Year: 2010

  • Jesus and Mo find the common thread in religions

    We all hate atheists. And compassion. We all hate atheists and compassion.

  • The Odone file

    Want some more Cristina Odone? Why not – she repays attention. She does a nice job of modeling the religious mind for us.

    As I read Nomad, the tone of this feverish, self-justifying tome reminded me of a Dutch social worker I met once. Hirsi Ali (who indeed worked for years as a translator for the Dutch social services) shares that same intolerant world view and politically correct instincts.

    This is Odone, complaining about someone else being feverish and self-justifying, and intolerant and politically correct. Does Odone think her writing comes across as placid and generous, tolerant and autonomous? Seriously?

    In her autobiographical accounts, Infidel (a worldwide bestseller) and now Nomad, Hirsi Ali blames everything that goes wrong in her own and her family life on Islam.

    Odone goes Kristof one better – she not only knows more than Hirsi Ali about Islam, she knows more about the cause of everything that went wrong in her life. Hirsi Ali thinks Islam was behind a lot of it, but Odone knows better. How? Well…because, that’s how. Because Islam is a religion, so it couldn’t have been a religion that was the cause, so that’s how. Odone is all-knowing and all-seeing. And humble.

    Hirsi Ali’s attack on the faith she has renounced would gain credibility if she could acknowledge its virtues as well as its flaws. But no, Islam is without merit in her eyes, a religion without poetry, charity, or wisdom. Its fanatics are not extremists; they are the norm.

    Now, pesky secularists might think that Hirsi Ali would know what she was talking about because she was there at the time and Odone was not, but sensible people can see through that kind of thing with no trouble, thank you very much. Hirsi Ali was there and being there was bad so it made her all like twisted and biased, while Odone was not there, Odone was in the UK where people like her don’t so much get their genitalia chopped off when they’re five or forced into marriage with some stranger a few years later, so she is in a position to second-guess Hirsi Ali about Hirsi Ali’s own experience because Odone is mellow and calm and reasonable and she loves the pope like a father.

    After that powerful insight, Odone complains about Hirsi Ali’s success (though she forgets to mention the death threats, and the dead Theo Van Gogh, and the having to live as a fugitive, and the being kicked out of her apartment and then out of the Netherlands), and then she gets down to business.

    A Muslim-basher, in our secular culture, is welcome everywhere. Even when they are capable only of the kind of obsessive, one-track thinking that gives social workers a bad name.

    A “Muslim-basher.”

    I cannot remain civil when commenting on Cristina Odone, so I had best stop. She makes me angry.

  • Jesus and Mo find the common thread in religions

    We all hate atheists. And compassion. We all hate atheists and compassion.

  • Jesus and Mo on moral bankruptcy

    They have their moral compass in good order.

  • Telegraph reports its own hatred and parochialism

    Media reporter informs us of fury of Odone at C4 documentary on pope.

  • Peter Beinart on Zionism and liberalism

    In Israel today, humane, universalistic Zionism does not wield power; it is gasping for air.

  • Reza Aslan on the academy

    We need scholars who understand that there is no division between the world of academia and the popular world.

  • Thinking through the freedom flotilla

    If there is to be a future, it means thinking through the problems in ways that get beyond the familiar intransigence.

  • Nathan Schneider talks to Richard Amesbury

    Atheism has always been “otherized” as the opposite of what America represents.

  • Jack of Kent on an illiberal judgment

    The CPS position on Section 127 is simply intolerable in a free society.

  • Iran: 26 people in imminent danger of execution

    The Iranian authorities are trying to spread fear to prevent new protests on the anniversary of the elections.

  • Gita Sahgal talks to Asaba Post

    When identity claims are smuggled in as part of non-discrimination norms, the goal of equality can easily be derailed.

  • Update on CFI

    There’s been a lot of unhappy and unfortunate stuff going on at the Center for Inquiry lately. I’m not going to link to any sources because I haven’t been able to find any that seem at all impartial (and also because several of them are at Facebook rather than at more public sites). To summarize briefly – Paul Kurtz was ousted or removed or set aside (see? I can’t even find an impartial verb) as CEO, and Ron Lindsay took over that job. There were changes. There were funding cuts or re-allocations. (See? Depends what you call it.) Senior people left, for various reasons. (See?) Paul Kurtz resigned altogether, and published an open letter about his resignation and the changes at CFI. There were pointed editorials in Free Inquiry; there were pointed blog posts at the CFI blog and elsewhere, which generated long threads full of pointed comments from CFI staffers and former staffers and members.

    Stuff. Lots and lots of stuff. Competing and conflicting accounts; resentments; bad blood; gossip; attempts to tamp down all these; repeat. Public linen-washing. Recrimination.

    On June 1 CFI issued an urgent fundraising appeal. That’s an exception to the no links, because it’s a press release and it’s unambiguous. They need money. By all means donate to them if you’re so inclined.

    They had a donor who had forked over 800 grand every year; the donor has stopped giving and has also not responded to communications from CFI.

