Category: Articles

Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain and One Law for All are calling on everyone to join the Day of Agreement.

It’s quite easy to do.

On 10 October, upload the day’s logo as your avatar on social media, Tweet #dayofagreement or try it with your colleagues, family and friends.

You can also join our five minute flash-mob at 12 noon in central London. (Email for more details).

Just remember, you can’t disagree with anyone – your colleagues, spouse, lover(s), mates, neighbours, children, bosses, or even politicians…

You are not allowed to dissent, ‘offend’ or question.

And before anyone gets too excited, they have to remember that they must also agree with everything you say. It’s only fair…

Seems impossible?

But that is what is expected of those of us who question, criticise or choose to leave Islam, including many Muslims and ex-Muslims…

Try it.

And while it all seems a bit of fun – on October 10 International Day against the Death Penalty – don’t forget that there are many living under Sharia law who are daily facing threats, imprisonment and execution for merely expressing themselves.

Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain
BM Box 1919, London WC1N 3XX, UK
Tel: +44 (0) 7719166731
exmuslimcouncil@gmail.com

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In the time it takes you to read this article, over 50 young girls will have their clitoris hacked out. What are you going to do about it?

Each girl will be pinned down, with no anaesthetic, whilst 8,000 nerve endings cringe at the touch of an unclean scalpel. Each girl will scream and writhe and howl – but you won’t hear any of them. Each girl will be irreversibly, unbearably, agonisingly mutilated.

“I heard it,” described Ayaan Hirsi Ali, “like a butcher snipping the fat off a piece of meat. A piercing pain shot up between my legs”. Skin rips, blood pours, cries screech. But it wasn’t over for her just yet: next “came the sewing… the long, blunt needle clumsily pushed into my bleeding outer labia,” thread weaving through thread to leave behind only a miniscule opening for urination and menstruation.

The scars of this torture, butchery on a factory-line scale – and that is the only way to describe it – will never fade. Premenstrual cramps, traumatic periods, an interminable stench of soured blood (caused by menstrual difficulties), problems with pregnancy and childbirth, pain during sexual intercourse, psychological damage and the risk of fistula are but a few of the long, long list of health complications that will haunt every girl’s adulthood. That’s if they survive the immediate blood loss, infection and severe trauma. It’s an experience from which a child may never fully recover.

Conservative estimates suggest that over 100 million women worldwide have been subjected to female genital mutilation (FGM). Article Five of the UN Declaration of Human Rights decrees that no one “shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”. And surely such human rights are universal; or else they are nothing.

Yet it is so easy to fall into the relativist quicksand, to jettison logic and lose perspective. Dr Richard Shweder is convinced that “many African women view [the clitoris] as an unbidden, unwanted, ugly and vestigial male-like element that should be removed”. In the guise of ‘tolerance’ for the beliefs and practices of other cultures, what is revealed is a shameless double standard, a prescription for inaction and indifference in the face of the most horrendous cruelty, a blank cheque for tyrants and oppressors. We mustn’t let the wool be pulled over our eyes.

It was Isaiah Berlin who acknowledged the undeniable truism that “human being must have some common values or they cease to be human” at all – and truisms have a knack of remaining true. How can gruesome and unjust practices be ring-fenced from criticism just because others practise them? Is it really a form of respect to abstain from criticism, or a form of infantilisation? How can the rights of someone born in Luxor differ from those of someone born in London?

The excuse of ‘it’s their culture’ has surely run its course. According to Maryam Namazie, such myopia only “legitimizes and maintains savagery”. When the rhetorical gift-wrap is discarded, relativism is no more than a hollow shell of reality. When you put culture first and human beings second, the only result is violations of human rights. But a culture can only consist of human beings, and by its very nature, can’t espouse beliefs, can’t endorse barbarism, can’t think for itself. Only human beings can.

Far too often in dialogues of this sort, we’re topsy-turvy from the outset. Our perception of a culture is more often than not defined by whichever groups from within shout the loudest – hegemonies that usually comprise, coincidentally, the executors of persecution, those in positions of power and authority. Our understanding (or, more accurately, our misunderstanding) of culture, in the opinion of leading political theorist Bhikhu Parekh, “tends to essentialize identity and impose on the relevant groups a unity of views and experiences they do not, and cannot, have. Not all women, gay people, black people and Muslims take the same view of their identity, or manifest it in the same way”. The marginalised and the disempowered rarely, if ever, get the chance to assert what their culture might be.

But quite frankly, girls know that FGM is wrong simply because it hurts. “I thought,” said Boge Gebre, an Ethiopian woman, “how can this be my culture, if it kills me?… I knew I was not a cow, a chattel, and I did not want to be treated like one. No woman wants to be abducted or cut up. This is true whatever your culture”. When the culture of the oppressor is privileged over the culture of the oppressed, we begin to flounder in a very perilous sea indeed.

Every time we flinch in debates over the universality of human rights, another girl flinches at the sight of the razor blade or shard of glass that may well ruin her life, or end it. In every part of the world, there are costs incurred for every human right that is breached: in the lives lost to brutality; in the extinguishing of views that would give so much to communities; in the potential progress that could have been made by those who have been and continue to be rendered too scared to speak out, let alone to pursue their dreams. As Salman Rushdie observes so astutely, “Everybody wants the same thing: to be free, to choose their own futures, to feel that there is a future. This is universal”.

You can sign Avaaz’s petition against the FGM in the UK online. Go to

http://www.avaaz.org/en/petition/Stop_female_genital_mutilation_in_the_UK/

“As Bertrand Russell said, ‘Most people would rather die than think; most people do’,” quips A.C. Grayling, leaning forward as though offering me a truffle of wisdom for my delectation.  Philosophy is a rather strange business in the modern world of consumerism and commerce, I suppose.  We’re so used to being force-fed ideas these days that we rarely, if ever, dare to stop and think for ourselves.  And that’s where Grayling bucks the trend.

Author of over twenty books including a secular bible (‘The Good Book’) as well as countless newspaper and magazine columns, Grayling has been a paradigm of humanism for many years: Vice President of the British Humanist Association, patron of Dignity in Dying, Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society… the list goes on.  And yet, had I anticipated some sort of stuffy Socratic dialogue with a kooky academic or a living, breathing replica of Rodin’s Thinker (with added mane), I would have been taken aback by his down-to-earth, congenial presence.

What makes Grayling tick is “the fact that the world is so rich in interest and in puzzles, and that the task of finding out as much as we can about it is not an endless task but certainly one which is going to take us many, many millennia to complete”.  There’s a sort of childlike grin that beams out at me, as he affirms that “that’s exciting – discovery is exciting”.  Grayling joys in doubt and possibility, in invention and innovation: the tasks of the open mind and open inquiry.  It’s a mindset, he reveals, that “loves the open-endedness and the continuing character of the conversation that mankind has with itself about all these things that really matter”.

It is this that marks the line in the sand between religion and science.  The temptation to fall for the former hook, line and sinker is plain to see: “People like narratives, they like to have an explanation, they like to know where they are going”.  Weaving another string of thought into his tapestry of human psychology, Grayling laments that his fellow beings “don’t want to have to think these things out for themselves.  They like the nice, pre-packaged answer that’s just handed to them by somebody authoritative with a big beard”.  He looks down towards a small flower arrangement on the table, and plays with it contemplatively before continuing in an almost plaintive tone: “And that is a kind of betrayal, in a way, of the fact that we have curiosity but, most of all, we have intelligence and so we should be questioning, challenging, trying to find out”.

But the pessimism doesn’t persist for too long.  Grayling’s biting wit is never too far from the surface of his arguments, especially when he’s waxing lyrical about theology.  By tracing what he calls “a kind of Nietszchean genealogy of religion,” he adopts a storyteller’s tone: “You see a geography – and it’s an interesting one – in that the dryads and the nymphs used to be in the trees and in the streams,” from whence they evaporated into the wind and the sun.  The more humankind has discovered about the world, the more remote our gods have become.  “They went from the surface of the earth,” he observes, guiding me with his hands, “to the mountaintops, then into the sky, and finally beyond space and time altogether”.  Not only have gods and goddesses retreated into their extraterrestrial hiding-places, but they’ve also dwindled in number (generally) to only one or three, depending on your divine arithmetic: “So they’re being chased away bit by bit,” Grayling chuckles.

For all his cutting cogency, there’s an underlying empathy to what he says.  Grayling seems to be desperately trying to reach out to those he believes to be lost in an intellectual fog of their own making, attempting to lend a hand and pull them out.  But he’s worried – and rightly so.  The problem with extreme strands of Islam, Christianity, Judaism and Hinduism is self-evident: “They force people to narrow their horizon of vision down so that they are almost blind, almost infantilised, almost in a straitjacket of captivity.  But every religion goes through a fundamentalist phase,” he acknowledges in his typically even handed manner, “and every religion leaves its fundamentalist rump; you can see this perfectly clearly in the case of Christianity”.

Will we ever grow out of religion, though?  He leans against the wall casually, stretching out his legs before responding with an assured brand of optimism: “It seems to me that in five or ten thousand years time when people look back (if there are any people) at this period of history, the two or three thousand years when Judeo-Christian influence in the world was considerable, they will collapse it down to a sentence”.  Just as we view the advent of Cro-Magnon humans to Europe in 40,000 BC and the disappearance of Neanderthals around ten thousand years after that as historical facts and nothing more, so future historians will consider religion as a mere artifact.  Indeed, according to Grayling, they will astutely recognise that “that was a bad time for human beings, because they were getting cleverer with their technologies, but they were no wiser”.

But it’s crucial to Grayling’s philosophical outlook that when we lose faith, we don’t lose hope.  “Almost any religion can be explained to another person in about half an hour,” he claims, adjusting his imperious-looking gold-rimmed spectacles, “but to know anything about astrophysics or biology or anything that really gives us an insight into the real beauty of the universe?  That takes some years of study at least”.  Such logic allows the adversity of a world without faith to be rebranded as opportunity, oblivion as salvation.  He pauses briefly, before launching into one gem in his immensely vibrant stash of anecdotes and references: “There’s a writer, a man called J.B. Bury, who wrote a wonderful history of Greece a long time ago now.  He talks at one point about the Greeks’ own histories of their own city states, and he was talking about one in particular, the kings of which could be traced back to divine origin”.  I wait, as though anticipating the punch line of a joke, while he stalls for a second in his recollection.  “And J.B. Bury effectively said,” he goes on, “‘Oh it’s so boring.  It was only a god who founded this city.  But if it had been a real man who had struggled, fought against enemies and been ingenious in getting his people together, now that would be a really interesting story’”.  It’s an incontrovertible truth, and it highlights the contrast “between religion, which is very boring, and reality, which is much more exciting”.

Yet for as long as religion rules the roost, we can only undermine it inchmeal.  But challenge it we must.  “I think one of the most wonderful things I’ve ever heard is the remark that George Bernard Shaw made about the ‘golden rule’ – ‘Do unto others as you’d have them do unto you’ – and he said, ‘under no circumstances should you do unto other people what you’d like them to do to you because they may not like it’”.  A barrage of rationality and clarity storms through his argument, measured and incontrovertible: “It’s a very, very deep insight.  What you really have to do is understand the diversity of human nature and needs and interests, and try to see people in their particularity”.  For religious zealots, he remarks with a knowing shake of the head, this is nigh on impossible.  If there’s one right answer, one absolute truth, one correct way of living, “there can’t be any diversity because that’s heresy”.

Dealing with plurality, then, is perhaps the greatest challenge that faces modern civilization, but Grayling doesn’t believe that the solution is multiculturalism.  “I very much agree that multiculturalism was well intentioned,” he affirms with the considered enthusiasm that I’ve come to expect of his responses.  The notion of a mosaic society, though, has developed flaws, allowing disempowered and oppressed individuals to slip through the cracks, causing injury upon injury.  “By allowing,” he elucidates, “Sharia Councils to exist, young women who are brought over as brides who don’t speak English, who are divorced by their husbands, who lose their children and their property, don’t even know that there are proper courts of law in the country to protect their rights”.  Grayling prefers aspects of the French laïcité, the implication that citizens of France are “first and foremost French men and French women,” everything else being incidental and a matter for private choice.  Though it has its problems (discrimination against the ‘invisible’ Algerian and Moroccan minorities, to name but one), he believes it ensconces a better sense of cohesion than what has become a divisive multicultural policy.

“It’s terribly interesting, isn’t it,” Grayling continues, with his characteristic passion for all things discursive, “that the French have banned the face veil, and the Germans have just banned circumcision”.  Never one for impertinence or rashness, he reclines in thought for a second or two: “I’m in favour of banning both of them,” he concludes.  Why ban the veil, though?  “Well, if I went to Saudi Arabia I wouldn’t walk around the streets in shorts”.  Just as that society has its norms, so does ours.  Just as wearing shorts in Riyadh is seen as an insult, covering your face in London is seen as suspicious and troubling.  “But the law is an interesting one,” he says, acknowledging the caveat to his argument, “because it has a very neat nuance to it”.  Face coverings are deemed unacceptable by the government only in publically funded spaces (like hospitals and schools); “the law doesn’t stop people wearing face veils when they’re doing other things”.

What strikes me as extraordinary about Grayling is his lack of fear, intellectual or moral.  He’s never afraid to offer his thoughts for general discussion, but nor is he afraid to admit he doesn’t have all the answers.  After all, who does?  I’m not surprised, therefore, when he responds tentatively when I ask about the vexed ethical question of military intervention in Syria and other tyrannies across the globe.  “Well, this is a hard question and therefore a very good question.  A terribly difficult one,” he repeats, flicking aside his mane of silvery hair.  He begins slowly but surely in a matter-of-fact tone: “The clear thing that one can say is that where there are unarmed civilian populations being terrorised, oppressed, murdered, tortured and imprisoned by a regime, there seems to me to be no argument; one should go in there, and help them, and protect them”.  It’s an ugly situation, though, and one that Grayling does nothing to pretty up.  “On the other hand,” he goes on, “the people who are fighting against Assad include people like al-Qaeda and Hezbollah.  It’s a real tightrope”.  He’s visibly torn, his empathy pitted against his desire not to open up another Pandora’s Tinderbox in the Middle East.  “And meanwhile,” he looks across at me with an almost pained expression, “children, women, old people, innocents and non-combatants are suffering.  It’s a murky situation.  Everybody in the West wants to see Assad fall – I do – that would be terrific; if only we could be reasonably sure that what would follow would be a much more humane and sensible setup.  But,” he forewarns, “there can be no guarantees”.

With the interview coming to a close, I decide to pose one final question.  What’s the secret to the good and happy life?  I half-expect him to pause for thought, but Grayling bursts in with effervescence: “It’s being engaged, it’s having a project, it’s being outward-looking.  I think it was Emerson who said that a man wrapped up in himself makes a very small parcel”.  I’m intrigued to discover that taxi drivers, upon discovering his profession, often quiz him on the meaning of life.  “And I say: ‘The meaning of life is what you make it.  There will be as many different meaningful lives as there are people to live them’”.  It’s an incredibly positive and open-minded outlook.  He closes by reminding me that “if we honour the obligation we have to ourselves to develop to the best of our ability the constellation of interests and passions and talents that we have, then – even if we don’t succeed, never win a gold medal, never get knighted, never get published – that in itself is the good life”.

