Year: 2010

  • A duel at sunrise

    Seriously. Cristina Odone must feel very sure that Richard Dawkins won’t sue her for libel, or she wouldn’t say “Richard Dawkins is responsible for peddling a lot of lies about faith” in her blog at The Telegraph, and the Telegraph wouldn’t let her, either. She wouldn’t just casually risk a money-devouring and time-devouring lawsuit just for the hell of it, or for the tiny fun of accusing Dawkins of peddling lies in a Telegraph blog. She writes for the national press in the UK, so she can’t possibly be unaware of the UK’s insane libel laws and how they are used. She can’t possibly be unaware of Simon Singh and the BCA and the word “bogus” – so it’s surely fair to say that she simply would not use that word if she were not very confident that she and her paper would not be sued when she did. That’s fair isn’t it? I’m not being uncharitable? She can’t have thought “Risky word – libel – lawsuits – Singh – two years – hundreds of thousands – better not – oh what the hell, I’ll risk it, because it’s worth it.” Can she?

    No. So she must have felt safe. How could she have felt safe other than because she knows Dawkins was part of the campaign against the libel laws and for Singh’s right to say what he said? Or perhaps because she knows more generally what his principles are. At any rate she clearly did feel safe, and feeling safe, she went right ahead and accused him of lying.

    She’s not a good person. She is apparently a “good Catholic,” in the sense that she is blindly loyal to the Catholic church and will stoop to almost anything to defend it – but she is not a good person. She takes advantage of other people’s principles in order to defame them.

  • Cristina Odone demonstrates Catholic liberality

    Says Dawkins “peddles lies.” Clearly she knows he won’t sue for libel, so she feels free to libel him.

  • Kristof’s strident review

    ‘Hirsi Ali denounces Islam with a ferocity that I find strident, potentially feeding religious bigotry.’

  • Andrew Roberts on Nicholas Kristof on Ayaan Hirsi Ali

    For true stridency one should read Kristof’s almost unhinged response to Hirsi Ali’s book.

  • My owner knows what’s best for me

    There’s Rowdha Yousef, who is worried about this alarming trend for Saudi women to start making a few faint gestures toward acting like human beings. She is outraged.

    With 15 other women, she started a campaign, “My Guardian Knows What’s Best for Me.” Within two months, they had collected more than 5,400 signatures on a petition “rejecting the ignorant requests of those inciting liberty” and demanding “punishments for those who call for equality between men and women, mingling between men and women in mixed environments, and other unacceptable behaviors.”

    Her guardian knows what’s best for her, therefore she wants to help see to it that all women will continue to be required to have guardians whether they want them or not. She is not, apparently, content to have a ‘guardian’ herself (at age 39, with three children), she wants all women to be forced to have them. She doesn’t seem to be slowed down by the thought that the fact that her guardian knows what’s best for her doesn’t automatically mean that all guardians know what’s best for women. It would be expecting far too much to think she should suspect that requiring women to have ‘guardians’ indicates a view of women that is not altogether egalitarian.

  • But is there a common ground to be found?

    Eli Horowitz of Rust Belt Philosophy finds the Templeton Foundation and its everlasting questions irksome. The World Science Festival has its Science ‘N’ Faith panel, as we know, which asks rilly deep questions:

    For all their historical tensions, scientists and religious scholars from a wide variety of faiths ponder many similar questions—how did the universe begin? How might it end? What is the origin of matter, energy, and life?

    Ooh yeah, how, how? Eli adds a few more deep questions.

    How many years can some people exist before they’re allowed to be free? Who put the “bop” in the “bop-shoo-bop-shoo-bop”? Why do we drive on parkways and park on driveways? What’s eating Gilbert Grape? Who framed Roger Rabbit?

    Ooh yeah, who, what, how? I bet Chad Orzel would know.

    Meanwhile – Josh Rosenau’s claim, in his post on why there shouldn’t be any atheist scientists on the panel, tells us what the panel will be about:

    The premise of a panel on “the relationship between science and faith” is, after all, that there is a relationship…The whole point Affirmative Atheists are making is that there is no dialogue to be had. Which means that the panel would descend into a metaconversation about whether there should even be conversations like the one they were supposed to be having.

    But Josh’s description doesn’t match the description given by the World Science Festival itself:

    The modes of inquiry and standards for judging progress are, to be sure, very different. But is there a common ground to be found? ABC News’ Bill Blakemore moderates a panel that includes evolutionary geneticist Francisco Ayala, astrobiologist Paul Davies, Biblical scholar Elaine Pagels and Buddhist scholar Thupten Jinpa. These leading thinkers who come at these issues from a range of perspectives will address the evolving relationship between science and faith.

    The question mark after the word ‘found’ seems to indicate that the panel has not been given orders to start from the certainty that there is a common ground to be found, but rather to discuss whether there is or not; that being the case, it is entirely unobvious that an atheist would send the discussion careening off into obsesso-crazy land, as Josh claims.

  • More irregular verbs

    Jason Rosenhouse has an excellent post on the science ‘n’ faith panel at the World Science Festival.

