They believe the child protection records of Murphy-O’Connor, O’Malley and Dolan disqualify them.… Read the rest
All entries by this author
What’s so bad about missionaries?
Jun 2nd, 2010 | Filed by Ophelia BensonMy take on the Comment is Free belief question.… Read the rest
Nothing decisive to say
Jun 1st, 2010 4:15 pm | By Ophelia BensonOutside the world of nature, however, science has no authority, no statements to make, no business whatsoever taking one position or another. Science has nothing decisive to say about values, whether economic, aesthetic or moral; nothing to say about the meaning of life or its purpose.
Notice how quickly he moves from an emphatic absolute in the first sentence – no business whatsoever – to a qualified one in the second – nothing decisive to say. As Susan Haack says, there’s the bit where he says it and the bit where he takes it back. Science may have nothing decisive to say about values, but that’s not the same thing as having nothing to say … Read the rest
Defining ‘badness’
Jun 1st, 2010 11:58 am | By Ophelia BensonRobert Lambert and Jonathan Githens-Mazer tell worried Guardian readers about “Islamophobia and anti-Muslim violence” as if they’re roughly the same thing rather than being very different things. Dislike of a belief-system is a very different thing from violence against people.
[M]embers of the EDL are echoing sentiments about Muslims they have adopted from sections of the mainstream media and the BNP. It is no coincidence that Nick Griffin has been peddling exactly the same hatred towards Muslims for the last decade. Similarly, a cursory examination of the records of Islamophobia Watch over the last five years provides a sense of the extent of Islamophobia in the mainstream media.
Islamophobia Watch! As if that were a respectable and reliable source! Bob … Read the rest
Checking the compass
Jun 1st, 2010 10:52 am | By Ophelia BensonThomas Jones says in the Telegraph (reviewing Hitchens’s memoir):
The drift from left to right is hardly unusual, and the causes for his disillusionment with socialism and attraction to liberalism – the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, visits to Cuba and Poland under Communism, the pleasures and freedoms of life in the United States – are made plain enough.
I’m not sure that really is a move (or drift) from left to right. That would make displeasure and unfreedom left, and I don’t think that’s accurate. I know, the idea is more that some coercion is worth the price for the sake of more pleasure and freedom (or more something) for everyone, and that does describe part of … Read the rest
The Telegraph reviews Hitch-22
Jun 1st, 2010 | Filed by Ophelia BensonHis opinions are deeply felt and fiercely expressed but only dimly thought through.… Read the rest
Did humans evolve to fill a ‘cognitive niche’?
Jun 1st, 2010 | Filed by Ophelia BensonWe need more evidence, of a kind we can’t ethically get.… Read the rest
Pope sends more foxes to investigate chickenhouse
Jun 1st, 2010 | Filed by Ophelia BensonFormer archbishop Murphy-O’Connor will lead inquiry into clerical child abuse in Ireland.… Read the rest
Lambert and Githens-Mazer on “Islamophobia”
Jun 1st, 2010 | Filed by Ophelia BensonThey cite Islamophobia Watch for evidence. Yes really.… Read the rest
Normblog on Eagleton
May 31st, 2010 | Filed by Ophelia BensonIt is not obligatory for a liberal to pretend that anti-liberal creeds are as valuable as liberalism itself.… Read the rest
Vatican punishes child-raping priests
May 31st, 2010 | Filed by Ophelia BensonBy telling them they’re going to hell forever and ever.… Read the rest
“Good job, mullah sir”
May 31st, 2010 12:08 pm | By Ophelia Benson[T]he girls, ages 13 and 14, had been fleeing for two days along rutted roads and over mountain passes to escape their illegal, forced marriages to much older men, and now they had made it to relatively liberal Herat Province.
But a cop spotted them, and far from protecting them, he sent them back home. “There they were publicly and viciously flogged for daring to run away from their husbands.” Or rather their “husbands” who were more like rapist slaveowners than anything we in the less thuggish part of the world would consider “husbands.”
… Read the restForced into a so-called marriage exchange, where each girl was given to an elderly man in the other’s family, Khadija and Basgol later complained that
Fresh deep boundaries
May 31st, 2010 11:02 am | By Ophelia BensonAndrew Brown spots another opportunity to piss on “the new atheism” and pounces on it with his usual cheerful malice.
…the new atheism, with its constant use of “religion” as a term which means something (nasty) is an attempt at social construction. In particular it’s an attempt to make fresh deep boundaries between ingroup and outgroup.
Yes, in some senses, and partly. But one could say the same thing about the civil rights movement; about science; about feminism; about scholarship; about liberalism; about conservatism; about any human endeavor with actual specific articulated ideas or truth-claims. And it might and should occur to Brown that religion too is very often an attempt to make fresh deep boundaries between ingroup and outgroup, … Read the rest
Thoughts of a bishop
May 31st, 2010 | Filed by Ophelia BensonThis but then again that but on the other hand this but then you know that however there is also yet nevertheless one might say… Read the rest
Afghan girls flogged for escaping forced marriages
May 31st, 2010 | Filed by Ophelia BensonMuch older men force girls to ‘marry’ them; the girls flee, are caught; much older men team up to flog them as hard as they can with a leather strap.… Read the rest
Matters of Faith
May 31st, 2010 | By George M. Felis, PhDNigerian Pentecostal preacher Helen Ukpabio claims that Satan possesses children, who thereby become witches with evil magical powers. While this claim may be appalling superstitious nonsense on the face of it, traditional African beliefs about spirits and witchcraft and curses mean that far too many Nigerians take such nonsense seriously, with predictably horrible consequences: Some parents have abandoned their “accursed” and “possessed” children. Others have spent money better used to feed themselves and their other children to pay preachers like Ukpabio outrageous fees to perform exorcisms. On occasion, holy-rolling believers – sometimes, appallingly, including the child’s parents – have taken the task of exorcism on themselves, torch-wielding mob style: Exorcism rites have included splashing or bathing children in acid, … Read the rest
Mark Vernon reports on Hay Festival
May 31st, 2010 | Filed by Ophelia BensonSpecifically a debate on the motion ‘Reason is always right.’… Read the rest
Why even bother to ask
May 31st, 2010 9:01 am | By Ophelia BensonOf course. I posted a link to that interview with David Sloan Wilson and wondered if he gets Templeton money, so googled his name and Templeton. Well of course he does. Silly question. Barrels of it, apparently – Google turns up a whole raft of items.… Read the rest
David Sloan Wilson promoting ‘evolutionary religious studies’
May 31st, 2010 | Filed by Ophelia BensonHe is ‘infuriated’ about ‘the newest crop of angry atheists.’… Read the rest
CJR reviews Hitchens’s memoir
May 30th, 2010 | Filed by Ophelia BensonFor three decades he’s been showing US journalists how to write.… Read the rest