As I stroll out of the Bloomsbury café in which we’ve been sitting for the past hour or so and head off towards the train station, I finally feel that I have some sense of what Bertrand Russell meant when he said that “Most people would rather die than think”.  Thought can be scary, blasphemous, even iconoclastic.  It can make us feel desperate and hopeless and purposeless.  And yet despite that, largely thanks to people like Grayling, thought and reflection can invest our lives with something more than hope, and more than wish-thinking: meaning.  “Is he wise?” a friend asks me later that evening.  A response is barely necessary.

According to a recent worldwide poll called The Global Index of Religiosity and Atheism, Africa is the world’s most devout region. Even with a global decline in religiosity, the black continent has the smallest number of self-proclaimed atheists in the world. I think this poll clearly mirrors the state of religion and atheism in the region. Nigeria trails behind Ghana in terms of religiosity with 93 percent of the respondents saying they were religious. I guess fewer Nigerians would identify themselves as religious if there were assurances of safety and no victimization if they proclaimed and declared themselves atheists. In Nigeria, people who do not profess any religion or belief in god find themselves in a perilous predicament. They are ostracized, maltreated and discriminated against. But the situation of atheists is not the same across the country. How one is treated as an atheist depends on so many factors, such as the part of the country where one is living – is it in the Christian dominated South or in the muslim dominated North? Is it in the rural or urban areas? It also depends on one’s family background, gender, level of education, employment and income. Male atheists who are highly educated and are financially independent face less risk than their female counterparts.

In Nigeria, atheism is a taboo. It is abominable for anyone to proclaim openly that god does not exist. It is not safe and normal for persons to admit being atheist. The reactions include sardonic incredulity, shock, anger, and hatred. Atheism goes with huge costs – social and political consequences – which many people cannot afford. Generally atheists are not accorded respect. They are not treated as human beings with equal rights and dignity. In fact in Nigeria it is better and more socially acceptable to profess a belief in any god or any religion than to profess no religion and lack of belief in god. Many people will not welcome an atheist to their homes. The general misconception is that atheists are horrible human beings, the agents of the devil who lack common moral decencies. Many people are made to believe that atheists can corrupt their minds or ‘souls’, cause them to derail from the path of truth and righteousness, and lead them to hell fire and eternal damnation. In fact the whole idea of atheism is scary to many Nigerians. Most people would want not to be associated with that label or perspective. Most Nigerians believe all initiatives should be founded on god, no matter how absurd or vaguely conceived such an idea is.

Again, most Nigerians socialize and marry along religious and theistic lines. The issue of the religion or belief in god plays prominent role when marriages are contracted. So atheists – self proclaimed atheists – may find it difficult to get partners unless they are ready to convert or to renounce atheism or to conceal their atheism. Unfortunately the dream of most young Nigerians is to marry in churches or mosques or to have their marriages blessed by a clergy even when such marriages are contracted in a court or registry. There are no indications that ‘blessed marriages’ succeed better than those contracted without such theistic theatrics.

In Nigeria, anyone who goes open and public with his or her atheism risks losing family support, care and solidarity. In 2003, a Muslim woman from the North who is acclaimed nationwide as liberal and progressive in her views visited our humanist stand during an event in Abuja. After a short brief on what humanism was all about, she said she would have nothing to do with any of her children who renounced Islam. Many children are not ready to go against what is often perceived as the divine will of their parents particularly when it comes to religious or theistic matters. They prefer to pretend and to present themselves as religious and theistic. In Nigeria, family and community links are very strong and important. The Nigerian state is not as developed as states in the western world, and many people rely on their families and community members for care and support. So, families often tyrannize over the lives and choices of members. For example , most people who are born in Christian families are brought up in a christian way, attend christian schools and marry christian partners. Parents regard it as a duty to bring their children up in a  religious and theistic way. For a child to profess atheism is generally seen as a mark of parental, family and societal failure. Atheism goes with a stigma which most families abhor and do not want to associate with.

I didn’t get it, and I haven’t got it for most of the time. I’m only just getting it – the faux-masculine shibboleths that I’m expected to observe, in order to be ‘one of the guys’.

Especially the degradation of women as rite of passage.

Don’t get me wrong…

I’m nobody’s knight in shining armour (I think this will be the last time I repeat this for some time), and I don’t believe in chivalry towards women – chivalry, as opposed to decency, assumes that women are frail objects to be protected like delicate porcelain in a world they’re not equipped to deal with. Women are no such thing.

I’ve got an interest in this. If pseudo- and actual misogyny are used as defining criteria for what it is to be masculine, then I consider that an imposture. I don’t want that group identity lumbered on me, and moreover, I’m willing, if imposed upon, to fight for my stake in masculine culture to the exclusion of other men.

Gentlemen, if you’re going to make an asshole out of yourself in the first instance, I’m not going to take much notice when you make squeals of indignation, when you get a little comeuppance. That is unless, I find it justifiable, useful, and entertaining, to laugh at you.

Seriously though, some men really shit me. The things that some of you expect me to take on board as normal, or healthy, or unappealing-but-otherwise-not-rebarbative.

[Trigger warning: There isn’t anything explicit beyond this point, but the subject matter is rather dark, delving into the dank, unsanitary world of misogyny, as it does].

***

Back in the early 1990s, I liked to particularly geeky genres – anime and horror. And I don’t mean just any old anime – the big budget stuff, with watercolour landscapes and the like. As for horror, I liked a good dose of black humour and slapstick – not the sadism that passes for a horror movie these days.

So… I was introduced by one of The Guys, to another one of The Guys, who knew a thing or two about anime – this guy was really nerdy, as in poor social skills, and never talking to women. All the same, I took the guy’s recommendation on face value.

I had no idea what I’d unleashed.

So I forked out $35 on a VHS cassette of some anime that I hadn’t seen before, that was horror, and was R-rated. Nothing on the cassette, at first glances, even suggested what sadistic crap I was going to be exposed to (and keep in mind, my revulsion, even though this stuff was heavily censored).

Basically, the Internet being what it is, people are going to have some idea of what I ran into. Rape, murder, torture, cannibalism, all sensationalised and eroticised, little of which even the cutting of swathes of footage managed to hide particularly well.

(No, I’m not advocating censorship – I’m pointing out how rotten the uncensored product, and the mind of its creators, must be).

This wasn’t a horror movie, although I was horrified – traumatised into disbelief, at first, actually. This was animated snuff for sickos.

And the sickest part, you ask?

The level of acceptance amongst some of The Guys. Hell, there was backslapping, and in-jokes, and ideations, and apologetics, and… You don’t want to know.

Suffice to say I conveniently lost contact with all of the individuals concerned by the end of the 90s, before I lost all control and went on a rage.

***

I didn’t get then, that the degradation of women was expected as a practice amongst the group members. Why would this be necessary?

It gets worst, it seems, the older the guys get. Or at least, the older and lonelier the guys get.

(It never occurs to them, that being like they are, being left well alone may actually be on balance, morally desirable – context like mental health care, to be taken into account).

Months ago, while the Internet, and in particular the atheist part of it, were arguing about male privilege, and neckbeards, and sexual harassment, and sexual liberalism, and the like, I was gradually, and unwittingly extricating myself, via conflict, from the company of a few sad old men. I treated it, as a one-on-one, man0-a-mano (if you’ll allow the mistranslation), arrangement, where I’d pick my differences with one of the guys, and nobody else was bound to pick a side.

As I whittled my way though acquaintances, as the remainder of the group became smaller and smaller, my understanding became deeper, and my barbs more articulate. Eventually, I was able to cut to the wrongness underpinning people’s behaviours – self-pity, the objectification of women (and girls), sexual entitlement bias, selfishness, victim-blaming in matters of sexual harassment, and so on.

Once the penny had really dropped, all of a sudden, my one-on-one style of conflict, which had unanimously been agreed to be a virtuous approach, was up-ended, and the remainder of the group simply rounded the wagons and cut me off. The group, defended as a group, and as far as I’m concerned, marked themselves as pathetic in the process.

Don’t think though, that I’d reverse the consequences – I’m much happier now.

***

It’s not just the sexually pathetic, though. Old rockers, old punks, and other aging edgy sorts, too often when meeting me for the first time, use the words ‘cunt’, ‘slut’, ‘scrag’, ‘bitch’, and the like, the way the occasional rapping grandpa uses a back-to-front cap. ‘What’s up, my dawgs?’

This does not impress me.

Why on Earth do I have to take just an even share of the masculine group identity with this sad bunch? Why am I expected to assumed the mantle shared by yet another tragic victim of the male menopause?

Men can be better than this.

And don’t go all old school on me, you ‘Women Know Their Rights Too Well These Days’ tragics. You know what’s also a masculine tradition? Stepping outside.

Yes, I know it’s a stupid tradition – I just find it odd that while some guys think it’s stupid as well, they’re still happy to hold onto the misogyny.

***

There’s a silver lining on this aerial-turd of a dark cloud. (If you think this is a mixed-metaphor, wait ‘till it starts raining).

I’ve literally spent years ruminating on this garbage, which has made me investigate, which has made me sick and depressed, which has made me ruminate, which has made me… ad nauseam.

(This actually has, ultimately, induced nausea and vomiting).

During the less sane, more-damaged periods of my life (1998-2001), while not actually making me dangerous, this culture of misogyny has driven me to scary, unpredictable, social ineptitudes, miscues, and miscommunications. I’ve since fought back from there, obviously, but it’s still been perplexing and frustrating.

The upside, if you can call it that, is that I can intuit this kind of thing now. I’ve got a feel for what makes these guys tick, and I don’t have to engage in any lengthy study to get the needed grasp. I don’t need to damage myself anymore, through the high-fidelity surveying of the sewers of the woman-hating mind.

I’m now a position to retaliate, with less risk to my own mind.

No, I’m not about to single anyone out, or psychoanalyse them. I have no business deploying professional diagnostic tools in such a capacity.

My angle is playing on the insecurities, the infantile pettiness, and the absurdities that underlie this broken, failed masculinity. If anyone will be outed, it’ll be the neckbeards outing themselves in fits of rage, if they choose to retaliate.

I enjoy being a man. I don’t enjoy having my satisfaction disrupted by men who need to feel bad about women, just to feel good about being men themselves.

This is my shtick – where there is entitlement, and self-pity in these matters, I’m going to be unsettling. I’m not responding so much to recent events in the atheosphere (although there is that), and again, I’m not singling-out or piling-on.

A need to do this has been around longer than the recent clashes in my social proximity, and it’s a need that’s at least deeply engrained within me – carved into me.

I hope to unsettle, to induce doubt in misogynists (and racists, and ablists, and racists, and homophobes, and so on), through short fiction, poetry and satire, directed at the commonplace. I want to implicitly suggest uncomfortable questions, and yes, I will enjoy watching certain types of people squirm as they doubt themselves.

I shall not assume the mantle that is expected of me.

Scientific definition of Hymen: The thin membrane located inside the woman’s vagina, a few centimeters in depth, tearing after penetration either by sex or otherwise.

Is the Hymen a natural evolutionary requirement (according to Darwin) and not a moral requirement? Some animals also have hymens, such as the platypus, elephants, whales, llamas, sea cows, moles, chimpanzees, rats and lemurs.

Social definition of the hymen: a measure of honour on the basis of the girl’s chastity and virginity – no sex before marriage in Arab, Indian and some African countries!

Scientific definition of me as a woman: A live human being who has all the characteristics of other living things, such as breathing, needing nutrition, growing, reproducing, and who is characterized by thinking and production and development through thought and action.

Social definition of a woman: A human-being the oriental society puts under the category of ‘Woman’ – and I’m proud to be female but according to their concepts it means I am the weaker sex who is always ranked second after the Man under The Order of God, the tribe and the support and approval of laws is based on this.

I am a producer who has duties towards self, family and community more than Rights. Because I’m the plowed one, and odd if I reject sex with my husband, and ordered in the house of obedience, and dominated, and share a husband with two, three, or four others in accordance with the Quran. And I am to be withheld, transformed into a mummy by covering my neck in a hijab, hit and abandoned and punished and imprisoned or stoned to death, governed and controlled by the male parent (the Lord of the Family, no matter how old or young he is), cannot go out and get married, I am issued with a passport or identity card, cannot travel except with his consent; who is married even before reaching puberty. I cannot always win my freedom because the authorization for divorce is given by my husband only; am a governess, an obedient servant who has the largest share of hell and the torments of God to come later!

Since the birth of baby girl among the Muslims is a disgrace to be concealed, because she is not born male, she represents a shortfall, an- inferiority … a potential tool of delinquency.  And to her shame is every attempt to commit a sexual act with a man before marriage. She is a tool for rape, sin and incest, and even theft because men can steal her modesty with a leer.

In short, sin is diagnosed. They create sexual desire, this desire which is itself sinful for men. And it constitutes a permanent threat to the girl and Islamic ethics. It is a potential tool for crime, for slaughter by the father or brothers to wash their blemished honor. So the honor of Muslim men is washed with the blood of girls.” [i]

I am a human being who works, supports, assumes, produces, begets children, raises them, is persecuted and has the majority of her rights violated religiously and legally. And if I do something against these codes will be subjected to what is called an honour killing – stoned to death or imprisoned.

I am the human being sold as flesh and bought in many forms in the name of marriage!

I am not seen as a human being but as just a few centimeters between her thighs. Turn the world upside down and shake the thrones if blood doesn’t flow on the wedding night (first marriage)! Make sure of my virginity, my honour, my reputation, purity and chastity while I clamp my hand to my cheek waiting for the man tearing my virginity, while I forget my right to live a natural life like other creatures, including man, my right to feelings and to keep myself from pain and disease.

Thus I will be honored by my family and my tribe,  preserve my religiousness and maintain the values of my community.

I’m under the man just because he does not have a hymen.

We can’t on this basis ensure he keeps the honor of his family, his religion and the values of his society.

Women’s bodies spin like a shadow around men – humiliated, guilty, concerned, threatened, dirty, unclean, the source of a narrowness and sin. These tools are the forbidden that are coveted, hidden and displayed, trapped and coerced. The feminine body is a hidden sex object, reprehensible and defective, like instruments which are essential for sex but which they are ashamed to use. [ii]

Recently some governments and authorities reinforced the tribal practices which are regressive, suppress freedom and lead to patriarchal violence against women, including permitting the examination of a girl to legally establish her virginity before marriage to assure the man and his family the goods they’ve bought are brand new!

In real terms, just because a girl is a virgin girl it does not necessarily mean nobody has touched her. Nowadays she can do what she wants because the membrane can be restored with minor surgery, or even a fake hymen used – an industrial membrane made inChinawhich costs less than three dollars!

This way she can deceive a husband and his family and by cunning assume the mantle of chaste virgin!

Is this really what you want, to be fooled by few fake drops of blood, to fool yourself for some kind of peace of mind? What is the difference in reality between a fake hymen and one that is torn and unrepaired?

If the honor and chastity, reputation and preservation of the values and habits of society are determined by the state of a hymen how can we make sure that a man keeps to the codes if he does not have a hymen to prove it? This allows him free reign of his natural behaviour, freedom to enjoy his rights at the expense of women. But while she is the object of male desire she is also the forbidden – and this is the great double-standard.

This duality is one of the fundamental pillars upon which the collective consciousness rests.

When I’m talking about the Arab consciousness in general I do not mean all Arab intellectuals, journalists, writers, artists and researchers. But these represent only a small minority against the vast majority still suffering under the yoke of this tradition. That is what I mean the collective consciousness.

