Joan Smith nails the problem.

In the past, Catholics and Protestants took turns to slaughter each other as Sunni and Shia are doing now, but Christianity has to a large extent been secularised…At the heart of this process is an alteration in the status of religious texts…The idea that a single book written centuries ago has unique authority – in effect, a veto over all other ideas – makes no sense in societies where intellectual curiosity is valued and encouraged. Yesterday Inayat Bunglawala, assistant general secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain, criticised the arrest of Ms Gibbons in Sudan and described it as a “quite horrible misunderstanding”. But during a public debate in London two weeks ago, he

Okay, you tell me – what does the phrase ‘human dignity’ mean? I don’t mean look it up, I can do that and that’s not what I’m asking anyway; I mean what does it mean as far as you know? What, if anything, does it suggest to you if you hear it or read it? A commenter pretended to find it scary as well as funny that potentilla and I both consider it meaningless, so I’m curious.

Why do I consider it meaningless? I suppose largely because it doesn’t seem to refer to anything real. What human dignity? I don’t consider humans to have much dignity. We’re too mortal, too fleshy, too fragile, too clumsy, too weak, too dim to … Read the rest

Jesus and Mo discuss the ‘personally offensive’ issue. I would love to think Bill Buckingham will see that – but perhaps if he did he wouldn’t realize that it was about people like him.

Richard Chappell also discusses it.

It’s so depressing how arbitrary subjective responses are presented in public discourse as though they were legitimate reasons…The underlying problem, I suspect, is that our public culture has become so infected with subjectivist assumptions that people don’t realize that there’s a difference between desires and reasons. Sentiments are taken as given; no-one ever stops to question whether their reactive attitudes are warranted. Any kind of negative emotion is not just evidence, but constitutive, of suffering injustice. You’re