end of a fist…the form requires that you come out swinging from an extremist position…A polemic [is] made for igniting passions and selling books, for forcing sudden and unsupported change, and for shaming any opposing voices into stunned silence…I often cringe at the savage glee with which these people carry out their attacks and sully the communal discourse.

    Not hostile? What is that, friendly?

  • Ignore that man between the pictures

    Nick Cohen on republicanism v the monarchy in Time is very droll, because of a certain inconsequence on the part of the editors. It goes like this:

    When the 18th century English dissenter Richard Price, friend of Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, warned that fawning before royalty produced “idolatry as gross and stupid as that of the ancient heathens,” he aptly titled his denunciation “A Discourse on the Love of Our Country.”
    Ha! Never mind all these pesky words about something or other, just look at the pretty snaps. Oooooooo she don’ahf look luvley in that tyara.
    But whatever the complicating factors, only royal propagandists doubt that the marriage of this bland couple is failing to excite the nation.
    Okye! I don’t know what “propagandist” means anyway, so I’ll just watch the nice video.
    But if the media had taken their cameras to the beaches, parks and pubs of Britain, they would have found millions of others who no longer cared for the spectacle and maybe, just maybe, were beginning to agree with Price, Paine, Jefferson and Franklin that their country deserved something better.
    Brilliantly funny, do admit.

  • Nick Cohen on the royal pain

    Charles Windsor constantly interferes in politics and promotes every variety of reactionary superstition and new-age quackery.

  • Want to drive on the sabbath? Get a thought car

    It totally works, because thought is not action, so you’re allowed to use the thought car.

  • Katha Pollitt on the bitter tea of Greg Mortenson

    Afghanistan and Pakistan have many honest aid workers, including many locals—they just don’t get the celebrity media treatment or the celebrity-sized budgets.

  • Blair and Brown not invited to the royal wedding

    Palace explains. We forgot. No, they’re not knights of the garter. No, it wasn’t a state occasion. No, they’re not Vic’s great-great-great grandsons.

  • Pop culture interlude

    So James Spader is one of the group of possible successors to Steve Carrell. That would be fun. I thought he was brilliant in Boston Legal.

    I liked the red mittens. The oven mitt thing was really mean. The red mittens repaired that.

  • China scolds Salman Rushdie about human rights

    Rushdie called for the release of Ai Weiwei. China calls this “blatant interference in China’s judicial independence.”

  • Jerry Coyne on the archbish on evolution

    Buried within the leaden prose is a deep and abiding dislike for evolutionary biology and genetics in particular.

  • Charles Freeman on reliquaries at the British Museum

    Glittering opulence risks concealing the anguish poured out at the shrines as those desperate for salvation pleaded with a saint to intercede with God for them.

  • This is not a job for bomb makers

    Another thought about “Why Do We Need New Atheists?” (subtle way of announcing a desire to get rid of us, that title). The post is actually a pretty rich study in scapegoating and other forms of disguised hostility, so despite its nastiness and wrongness, it repays a close look.

    (The disguised part really interests me. I’ve said before, probably more than once, that one thing I really dislike is hostility or rivalry that tries to dress itself up as its own opposite. I really hate it when people are obviously brawling or competing but pretend that they’re just joking or “teasing” or being absent-minded. I especially hate it when women do that, because it fits a stereotype about us.

    This may be one reason Gnus get so much stick. We mostly don’t do that “oh I’m just a sweet little thing” routine – so we leave people plenty of room to pretend shock-horror at our failure to dissemble.)

    There is a fear among New Atheists that moderating and dissenting voices are trying to erase the polemic as an avenue of approach. But that’s a polemical overreaction. No one is suggesting that we burn New Atheist books or silence their authors. Those bells have been rung. We can’t un-ring them, nor should we. The Four Horsemen of New Atheism did their work well, but they cannot help us clean up the battlefields they created. That’s not their job. The clean-up, the strategizing, the community rebuilding, the future imagining, and the alliance-making — this is not a job for bomb makers.

    On the one hand, no one is suggesting that we silence gnu atheist authors (and where would you get the authority to do that if you were suggesting that?), but on the other hand, this is not a job for bomb makers. In other words, actually yes, we do want you to be silent now, because it’s time to “clean up the battlefields” you created.