Thus the Arab awareness in its present form has one face missing – that of the critic who believes in evolution … If asked about religion and faith can only answer with the faith of the righteous and if asked about science knows only the science that is Divine. Scientific knowledge is abrogated, reason is handed down. And if asked about ethics or justice will only praise their own justice and morality.

“So why continue with Arab culture? Where is the historical development? Where is the transition from the old, how will new thinking avoid old mistakes? [iii]

Some of you may be angry because I link these problems with Islam but they are two sides of the same coin. They are ideas which support each other to form a dogma forcing us to live by the culture of people from history despite changing conditions and the need to change ideas. Instead man’s ideas being used in the service of mankind his life is adapted to suit them.

Such a culture worships individuals, reduces history to a single moment, and the individual at the head of the culture becomes a tyrant whose tyranny cannot be maintained only through violence.

Honor is not between the thighs of women, or between the thighs of men. Honour begins with words and is never ending in all man does to represent his honour – in his work, his purity, his devotion to his country, his dedication to his family.

On July 27, a local penticostal church is planning a ‘crusade’ at the Cultural Centre in Calabar in Cross River State. The theme of the event is: Koboko Night: My Father My Father That Witch Must Die.The same church has, in March, organized a similar event in Uyo, Akwa Ibom state.

 [media id=54597 title=”Leo1″ width=”213″ height=”159″ class=”aligncenter size-full wp-image-54597″ ]

Akwa Ibom is another state where witch belief is strong and witchcraft related abuse is common and widespread. The activities of churches and prayer houses have been linked to the problem of witch hunting in the region, but very little has been done by local authorities to call these religious nuts to order.

Once again I want to draw the attention of the authorities to the activities of this church and other churches in the region that are fueling witch hunting in the name of spreading the gospel. These religious entrepreneurs have found a market niche in witch beliefs and are busy exploiting it at the expense of the rights and dignity of our children and elderly persons. They fuel witchcraft fears through their books, films and deliverance sessions, and spread the false gospel that people’s problems are caused by witches and wizards in their families and communities.

I urge that these faith groups be sanctioned without delay.

The authorities cannot continue to look the other way, ignoring the havoc being caused by these evangelical throwbacks. The governments of Cross River and Akwa Ibom should act swiftly and bring to justice all witch hunting pastors, god men and women in these states. They should prohibit all church programs that incite hatred and violence in the name of witchcraft.

The states of Akwa Ibom and Cross River cannot afford to go back to the times when the streets were dotted with children abused and abandoned for being witches and wizards. They should monitor the programs of churches and pastors in the region and ensure that they are not propagating the poisonous gospel of witch hunting or inciting hatred and violence in the name of witchcraft.

For instance the theme of this crusade is literally inciting, and could lead to an upsurge of witch persecution and killings in the region. The title Koboko Night implies torture and abuse of any alleged witch. This could cause some people to go home and start beating up their children or aging parents whom they suspect of witchcraft.

[media id=54598 title=”Leo2″ width=”213″ height=”159″ class=”aligncenter size-full wp-image-54598″ ]

And then adding ‘that’ witch must die’makes it more horrifying. It clearly sanctions death and execution of any alleged witch. This clause alone can cause people to murder or commit atrocious acts against family or community members whom they believe are witches. This is particularly worrisome because the Bible which christians accept to be the holy book says in Exodus 22:18 ‘Suffer not a witch to live’. Obviously this biblical verse constitutes the evangelical basis of this crusade.

This event, if it goes ahead, will certainly be a big blow to the efforts of the government to address this problem and curb the cultural scourge of witch hunting. It will be a clear sign of lack of political will and commitment on the part of the authorities to tackling the problem. The government and people of Cross River should not allow this program to be held. They should arrest and prosecute those behind it. That will serve as a deterrent to other other witch believing churches and pastors. Witchcraft accusation is a crime under the law. Also inciting hatred and violence in the name of witchcraft is a criminal offence. So the law is very clear on this and should be employed by the authorities to bring these evangelical rascals to book.

Witch hunting must stop. Witch hunting churches and pastors must be stopped.

Columbus, OH – Unlike other demographics, Americans 30 and under are
doubting God more than ever before – and organized atheism on campus
is reaping the benefits. The PEW Research Center released a new survey
last week finding that the percent of Millennials reporting doubts
about the existence of God has doubled in five years, from 15% in 2007
to 31% today. No other generation saw a change larger than 2%. The
Secular Student Alliance, a national nonprofit which helps organize
and support nonreligious students, has boomed in the time period.

“Our generation is causing a fundamental shift in how society will see
religion,” said Jesse Galef, the Secular Student Alliance
Communications Director. “The internet has exposed young people to
different worldviews, and they’re carrying their newfound skepticism
onto campus to organize.”

The Secular Student Alliance has exploded with growth, outpacing the
larger trend of doubt. The organization has increased fourfold since
this time 2007, from 81 campus groups then to 357 today. They expect
the trend to continue, not slow down.

“We’re creating a ripple effect through our culture,” continued Galef.
“The more safe places we create for young people to discuss their
doubts, the more they can inspire questions in others.”

The question itself is part of the larger, ongoing Pew Research Center
Values Study. Participants over the years are asked whether they agree
with the statement “I never doubt the existence of God.” Millennials –
classified as those born after 1981 – reported disagreeing with the
statement 31% of the time. This is the highest response ever found in
this 25-year report.

Other generations have remained fairly stable in their level of doubt
over the years. The next highest generation, Gen-Xers born between
1965 and 1980, disagreed 17% of the time, up only 1 percent from 2007.

Previous surveys including the 2009 American Religious Identification
Survey had indicated that younger generations were less likely to
self-identify with religion. The American Values Survey is different
in that it sheds light on beliefs rather than affiliation with a
particular religion.

More information can be found at
http://www.people-press.org/values-questions/q41d/#generation

And a word from your editor: Donate to the SSA!

When Adele Wilde-Blavatsky’s article ‘To be Anti-Racist is to be Feminist: The Hoodie and the Hijab are not Equals’ on the Feminist Wire garnered a storm of opposers angrily accusing her of everything from attacking the identity of Muslim women, to exercising white privilege, to perpetuating racism and Islamophobia, it led to the Feminist Wire censoring both Wilde-Blavatsky and its own subsequent response.

The “Collective Response” removed from The Feminist Wire, but published later on Jaddaliya.com, is signed by “a group of feminist writers, activists, and academics” from “diverse racial, religious, economic, and political backgrounds.”

But are the signatories really as diverse as they claim to be? It’s worth taking a closer look at the characteristics that can be garnered from the signatures.

First, they overwhelmingly represent universities of the so-called Imperialist part of the world, the part that they claim is the harbinger of western privilege seeking to subdue and persecute the poor, non-white and Muslim of the world. Of the 86 signatories as of May 18, 2012, all but six specifically identity themselves with institutions, mostly universities, in the United States or Canada, and one in the United Kingdom. One is at the American University in Cairo, the closest to thing to anyone signing from a Muslim-majority country. The other five signatories don’t identify their locations.

Who is represented among the signatories is also demonstrated not so much in who signed, but in who didn’t. The complete absence of signatories from universities (or otherwise) in parts of the world that form the epicenter of the debate’s topic, might cause an anti-imperialist to argue that ‘privileged’ women at western universities are speaking for the silenced women of the Muslim world, therefore perpetuating hegemonic discourse.

I actually don’t really care where people live or work, or where they were born, when they opt to protest something. But it’s not lost on me that those who have attempted to vilify Adele Wilde-Blavatsky were quick to focus on her “whiteness” as a characteristic that automatically makes her a paternalistic western feminist. Hence, the above is simply an exercise in the game that Wilde-Blavatsky’s detractors are playing. If you’re white, you dare not speak about issues that don’t concern you. It’s a refrain I’ve confronted often enough myself, and at the risk of belabouring this controversy further, it’s worth examining more closely given that the Feminist Wire censorship incident is hardly unique as a case of those labeling themselves “feminist” misusing the race card, and in the process, trumping real struggles over rights and freedoms that face women.

But first, allow me to point out one other feature of the signatories. The bulk of them represent Women’s Studies Departments, at western universities. This is telling, and sad.

Where are all of these voices when horrific incidents of violence occur against women in Afghanistan? When dissenters are censored in Saudi Arabia? When women’s rights defenders are raped inside Iranian prisons? When 12-year-old Yemeni girls have their insides torn open when they are raped in their marriages to adult men?

In the world of urgent action for women who are under siege in a plethora of deadly situations, in the realm of courageous and outspoken responses to the misogyny that festers under the purview of male rulers that deem women akin to cattle—whether the rulers of governments or the rulers of families—Women’s Studies departments in western universities have simply been non-players.

They are too busy, it would seem, investigating intersectionality, avoiding being seen as patronizing westerners, deconstructing dominant discourses, challenging hegemonic “narratives”, labeling all action for women abroad as Orientalist, and fighting the murky imperialism that lurks everywhere, threatening to colonize and subdue exotic cultures at any moment.

But out there, in the real world, the most pressing issues facing women are all too often ignored by those studying questions of gender from the confines of Women’s Studies departments. Research agendas seem more determined by deep-rooted biases favouring relativisms and a post-modernist view of the world, than by the empirical evidence that everywhere around us, women are getting mutilated, maimed, raped, beaten, prostituted, set on fire, drenched in acid, and murdered because they are women, and a disproportionate amount of this takes place in Muslim societies.

The destruction of women’s bodies is the most violent manifestation of systematized male control over women, and this systematized control uses culture and religion as its primary vehicle. And no matter how hard you try, you just can’t pin it all on American foreign policy in the Middle East, on neoliberal economic policy, or on colonial legacies. The justifications vehemently given for the subjugation of women in so much of the Muslim world come from within those cultures, and typically, from the men. Referring to local “tradition”, religion or culture, such men don’t even blame their treatment of women on the outside world or on American policies, so why would foreign scholars do so?

As a Caucasian woman fighting for the rights of women in Afghanistan, I’ve had many experiences where my race was brought up as “problematic” as it relates to the legitimacy of my right to speak out against the atrocities I’ve witnessed against women here over the past 15 years. It’s been implied that as an outsider from a western country, I could only be some kind of zealous missionary bearing “my” message of rights, or the specter of a neo-colonialist simply extending imperialism by other means over a resistant people. I’ve been called a racist more than once, and only ever by individuals who reside comfortably in the West and consider themselves to be of the political left, that is, to be “progressive”.

The casual misuse of a term that has a very precise meaning and is among the gravest accusations one can make towards another person is an indicator that those conflating the advocacy of women’s rights in the Muslim world with racism simply have no idea what they’re talking about or what they are fighting for anymore. They’ve drifted so far off a genuine social justice agenda, that they’ve found themselves shipwrecked on the shores of the fascist, patriarchal and hate-filled political ideologies that work to keep the female sex securely in submission. They invoke the racism card to shut down dialogue, pushing out of the conversation anyone they can associate with whiteness, making the ridiculous assertion that just by existing, just by speaking, any white person perpetuates inequalities. As Adele Wilde-Blavatsky asks, “Are you seriously suggesting that we can only debate an issue if we have first-hand experience of it? Do I have to be a porn star to critique pornography?” As she experienced,

To claim, as one woman did, that I used the ‘ties’ of ‘non-white bodies’ to ‘obfsucate my whiteness’ not only reduces me and my family to the level of our skin colour but also categorically ignores our intimate connections and unique personal experiences and cultural and religious backgrounds. Most importantly, it denies us the experience we share as human beings in terms of genuine love, care and compassion. The very thing you accuse me of doing in relation to Muslim women.

And like the boy who cried wolf, when accusations of racism are blatantly and routinely misused, it’s easy to then miss or ignore real instances of racism.

Where inequalities are truly being perpetuated is by those who have co-opted the language of feminism, but really work to preserve the status quo of misogyny by giving credence to cultural relativism, and by letting an indelible paranoia of imperialist identity override the need to speak out against the real perpetrators of abuses against women. Similarly, Wilde-Blavatsky referred to a “fear of Islamaphobia so intense” that it risks shutting out dissenting Muslim voices calling for more freedoms, such as the freedom of choosing how to dress.

Too much of the western academic world has consistently ignored the homegrown voices courageously demanding the kinds of rights and freedoms we have come to take for granted. I still have faith in feminism, because I’m fortunate enough to interact with real feminists every day—women in Afghanistan who aren’t willing to compromise on their demand for rights in the name of culture or identity—and who risk their lives every day to express their belief in the idea that human rights are universal.

In the west, we have forgotten that the rights we enjoy today were not granted, they were taken. Now it’s the turn of others to take theirs.

I may be Caucasian, and I may be non-Muslim. It would hardly even matter if I were also a man. I’m calling a wrong when I see it, and if you want to box me into a corner based on the superficialities of 21^st century identity politics as defined by post-modernist Women’s Studies Departments far removed from the real battlefields for women’s rights, so be it. But I will speak out whatever the skin colour and whatever the religion of the victims of misogyny. If those who profess to be scholars confuse that with racism, by god, scholarship is in trouble. Civilization, indeed, is in trouble.

I’m back home in Adelaide now, trying to mellow out after the trip, and dealing with things that have popped up in my absence – such as the contents of an abused toilet drain which I’ve had to shove my arm down. The house sitter’s 3-ply was a bit much, it seems.

These are some of the tribulations of travel (and of being too cheap to call a plumber).

Trains, as it happens, are an interesting way to travel across the big dry continent that is Australia. At first, I considered it the scenic option, never having done it before. If I didn’t like it, at only 828k (514Mi), it was one of the shorter interstate train rides in the country. Allow me to summarise western Victoria in a single photo…

[media id=48753 title=”westvictoria” width=”213″ height=”159″ class=”aligncenter size-full wp-image-48753″ ]

Western Victoria is a bloody great paddock…

Passing through most of the west end of Victoria was like this, but with the exception of the

Grampians (Gariwerd) in the distance.

If you’re a geology nerd, short of actually getting off the train and travelling to the pictured mountains, the main feature of interest on the trip is the difference in the amount of topsoil between departure and destination; South Australia having much less. Exciting, huh?

Debbie Goddard, at drinks at The Moat (opposite Embiggen Books), made the observation that Australian place names, particularly in rural settings, sound odd. I’m at a loss understanding what she means.

 [media id=48754 title=”funnyname” width=”213″ height=”159″ class=”aligncenter size-full wp-image-48754″ ]

‘Weird’? ‘Funny’? I’m not seeing it.

***

It’s been my intent, in covering the Global Atheist Convention, in as much detail as I can muster, to convey some of my subjective experiences in the hope this helps put the reader on location. I’ll try to flesh out the overall experience somewhat, in summary.

I’d been in a bit of a loving mood throughout the whole experience, and I hope this is obvious to those of you who at least aren’t tone deaf. With the exception of Jim Jeffries, who genuinely pissed me off, at worst it’s been occasional reprimand (Dick Gross), and effusive praise (Sam Harris, Jason Ball, Marion Maddox, Kylie Sturgess et al.), with affectionate piss-taking (PZ Myers, Simon Taylor, Melbourne, the English) taking up a good part of the disposition I’d taken towards the adventure.

Also, I’d hugged the bejesus out of people; Chrys Stevenson (par for the course); Dave the Happy Singer and Jasmine Marosvary in one lovely group hug; Jin-oh Choi (who looked a little worried) and an obliging Jason Ball. Luckily for Marty Pribble, there were people between us or he would have been hugged to death, and it’s probably lucky for me (‘HELP! SECURITY!’), I didn’t hug-attack Dan Dennett when I had the chance, opting instead to settle for a mutually shared nod.

