Year: 2010

Josh Slocum suggested that I should flag up Alaina Podmorow’s retort to Melanie Butler’s article here, so that people who read just this page wouldn’t miss it. Good idea. So if you read this page and no other – well one, you’re a chump, because the front page is updated every day, so you’re missing news items and the occasional Flashback goody as well as a lot of very good articles – but two, don’t miss Alaina’s piece. Alaina is 13, she founded Little Women for Little Women in Afghanistan when she was 9, she has raised a lot of money for women in Afghanistan and has seen the money matched by the Canadian government. She doesn’t agree with Butler’s strictures on ‘Western’ feminists who try to support women in Afghanistan.

No one will ever tell me that Muslim women or any women think it’s ok to not be allowed to get educated or to have their daughters sold off at 8 years old or traded off at 4 years old because of cultural beliefs. No one will tell me that women in Afghanistan think it is ok for their daughters to have acid thrown in their faces. It makes me ill to think a 4 year old girl must sleep in a barn and get raped daily by old men. It’s sick and wrong and I don’t care who calls me an Orientalist or whatever I will keep raising money to educate girls and women in Afghanistan and I will keep writing letters and sending them in the back pack of my friend Lauryn Oates as she works so bravely on the ground helping women and girls learn what it is to exercise their rights. I believe in human rights so I believe everyone has the right their own opinion, I just wish that the energy that was used to write that story, that is just not true, could have been used to educate a girl in Afghanistan.

I’m happy to see that several blogs have linked to Alaina’s article; Terry Glavin’s for one. So don’t miss it.

And now, for a different take on the whole ‘why are you telling atheists to shut up when we’ve barely had time to open our mouths?’ question, we can consider how these things should be done. With a little panache, that’s how.

[F]reethought thrives on contrarian impulses. The whole “Who says so?” attitude of many secular humanists leads to purist rigor, one-upsman-ship, even soteriology: The God I don’t believe in is bigger than the God you don’t believe in. The harm religion did me was more serious than the harm religion did you. The full-frontal unbelief I represent is truer and purer than the unbelief you’re espousing. Reason saves, faith enslaves. (That’s pretty good: try it on a coffee mug.) In the past, I’ve used the word “Pharisaic” humanism to describe this posture, but because the culprits don’t know who the Pharisees were the allusion has not become…code.

That’s pretty funny, and it’s not made any less so by the fact that I can’t entirely repudiate the picture.

I once repeated a Woody Allen joke in front of a heavily atheist audience, having just told it the week before at a local, liberal temple. “I don’t believe in an afterlife but just in case I’m taking a change of underwear.” My Jewish audience was tickled pink. My atheist friends looked at me as though to say, “Are you saying you do believe in an afterlife”? Twice-born atheists can make an outsider feel as unwelcome in the Temple of Bright as a secular humanist would feel in a tent meeting down in Tuscaloosa. (You know, where Groucho says they take the elephants because it’s easier to remove the ivory there).

Well I can entirely repudiate that picture, because that joke and that kind of joke always makes me laugh. But the whole thing is still pretty funny. If only all critics had that much wit.

The pope is such a rad rebellious dude – he doesn’t take any shit from anybody, you know? He’s his own man. He makes up his own mind. He doesn’t let the vulgar herd tell him what to say or do or think. Odi profanum et proceo kind of thing.

Addressing crowds in St Peter’s square during a Palm Sunday service, the pope did not directly mention the scandal spreading though Europe and engulfing the Vatican, but alluded to it during his sermon. Faith in God, he said, led “towards the courage of not allowing oneself to be intimidated by the petty gossip of dominant opinion”.

Yeah, man! Sing it! The pope is like Holden Caulfield or somebody – fighting the phoneys all the way. He’s got faith in God, so he’s got the cojones to not let himself be ground down by the petty trivial itty-bitty gossip about priests fucking children and bishops keeping it secret that dominant opinion keeps making such a big stinking deal about. Awesome, dude! The pope totally rocks. (You can make a Peter-petrus-rock-on this rock I will found my church joke here if you want to.)