    He notes that Chad Orzel says, “The simple fact is that people with fixed and absolute views do not make for an interesting conversation,” and comments

    Right, because it’s only New Atheists that have fixed and absolute viewpoints. When someone like Francisco Ayala writes,

    I contend that both — scientists denying religion and believers rejecting science — are wrong. Science and religious beliefs need not be in contradiction. If they are properly understood, they cannot be in contradiction because science and religion concern different matters.

    there is nothing fixed or absolute in his views? To declare bluntly that any conception of the science and religious dispute different from his own is an improper (as opposed to merely different) view is every bit as absolute as anything the New Atheists say.

    And he gets to say it louder than most of us, thanks to the Templeton Prize. Not because he wrote a book that appealed to a lot of people, as several of the New Atheists did, but because Templeton gave him its prize. Templeton gave him its prize because he could be relied on to say things that Templeton wants said – in other words, because his view is pretty fixed and absolute.

  • Peter Tatchell to do C4 documentary on pope

    Widdecombe, Odone, Jack Valero of Opus Dei pitch fits.

  • Vatican wants to engage with atheists

    But only with the ‘noble’ ones, not the polemical kind – no Onfray or Dawkins or Hitchens thanks.

  • The Nation looks at Templeton

    ‘Scholars aren’t quite sure what the “science of Godly Love” means, exactly.’

  • The modes of inquiry are, to be sure, very different

    The World Science Festival is offering a “Faith and Science” panel, funded by the Templeton Foundation, of course. Chad Orzel disagrees with Jerry Coyne and Sean Carroll on the wrong-headedness of this. Sean points out

    there is a somewhat obvious omission of a certain viewpoint: those of us who think that science and religion are not compatible. And there are a lot of us! Also, we’re right. A panel like this does a true disservice to people who are curious about these questions and could benefit from a rigorous airing of the issues, rather than a whitewash where everyone mumbles pleasantly about how we should all just get along.

    To which Orzel responds

    I’m not convinced you need anyone on the panel to make the case that science and religion are fundamentally incompatible…The interesting subject of conversation is not so much the absolute compatibility or not of science and religion– given that neither side is really going to budge on that– but rather how it is that religious scientists reconcile the supposedly incompatible sides of the issue.

    He doesn’t know that “neither side is really going to budge on that” and therefore he doesn’t really know that a discussion of it would be immovable and uninteresting. It’s true that it’s unlikely that either side will budge as a side and as a result of being on the panel, but what individuals including those attending the panel will do is much less obvious. His dismissal is, as so often with accommodationists, flippant and dogmatic at once.

    Josh Rosenau thinks it’s good stuff though – in fact better than that: he says Orzel is absolutely right.

    Someone like Dawkins would stop the World Science Festival panel cold. The whole point Affirmative Atheists are making is that there is no dialogue to be had. Which means that the panel would descend into a metaconversation about whether there should even be conversations like the one they were supposed to be having. And that wouldn’t inform anyone.

    Why wouldn’t that inform anyone? Rosenau doesn’t say. Why should there be conversations like the one they were supposed to be having at a science fest? It’s certainly not obvious to me, given that science and “faith” operate in rather different ways. It’s also not obvious to me that, or why, an explanation of that fact would not be interesting.

    Larry Moran comments on Orzel and Rosenau.

  • Look out! Another slippery slope!

    Privacy and health concerns, moral or religious convictions, sensitivity training, indoctrinate, myths of the homosexual movement.

  • Saudi woman bravely resists reform

    Started campaign “My Guardian Knows What’s Best for Me.”

  • Slippery slope! Watch out!

    Disability campaigner wants to impose her unreasonable fears on everyone.

  • ASA rules against church miracle cure claims

    We noted that the ad stated “… I have seen the dead raised and I have witnessed nearly all types of healing miracles.”

  • An extended chat with Hitchens

    ‘There are all kinds of stupid people that annoy me but what annoys me most is a lazy argument.’

  • Nazia Quazi is free at last

    Canadian was held in Saudi Arabia for three years by her father under ‘guardian laws.’

  • Brazil proposes ‘fetal rights’ bill

    Next up: bill of rights for ovaries.

  • Taliban attacks peace jirga

    Burka-clad suicide-bomb attackers, rocket grenade launchers, no peace please we’re jihadists.

  • Don’t mess with the Vatican

    Okay, I give up – why is the Obama administration siding with the Vatican against people who think it should be accountable for its many crimes?

    Faced with a number of court cases in the United States that have named the pope himself as a defendant in the enabling and covering up of many rapes, the Vatican has evolved the strategy of claiming that the Holy See is in effect a sovereign state and thus possessed of immunity from prosecution. It has now been announced that the Obama administration will be advising the Supreme Court to adopt this view of the matter.

    Why? What’s the thinking? Why should a church be declared a sovereign state? Why especially should the Obama admin be taking that view at the very time when there is a push to prosecute that church for protecting child-rapists for decades?

    [T]he State Department is required by Congress to make an annual report on the human rights record of every government with which we have relations. Yet there is no annual human rights report on the Vatican—or Vatican City or the Holy See, if you prefer. When questioned on this rather glaring lacuna, officials at Foggy Bottom say that for human rights purposes, the Vatican is not a state.

    So it gets to be a state when that is convenient for it, and it gets to be not a state when that is convenient for it. Why? Why is the catholic church alone among religious outfits given such special privileges? Why is the rule of law not more important than the Vatican’s desire to escape any form of accountability for its cowardly self-regarding cruelty-perpetuating actions?