No offense to the rest, but I have to say that Jason Ball earned his hug the most. Jason was instrumental in helping with the personal matter (that’s not my story to tell) I mentioned in regard to my absence on the Sunday morning. This even though he was speaking on stage the same day, with everything else on top of that that comes of being an organiser. Also owed hugs in this matter are Rod, Leigh and Donna, and anyone else involved I’ve missed (with hugs going to Fin if he wants them, although I suspect he’d be satisfied with a handshake).

It’s gobsmacking, how warm people can be towards one another, despite having at most previously only ever met online. It was like a family reunion, albeit without the contempt that familiarity breeds. People actually got on.

The pub out by the bridge was the de facto meeting location, but I was left wondering if there’s a next time, if there couldn’t be a slightly more purpose-specific meet-up area designated. People could wear little paper hats with Twitter account names on them, so as not to be stalked offline by giving their real names.

(It has to be mentioned that I find the meeting-up with people I’ve interacted with online, in the free thinking community, more exciting that the prospect of getting to shake hands with any of the big-name speakers. My priorities may be a little out-of-whack, with an anti-fan-mentality bias. I’m not a convention goer by nature. I don’t even like book signings.)

***

Interactions with the religious..?

Part I: Smell the testosterone.

Okay, there were more guys than girls at this thing. A lot of people have written a lot on this topic already, and while broadly it still needs more discussion, I’m going to focus on a very specific part of the sausage-fest phenomenon.

 [media id=48764 title=”strut” width=”213″ height=”159″ class=”aligncenter size-full wp-image-48764″ ]

Strut!

This was one of the more cheerful scenes of defiance by the young infidels in attendance. I like funny walks. But then there was the one-upmanship…

‘’Cause if you’ve gotta do a silly walk, I’ve gotta man-up and stand face-to-face with the Muslims from only an inch away!’ – This actually happened.

It seems some young men learn way too much of their social skills from professional wrestling. The fact that there was a shorter supply of mates women on location possibly accentuated the competition, leading to much pomp and wankumstance. Indeed, the ratio of men to women seemed greater around our fundamentalist guests, than in the convention proper, with a bias toward younger males.

(I’m making the assumption, from null hypothesis, that the proportion of heterosexual men in the atheist crowd is significantly similar to the proportion of hetero men in the greater population; i.e. the majority).

The kiss, was the ultimate counter-protest, I feel, followed by the chants of ‘where are the women?’, and then a number of the fearless, exhalant poses by free-thinking women (most quite good, but with some others being simple works of copy-cat, me-too-ism). I’m not sure to what extent self-aggrandizing posturing detracted from the better counter-protests, but I’m left wondering if there were more even demographics at the event, whether the dynamic would have been different.

(Near-omnipresent cameras tended to lend to this effect, I suspect.)

With young men less competitive for potential mates through displays of plumage, and women less pressured to demonstrate worth within a boy’s club, and without the run-away distillation that occurs when congenial people find such atmospheres uncongenial and leave, I can at least imagine things improving. Could this help the way in which we confront/interact with, the loyal opposition?

This is in addition to considering how states of sausage-fest could politically undermine atheists criticising religious misogyny; couldn’t greater gender equality within the atheist community simply make us operate better, generally?

Part II: Meriting a special place in the conversation

There’s something I want to say about Marion Maddox, as well. While I generally agree with what she had to say, in as far as I understand her comment on Jim Jeffries’ misogynist shtick (it’s not clear she wasn’t talking about Jeffries as a representative sample of atheist culture) I think she may have underestimated the openness of the audience.

Again, this is subjective, but I’m getting a little tired of people ‘informing’ me that most Australian Christians are for the separation of church and state. Yes, I know this.  To assume that I operate under a different assumption is to misunderstand me, and I’m misunderstood this way quite a lot, sometimes I wonder, if not on purpose. I suspect many of those in the godless community may well share this irk.

The fact that Maddox’s Christianity wasn’t a big deal with the audience, and that she was well received, even when making strong criticisms about Jim Jefferies, is to the attendees’ credit. At most, the significance of her Christianity provided a small source of irony, but beyond that, people were only really interested on what she had to say, and judged what she said on merit.

I don’t think this was the kind of audience one could reasonably assume to be so ignorant as to believe that most Australian Christians are just like Fred Nile or Jim Wallace. Perhaps the anxieties surrounding this issue could be talked through, although to be honest, it’s a bit of an imposture. The moderate Christian left, of which Maddox is still a part, has more institutionalised power, and larger numbers, than the ‘New Atheism’.

It can get a bit much, expecting this kind of thing to be humoured.

This kind of anxiety – that poor mainstream Christianity may be misunderstood by less powerful groups – in a country like Australia, is only Christianity’s problem, and a problem mainstream Christianity can ultimately only resolve itself. The problem isn’t people being ignorant about mainstream Christianity; the problem is the way that these anxious Christians view other groups.

For almost anyone else, it’s a waste of time that could be spent cooperating on something more productive.

That being said, I think that Marion Maddox earned her place on the secular political discussion panel more than anyone else, the atheists notwithstanding – the mentioned perception anxiety wasn’t that big of an issue in this case. Perhaps if there’s a next time, we could have an Australian secular Muslim on the panel as well. The political battleground where parents and advocates engage with evangelical Christians seeking to proselytise in Australian public schools would be a good place to start looking for a meritorious candidate.

(And I don’t mean someone moderate, safe and inoffensive like Waleed Aly, who’s proven to be somewhat

hapless in his discussion of secularism, in much the same inoffensive, equivocal manner as Dick Gross. Nor do I suggest that any participant in these discussions should be treated with kid gloves on account of their religious minority).

***

Who would I have liked to have seen in a dream line-up?

I loathe confected ‘political incorrectness’, whether it’s comedians like Bill Maher, or poor persecuted columnists like James Delingpole; pretending to say the things that can’t be said, for fear of persecution. The origins of the term get overlooked, and the inferences, that of opposition by sections of the left, to its own totalitarian elements, are forgotten.

‘Political incorrectness’ has been reduced to a stunt. It’s not like risqué Jim Jeffries is a signatory to the Euston Manifesto*, or the architect of a Sokal-style hoax, nor is he a latter-day George Orwell.

(The Euston Manifesto: There’s an idea, for anyone wanting to call upon ‘politically incorrect’ atheists as speakers. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink.)

Then there’s the matter of mixing up the academics with the comedians a bit more – especially on the first night, when it was all comedians. Here’s what I’d have lined up for the first night, if I was a quasi-omnipotent organiser.

An opening by David Nicholls, followed by a meeting of the MCs, Kylie and Lawrence; Ben Elton would have replaced Mikey Robbins’ act, with Kylie and Lawrence continuing MC duties originally taken up by Robbins. Stella Young would follow, taking Elton’s original position, warming up the audience for PZ Myers to perform his bloviated wank, before Dara Ó Briain would take to the stage for the final comedic spot.

Apparently Ó Briain was in the country at the time, which makes the possibility seem all the more tangible. (If you’re unfamiliar with his work, you can always

check him out on YouTube).

Other dream changes come to mind, some of which I’ve mentioned before; moving Tanya Smith or Annie Laurie Gaylor to later on the Sunday; dropping Dick Gross, Colleen Hartland and Derek Guille from the political panel, replacing Guille with Meredith Doig, Gross with a secular Muslim, and Hartland with Russell Blackford, Graham Oppy or South Australian Labor MP,

Ian Hunter; maybe giving Fiona Patten her own spot on the Sunday to discuss sex and religious politics, and maybe, if it could be swung, having Dawkins co-MC the event, with only the one scheduled session, with or without the horsemen (maybe Kylie Sturgess could have a tilt at main-eventing Saturday night, philosophy in schools-wise).

What else would I have liked to see?

I would have dropped the opening video. No, I didn’t like it. Bloviated; triumphal; tone-deaf; white-dude; wank.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3OtBFisK-g

The spirit of a line of white, mostly European thinkers, straight-sailing to Melbourne on a 19^th century vessel, to confront superstitious masses; I’m not calling it racist, or imperialist, or whatever-elseist; I’m calling it tactless. In an Australian context, it couldn’t have had much worse connotations than if Readings had announced that each signing of Dawkins’ The Magic of Reality came with a free small-pox ridden blanket.

The video wasn’t doing anyone, any favours, and this is before considering how cheesy it was! Also, the ‘he’, applied generally to children, gets bonus white-dude points.

(Honestly, I’m not angry. I’m still laughing, shaking my head, and face-palming. But still, it’s a lesson worth learning from.)

Preferably, I’d love to see openings a little more Monty Python, preferably with Terry Gilliam-style animations of George Pell, The Rat, Dumbledore and Momo. And I think Terry Jones, or the vocal likeness thereof, would voice a wonderful Karen Armstrong.

I’m not really sure any of the other things I’d like to see could be integrated without the basic format being radically altered; multiple smaller sessions and events running simultaneously; more stalls with godless knick-knacks from more sources, and an atmosphere that’s more carnival. This kind of change would likely require a different venue, more like a university campus, with suitable open spaces, and multiple lecture halls.

A celebration of reason meets Lollapalooza meets street market. Materialist, monist, poetry slams; Fiona Patten coordinating a mini-Sexpo; more short film screenings sourced from godless artists around the world; amateur art auctions; a speaker’s corner, and a memorial Carl Sagan ‘smoking paraphernalia’ booth. This, plus all the usual discussion from the quality activists, comedians and public intellectuals, people have come to expect and respect – headline speakers on the main stage.

This isn’t a shopping list of wants to be taken literally, rather just a few hypotheticals to flesh out an idea (although Geoffrey Robertson doing Hypotheticals with the Three Horsemen and Ayaan Hirsi Ali would literally be awesome). I certainly don’t have a privileged view of how the convention was organised, so I can understand if there are any people in the know reading this, thinking ‘no, no, no’.

I don’t want to come across like the ungrateful brat, who in a fit of disappointment plans their remedial wish list for Santa, for next year’s Christmas.

***

Really, I enjoyed myself immensely, it’s just I was left a little hungry. Perhaps I should have stayed in Melbourne for longer. Perhaps it’s just a little extra motivation, now that I’ve met a number of wonderful free thinkers in the flesh. Maybe it’s all the possibilities.

Simultaneously, it was also pretty taxing. I was glad to get going home, or at least I was once I was under way.

Only, it’s I just couldn’t have taken a picture of the way out of Melbourne, even if I hadn’t fallen asleep. Victorians, you really need to beautify the railway out of the west of Melbourne; I’d rather have left your capital city through an s-bend.

The ride home wasn’t all bad though, and as I said, I slept through the ugliest of it. Lunch was also better on the return, but the voice-overs used to announce historical landmarks were from the same turgid script.

Stories about kids putting shoe polish on the tracks back in the days of steam locomotion, complete with kitsch rib-tickling about their parent’s misplaced disciplinary priorities, can be amusing only once at best. Methinks some rail-people need some new material.

[media id=49138 title=”bruce1″ width=”211″ height=”159″ class=”aligncenter size-full wp-image-49138″ ]

I’d rather read about Kami’s acting-up during his youth, than have to hear about 1920s railroad shenanigans (twice!) and not just because Kami’s writing is better. On all criteria, Kami vs Great Southern Rail, Kami won out.

I’m going to tell myself that the author of the rail script was Victorian, and chalk this one up as a South Australian victory.

Oh, Adelaide…

[media id=49139 title=”bruce2″ width=”213″ height=”159″ class=”aligncenter size-full wp-image-49139″ ]

See, this is the kind of thing you see when you’re looking out along the rail yard on approach to Adelaide from the South. Even the north, with its industrial areas and bogan suburbs, is more appealing than the western approach to Melbourne – and I suspect, needlessly so. Melbourne has enough space in the west, along the line, to make improvements.

Travel, notoriously, can make you appreciate home more, and I’m reminded from this trip, not to take Adelaide’s beauty for granted. Instinctually, when circumnavigating the Melbourne central business district, I expected to find it skirted by parkland. Adelaide is hardwired into me as the template by which I judge these things in other cities.

I found Melbourne’s

^{Flagstaff Gardens to be a lot like the Adelaide Parklands, almost like a welcome piece of home. Only, you can see one end of Flagstaff Gardens from the other, which isn’t nearly true of the Adelaide Parklands (which in total, occupies around eighty times the amount of land).}

It was from the Adelaide Parklands that the last leg of my journey, to my own doorstep, proceeded smoothly. There’s a strange kind of connectedness you feel, travelling by train between cities, especially when there are few stops, and only smooth transitions. Melbourne feels like it’s just down the line a little further from another journey I regularly make.

I rather like this sense of connectedness. I feel connected to Melbourne – its parks, a number of its people, its poetry, art and its comedians. I feel more connected to the wonderful Embiggen Books, which I visited for the first time. I feel more connected to the godless community, Australian, and from abroad.

Perhaps you can tell that I don’t get out enough, but I don’t think that detracts from the experience. I hope to travel, by rail, to Melbourne again, and hopefully not too far in the future.

~ Bruce

Here is my unpublished response to a collective response (signed by over 70 feminists) that was published on The Feminist Wire website opposing my article: ‘To be Anti-Racist is to be Feminist: The Hoodie and the Hijab are not Equals’. I sent this response to TFW editorial collective for publication, prior to their removing both my article and their collective response.

Thank you for this collective response to my article. I absolutely accept and welcome the effort by The Feminist Wire Collective to challenge hierarchies of privilege and build solidarity. I have listened to your concerns and taken them to heart as well. We can all learn something from this debate. I also welcome any initiative for an honest conversation about privilege, racism, and Islamophobia within feminist collectives and movements. If my article has in any way helped to kickstart that initiative, then I welcome that.  I would also like to express my gratitude to the founder, Tamura Lomax, for inviting me to join The Feminist Wire collective last year. I am proud and honoured to be part of such a writers’ collective.

For the record, and in my defence, prior to publication, I actively sought out the opinion and feedback of four Collective members. The feedback I received from two members was complimentary and positive. No-one offered any objections to it or suggested any significant editorial changes. Although, that is not to say that they agreed with the content either. That said, some of my comments have clearly been distorted, and at times, misrepresented in your letter.  I have also been accused of holding views that I do not. I will address these matters below.

First, I was upset by, and strongly object to, the accusation or suggestion that I am ‘racist’. The views that have been expressed in relation to me and my family members on Facebook and The Feminist Wire website, were not only offensive and but also denied us our basic humanity.  To claim, as one woman did, that I used the ‘ties’ of ‘non-white bodies’ to ‘obfsucate my whiteness’  not only reduces me and my family to the level of our skin colour but also categorically ignores our intimate connections and unique personal experiences and cultural and religious backgrounds. Most importantly, it denies us the experience we share as human beings in terms of genuine love, care and compassion.  The very thing you accuse me of doing in relation to Muslim women.

Then there are the misrepresentations and distortions. You state:

For her (the author), Trayvon Martin’s hoodie signifies a history of racism, whereas Shaima Alawadi’s hijab signifies only male domination and female oppression.

I never stated that the hoodie ‘signifies a history of racism’.  I stated that the history of the hijab and the hoodie were not comparable or ‘equals’. The hoodie is an item of commercial sports wear, produced by sports clothing companies, in the name of comfortable clothes freely worn by men and women alike. The hijab is not comparable to the hoodie in that respect.  That is not to deny that some  people may seek to highlight the racial aspects of both items of clothing, what I am denying is their equality in terms of their origin, purpose and the general freedom to wear them.

