Year: 2010

Hurry up and get back to blogging, 1.5 of you exclaim, we’re jonesing here. Very well. Since the vagaries of jet lag this time are working even on the westbound leg, and waking me up after three hours of sleep where normally I just crash and sleep for 8 or 9 hours on getting home – I’ll oblige.

First there was this seminar, which you heard about beforehand, the one that started 3 hours after I landed. A lot of it was Q and A, and it was rather like facing an audience of mind-readers. They all seemed to know exactly what I was getting at, and to feel the same way about it, and to have illustrative stories to tell. I wasn’t really expecting that. I was expecting, I suppose, broad general interest and curiosity (in anyone who showed up), since why else bother to attend, but I wasn’t expecting quite such…”oh, you too?”

I chatted to some while signing books afterward, and some of the same people were at the launch a couple of hours later. One lovely guy (hi Jan!) has been following the whole accommodationism-Mooney wrangles and sees Mooney exactly the way I do. Ha. Even in Sweden people have his number.

One of the real high points was the next morning, when I went to the office of Glöm aldrig Pela och Fadime – Never forget Pela and Fadime. They are two women who were murdered for reasons of “honor” and shame, and the campaign is run by a terrific, brave Iraqi woman called Sara Mohammad. I asked if there is any kind of umbrella organization that links the work of people like Sara and that of others like Mina Ahadi, Necla Kelek, Maryam Namazie, Houzan Mahmoud, Homa Arjomand, Azar Majedi, Fadela Amara, etc etc etc – and apparently there isn’t. There should be. We all agreed there should be; solidarity, you know.

That’s an installment. There’s more.

Hello, I’m back – after 19 hours of travel. I left the hotel at about 7:20 this morning and got home at about 5:30 p.m. which was 2:30 a.m. Stockholm time. You see what I’m getting at. 7:20 Sunday morning to 2:30 Monday morning, on the road. It’s a bit fatiguing.

But never mind that. I had the most brilliant, incredible time – it was the best ever. I met all these terrific, brave women…

like Sara Mohammed of Never Forget Pele and Fadime –

like Sara Mats Rasmussen who burned a hijab in Norway on Women’s Day 2009 and has a regular column in Aftenposten

and many more. And that’s quite apart from what a great place Stockholm is.

Barney Zwartz channels Mark Helprin (via an article from an anthology titled New Threats to Freedom. It’s the usual atheist-hating sludge pretending to wit: everything is reversed: it’s not religion that is conformist and coercive, good heavens no, it is that pesky dogmatic militant belligerent ‘my way or the highway atheism.’

Really. Really. I know I’ve said this before, but does Barney Zwartz never go into a bookstore? Does Mark Helprin? I was in the University bookstore here a couple of days ago, and the atheist empire has gotten smaller as well as less visible. It used to take up a good chunk of one shelf, so maybe about 2′, at about chest level, under a sign that said Religious studies and atheism. Now there are no atheist books under that sign, or anywhere else on the adjacent shelves. I looked and looked and finally had to ask, and I was led to a distant shelf where there were a few lonely atheist books at ankle level. There’s hegemony for you! Meanwhile there are many shelves under Christianity, many more under Judaism, many more under Islam, many more under Religious studies, many more under various subject headings – shelf after shelf after shelf after shelf. Yet, somehow, it is atheism that is A New Threat to Freedom.

[Helprin] opens with an anecdote from his youth of trying to philosophise his way out of a fist fight, only to be told by his opponent, “don’t give me none a dat college stuff!” This, Helprin suggests, is exactly the sort of tactic Richard Dawkins employs, confining any discussion to a realm that will give the answer he wants.

Really. Helprin “suggests” that Dawkins employs “exactly” the sort of tactic that says “don’t give me none a dat college stuff!” and then punches you.

If Helprin really “suggests” that, he’s being flagrantly dishonest. If Zwartz got him wrong, then it’s Zwartz who is being flagrantly dishonest. Yet both of them, apparently, think it’s atheists who are coercive.

Since time immemorial, insistence on a sole path to truth has been essential to intolerance. Long the preserve of religion, in the 20th century it went atheistic totalitarian, and has now reached the free West, Helprin says.

Totalitarian; that’s quite a strong charge. Yet it’s atheists who are coercive.

Helprin attacks the atheist bus campaign that began in Britain and has reached Australia. “Signs on buses tell you it’s OK not to believe in God. Admitted, but what of signs that said, ‘it’s OK not to be gay’, ‘it’s OK not to be black’, ‘it’s OK not to be a Jew’? While true, these statements are more than the simple expression of a point of view. Accurately perceived, they are an ugly form of pressure that while necessarily legal is nonetheless indecent.”

No. Being gay or black is not a belief or a not-belief. Being gay or black* is not parallel to not believing in God. Saying it’s OK not to believe something should not be construed as a form of pressure when it is obviously an attempt to counter a form of pressure.