    CFI was forced to lay off some people. One of them was Norm Allen, who among other things ran the African Americans for Humanism program. He was also – this is my addition, I haven’t seen it mentioned anywhere – their liason with Leo Igwe. I don’t mean “Leo will be cut off from CFI now!” – I just mean that’s another valuable thing he was involved with, and one that I know a little about. Debbie Goddard is taking over much of Norm Allen’s work, and I’m confident that Leo will not be cut off from CFI – though I can’t say I’m confident that whatever money they were spending on their Nigerian branch is safe. I don’t know what their Nigerian branch involves – maybe it’s just a notional branch that really means some part-time volunteers, and maybe it will be no worse off than it was. I hope so.

    At any rate, all this did not go smoothly. That’s not surprising. That’s you updated.

  • HolfordWatch on fish oil excitement

    The finding is interesting, but it does not show that fish oil pills help with concentration, ADHD or depression.

  • Ben Goldacre on the return of fish oil

    More excited reporting of not so exciting research.

  • Murders of Congolese activists must be investigated

    Chebeya was an outspoken critic of corruption and human rights abuses.

  • DRC: police chief admits role in murder of Chebeya

    Floribert Chebeya, head of the human rights group Voix des Sans Voix, was found dead on Wednesday.

  • Australia: doctors oppose FGM

    That includes ‘ritual nicking.’

  • Always look on the bright side of FGM

    Nicholas Kristof tells off Ayaan Hirsi Ali because of course he knows far more about Islam than she does.

    To those of us who have lived and traveled widely in Africa and Asia, descriptions of Islam often seem true but incomplete.

    Including, apparently, descriptions by people who grew up immersed in Islam, genitally mutilated under Islam, beaten up by their teachers of Islam, issued death threats from adherents of Islam. The descriptions are true – but Kristof wants more. He wants to hear about the pretty calligraphy.

    The repression of women, the persecution complexes, the lack of democracy, the volatility, the anti-Semitism, the difficulties modernizing, the disproportionate role in terrorism — those are all real. But if those were the only faces of Islam, it wouldn’t be one of the fastest-growing religions in the world today. There is also the warm hospitality toward guests, including Christians and Jews; charity for the poor; the aesthetic beauty of Koranic Arabic; the sense of democratic unity as rich and poor pray shoulder to shoulder in the mosque.

    That first list is quite a doozy! Repression of women, no democracy, anti-Semitism, anti-modernism, affinity for terrorism [and he forgot homophobia, hatred of outsiders and “infidels,” madrassas, the death penalty for leaving, and a few more large items] – with all that is it really surprising that Islam gets some criticism? It sounds absurd to admit to all that and then say yes but, especially when the yes buts are themselves dubious. Hospitality to Christians and Jews? What – they get a nice meal before they get driven out of town? And as for the sense of “democratic unity as rich and poor pray shoulder to shoulder” – well it may be democratic unity but it sure as hell isn’t gender unity; women are banished to the back of the bus. Forgive me if I can’t get too sentimental because Kristof gets dewy about rich and poor men praying shoulder to shoulder in the mosque.

    Really – he should know better. He should know better to admit repression of women, no democracy, anti-Semitism, anti-modernism, affinity for terrorism and then go on to say “but it’s not all bad.” Fuck that. With that list, it’s bad enough, and good liberals shouldn’t be cobbling together feeble excuses for it.

  • More tinkling cymbal

    But that’s not all, of course. Odone has more to say than that. Odone has a lot to say.

    First of all she complains that Channel 4 chose, to present a show on paedophile priests, a guy who is “an avowed atheist” and who has “no knowledge of the contemporary Catholic Church,” as if both are obvious disqualifications for presenting a show on paedophile priests. Her thinking seems to be that you have to believe in god and be an expert on the Catholic church in order to present a tv show on a concentration of child rapists in a particular profession. In other words her thinking seems to be that only someone who starts out with some sympathy for clerics in general and Catholic priests in particular can do a good job of presenting the subject. But that kind of sympathy is just what has allowed rapists to hide behind the robes of the church for so long. Sympathy is not what’s wanted; what’s wanted is the kind of stony unsympathy that Johann Hari so beautifully demonstrated on the BBC a few weeks ago. You don’t want people who will make allowances and excuses, you want people who will say this is criminal and outrageous and has to stop right now.

    Then she goes on to complain that Peter Tatchell is presenting a show on the pope.

    How appropriate, huh? Tatchell, the gay rights campaigner, getting his hooks into his favourite hate figure. Who cares that in doing so he will be offending the more than four million Catholics in this country?

    Ugly, isn’t it – “his hooks.” Who is accusing whom of having a hate figure? And then the self-pity about offending Catholics – because Peter Tatchell presents a show on the reactionary head of a reactionary church. If the four million Catholics don’t want to be “offended” then they should have a better church. (Yes, that’s irony. They can’t have a better church, of course, because they don’t get to decide. But this is why their being “offended” is so beside the point. They aren’t the church, they didn’t create the church, talking about the pope is not talking about them. They’re to blame for sticking with it; others are not to blame for saying what’s wrong with it.)

    As for Channel 4, there is a very clear way for it to show itself to be in good faith, rather than bad: it must commission a programme on gays presented by Anne Atkins.

    That’s simply disgusting. “Gays” are not the pope; “gays” do not tell millions of people what to do; gays are not the Catholic church or any other church, gays have no institutional power over other people; a programme on gays would not be the same kind of thing as one on the pope, so there is no need to have a homophobic presenter for the sake of “balance.”

    Milk of human kindness eh.