Barney Zwartz channels Mark Helprin (via an article from an anthology titled New Threats to Freedom. It’s the usual atheist-hating sludge pretending to wit: everything is reversed: it’s not religion that is conformist and coercive, good heavens no, it is that pesky dogmatic militant belligerent ‘my way or the highway atheism.’

Really. Really. I know I’ve said this before, but does Barney Zwartz never go into a bookstore? Does Mark Helprin? I was in the University bookstore here a couple of days ago, and the atheist empire has gotten smaller as well as less visible. It used to take up a good chunk of one shelf, so maybe about 2′, at about chest level, under a sign that said Religious … Read the rest

Okay I’m off. Have to make sure I have everything I need, and do various other chores. Take care of yourselves, drink your Ovaltine. I’ll be back Sunday.… Read the rest

James Fergusson says everybody should calm down and not get in such a swivet about women being treated like rebellious livestock in Afghanistan.

This does not mean the west should stand by in silence. On the contrary, it is our duty to go on arguing the case for gender equality and to keep Afghans engaged in that old debate. But we have no right to be shrill…

No right to be “shrill”? Why not? Why doesn’t anybody have a right to be “shrill” about gross cruelty and vindictiveness and oppression?

Well because we don’t understand, Fergusson says.

It might help if we understood the Taliban better. The harshness of the punishments they sometimes mete out only seems incomprehensible to the

Lord Mackay of Clashfern is a funny guy. He’s a We Wee Free, and he thinks Scots courts should use the bible to help them out with the law stuff.

Mackay, who is also the current Lord Clerk Register, the oldest surviving “Great Office of State” in Scotland, now acts as honorary president of the Scottish Bible Society (SBS), and has invited sheriffs and judges to refamiliarise themselves with biblical principles and act accordingly when presiding over court cases…

“I believe the teaching of the Bible is vitally important for guidance in daily living for all of us.“The…modern version is especially useful in dealing with our day-to-day challenges.

“If we use it in this way we will soon learn

You can blame Jerry Coyne for pointing out Pete Enns. The damage is done, at any rate.

He’s a condescending bugger, I must say.

To say that God’s existence is detectable with certainty through reason, logic, and evidence is a belief because it makes some crucial assumptions. For one thing, it assumes that our intellectual faculties are the best, or only, ways of accessing God. This is an assumption that privileges Western ways of knowing and excludes other wholly human qualities like emotion and intuition.

See that? He’s calling “intellectual faculties” Western, which is a little bit of an insult to people who are not Western.

It is an old argument but a good one: any god worthy