Year: 2010

Religious bodies have been demonstrating their virtue again. They’ve quit Labour’s ‘advisory group on religion’ in a huff because the secularists there resisted their demands to be allowed to ignore equality laws.

Muslims had already stopped attending the group…Hindus, Baha’is and secularists are still represented but the Church of England, Salvation Army, Methodist Church and Roman Catholic Church have all left.

Because they don’t want no stinkin’ equality. How impressive.

Peter Vlachos, the National Secular Society delegate, said he was appalled and accused the church groups of “abusing” the forum. He said: “Rather than supporting and championing equality and human rights, the Churches have tried to use the consultative process to try to gain further exemptions from equalities legislation. They wanted the freedom to discriminate and they didn’t get it so now they’ve walked away.”

So – generosity, compassion, justice, equality – all spurned by the churches. So that’s what they’re like, is it? Well I knew that, but I’m a little surprised they’re so open about it.

The Pope recently intervened in the debate over equality legislation in Britain. Benedict XVI is expected to use his visit to Britain in September to preach moral virtue. Leaders across the churches continue to defend the right of Christians and other religions to discriminate against women, gays and others according to their religious beliefs.

Right. The pope, who spent years enforcing secrecy about child abuse in his church, will be preaching ‘moral virtue,’ which takes the form of defending the ‘right’ to discriminate against various groups of people ‘according to one’s religious beliefs.’ Well the hell with that – that’s not moral virtue. The pope wouldn’t recognize moral virtue if it grabbed him between the legs.

I’ve been reading an article called ‘Canadian Women and the (Re)Production of Women in Afghanistan.’ I do not like it.

From the abstract, so that you can get the big picture:

Focusing on
the prominent group Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan (CW4WAfghan), this
paper looks at the role its advocacy assumes in the context of the “War on Terror”. In
Canada as in the United States, government agencies have justified the military invasion
of Afghanistan by revitalizing the oppressed Muslim woman as a medium through which
narratives of East versus West are performed. While CW4WAfghan attempt to challenge
dominant narratives of Afghan women, they ultimately reinforce and naturalize the
Orientalist logic on which the War on Terror operates, even helping to disseminate it
through the Canadian school system. Drawing on post-colonial feminist theory, this
paper highlights the implications of CW4WAfghan’s Orientalist discourse on women’s
rights, and tackles the difficult question of how feminists can show solidarity with
Afghan women without adhering to the oppressive narratives that permeate today’s
political climate.

Then from the main body:

Building on Krista Hunt’s analysis of feminist
complicity in the War on Terror (Hunt 2006), this essay draws attention to Canadian feminists’ role in (re)producing neo-imperialist narratives of Afghan women. Focusing specifically on the NGO Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan (CW4WAfghan),
it shows how their use of feminist rhetoric and personal first-hand narratives, together
with national narratives of Canada as a custodian of human rights, add to the productive
power of the Orientalist tropes they invoke.

If within Canada, constructions of Afghan women remain one of the most
powerful means by which knowledge about the “War on Terror” is produced,
CW4WAfghan are among the most active and powerful disseminators of such
knowledge. CW4WAfghan express the importance of this role in their twofold mandate:

1) to raise awareness in Canada of the need to secure and protect human rights
and opportunities for Afghan women and, 2) to support the empowerment
efforts of Afghan women in education, health care and skills development
(CW4WAfghan 2008a).

By explicitly focusing on how the second half of this mandate is pursued, my aim is not
to discredit what CW4WAfghan may have accomplished in Afghanistan, but rather, to
see how this work might be undemiined by becoming part of the War on Terror’s neo-
imperialist project of knowledge construction.

And so she does. She wants to get her Master’s degree, so she proceeds with her project of saying invidious things about an NGO working for Afghan women’s rights, for another forty pages. She leans heavily on Foucault and Said, she talks much of knowledge-power and Orientalism, and she ploughs her academic furrow. Meanwhile the women who work for CW4WAfghan do that. I know which I admire.

I might give you more extracts later. It’s replete with interesting items. The sad part is it was published in the Cambridge Review of International Affairs.

There’s a post at Talking Philosophy called In Defence of Religious Belief. I would comment on it there but I can’t because I’m banned from commenting, so (since I want to say something) I’ll do it here.

It’s a thought experiment. You’ve been having hallucinations of a monster following you. You believe the shrink who tells you you’re mentally ill. ‘You’re a logical sort of person. If you weren’t too classy, you’d even consider becoming a New Atheist.’ But the experiences feel real.

And then it happens. It’s late at night. You’re alone in your bathroom, and the monster comes crashing in through the window – at least this is what you experience – and it’s on you. It doesn’t attack, but it’s right in your face, and you can smell rotting flesh on its breath. You close your eyes hoping it’ll just disappear, but you can hear its breathing, sense its malevolence, and in your head there’s this insistent thought: What if it’s real?