I also never stated that the hijab ‘signifies only male domination and female oppression’. Yes, I quoted Muslim feminists who support the ban of the hijab in French schools and who find the hijab representative of male domination and female oppression.  I agree with their viewpoint but that’s not the same as claiming that myself. In fact, later on I concede that a minority of Muslim women (who have the freedom of choice) may exercise that choice freely, without the constraints of force or punishment.

You then state:

What we do find deeply problematic, however, is the questioning of women’s choice to wear the niqab and the presumption that this decision is rooted in a “false consciousness.”

This is not a presumption, there is significant empirical evidence from Muslim women bearing witness to a deeply oppressive patriarchal culture and religious practice which entails being brainwashed and forced to wear the hijab and burqa from a young age and being severely punished for not doing so.  Women have been tortured and murdered for not wearing these clothes.  However, you only refer to the Muslim women who have the freedom to exercise choice. What about the millions of Muslim women who don’t? Are their voices and experiences not relevant in this debate at all? Is the fear of Islamaphobia so intense that it cannot accommodate the voices of Muslim and non-Muslim women who want to see the hijab banned?

In terms of the subtle issue of ‘false consciousness’, my article clearly stresses that we should not conflate two issues here a) the freedom to choose and b) the choice itself. You have conflated the two issues in your response. I accept that there may be women (outside of Islamic states where women and girls do not have a choice) who freely choose to wear the hijab, but argue that this choice could still be critiqued. In the same way that women who choose to have cosmetic plastic surgery, as a result of patriarchal norms  and pressure, are criticised by women of all races and backgrounds. In fact, the picture (below) that I chose to be published along with my article, clearly demonstrates the parallels I  seek to draw between patriarchal control of female bodies and physical appearance in both secular and religious countries:

There are some double standards at work here too. On the one hand you attack me for using my ‘ white privilege’ to suggest that some Muslim women, who can freely choose to wear the hijab, may be doing so as a result of ‘false consciousness’. On the other hand, you accuse me of the ‘false consciousness’ of (i.e. unintentionally) propagating the views of white privilege and racism. If you can accuse me of not fully understanding the impact of my words on some Muslim women, then by the same token, why is my accusation that some women similarly suffer from that same lack of empathy/understanding in respect of the impact their choices have on myself and other females? And I would argue that the choice Muslim women make to wear the veil in secular countries, to impose that choice on the their daughters whether by force or by social pressure, most definitely does have the potential to cause a negative impact on myself, other women, men and children. For example, what message does it send to young schoolboys and girls when they see a Muslim schoolgirl covering her hair in the name of patriarchal religion, while Muslim boys’ heads go uncovered?

You also portray my view as if it lacks any support from Muslim or Arab women. As I stated in my article, I agree with Fadela Amara who explained her support for France’s ban:

The veil is the visible symbol of the subjugation of women, and therefore has no place in the mixed, secular spaces of France’s public school system.

When some feminists began defending the headscarf on the grounds of “tradition”, Amara vehemently disagreed:

They define liberty and equality according to what colour your skin is. They won’t denounce forced marriages or female genital mutilation, because, they say, it’s tradition. It’s nothing more than neocolonialism. It’s not tradition, it’s archaic. French feminists are totally contradictory. When Algerian women fought against wearing the headscarf in Algeria, French feminists supported them. But when it’s some young girl in a French suburb school, they don’t.

If we take Amara seriously, and I do, there appears to be a no-win situation for a white feminist in this debate. If we support, defend and promote your viewpoint, we will be accused by Muslim feminists like Amara of neo-colonialism. If we support feminists like Amara, we face condemnation and accusations of racism and privilege. Are you suggesting that neither I nor Muslim feminists (if my skin colour and religion offends you) can condemn this choice at all?   Are you seriously suggesting that we can only debate an issue if we have first-hand experience of it? Do I have to be a porn star to critique pornography?

You also then claim that I reduce Muslim women and women of colour

to a piece of cloth and the experiences of people of colour and practioners of an increasingly racialized and demonized religion are repeatedly questioned and denied.

Again, this completely ignores and glosses over the quotes in my article from Muslim and Arab feminists. In fact, ironically, I and others would argue that it is the very people who defend and promote the veil that reduce Muslim women to a piece of cloth.

I agree with you that it is absolutely essential to highlight the racism and Islamaphobia present when it comes to ‘the demonization, incarceration, and oppression of Muslim men, women, and children at home and abroad.’ However, let’s not forget that Muslim women and children are regularly demonised, incarcerated, and oppressed by Muslim men at home and abroad, the hijab being just one example. Yes, colonialism and Islamaphobia also play a key role in the oppression of Muslim men and women, but the real enemy here cannot be reduced to white men in suits and military clothing; and it certainly cannot be reduced to ‘white privileged’ feminists either.

Reading through your response and the subsequent comments about it online, the main point of contention appears to be my skin colour. If a Muslim feminist had written the same piece I doubt very much it would have come under the same level of hostility or scrutiny.  You state you dislike women of colour being reduced to their skin colour but that is exactly what you have done to me. You gloss over and ignore any of my own intersections of race, culture, religion and ethnicity with very little knowledge about me on a personal level.  Had it ever occurred to my detractors that I might be challenging the hijab on the basis of my Buddhist viewpoint not my skin colour? Does the presumption always have to be viewed through the reductionary lense of a person’s skin colour?

For example, the fact that one woman who posted on Facebook immediately assumed, when I was discussing immigration in the UK in a previous article for The Feminist Wire, that I was talking about non-white immigration, demonstrates the level of presumption and prejudice here. In addition, when I welcomed and agreed with another woman’s post, it was argued that I must have done so because she was white, further revealing an excessive level of paranoia and hostility towards whiteness. Whereas the truth was it had never even occurred to me, nor was I even aware, of the woman’s skin colour.  It is also a false accusation because I did thank and concur with the comments of a non-white woman on TFW website, who stated my article was ‘brilliant’. You can see how ridiculous my defence becomes when skin colour is deemed to be so important.

In conclusion, I understand that emotions are running high in this debate and am very sorry for any offence or upset I may have caused. It is important to stay calm and rational though.  It is sad that my article, whose sole aim and purpose was to attack patriarchal religion and culture, was interpreted by many within TFW Collective as oppressing and violating the identity of Muslim women. This could not be further from my intention. I am listening and accept that there may have been issues I could have expressed differently or with greater sensitivity.  However, I believe you also need to be careful that you do not fall into the cultural relativist trap of defending and supporting misogynists and patriarchs.

To end, I randomly read this quote today and thought it worth sharing:

“Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one’s self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily.” – Thomas Szasz

Yours in learning, peace, love and solidarity

Adele

I’m sure you Americans in the readership have the same phenomena where you are, albeit with different tourists, most probably the English; ‘FAWCET-FAWCET-FAWCET-WELL-HOWDY-PARDNER-BATHROOM-FAWCET-MCDONALDS!’

Do you ever get sick of visitors to your country overusing your words, and using them wrong? Technically wrong; wrong connotations; wrong situation; mismatched nuance and misjudged tone?

‘G’DAY-MATE-MATE-MATE-THROWASHRIMPONTHABARBIE-BRUCE-BRUCE-BRUCE-CRIKEY-ESKY- DINGO-DRONGO-WANKER!!!’

This is what you look like when you overuse the lingo. It’s not a good look, mate.

I tried preventing this before it even had a chance to happen with CFI’s Debbie Goddard, by confounding her with complete nonsense, and I think it worked. If you ever get the chance to meet her, ask ‘why can’t Fred ride a bike?’

(Don’t ever ask me, ask her.)

I never got to PZ Myers in time though, before he’d called Chris Stedman something like a ‘fluffy feelgood wanker’ (I paraphrase). I not sure about the ‘fluffy’ or the ‘feelgood’, but he did call him a ‘wanker’ – I do remember that bit. PZ’s been using the term ‘wanker’ a lot lately, like he’s the overly proud recipient of an honorary doctorate in

Strine from Steve Irwin University, for achievement in the twin fields of ‘Crikies’ and ‘Ubeudies’.

I do agree though, at least in my understanding of the term; Chris Stedman is a wanker. I’m not sure though, if PZ wasn’t actually looking for a harsher term (it’s not entirely uncommon for some Australian parents to lovingly call their kids ‘wanker’ for being silly, so I’m a bit taken aback at how PZ’s use of the term has been seen by some as so shocking).

***

Monday morning was the beginning of a wonderful, if a little grey, Melbourne day. I had chores to do, and places to go; it was my last full day in the city of Melbourne.

As it turned out, I ended up having quite an enjoyable breakfast with Rod, one of the volunteers from the GAC (you may have seen him running around in a blue convention t-shirt). Rod was even nice enough to shout. Here’s breakfast…

[media id=47653 title=”latte” width=”120″ height=”160″ class=”aligncenter size-full wp-image-47653″ ]

Coffee, yum, etc…

Note the sepia tone, the latte, the mostly out-of-shot remnants of a vegetarian breakfast, all taken on-location in Melbourne’s inner-suburbs.

To Australians, all these factors add up to one thing…

…WANKER!

(Actually, the latte is very common in Australia, consumed by yobs, bogans and working class yahoos. Pretending the latte is wanky, technically makes you a wanker. It’s the same deal with sparkling white wine, incidentally.)

***

After talk of green energy sources with Rod, talk of the local promotion of Aboriginal cultural enterprises, talk of public housing and wrought iron fences, and talk about this-and-that inner-city topic, it was a handshake before heading off to La Trobe University to meet up with another mate. We talked about Alvin Plantinga’s argument that naturalism was self-refuting (rubbish!); talked about student publications; talked about the continental philosophers over at Australian Catholic University (rubbish!), and talked about which Greek philosopher my mate’s lecturer looked like, all while I had a vegetarian lunch.

To Australians, all these factors add up to one thing…

…WANKER!

***

Before I go any further, I must confess that I once did a bit of interfaithy professional development in values education, run by UNESCO…

…WANKER!

***

Given that discussion, at the interfaithy event of the night called The Road Less Travelled, would be based largely on anecdote, I’ll summarise my own anecdotal observations about interfaith, up-front. These are the thoughts I had on my mind, going into this thing.

There’s too great a fetish in finding shared values, to the point of fabrication – oh, we’re all believers one way or another. (I’m so grateful that Hitchens caught Mos Def out on this, the dross that it is).

There’s ecumenical hostility towards atheists in the interfaith movement, often manifesting as scapegoating for social problems, more likely caused by religion (don’t you love those ‘New Atheists’ and ‘secular fundamentalists’, with their mosque bans and their placards reading ‘go home, this is a Christian nation’? I’ve never seen such a thing, actually.)

There’s far too much tokenism, not just in the selection of tokens from minorities, and in the singling them out from the nasty remainder. There’s also the exaggeration, and fabrication of the nastiness of the ‘nasties’, often enabled by the token themselves.

Z: Y isn’t like the rest of the Xs, and even if most Xs aren’t nasty, THOSE outspoken Xs over there ARE, isn’t that right, Y? (Oh, how we’d like to be able to cooperate with the Xs, if only…*sniff*)

Y: Yes, they’re not helping. They’re making my job harder, helping you cooperate with them. If only they’d be more respectful, you could allow them to cooperate in fixing the problems they didn’t create. Then they could finally be relieved of the consequences of these problems they didn’t create, which they complain about no end, which again, isn’t helping.

Z: Don’t worry Y, we’ll shelter you from those consequences. You’re Being Helpful. You’re an equal around here.

Interfaith pats people on the back for stuff they’re supposed to do, regardless. You’re not supposed to be fighting amongst each other! Congratulate you for getting along? Next you’ll expect an award for not roasting any of your children on a spit this year. Congratulations on your low expectations!

The most useful thing interfaith does in developed countries, it seems to me, is offer an avenue for middle-class singles to hook up for hot, hot, interfaith sex. ‘You are so spirichooal!’ Wakka-chikka-wah-wah!

(Honestly, you’ve got about as much chance of convincing me a good part of middle-class interfaith isn’t about lonely horny people, as you have of convincing me that the spiritualism in Lady Chatterley’s Lover isn’t the result of DH Lawrence focusing on giving himself a solipsist reach-around.)

Interfaith appropriates acts of ecumenical cooperation through innocuous branding, advancing an increasing monopoly over such cooperation. Having a single approach, or movement, monopolising cooperation is a Bad Thing. It stunts innovation, and allows vested interests to more easily hijack or pervert initiatives (see UNESCO).

Perhaps damnably, interfaith enables homophobia, especially on an international stage – people who should never have been consulted on human rights, through interfaith approaches (and an aversion to modernist ‘imperialism’) are now able to steer human rights discussions, simply by virtue of their numbers and faith positions (aka different ways of finding meaning aka different ways of not liking gays). Homophobia is a ‘shared value’, and nothing unites the tribes like the shared loathing of another Other.

(Perhaps it’s worthy of mention at this point that almost by definition, having anything to do with interfaith makes a person a wanker – and I paid for a ticket.)

You may be forgiven for reaching the verdict that I’m a little sceptical about interfaith.

***

So, at The Road Less Travelled, PZ Myers, Chris Stedman and Leslie Cannold were moderated in discussion by Meredith Doig of The Rationalist Society of Australia (Australian free-thought gets damn good value out of this lady, incidentally), on the big question:  ‘can believers and atheists work together for the common good?’

I’m glad this specific question didn’t get much time, because while it looks good on a flyer, it goes nowhere very fast. Can believers and atheist work together for the common good? Well, yes, obviously. Can I go home now?

When I was a little boy age two, living out in the middle of rural Australia, I had a godless family, while our neighbours were Christians. We didn’t proselytise each other – we had other priorities at the time, namely food and shelter (honestly, my family lived in a corrugated iron shack). We cooperated, and even though we needed to cooperate, we did so primarily because we loved one another.

While I cherish having had this relationship, it’s a particularly unremarkable story, at least here in Australia. It happens all the time, especially amongst the working class – with the interfaith movement nowhere in sight.

So I had a question in mind, particularly for Chris Stedman, before I even rocked up to the event…

‘If atheists can get along with the religious by other means – without interfaith initiatives – what does interfaith have to offer above and beyond existing cooperation, and what would atheists be expected to bring to the table in order to make such extended cooperation possible?’

…then I rocked up.

***

Truthfully, I was more impressed with Chris Stedman than I expected to be. The fact that he too was pissed off with the shared values fetish, and that he recognised substantive difference as needing to be acknowledged before any kind of binding decision making, went a long way with me.

He was also less effulgent and far less vague than I’d expected, given what I’ve read of his online. (Is he able to be like this on a regular basis, in the US?)

I didn’t entirely buy his objection to being tokenised, though, although I guess it’s not nothing that he at least has this concern. The stoushes he’s had with ‘New Atheists’ online, and the complaining about his job being made harder, at least flirt with the prospect of his making a token of himself.

As for my question, well I didn’t need to ask as it was effectively answered as the discussion unfolded – the upshot of interfaith is getting closer to religious people on an organisational level, while the price is deference, paid in the currency of ‘respect for belief’.

***

Simon Blackburn raises the concern in ‘Religion and Respect’, published in Philosophers Without Gods (Oxford University Press), of ‘respect creep’ – how demands for ‘respect’ (a ‘tricky term’) through vague terminology, increment until the demand has become for deference.  It’s an essay that anyone treating the civility of ‘respect of religious belief’ as common sense needs to be made to read.