    Only we didn’t create any battlefields. McLaren loves her some metaphors, and she lets them run away with her. We didn’t create any god damn battlefields, and there is nothing to clean up. What is she talking about? “The clean-up, the strategizing, the community rebuilding, the future imagining, and the alliance-making” – oh that – she’s talking about The Great Return to Conformity. She’s talking about resuming the status quo. She’s talking about restoring The Group to its former hegemony by rebuilding community and making alliances.

    We know she’s doing that, because she’s saying we can’t do it. Thus we know she’s not talking about just ordinary life, because how could she possibly say we can’t help with that or that it’s not our job? She couldn’t – so she’s talking about a kind of community and alliance that of its nature excludes us. She’s doing her best, in an opaque way, to tell us we are too weird and extreme and abnormal to be part of the Community.

    It’s sinister stuff, frankly. I don’t think she intended it to be, but I do think she has a sad lack of awareness about the resonances of her own rhetoric.

    That’s my thought.

  • God is loving and holy

    Greta Christina pointed out a little nightmare of a post by William Lane Craig at his wittily-named blog “Reasonable Faith,” saying that genocide is ok because God decided.

    I haven’t properly read Greta’s article yet because I wanted to read Craig first. I’m doing that now.

    He says about the genocide of the Canaanites.

    These stories offend our moral sensibilities.  Ironically, however, our moral sensibilities in the West have been largely, and for many people unconsciously, shaped by our Judaeo-Christian heritage, which has taught us the intrinsic value of human beings, the importance of dealing justly rather than capriciously, and the necessity of the punishment’s fitting the crime.  The Bible itself inculcates the values which these stories seem to violate.

    What? The story violates our moral sensibilities but oh, haha, those moral sensibilities come from the place that says the story is fine.

    Oh no you don’t. None of that, bub. That’s called having it both ways, or eating your cake and having it, or a contradiction.

    The story violates our moral sensibilities because we have better moral sensibilities than the people who wrote the bible. We have the benefit of many centuries of thinking and learning and cumulative wisdom. We did not get them from the bible.

    According to the version of divine command ethics which I’ve defended, our moral duties are constituted by the commands of a holy and loving God.  Since God doesn’t issue commands to Himself,  He has no moral duties to fulfill.  He is certainly not subject to the same moral obligations and prohibitions that we are.  For example, I have no right to take an innocent life.  For me to do so would be murder.  But God has no such prohibition.  He can give and take life as He chooses.

    How does Craig know this god is “holy and loving”? He doesn’t. I don’t know that about Craig’s god, and I don’t know that Craig knows it either. I don’t want to be subject to Craig’s cosmic dictator who can kill anyone he damn well feels like killing. I’m not going to agree to Craig’s PR for the dictator.

    Moreover, if we believe, as I do, that God’s grace is extended to those who die in infancy or as small children, the death of these children was actually their salvation.  We are so wedded to an earthly, naturalistic perspective that we forget that those who die are happy to quit this earth for heaven’s incomparable joy.  Therefore, God does these children no wrong in taking their lives.

    So then all children should be murdered. It totally makes sense – that way they’re guaranteed god’s grace, while if they live to get older, they might lose it, by being gay or an atheist or an imbiber of spirits. Those who die are happy to quit this earth for heaven’s incomparable joy, so what possible reason could there be not to kill all children right now?

    Anyway, the best news is, it turns out that Christianity is good while Islam is bad.

    Christians believe that God is all-loving, while Muslims believe that God loves only Muslims.  Allah has no love for unbelievers and sinners.  Therefore, they can be killed indiscriminately.  Moreover, in Islam God’s omnipotence trumps everything, even His own nature.  He is therefore utterly arbitrary in His dealing with mankind.  By contrast Christians hold that God’s holy and loving nature determines what He commands.

    So if god kills you tomorrow it’s because of god’s holy and loving nature, even if you don’t go to heaven like the babies and children but instead go to the bad place. You’re pleased, right?

  • Hitchens on the upcoming nuptials

    By some mystic alchemy, the breeding imperatives for a dynasty become the stuff of romance, even “fairy tale.”

  • Stupid “birther” ravings carry on regardless

    “It’s easier psychologically to come up with a rationalization than it is to admit that you were wrong,” said Ronald Lindsay.