No, you can’t say that
Messing around with Google in Swedish, I find a blog post by a guy who was at the seminar on Thursday. He includes the wonderful book cover by Elisabeth Wallin and adds that he was the model for the guy on the left – the rabbi holding a big jagged stone ready to throw. How cool is that?!
There was a giant blow-up of the jacket at the launch – it was about the size of a door. In the huge version it becomes clear that all three clerics are spitting on the women at their feet. Once you know that you can see it in the small version – that thing that looks like a wispy beard on the pope is actually a river of spit.
Wallin was supposed to be at the launch but alas she didn’t make it, so I never met her. Too bad; that would have been great, she being so pleasingly controversial and all. But I met other pleasingly controversial people. I was apparently even controversial myself. I’d written an article for the occasion, at Fri Tanke’s request, and it was going to be published by Express Expressen, one of the biggest newspapers. During the launch, Christer got a text message from them saying on second thought, we don’t want it, because – er – well we’ve already said religion is not entirely wonderful, so there’s no need to say it again. The opinion page editor wanted it, but the editor-in-chief intervened to say No.
Don’t go thinking that because Sweden is all secular and cool and leftwing, it doesn’t scowl at frank atheism just like all other right-thinking conformist people. That was what I thought, but I learned better pretty quickly. Frank atheism is frowned on, and as for criticism of Islam – that’s right out. That was being discussed at the launch – I think perhaps I was saying a few words about it, but the fog of jet lag was thick by that time, so I’m not sure; at any rate it was being discussed when Christer got the text message so he was able to use it as an illustration of the very thing that was being discussed. It was an interesting moment. The room full of women’s rights activists and secularists, discussing the fact that there is heavy social pressure not to talk about the role of religion in denying women’s rights, only to be told that a major newspaper has changed its mind about publishing an article on the role of religion in denying women’s rights. The irony is poignant.
I think that you have coined a wonderful term – ‘frank atheists’. It is a much more apt label than ‘new atheist’, which IMHO is a misnomer.
Can I use that? I like it! Frank Atheist. It has a ring of specificity about it.
Certainly you can use it! I sometimes call it avowed atheists – sometimes explicit atheists – sometimes unapologetic atheists. It’s all the same point: what the gnu atheist-haters object to is simply our explicitness, which is equated with rudeness or worse. The classic illustration of this is Mooney’s calling Coyne’s “Seeing is Believing” “uncivil,” which is stark raving nonsense.
So lucky to meet the model of the jagged-rock throwing rabbi. . . I am envious. Thanks for pointing out the spit, I’d never have figured it out.
Very annoying about the newspaper, and not a nice way to treat a controversial visitor, either. Was the lunch tasty, at least, or has the jet lag deleted it from your memory?
Just a slight correction. I think the name of the paper is “Expressen”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expressen
Claire, I don’t think I met the guy, in fact I’m pretty sure I didn’t. I just found his post by Googling in Swedish (if you see what I mean). Launch, not lunch – but no jet lag is powerful enough to delete food from my memory. Everything I had there was good. I would so like to do a post describing every item available for breakfast, but I shall refrain, in order to preserve my reputation for almost ethereal indifference to fleshy subjects like food. But really. It was like Platonic ideal Paradise o’ Breakfast.
Oh my. Perhaps I myself should consider eating breakfast before I try to read complex words like “launch.” I see lunch everywhere I look, apparently.
I’ll be on the look out for the guy, to introduce him to you.
Thanks for the name correction, Matti – I guess Christer was just automatically translating it when he said it. Swedes are incredibly obliging about speaking English all the time for the benefit of foreign visitors.
I was sorry not to be able to get to your seminar Ophelia. I reserved a place but realized later that my laboratory had our annual retreat booked for the same day on the outskirts on Stockholm and so I had to go on that. It sounds like I missed a fascinating event.
Indeed. Among book reviews, Seeing and Believing is notable for its civility. Definitely more civil than Jerry’s TNR review of Ann Coulter’s Godless!
Clearly, Chris Mooney and many, many others regard it as a lapse of civility for any scientist to conclude, after careful argument, that science and religion are incompatible. Any respectable scientist would know that it is one of their public obligations to affirm the compatibility of science and religion.
Sigmund, I was sorry too.