Well of course there is, with an experience like that.

At this point, given how high the stakes are, isn’t it reasonable to believe that the monster is real? Imagine yourself in that situation. What would you say to somebody who told you it was unreasonable or irrational to take evasive action? You wouldn’t be impressed, I suspect. Moreover, it’s not simply that you wouldn’t be impressed at the time – which is not particularly interesting, since you’re in a freaked out state – you wouldn’t be impressed afterwards either, you wouldn’t be impressed on calm reflection (with the claim that you were unreasonable to believe then).

That last parenthesis is important – I overlooked it at first, and objected, but then I went back and saw the parenthesis and my objection became superfluous. But given the parenthesis, the overall claim is a pretty narrow one – too narrow for the rest of the work it’s supposed to do. No, I wouldn’t be ‘impressed,’ or convinced, by anyone who told me I was unreasonable to be terrified by the hallucination while it was going on. That would be absurd. But I don’t think I know anyone who would say that. Of course a terrifying convincing hallucination is terrifying while it is happening.

But so what? That doesn’t translate to the claim that I would be reasonable to go on thinking the hallucination was real after it was over – which I thought was the claim itself, until I noticed that last parenthesis. That’s not the claim – but then what is the claim?

Well maybe it is the claim.

Clearly belief in the monster isn’t epistemically warranted: the perilousness of a situation is not part of that story (though this is not to accept that the belief is entirely without epistemic warrant – the fact that the experience has a verdical quality surely counts for something). But the belief is warranted in a certain kind of rationally defensible way. You’re not making a cognitive mistake if you believe: given how high the stakes are, given the fact that the experience seems to have a veridical quality, it’s reasonable for you to believe it.

This is in the present tense, so apparently the claim is after all that it’s reasonable to believe in the monster in general – not just during the hallucination but indefinitely afterward. I don’t think that claim is right. It could be right if ‘you’ had no knowledge of brain science, but the implied ‘you’ has gone to a psychiatrist and knows what hallucinations are, so that’s ruled out. So no, I don’t think it is reasonable for you to believe it, despite the veridical quality. At least not without asking a few questions first.

The monster came ‘crashing in through the window’ – so there would be broken glass if it were real. Is there any broken glass? Is there any physical evidence at all? Have you looked?

What about the fact that there was no contact? That’s very odd, isn’t it, if the monster is real? It’s ‘in your face’ but it doesn’t actually touch you? It goes to the trouble of crashing through the window (what floor is your bathroom on, by the way?) but it doesn’t attack you or touch you – well what kind of creature is that? Maybe not a real one? Eric MacDonald makes the same objection over there.

And then – if there is no physical evidence, and it didn’t touch you, then it certainly looks as if you had a very powerful hallucination. If that’s the case – there could well be something very wrong with you. You could have one hell of a brain tumor. The reasonable thing to do is go to a specialist, it’s not to go on thinking the monster is real as you did while it was (it seemed) breathing in your face.

The rest of the post of course makes an analogy with religion, but since the monster thing, as written, doesn’t work, I won’t bother with that.

The church isn’t giving an inch – on the contrary, it’s fighting like a starving tom cat.

The Catholic Church is being unfairly singled out for criticism of sexual abuse of children by priests and will not tolerate campaigns to discredit it, the powerful head of Italy’s bishops said on Monday.

Oh right – it’s all so terribly unfair. The church sets itself up as a moral arbiter for the entire world, and then it’s surprised and wounded when we get cross with it for its settled habit of hiding priestly child-rape from the police. Yes indeed, that is like so unfair. And it ‘won’t tolerate’ – what does it mean it won’t tolerate? What’s it going to do? What’s it threatening everyone with? Who do they think they are?

Oh it’s a stupid question. They think they’re the holy version of the Mafia, and of course they’re right, except for the holy part.

Speaking two days after Pope Benedict apologised to victims of sexual abuse in Ireland, Bagnasco said the Church was “not afraid of the truth, however painful and detestable” but would not accept any “generalised campaigns to discredit it.”

Well, chum, the church is just going to have to accept it, isn’t it. It has no way of preventing it, and it has no moral standing with which to deflect it. So go ahead and tell each other what you won’t tolerate or accept, but nobody else (apart from Damian Thompson) will pay much attention.

Fergus Finlay hasn’t much sympathy.