If you consider this ‘respect creep’ in the context of marginalised religious minorities, and empowered religious majorities, it’s not long before you realise that common sense civility in these matters means certain things. The minority will show deference to the majority, while the empowered majority will overlook reciprocity, simply because it can get away without thinking about such details. Naively playing along, in order to ‘cooperate’, in campaigns geared towards anything approaching equality, is a ludicrous strategy.

Something along these lines seemed to pan out in the discussion between PZ Myers and Leslie Cannold – although to be fair to Cannold, whether it was flippancy or Minnesotan modesty, PZ downplayed the significance of the ‘Crackergate’ affair (the point of contention), making it look like a random blasphemy stunt. PZ was told it didn’t help campaigns for separation of church and state when religious beliefs were mocked.

PZ progressed through an array of rationale; ‘bragging’; to show nothing is sacred; scientists care about the truth, and the truth is it’s just a cracker; ‘you know this used to be a ritual used to justify pogroms against the Jews?’ (I paraphrase).

PZ never mentioned there was already an angry Catholic mob campaigning against and threatening some poor sod who accidentally ‘abducted’ a communion wafer, well before the wafer desecration of ‘Crackergate’ fame. PZ never got to mention that his choice of desecration – the nail – was in response to the old anti-Semitic wood carvings depicting Jews crucifying communion wafers.

PZ never got to mention the torrent of (often anti-Semitic) hate mail and death threats he received in response to the desecration.

Obviously, the level of detail involved in ‘Crackergate’ would have taken up the whole night, and then some. I didn’t actually expect PZ to give us the whole story. I would have liked it though if he’d raised the point that he was acting in retaliation against a specific case of the demand for deference; something that goes to the heart of what the discussion was about.

How do you cooperate with a hateful, forceful, bullying and sometimes violent mob that expects deference? This is what PZ was up against in ‘Crackergate’, and it rears its head at other times as well, sometimes even with mock politeness when ecumenical cooperation is sought.

We don’t normally deal with quite this kind of thing here in Australia, and while my own behaviour and interaction with the religious is more in line with Leslie Cannold’s stated views, and while my interest in the truth comes more from a ‘need-to-know’ utilitarianism, I still view ‘Crackergate’ as both a moral, and a politically necessary victory. In this case, the mob needed standing up to and I don’t care one dot when people bemoan how decorum comes into it.

I find a lot of staged acts of blasphemy to be contrived, self-aggrandizing and clichéd attention-seeking (i.e. wanking), but not ‘Crackergate’.

***

I went away from the gathering with a better impression of Chris Stedman than I’d expected*, a more fleshed out impression of Leslie Cannold, and pretty much the same opinion of PZ Myers as I had a few weeks earlier. (Although Leslie Cannold’s polished mock-familiarity [say when pretending to whisper to the crowd] seemed better geared to larger audiences than the smaller, closer crowd we were in.)

I found the some of the crowd quite annoying (although Jason Ball, and a number of the other young rationalists were around, which was good), being seated to one fellow who just kept complaining about this, that and whatever that had happened around the traps**.

There was a young wanker in the audience, who seeing as how PZ ‘valued disrespectfulness’ (I paraphrase), and how PZ supposedly thought he was ‘better than us [religious people]’ (again, I paraphrase), decided to point out that PZ was unsuited to the role of scientist because he was fat. That was fun. After having his misconceptions and curious assumptions calmly punctured, our young wanker friend was forced to concede, ‘…then… we agree…’

If only every religionist who chimed in about how ‘New Atheists’ were trying to get Francis Collins sacked on account of being a Christian were as open-minded and as able to listen as well as our young wanker, we’d have had a more productive discussion on that front. Maybe the difference is down to the humanizing capacity of face-to-face discussion. Either that, or Miller et al. are bigger, more sanctimonious wankers than I realise.

(A defensive interjection by either a PZ fan, or a dietary science student, wasn’t needed – PZ had things well in hand).

Sadly, I didn’t get too much face-to-face myself at the after-party at Embiggen Books, owing to not going. I had to prepare for my departure from Melbourne, city of wankers, scheduled for early the next morning.

Somehow, I get this sense that discussion of serious matters would have stayed serious, while the overwrought stuff (like ‘respect for belief’) would at last have been treated with due relaxation. I get that feel about after-parties generally, and Embiggen Books specifically; not wanky.

(An exception being, I have this image in mind, of PZ waddling around Embiggen Books, trying to speak Ostrayun, while eating Vegemite smeared communion wafers – very wanky).

Shuffling back out into the dark with my thoughts and reflections, while the party went on, was how my experience of the Global Atheist Convention of 2012, ended. Thanks for having me, Victorians.

~ Bruce

* I may even be able to handle reading his book now.

** Like my GAC coverage?

London: MP Chuka Umunna, the most senior UK politician of Black African heritage, has hosted the first ever House of Commons Summit designed to end child abuse resulting from witchcraft-branding. Former Home Office Minister Meg Hillier said that the Home Secretary should consider using her power to refuse to allow faith leaders who have branded children as witches to enter the UK.

Chuka Umunna’s position as Shadow Business Secretary and the only black member of the Shadow Cabinet means that he is the most senior politician in the UK who is of African origin. The London MP hosted the Summit in conjunction with AFRUCA, Africans Unite Against Child Abuse, to bring together policymakers, charities, faith leaders and community representatives in order to examine how best to curtail child abuse resulting from accusations of witchcraft or possession by evil spirits.

The Summit followed the conviction of Eric Bikubi and Magalie Bamu for the murder of Kristy Bamu on Christmas Day 2010. The Crown Prosecution Service said that Eric Bikubi inflicted ‘violence on an unimaginable scale’ and that Magalie Bamu ‘willingly subjected her 15 year old brother to extreme violence’. The teenager was found with 130 separate injuries and died from a combination of drowning and beatings to his head, chest and limbs.

The event was held in the Grand Committee Room of the House of Commons at the Palace of Westminster on the 18^th April and, as well as Chuka Umunna and Meg Hillier, those speaking at the event included Tim Loughton MP, the Children’s Minister; Catherine McKinnell MP, the Shadow Children’s Minister; Keith Vaz MP, Chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee; and Modupe Debbie Ariyo OBE, Founder and Director of AFRUCA.

The Home Secretary has the power to refuse entry to the UK to anyone whose presence in the UK is not good for our country. She should consider using this when faith leaders who have branded children as witches seek to enter the UK.

 Safeguarding is just as important in a faith setting as in a school. Faith leaders are trusted because of their leadership in their community. Parents and carers should be able to be reassured that their trust us well placed.

The Summit featured contributions from around 50 community leaders, policy makers and other interested groups and issues raised included the content of some Christian TV channels, safeguarding practices in Churches, and possible changes to the Law which would explicitly tackle this kind of abuse.

London MP Chuka Umunna, who hosted the Summit, said:

Children branded as witches or being possessed by evil spirits can face some of the worst abuse and neglect imaginable.  As a society, we must face up to this and stop this abuse from happening.  A lot of abuse happens under the radar which makes it all the more important that we put all our energies into hunting it out and putting a stop to it.

 We must send out the strongest message possible that there can be no excuse whatsoever for treating children in this way, branding them as witches or being  possessed by evil spirits, and if you carry out these awful acts the strong arm of the law will be brought to bear on you.

I am glad that so many prominent MPs attended this event – including the Children’s Minister – and that the community, policy makers and the third sector were able to come together in this way to agree a list of actions we will all take to prevent the abuse and neglect of our children and young people.  The Summit was a good first step in bringing this issue to the attention of those in the corridors of power but it is only a first step – we need to ensure it is followed up with action.”

We are grateful to the MPs who attended and to Chuka Umunna for hosting this very important Summit. The huge turnout shows that AFRUCA clearly has the support of the African community in pushing for positive changes in the best interest of our children. It is totally incomprehensible that someone’s life can be ruined because someone thinks they are a witch. We will therefore continue to work to prevent children from being harmed as a result of witchcraft branding.

For further information please contact David Hale on 07891390988 or at david.hale@parliament.uk.

Foreign Policy has a superb series out now called The Sex Issue. In their own words, here is what it’s about:

When U.S. magazines devote special issues to sex, they are usually of the celebratory variety (see: Esquire, April 2012 edition; Cosmopolitan, every month). Suffice it to say that is not what we had in mind with Foreign Policy’s first-ever Sex Issue, which is dedicated instead to the consideration of how and why sex — in all the various meanings of the word — matters in shaping the world’s politics. Why? In Foreign Policy, the magazine and the subject, sex is too often the missing part of the equation — the part that the policymakers and journalists talk about with each other, but not with their audiences. And what’s the result? Women missing from peace talks and parliaments, sexual abuse and exploitation institutionalized and legalized in too many places on the planet, and a U.S. policy that, whether intentionally or not, all too frequently works to shore up the abusers and perpetuate the marginalization of half of humanity. Women’s bodies are the world’s battleground, the contested terrain on which politics is played out. We can keep ignoring it. For this one issue, we decided not to.

The articles’ criticisms are aimed squarely on the worst offenders in the oppression of women, such as Iran and Saudi Arabia, as well as commenting on discriminatory practices elsewhere such as sex-selective abortion in India.

An article by Egyptian-American journalist Mona Eltahawy called “Why Do They Hate Us” co-opts the question so often said to be asked by Americans, and asks it as a woman. Eltahawy is particularly forceful in her indictment of the misogyny so prevalent in the Middle East:

Name me an Arab country, and I’ll recite a litany of abuses fueled by a toxic mix of culture and religion that few seem willing or able to disentangle lest they blaspheme or offend. When more than 90 percent of ever-married women in Egypt — including my mother and all but one of her six sisters — have had their genitals cut in the name of modesty, then surely we must all blaspheme. When Egyptian women are subjected to humiliating “virginity tests” merely for speaking out, it’s no time for silence. When an article in the Egyptian criminal code says that if a woman has been beaten by her husband “with good intentions” no punitive damages can be obtained, then to hell with political correctness. And what, pray tell, are “good intentions”? They are legally deemed to include any beating that is “not severe” or “directed at the face.” What all this means is that when it comes to the status of women in the Middle East, it’s not better than you think. It’s much, much worse.

Eltahawy says not a word of a lie. She tells it like it is, merely describing practices and actions on the part of men towards women that are violent and depraved. When you read such descriptions, free of the sugarcoating so often slathered on by those who squirm at the very idea of criticizing other cultures, you realize just how rare it is to hear the devastating truth. In asking what is to be done, she warns:

First we stop pretending. Call out the hate for what it is. Resist cultural relativism and know that even in countries undergoing revolutions and uprisings, women will remain the cheapest bargaining chips. You — the outside world — will be told that it’s our “culture” and “religion” to do X, Y, or Z to women. Understand that whoever deemed it as such was never a woman.

She pre-empts all those whose defensiveness and apologism will kick in almost automatically at such a direct attack on misogyny in a specific region of the world, since it’s the fashion among university-educated elites to be respectful and polite at all cost when it comes to cultural differences, and always conscientious of the grave risk of being labeled a cultural imperialist.

And as predicted, it’s just not okay to criticize the appalling treatment of women in the Arab world, without at least an equal condemnation of, ideally, 1. the United States of America; 2. Israel, and 3. the Western world more generally, in that order.

Sherene Seikaly and Maya Mikdashi, in their response to Foreign Policy’s series, accuse Eltahawy of reviving “binaries”, and take issue on all of the predictable fronts:

its focus is almost exclusively on Iran, the Arab world, and China. Thus “the world” is reduced for the most part to Arabs, Iranians, and Chinese—not a coincidental conglomeration of the “enemy.” The current war on women in the United States is erased.

Well it is “Foreign Policy” magazine, so the lack of comment on the status of US women should not come as too big a surprise, and the focus on countries like Iran and China where the US has significant foreign policy interests (and challenges) would be expected. This is the classic relativist argument: you didn’t criticize all countries or cultures equally, so you’re mean and unfair. This argument’s fallacy lies in the reality that countries and cultures don’t all subjugate their women equally. So different doses of condemnation are quite justified.

Further, the article is about women in the Arab world, and specifically, Egypt. It’s not about American women. It’s not about Swedish women. It’s not about Bolivian women. Eltahawy knows and writes about women in the Arab world. She’s not obliged to comment on the status of women everywhere under the sun, and she’s not even obliged to add caveats, (“not withstanding that women in Country X are also demeaned, …”) in order to criticize what she sees around her, in the region she knows.

About Karim Sadjadpour’s terrific article, “The Ayatollah Under the Bed(sheets)” which points out the co-existence of a radical effort to suppress normal sexual behaviour alongside some both quirky and harmful perversions prevalent in Iran and the Muslim world at large, Seikaly and Mikdashi say:

Leaving aside his dismissal of the centuries old tradition of practicing Muslims asking and receiving advice on sexual and gender practices, the article assumes an unspoken consensus with its readers: the idea of a mullah writing about sex is amusing if a little perverted.

Again, Sadjadpour is being indicted for criticizing the obvious: a hypocrisy on the part of the Iranian clergy when it comes to human sexual activity that Iranians themselves routinely defy and poke fun at. And is this tradition of sexual advice-seeking from mullahs to be celebrated when it’s yielding such penetrating (pun intended) probing as this, a hypothetical situation deeply pondered by one Ayatollah Gilani of Iran?

Imagine you are a young man sleeping in your bedroom. In the bedroom directly below, your aunt lies asleep. Now imagine that an earthquake happens that collapses your floor, causing you to fall directly on top of her. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that you’re both nude, and you’re erect, and you land with such perfect precision on top of her that you unintentionally achieve intercourse. Is the child of such an encounter halalzadeh (legitimate) or haramzadeh (a bastard)?

Then they’re peeved with the magazine’s visuals, a series of photographs of a nude woman painted all in black except for her eyes:

She stares at us afraid and alluring. We are invited to sexualize and rescue her at once. The images reproduce what Gayatri Spivak critiqued as the masculine and imperial urge to save sexualized (and racialized) others. The photo spread is reminiscent of Theo van Gogh’s film Submission, based on Ayyan Hirsli Ali’s writings, in which a woman with verses of the Quran painted on her naked body and wearing a transparent chador writhes around a dimly lit room. Foreign Policy’s “Sex Issue” montage is inspired by the same logic that fuels Submission: we selectively highlight the plight of women in Islam using the naked female body as currency. The female body is to be consumed, not covered!

Both Foreign Policy’s photos and Hirsi Ali’s use of paint on a woman’s nude body is aimed at irony, a point lost on Seikaly and Mikdashi. The images are intent on provocation (and it certainly worked in the case of Seikaly and Mikdashi) in that they confront us not with the invitation to “consume”, but with what the mullahs try to hide: that underneath the niqab is a woman’s body. The message is that while misogynists want women to be covered up, they still sexually exploit them underneath. Covered up, they are still consumed.

The photos are somewhat less guilty of “sexualizing” women than the advice dispensed from the Ayatollahs who counsel that women have such sexual prowess that their hair alone has the power to render man forceless (and therefore must be covered up), or the snipers of the Basji in Iran who were reportedly specifically shooting beautiful women among the protesters thronging the streets of Tehran in 2009, as Sadjadpour points out. They are less guilty of sexualizing women than the men in Egypt who subjected women protestors to forced virginity tests, which Eltahawy called “rape disguised as a medical doctor inserting his fingers into their vaginal opening in search of hymens.”