After that there’s a lot of windy stuff conflating aesthetics and emotions with something ineffable, and using that to swear at atheists for being narrow and philistine and boring. It’s stupid, malevolent, pretentious stuff.

And now I really am leaving.

*Being a Jew mixes the two.

Okay I’m off. Have to make sure I have everything I need, and do various other chores. Take care of yourselves, drink your Ovaltine. I’ll be back Sunday.

James Fergusson says everybody should calm down and not get in such a swivet about women being treated like rebellious livestock in Afghanistan.

This does not mean the west should stand by in silence. On the contrary, it is our duty to go on arguing the case for gender equality and to keep Afghans engaged in that old debate. But we have no right to be shrill…

No right to be “shrill”? Why not? Why doesn’t anybody have a right to be “shrill” about gross cruelty and vindictiveness and oppression?

Well because we don’t understand, Fergusson says.

It might help if we understood the Taliban better. The harshness of the punishments they sometimes mete out only seems incomprehensible to the west. The strict sexual propriety the Taliban insist upon is rooted in ancient Pashtun tribal custom, the over-riding purpose of which is to protect the integrity of the tribe, and nothing threatens the gene pool like extramarital relations…The Pashtuns are, famously, the largest tribal society in the world. Some 42m of them are divided into about 60 tribes and 400 sub-clans and they are intensely proud of their culture which has survived three millenniums of almost constant invasion and occupation.

What does he mean “works”? It “works” because the Pashtuns are a large tribe? So the fuck what? Who cares how big a tribe is if its bigness depends on brutal control of half its members and a life of generalized hostility?

The west views gender equality as an absolute human right and so we should. But no country, certainly not Britain, has yet managed unequivocally to establish that right at home; and we tend to forget both how recent our progress towards it is, as well as how hard the struggle has been. Full women’s suffrage was not granted in Britain until 1928. With such a track record, is it not presumptuous to insist that a proud, patriarchal society that has survived for 3,000 years should now instantly mirror us?

The fact that Britain has not yet managed unequivocally to establish gender equality is not a reason to be timid about resisting the Taliban version of gender inequality. Nobody is insisting that Afghanistan should instantly mirror Britain, but that’s not the only alternative to thinking “a proud, patriarchal society that has survived for 3,000 years” is nothing to be proud of when half its people are born to fear, deprivation and misery.

The Boers were a proud, patriarchal society too; so what? James Fergusson probably wouldn’t say “is it not presumptuous to insist that a proud, racist society should instantly mirror us?”; yet the word “patriarchal” apparently has a different kind of resonance. It shouldn’t.

Lord Mackay of Clashfern is a funny guy. He’s a We Wee Free, and he thinks Scots courts should use the bible to help them out with the law stuff.

Mackay, who is also the current Lord Clerk Register, the oldest surviving “Great Office of State” in Scotland, now acts as honorary president of the Scottish Bible Society (SBS), and has invited sheriffs and judges to refamiliarise themselves with biblical principles and act accordingly when presiding over court cases…

“I believe the teaching of the Bible is vitally important for guidance in daily living for all of us.“The…modern version is especially useful in dealing with our day-to-day challenges.

“If we use it in this way we will soon learn that what it says about human beings is as true today as it was when it was originally written all these years ago.”

Yeah? Like what? Deuteronomy 13, perhaps?

¹If there arise among you a prophet, or a dreamer of dreams, and giveth thee a sign or a wonder, ²And the sign or the wonder come to pass, whereof he spake unto thee, saying, Let us go after other gods, which thou hast not known, and let us serve them;

 ³Thou shalt not hearken unto the words of that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams…

 ⁵And that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams, shall be put to death…

So shalt thou put the evil away from the midst of thee. ⁶If thy brother, the son of thy mother, or thy son, or thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy friend, which is as thine own soul, entice thee secretly, saying, Let us go and serve other gods, which thou hast not known, thou, nor thy fathers…

⁸Thou shalt not consent unto him, nor hearken unto him; neither shall thine eye pity him, neither shalt thou spare, neither shalt thou conceal him: ⁹But thou shalt surely kill him; thine hand shall be first upon him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people.

 ¹⁰And thou shalt stone him with stones, that he die…

As true today as it was when it was originally written all these years ago?

Or how about Numbers 25?

 ¹And Israel abode in Shittim, and the people began to commit whoredom with the daughters of Moab.

 ²And they called the people unto the sacrifices of their gods: and the people did eat, and bowed down to their gods…

⁴And the LORD said unto Moses, Take all the heads of the people, and hang them up before the LORD against the sun, that the fierce anger of the LORD may be turned away from Israel. ⁵And Moses said unto the judges of Israel, Slay ye every one his men that were joined unto Baalpeor.

Useful for judges, is it?