[R]eading the letter as a layman, I have to say it was terribly disappointing, and chillingly dishonest in parts…[T]here was no sense, where victims of abuse are concerned, that the church will in future, at the direction of the Pope himself, abandon the adversarial tactics that have characterised all their dealings with people who have been abused in the past…And right from the beginning of the letter, there is a sense that the Pope has chosen to distance himself and the Vatican from what happened in the church in Ireland. There is an air throughout the letter that he is somehow only just discovering what happened in Ireland and that he is “deeply disturbed by the information that has come to light”. The tone of this early part of the letter is deeply offensive because everyone knows the concealment of abuse, and the refusal to cooperate in any open way with investigation, has been a Vatican tactic from the very beginning. The notion that the Pope has had to chastise the Irish bishops for their conduct – as if their conduct wasn’t deeply embedded in church policy – is thoroughly dishonest.

There now, Cardinal Bagnasco, you see how it’s going? People don’t believe you. It isn’t working. The bluffing, the threatening, the pretending to be surprised, the distancing, the claims that everybody does it – none of it is working. You’re deep in the weeds. You will still have your church, but it will be smaller; fewer young men will sign up to be priests; even fewer people will let the Vatican tell them what to do; deference will be a lot scarcer.

If you guys had any sense you would stop bluffing and threatening and distancing, and at least try to claw back a few shreds of integrity from the wreckage. But clearly you’re determined to make things even worse for yourselves. Whatever.

From the Murphy Report:

In addition to their clerical education, many of those in authority in the Archdiocese had civil law degrees or occupied prestigious appointments in third level education…Despite their participation in civil society, it was not until late 1995 that officials of the Archdiocese first began to notify the civil authorities of complaints of clerical child sexual abuse. In this context it is significant, in the Commission’s view, that every bishop’s primary loyalty is to the Church itself. At his consecration every bishop, as well as making a profession of faith, must take an oath of fidelity to the Apostolic See. [p 7]

As can be seen clearly from the case histories, there is no doubt that the reaction of Church authorities to reports of clerical child sexual abuse in the early years of the Commission’s remit was to ensure that as few people as possible knew of the individual priest’s problem. There was little or no concern for the welfare of the abused child or for the welfare of other children who might come into contact with the priest. [p 10]

And so on. I recommend reading the first 28 pages, at least, if you haven’t already. The whole horrible mess is laid out there. They protected the institution at the expense of raped children.

Madeleine Bunting again, as with the Ryan report last year, almost gets it, but then she drops the ball at the end.

There will be plenty celebrating the Catholic church’s plight, and it is hard not to agree in some part with MacCulloch, that hubris has played a huge part in this institution’s history and its current crisis. But it is also important to acknowledge that this is more tragedy than anything else. For the victims, their families, their congregations – many of whom see no cause for celebration despite their need for truth – and for those causes on which the church has proved a trenchant champion, stirring lazy consciences on the arms race, global inequality and capitalist excess.

Causes don’t need the Catholic church. They really don’t. This is the most fundamental point of the whole loathsome tale, the one that Bunting almost got but then lost again: the church has no moral standing, so it is not useful for stirring lazy consciences. We just don’t need the church’s help on the arms race, global inequality and capitalist excess – especially since it comes at the price of the church’s ‘help’ on abortion and contraception. We don’t look to the Mafia for help with causes, and we don’t look to the Catholic church either.

You have to wonder sometimes, you know?

95,000 descendants of the prophet Muhammad are planning to bring a libel action in Britain over “blasphemous” cartoons of the founder of Islam, even though they were published in the Danish press. The defamation case is being prepared by Faisal Yamani, a Saudi lawyer acting for the descendants, who live in the Middle East, north Africa and as far afield as Australia.

They’re teasing us, right? They’re not serious. I mean, they’re serious about doing it, sure, but they’re not serious about the ‘descendants of the prophet Muhammad’ bit. They’re being ‘ironic,’ they’re playing to our expectations, they’re parodying their own reputation for believing silly things. Right? They don’t really think it means anything to talk about ‘descendants’ of someone who lived 14 centuries ago, right? Because they realize that over that many generations, any one ‘ancestor’ is lost in the crowd. Any 1400 years ago ‘ancestor’ is just some tiny tiny fraction of your total ancestry, so it’s just stupid to talk about being a ‘descendant.’ They know that – they’re just playing ‘dumb believer’ for the benefit of the audience, or something. They don’t really expect anybody to be impressed that they’re ‘descendants’ of Mo…

[A British lawyer] said the descendants could argue that the cartoons — which first appeared in the Jyllands-Posten newspaper in 2005, sparking violent protests around the world — were a direct slur on them. “Direct descendants of the prophet have a particular place within Muslim society…By effectively criticising and making fun of the prophet you are, by implication, holding them up to scandal, contempt and public ridicule,” he said. “So it may be that they will suffer some kind of damage among their own community.”

Well then why don’t we all get together and sue Hanna-Barbera for doing ‘The Flintstones’? That’s got to be a nice little earner.