This is the game of the Ayatollahs, and all the men who disguise their desire for the sexual submission of women under the veil of religion: their sexualization of women is violent and systematic, and it uses religious discourse to keep women’s bodies their unchallenged preserve. It’s easier to sexually exploit women when they are trapped in your home and under your command, uneducated, married young, with no political, social or economic rights. When women escape into the public sphere, their bodies are much less controllable, if still at risk in any society where the pulse of misogyny still beats on.

But it is here where Seikaly and Mikdashi show their true colours:

Of course, female genital mutilation and ages of consent are topics that require our careful attention. In the case of former, the reality is that women are often those that insist on the practice because of ways that gender and political economy regimes together make it a necessary rite of womanhood. In fact, critical thinkers have long argued that this practice has more to do with the lack of economic opportunity for women, the imperative to marry, and the hardening and modernization of tradition in response to colonial and neocolonial interventions (including rights frameworks) than some irrational and razor crazed “hatred.” The same insight could be extended to the question of ages of consent. A reductive framework of hatred makes these topics even more difficult to critically think about and work on.

There is the telltale euphemism: FGM requires “our careful attention”. Not our condemnation, not to be erased, not to be opposed, not to be deplored. It needs “attention”. And actually, it’s women’s choice to undergo FGM, so back off. And if it’s not that, then, well, it’s the fault of colonizers and neo-colonizers. So despite the fact that FGM has been practiced in Egypt since the time of the Pharaohs, it’s really perpetuated by some unidentified neocolonial intervention. If something bad is happening in the world, colonizers must have something to do with it.

Such dependency on the view of the world as nothing other than a post-colonial/colonial environment typically negates the internal causes and purveyors of misogyny, most of which pre-existed any experience of colonization. When the blame for all the ills of the developing world are consistently placed on “colonizers”, however many decades or centuries after de-colonization, it’s hard to get the governments and people of once-colonized lands to take responsibility for the changes that need to occur if the status of women is to be improved.

As for women’s participation in the abuses they suffer, certainly it’s true that many adult women are those holding little girls down on the table so that their genitals can be butchered in a procedure that cannot be called anything but cruel, traumatic and without reason. But they do this as part of a culture where the perimeters were laid by men long ago, men who want women and girls to know their place. It is still part of a hatred of women, even if women are participating in it.

Call it culture, call it divine, call it neo-colonialism, but the thread of hatred is always there and often shrouded in the language of God’s law. God wants you to be submissive. God wants you to give in to your husband’s sexual appetite. God wants you to endure beatings. God wants you to be punished for venturing out in public; that is why you experience sexual harassment, sexual assault, or rape. This religion-based justification is not imposed from outside powers; it comes from within, and so it’s from within that it must be destroyed.

But putting this all out on the table is unwarranted, it would seem to Seikaly and Mikdashi, or at least, the blame should be equally divided between colonized and colonizers, between men and women, between Americans and the rest of the world (and Israelis, since a photo of a Jordanian woman protesting outside the Israeli Embassy in Amman is inexplicably included with Seikaly and Mikdashi’s article). They are uncomfortable with the sexual advice doled out by Ayatollahs being mocked. Again, this reaction is anticipated by one of the Foreign Policy writers, Sadjadpour:

the sexual manias of Iran’s religious fundamentalists are worthy of greater scrutiny, all the more so because they control a state with nuclear ambitions, vast oil wealth, and a young, dynamic, stifled population. Yet for a variety of reasons — fear of becoming Salman Rushdie, of being labeled an Orientalist, of upsetting religious sensibilities — the remarkable hypocrisy of the Iranian regime is often studiously avoided.

Without voices like Eltahawy’s, those of us on the outside looking in would be able to drown ourselves in the excuse-making of cultural relativism: they like being abused, degraded, violated. Our own society isn’t perfect, so how can we criticize? At best, we might give “careful attention” to the most overt forms of misogyny, like FGM. At worst, we might just tell ourselves that the women are choosing it, so let it be.

But it’s the men who made the rules. As Eltahawy points out, “Our political revolutions will not succeed unless they are accompanied by revolutions of thought — social, sexual, and cultural revolutions that topple the Mubaraks in our minds as well as our bedrooms.”

Day one – Thursday: It begins…

… or the fringe events begin, at any rate.

I’ve arrived in Melbourne, being greeted by more than a few pubs with closed doors and ‘For Sale’ signs, and hijab or ten. The voice of an invisible, satirical yokel cries in my mind ‘Sharia law! This was a Christian nation’.

We don’t have the same presence of far-right, totalitarian, Islamic groups here in Australia that Europe has. Our yokels object to Muslims, not Islam (which they don’t know anything about – ask them what they think of Wahhabism, and they’ll probably tell you they don’t like sushi), while our political left remains somewhat oblivious to the ways far-right political Islam can manifest, and don’t seem to understand why others on the left may have concerns.

(Indeed, given that moderate Muslims in migrant communities are often the first to be pressured/bullied/harassed by Islamic extremists in western nations, being reflexively blind to such extremism makes portions of the left bad friends to Muslims).

However, unless you encounter the yokel, the political RadiCool, or the occasional sanctimonious wonk, discussions of issues of religion and politics are comparatively laid back in Australia. We don’t have to worry about genuine critics of Islam being marginalized by the media, the way Maryam Namazie has been sidelined by the BBC in the UK, nor do we have to worry too much about secularists being sent death threats the way Jessica Ahlquist has been targeted by cowardly Christian nationalists in the US.

(And no, Andrew Bolt is not a victim of ‘political correctness’.)

***

I’m a vegetarian, in much the same ethical tradition as ethicist Peter Singer, a speaker at the Global Atheist Convention. Finding vegetarian-friendly meals on the fly while travelling can be a little trying, but thankfully I’ve had a little advice in advance, and tried out a local chain of vegetarian fast food: Lord of The Fries.

Lord of the Fries… No piggy served here.

It’s not the kind of place I’ll be eating at too regularly – cost and dietary concerns prohibit that. However, the food was truly wonderful, and worth every cent. I have my doubts anything like this could succeed in my hometown of Adelaide, but it’d be nice.

A cheaper vegetarian meal was sought in the Melbourne suburb of Preston, successfully, although the encounter raised an interesting issue. On shelves and on posters in the bakery sat propaganda for the ‘Supreme Master’ cult – a movement which has been advertising semi-regularly onAustralia’s multicultural, free-to-air television station, SBS.

This was hardly an interfaith exchange – my buying a vegetarian curry pie and sausage roll for cold hard cash. And it would be safe to say that I’m less than impressed with the way the ‘Supreme Master’ goes about the business of animal welfare and environmentalism. But in as far as we shared values, there was cooperation, differences notwithstanding.

On Monday night I’ll be going to an event hosted by Meredith Doig, and featuring Leslie Cannold, PZ Myers, and Chris Stedman, where the question will be asked, ‘can believers and atheists work together for the common good?’ I suspect my example fromPreston, amongst countless others, confirms a ‘yes’.

Honestly, I can’t think of a good, general secular principle binding me to not cooperate with believers. I guess you’d have to ask believers what their God (or ‘Supreme Master’) thinks, to see if there was an issue on their end.

In passing, I wonder just how much cooperation an infidel like me could expect from the staff of East Preston Islamic College or from the Islamic college at Werribbe – since arriving in Melbourne, I’ve heard rumblings from godless secularists and moderate Muslims alike, of concerns about Wahhabist overtones in the curriculum. This is second-hand anecdote, of course, not rigorous social science; perhaps Melburnian lefties will investigate rather than leaving it up to the Murdoch press.

Believer or not, most Australians don’t want divisiveness…although we argue endlessly about what it is and how to avoid it, with various levels of competence (when we’re not busy being too laid-back, that is.)

***

My Thursday night’s event of choice, which meant missing out on Dan Dennett and Peter Singer, was a discussion of Sean Faircloth’s ‘10 point plan’ on how to push secularism forward, and how a similar approach could be adopted in Australia, held at Embiggen Books. The discussion featured secularist power-houses Russell Blackford, Meredith Doig and Graham Oppy.

Near-consensus seemed to be reached that a series of such points should, at least in an Australian context, represent underlying secular principles from which specific policy points emerge, rather than being a shopping list of policy wants (which is pretty much what Faircloth’s list is). The difficulty in this however, it was suggested, was making such a series of points politically relevant and attractive to Australians. Abstract political concepts aren’t the easiest thing to sell, especially when you’re running up against savvy evangelicals and Australian Rules football.

Retellings of the consequences of sectarian policy, such as the suffering caused by a historically religious prohibition against same-sex marriage (now a wolf-in-secular-sheep’s clothing on account of concocted concerns about child welfare), have had increasing impact over the last twenty years upon Australia’s attitude towards marriage equality. Stories of human experience are necessary, in addition to secular philosophy, and scientific investigation of empirical truths (please consider this and this).

I was handed this flyer on my way to Embiggen Books for the evening’s proceedings…

There were many substantive matters discussed on the night, including the matter of free speech, which unlike as in the US, isn’t a particularly well protected right in Australia, if a right at all. The agreed-upon place for the continuation of the night’s discussion is over at Russell Blackford’s blog, in the comments of a recent post (here).

The evening concluded with Russell and Jenny Blackford and Graham Oppy, leading VIP Debbie Goddard, and a bunch of Adelaidian misfits off to The Moat, under the Wheeler Centre, for drinks and a chin-wag. I must have been getting tired, because some of the details are a little hazy, and I only had one drink (a nice little pinot) – I do recall misplaced apostrophes being found in the menu, and Archbishop George Pell being the butt of a joke.

Maybe I shouldn’t be revealing these kinds of details anyway. Hopefully though, my constitution can withstand the full force of the convention proper!

~ Bruce

Day two – Friday: Canapés and Entrées…

The official story was, I’m told, that the canapés were a part of some kind of standard package. This apparently counted against all the forms filled out by ticket holders, marking ‘vegetarian’ or ‘vegan’ (or whatnot).

I wasn’t around at the Global Atheist Convention in 2010 to compare, but I’m told there were similar issues then with vegetarian food. I can’t honestly say I was irked, myself, but there were grumbling veggies with grumbling tummies in earshot, that made their views apparent.

(Please note, I absolutely do not attribute the cause of this gastronomic mishap to any of the volunteers from the Atheist Foundation of Australia – I know full well some of the effort from behind the scenes, put into accommodating vegetarians. Nor incidentally, was the catering staff at the public end responsible.)

David Nicholls gave a decent opening address to the convention.

Things are changing, inevitably, with young faces like Jason Ball’s all over the place, but it’s worth noting where all of this came from. A reflection on the history of the Atheist Foundation of Australia, delivered from our bemulleted, rural, South Australian Prez, breathed life into the legacy of the older generation. I swear I could smell home brew, pottery, Brut 33, and old letters to the editor.

(I’m originally from rural South Australia, and I once also sported a mullet, so I’m allowed to stir; the Prez is one of my own people.)

Kylie Sturgess and Lawrence Leung took to the stage to MC the event, demonstrating the perfect mix of joviality and professionalism. A cocktail should be named after these two (a task that would have been satisfying, to have been able to see being put past The Hitch).

Mikey Robbins started strong, and I was glad to see him, 1990s throwback that I am, but I can’t help but think his stride was interrupted, somewhat, by what, I don’t know.

Ben Elton… Oh, Ben. Poor sexually repressed Ben.

Apparently, the idea of people with shaved nether-regions having oral sex offends the man’s sensibilities. I know Dawkins has been nominated the atheist pope, but he’s just too liberal about respecting other people’s sex lives – since when has he issued edicts about what consenting adults are and aren’t supposed to do with their tender bits?

Ben Elton; pope of atheists, or pope aspirant?

Aside from that, and a journey through what seemed like recycled material from 1999 (‘hey kids, how about those spam emails?’), Elton still seemed funnier than I can remember, since his appearance in a Comic Relief in the 1980s. The whole genital jeremiad was tied together into something approaching religious satire near the end of the act, but I would have liked more religious material, if only to reduce the appearance of old filler.

Stella Young, I didn’t know you, and I didn’t know I loved you; you were awesome.

Somehow, tying things together in a religious context towards the end of Stella’s act didn’t raise the issues I had with Elton’s performance. Getting to know how Stella views the world, prior to the introduction of religion, was a bit like getting to know the cast of Alien before introducing the eponymous monster – you were made to care when the proverbial hit the fan.

And not in some patronising, wishy-washy way, either. That was half the point, the way people pretend to be enlightened in their treatment of ‘the other’ – instead treating them like children or fashion accessories. I pity the wanker who tries to talk down to Stella.

I think I’m going to be dragging the concept of use-mention distinctions into my critique of performance art, where gender epithets rear their heads. Stella dropped the c-bomb; she used the term ‘cripple’. She mentioned ‘c**t’ when telling a crowd member they looked like they’d have preferred that term instead.

I’m not sure I’m entirely comfortable with this either, but at the very least she wasn’t calling anyone, one, or using the term insincerely or in a cowardly way (which would be bad art). I’m not going to fault it.

(I suspect use-mention error may be the perfect rebuttal of choice to those Internet misogynists claiming that a feminist mentioning the word ‘cunt’ in any analysis, is morally equivalent to when a misogynist uses the term by calling someone ‘cunt’. It isn’t equivalent, and I’d like to nominate use-mention as a technical distinction worthy of greater use in these discussions.)

I was told, when asking some local comedy fans, that aside from the c-bomb being a common staple of Melbournian comedy, that recently, there’d been local controversy over the use of the word – and subsequent pushback from comedians. Apparently they need to stand up to the oppression of being criticised, or something, the poor souls.

I’m not entirely sure of where I stand on the use of gender epithets in the arts, across the breadth of contexts that is. Was it in-character? Was it satirical? Was it pure gender hatred? What does this say about the sincerity of the artwork/artist?

However, as far as healthy scepticism permits, I’m quite sure where it is that I stand on Jim Jefferies’ use of the term. I loathe watching people calling other people ‘cunt’.

Yeah, Jim, you’re edgy. You shock. You push envelopes – the same envelopes, over and over and over again. Aside from becoming very predictable, very quickly, losing whatever shock value it had like some cheap chewing gum rapidly losing an initially strong flavour, what the audience was left with, ultimately, was a jerk who treats domestic violence like suitable trolling material.

‘…remember not to punch women…’

‘…saw off my mum’s breast…’

(I paraphrase).

Dude started edgy (aka cutting-edge misogynist), but by the end of the gig, sheer repetition degenerated Jeffries’ material into misogynistic Dad jokes. He should swap that Prisoner style jacket for a cardigan and a copy of the Herald Sun.

I’d hate to think that Jim Jeffries has to burn up audiences like a starving beard-neck at an all-you-can-eat, just to maintain the appearance of his material being fresh. I say this because the guy’s not talentless at all. When you stripped back the shock-misogyny, what you were left with is possibly the most talented comic of the night – easily beating out Ben Elton.

Marion Maddox (the believer on the next day’s politics panel) would call this out the following morning; atheists don’t get to criticise religious misogyny from the same platform they spew misogyny from themselves. While I wouldn’t say there’s grounds to say Jeffries was representative (and I’d call false moral equivalence on comparing a misogynist comedian to the women-hating antics of most religions), Jeffries as a choice of entertainer is more than wide-open to criticism.

The GAC started with the explicit mention of how feminism was aligning more closely with atheistic objectives, something that this convention’s line-up was supposed to demonstrate. I’m not saying Jeffries should be censored. What I am saying is that his trade should have been plied elsewhere, perhaps off with the rest of the comedy wankers in Melbourne– he didn’t belong on this stage, and I didn’t enjoy paying for a gold ticket to see him.

