Outraged privilege squalls again. Outraged privilege wants even more privilege please, and no grumbling.

The leader of the Catholic Church in Scotland, Cardinal Keith O’Brien, has used his Easter message to attack “aggressive secularism”…Cardinal O’Brien said the enemies of Christianity wanted to “take God from the public sphere”.

Whereas the cardinal and his all-male gang want to fill up the public square with their imagined god who endorses all their nasty encrusted hatreds and panics and secret bum-gropings. Well of course they do: that way they would have even more power than they already have. If they had enough power they could even shut up the journalists and bloggers and survivors who keep talking about all that child-rape and … Read the rest

I’m still faintly surprised by some of the reactions to Sam Harris’s book, and to the criticisms of it, so I re-read some this morning. I didn’t slap my brow and say “gosh it’s way better than I thought.” Nope.

Consider, for instance, p 199 n. 11.

…many people assume that an emphasis on human “well-being” would lead us to do terrible things like reinstate slavery…Such expectations are the result of not thinking about these issues seriously. There are rather clear reasons not to do these things – all of which relate to the immensity of suffering that such actions would cause and the possibilities of deeper happiness that they would foreclose.

That’s a terrible “argument” – it’s not an … Read the rest

A priest named Roy Bourgeois publicly supports the ordination of women, and participated in the ordination of his friend Janice Sevre-Duszynska, for which the Vatican promptly excommunicated him. Then he went to a film festival that showed a movie on the subject, so the Maryknolls are kicking him out and plan to ask the Vatican to laicize him, i.e. take away his priesthood forever.

This swift and unequivocal action has never been the response of these same church leaders to the rape, sodomizing, sexual torture and torment of children — from infancy through adolescence — by thousands of male Catholic clergy worldwide.

It’s always interesting to see what the Vatican considers important and what it doesn’t.… Read the rest

Anthony Grayling is going to be on The Colbert Report on Tuesday to talk about The Good Book.

That’s hitting the jackpot when it comes to promoting a book. It’s also likely to be pretty good fun in itself – like going on tv to have a chat with Alan Bennett, or Jonathan Miller, or John Cleese, or Michael Palin. I would be quite happy to do any of those things, or all four of them, and I would also be quite happy to go on tv to chat with Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert.

By all accounts, Colbert is a very nice guy. I’ve met someone who once worked for the Report – she had gone from that … Read the rest

In the wake of some discussions of Sam Harris’s The Moral Landscape I’ve been dipping into a few other books on morality, all of which are (frankly) much more rewarding to read than the Harris book. Mary Whitlock Blundell’s Helping Friends and Harming Enemies: a Study in Sophocles and Greek Ethics, for instance, the title of which is self-explanatory. Matt Ridley’s The Origins of Virtue, which summarizes a lot of research in a number of fields. And Bernard Williams’s Morality. From the chapter on Utilitarianism:

For we are going to be able to use the Greatest Happiness Principle as the common measure of all and everybody’s claims, only if the ‘happiness’ involved is in some sense comparable