About taking one’s own point of view to be the only or universal point of view.… Read the rest
Turkish Court Annuls Presidency Vote
May 1st, 2007 | Filed by Ophelia BensonSecularist opposition parties accuse Gul of a hidden Islamist agenda.… Read the rest
Appreciate Your Secularism
May 1st, 2007 | Filed by Ophelia Benson‘It’s a luxury to be able to take it for granted here – and worth remembering that we shouldn’t.’… Read the rest
Inayat Bunglawala Speaks Up for Sharia
May 1st, 2007 | Filed by Ophelia BensonShariah courts deal with civil matters such as marriage and divorce. The arrangement is entirely voluntary.… Read the rest
How dare you, sir
May 1st, 2007 10:27 am | By Ophelia BensonSteven Poole muses on
a possible tension in what passes for my “thought”: evincing on the one hand a kind of Anglo-empiricism, I nonetheless have a soft spot for the works of such writers as Derrida, Baudrillard and Zizek, all of whom are anathema to the Anglophone analytic tradition…[P]erhaps the common factor was this: I was not at all sure that I was as clever as any of these men, and so even when I was troubled by seeming opacity or nonsense, I reckoned that I had better tread carefully.
That’s an interesting ‘and so,’ since it leads to something that doesn’t follow from what ‘and so’ seems to claim that it does. It is not necessary to be sure … Read the rest
Utter certainty, yet leavened by humility and doubt
May 1st, 2007 9:28 am | By Ophelia BensonSpeaking of unshakeable faith, Andrew Sullivan gave a pretty good display of that (and I don’t mean that as a compliment) in the debate with Sam Harris. A pretty good display of knowing what he can’t know, of labeling beliefs as ‘truth’ merely because he has decided to believe them for no very good reason, of admitting it’s all nonsense yet insisting that he knows it all the same.
… Read the restThe reason I cannot conceive of my non-existence is because I have accepted, freely and sanely, the love of Jesus, and I have felt it, heard it, known it. He would never let me go. And by never, I mean eternally. And so I could never not exist and neither