Yes, I do know this is a freethinking community. I do know that there will be differences. But is it worth having a central theme of the convention crossed so thoughtlessly by someone who’s there as a crowd warmer?

What’s next? George Pell giving us the comedic stylings of why child abuse is funny?

Stage-time is a finite resource where John Stuart Mill’s opportunity cost comes in to play, unavoidably restricting the range of views that can expressed. It’s not wrong for freethinkers to prioritise in these circumstances

Is it such a crime against freethought, and so out of line with our cause, to have ‘haw haw, violence against women is funny’, off the agenda?

A guest post by Bruce Everett

Day three – Saturday: The meat of the GAC… or the TVP…

Early to bed, early to rise… sigh. I went to bed late, owing to running into an old school friend at the GAC, and going out for drinks. On our crawl, we even ran into the messiah…

Imaan – Bigger Than Jesus

He shares at least one thing in common with Richard Dawkins, incidentally; he doesn’t like Andrew Bolt.

***

Okay… Saturday… Early to rise…

Saturday morning, after being unintentionally awoken by one of my jetlagged Italian roommates (which was welcome because my alarm clock had broken), I got off my backside and made my way to the convention to see Peter Singer.

Singer, if you don’t know, is a vegetarian, which kind of suggests certain things about what the catering may need to take into account. Kylie Sturgess reminded the audience as much as we went into a break later in the day (respect those vegetarians!)

Catering turned out to be more amenable to us animal-cruelty avoiding weirdos in the audience.

Singer invoked the old device of The Expanding Circle to discuss the extent to which we are willing to extend our moral concern beyond our selves, and our immediate kin, though the tiers of groups, all the way up to and including all life on Earth capable of suffering. It was argued, predictably, that the circle is expanding; however, Singer referred to Steven Pinker’s recent Better Angels of Our Nature as an empirical basis for this claim, which was novel.

Although I think Singer was bested in terms of overall value by other speakers at the convention, he was still no slouch. Indeed, he’s the academic I most anticipated seeing at the convention; I wasn’t disappointed.

Leslie Cannold however, stole the show. It was at least a tie between her and Lawrence Krauss, who would follow later in the night, in terms of sheer energy and engagement.

The myths surrounding section 116 of the Australian Constitution were torn asunder by Cannold, especially in light of the DOGS 1981 case, where the High Court used what appears to be pure sophistry to interpret the separation of church and state inAustraliaout of existence. This was made apparent, and obvious, through a comparison of the incredibly similar wordings of our section 116 and the establishment clause of the first amendment in theUSconstitution.

Prepared with Max Wallace, and delivered by such a proficient communicator as Leslie Cannold, the issue was rendered vivid and undeniable. The success of the delivery of this message is important because of a common misconception; Australiahas no separation of church and state – it’s a soft theocracy.

***

Dan Barker was, well, Dan Barker. Lovable, but still with the oratory of a preacher; a kind I personally find off-putting. I emphasise; ‘personally’.

I can understand Dan Barker’s appeal to those leaving fundamentalist Christianity though. He nails biblical absurdities with wit and emotion, and just a bit of camp value, if you like that kind of thing. I especially appreciated Barker’s disclosure of how he spends the royalties from an old piece of Christian propaganda he produced back in the day; on a charity supporting women’s reproductive autonomy.

Others may differ, but aside from light entertainment, I got only one thing from Dan Barker’s performance, but it was a good-un; I gained a trust in his motives I otherwise couldn’t have.

When I discussed the Convention with Warren Bonnet (editor of the Australian Book of Atheism, and co-owner of Melbourne’s Embiggen Books), he emphasised the importance of these conventions as a means to humanise our networks; that we don’t just leave our interactions purely at the mercy of communications technologies, with all the social problems that can arise out of them.

While it wasn’t necessarily the high-profile atheists Warren and I had in mind, I think my experience watching Dan Barker, whom I’ve had (healthy) doubts about, demonstrates the point. I trust others can corroborate experiences like this.

***

After the morning break (with very nice, vegetarian-friendly biscuits – BISCUITS!), a political panel discussing the need for secular reform, in particular in the regulation of education, consisted of Fiona Patten, Colleen Hartland, Dick Gross, and Marion Maddox, with Derek Guille as moderator.

Marion Maddox stole the show, and given she was the biggest believer on the panel, it was perhaps ironic that she was easily most worthy of the title ‘secular fundamentalist’ – taking Dick Gross and Colleen Hartland to task for their comparatively soft touch. (It also helped that Maddox knew her material.)

Dick Gross was a waste of space on the panel, which isn’t to say I dislike him. It’s just that aside from a single salient point – concerning a matter of opportunity cost between comparative religion and science funding in schools – he listlessly equivocated and vacillated, seemingly wasting a lot of energy just to position himself as some kind of moderate.

All the positioning could have been justified if only he’d committed himself to clearer, more lucid disagreement with the others on the panel. But that isn’t what he gave us (and I don’t care one jot about his long-standing status as a popularFairfaxblogger.)

(Right on the back of the publication of Freedom of Religion & the Secular State, Dick’s was a seat that would have easily been better filled by Russell Blackford.)

Fiona Patten, of the Australian Sex Party, was largely in agreement with Marion Maddox, although the sequence of questioning left her largely nodding her head and adding occasional secondary points after Maddox spoke. I would have liked to have seen Patten given the lead more often – not to displace Maddox, but so that at least Patten had a chance to direct discussion towards the political niches where she has more specialised experience than Maddox. As an experienced newsperson, Derek Guille should have taken this into account.

General consensus was reached, which was more or less unsurprising; to do secular education right, public schools needed better funding across a number of curriculum learning areas. I’m in agreement; however, there are those libertarians in the ‘atheist movement’ who support voucher systems and privatisation who may be at odds with this.

I don’t say this to be all fuzzy and inclusive; rather, I think it would be interesting to see, especially of those plying a trade in the Skeptic movement (effectively placing them in competition with public education, and making them beneficiaries of widespread scientific ignorance), which libertarians disagree.

On balance, I think the event at Embiggen Books two nights earlier, with Meredith Doig, Russell Blackford and Graham Oppy, was better, although I think adding Maddox and Patten to the mix, based on their GAC appearance, would make for a dream-card. Maybe if there’s another GAC inMelbourne?

***

Dan Dennett followed, giving a lecture on closet atheists – directed especially at any undercover believers in the audience. I’ve already seen much of what Dan Dennett has to say on the matter, so I won’t discuss the substantive points (if you’re curious, there’s The Evolution of Confusion), however there are signs of Dennett’s project progressing, with further refinements to the theory, as well as practical developments (see The Clergy Project).

Dennett was cuddly, friendly and funny, as usual (we even got the ‘deepity’ spiel). Technical terms were bridged with puns, criticism with good humour, and as always with Dennett, commonly accepted implications of well established theory were exposed as having either logical flaws, or obvious exceptions.

***

Lunch saw visitors arrive, or at least, it was the first I saw of them during the day.

‘Eternal Life in Christ Jesus Our Lord’? What, these guys will be living in JC’s intestinal lining as irritants?

Really, what on Earth did they hope to achieve? And ‘no warning is too strong’? That almost sounds like a threat, although I suspect it may actually refer to the sulphurous odour wafting from sweaty, angry Christians.

After a suitably wonderful vegetarian lunch (the wraps were awesome), and fundamentalists largely already forgotten, I have to confess I was getting a little tired. Which isn’t to say I fell asleep, however…

AC Grayling was on next, and for the life of me I can’t remember the substance of his presentation. In part, I recall agreeing with him in advance, and having no particular objection to what he had to say. I recall good humour, but not the actual jest.

I feel as if I’ve done him a disservice, like I’m a disrespectful undergrad.

This, I guess, is just a part of the reality of these things – the chaos of travel, especially on a low budget like my operation (the gold ticket was really pushing it, but I intended to make a go of things). I’m new to writing on the road, or rails, as it were.

My only defence, in my poor study of AC Grayling, is that I’ve had distractions of all sorts on this trip. In this case, having lost my earlier company, I was seated next to this ultra-defensive, thirty-something guy, who was insisting that a general statement about the first night’s comedy made by Daniel Dennett was specifically a defence of Jim Jeffries (it’d be interesting to find out what Dennett actually thinks).

***

Lawrence Krauss was next to give a talk; adapted from one he gave a few years ago at the request of Richard Dawkins, and which led to Krauss’ latest, A Universe From Nothing. Krauss was very much alive, and I was very much awake, and while I was familiar with the content, I was still captivated by the delivery.

If I could have asked for anything more, it would have been rather than having it asserted that it doesn’t matter that Krauss’ definition of ‘nothing’ is different from the traditional metaphysical definition, to be told why it doesn’t matter. Perhaps something similar to how Einstein’s refutation of the traditional, supposedly logically necessary, Euclidean definition of space, shows us how our traditional-intuitive approach to ‘nothing’ (or any other traditional-intuitive truth) may also be wrong. The history of intuitive ideas is a graveyard.

***

After a break where I took in a subjective impression of the demographics of the audience (there seemed to be more ethnic diversity and a more even gender balance in the younger generations), Geoffrey Robertson took to the stage to deliver the inaugural Christopher Hitchens Memorial Lecture. Hitchens’ various exploits against tyranny were re-told in brief, with anecdotes from Robertson’s privileged perspective as a friend.

Robertson took to criticising religion in a way I’d never really seen of him – a trite little poem, and suggestions for the re-purposing of empty churches as public toilets. I’m left wondering where and when the next Christopher Hitchens Memorial Lecture will be held.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali followed, discussing the nature of the Arab Spring protests, and what an Islamist Winter would look like for those living in theMiddle East. Often, when Ayaan Hirsi Ali addresses matters of politics, rather than autobiography, I find a lot to take exception with, although in many cases I’m never quite sure if it’s an infidelity of language (and perhaps a leftish prejudice on my part), that’s to blame.

I do think that this is generally true – that Ayaan Hirsi Ali isn’t as precise in discussing politics as many, including myself, may want (consider, for that matter, what she had to say about her own non-existent affinity for statistics in Infidel). Then consider the literary pareidolia that arises in the media whenever it’s a ‘New Atheist’ that’s being covered; the result is a lot of myth surrounding the woman, which can be hard to cut through to ascertain what it is exactly that she wants, and what it is that motivates her politics.

There’s an obvious passion for feminism there, but I’m talking particulars and nuance (her critics almost always seem to be after something else – a caricature). The need for cooperation being a theme that emerged out of various talks by this point (with a lot of disagreement on how to go about it), Ayaan Hirsi Ali delivered a plea to the audience: secular Muslims need your help.

If you hadn’t followed her for some time, with a fair mind and parsing her prose through a fine-tooth comb, you could be forgiven for thinking this was a little inconsistent with her politics. I’m still not sure it absolutely isn’t, but I can’t for the life of me say why it is, if it is. The only kinds of interpretations I can subscribe to at this point, are ones that whatever else, at least acknowledge Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s sincere concern for people’s welfare, including Muslims, and especially Muslim women.

Yet still, accepting this kind of interpretation will get you chewed out by sanctimonious sorts.

***

Finally, with Now Praise Intelligent Design, was Richard Dawkins. Often it seems, Dawkins is in the game of repeating himself, over and over and over. This is in part, I think, due to people demanding answers to the same questions, in particular in relation to ideas he put forth in The God Delusion, over and over and over. With such public fixation, you’d think he hadn’t authored a book since.

In fact, that was largely the case with Dawkins’ Q&A debate on the ABC – Dawkins was positioned against Pell and yet again introduced as the author of The God Delusion (but nothing else), to be asked the same questions by the audience that he’s been getting for years.

It’s worth giving viewers and readers new to the discussion, their on-ramp, but some of us more rusted-on followers of discussion, occasionally need a little more to keep our attention.

It may be that Dawkins was quite aware of this. His talk, focusing on taking back the phrase ‘intelligent design’ to refer to designs by humans, that are intelligent, touched on neglected territory – explicitly raising the issue of the reproductive design of babies: eugenics.

Dawkins sorted eugenics into positive and negative categories, respectively adding desirable traits to a child’s genome, and editing away inherited diseases.

Dawkins warned of the need for much care in the implementation of positive eugenics, and confessed disquiet, going as far as pointing out that there is the Hitler factor to it; Hitler attempted it (albeit with dubious morals, and insufficient understanding of biology, as per the period).

I’m waiting for some clever RadiCool, or creationist, to edit this talk into the appearance of some kind of doomsday scenario where Dawkins is calling for a eugenic New World Order, or some such.

I’d really like to see more of this kind of thing from Dawkins, and I think there’s also a need for it – this kind of technology is going to take-off somewhere in the world, at some point,  irrespective of what naysayers say. Eugenics needs to be discussed, irrespective of the risk of being misunderstood by the wilfully scientifically illiterate.

***

Saturday night: The gala dinner.

I have to confess that I’m not a big fan of Mr Deity, and to be more honest, I have to say that I’m still not really sure why. I’ve got nothing at all against Brian Dalton (aka Mr Deity).

There was interesting discussion, aside from the comedy; the fact that Mr Deity was also popular with some liberal theists. For those advocating the maximum of cooperation at the GAC and events like it, this can only be a good thing.

I’m not a good judge for this. Mr Deity is just as much geek culture as it is atheist culture, and I’ve another confession; by default I’m not well disposed to any convention with a significant geek demographic.

This was my first convention, ever. Honestly. I still don’t think I could manage to withstand a DragonCon, ComicCon, or any of those other Nerdventions. Yuck.

So please don’t take my lack of appreciation too seriously.

Now this chap called Simon Taylor was the MC for the gala dinner, and it’s good that Kylie Sturgess and Lawrence Leung got a break. But there were a few more things I would have liked from Taylor, or at least one…

Specifically, when getting the various tables to design rationalism/atheism/science slogans, which he read out from little blue cards, he didn’t read out mine! (Hrmph!)

I’ll re-write it here and now…

‘Science: It’s self-correcting. Hopefully like whoever it was that booked Jim Jefferies.’

Maybe Mr. Taylor wanted to keep getting work… I still think it’s sufficiently light-hearted.

***

Dinner was good, incidentally, though the serving arrangements made it difficult to distinguish which guests at a table required vegetarian food.

I had to point this out with each course. That being said, my main meal was quite awesome; some kind of spicy, roast pumpkin number.

***

Shelly Segal. Maybe you’ve heard of her; she’s got an atheist album, oddly titled ‘An Atheist Album’.

The main problem I have with Segal’s performance was not of her own making – the sound was clearly set up wrong, with the volume up too high, and all sorts of distortion during the higher notes.

And Shelly Segal can hit her notes pretty hard. Couple this with the occasional acoustic ‘TWANK!’, and you have something potentially jarring for people who are, in large part, trying to enjoy a meal.

I won’t stop being an ass there though. Her lyrics were too didactic, too descriptive by far. It’s as if a conclusion has been decided upon, and the lyrics reverse engineered to that end, by committee. The songs, those which I’ve heard, state their premises explicitly, rather than proceeding artistically from them.

An Atheist Album.

It’s much the same difference as between Parrot (shown the following afternoon) and the clumsily scripted The Ledge. I hope at some point, Shelly Segal is afforded the opportunity to take creative influence from the likes Craig Foster and Emma McKenna (the directors of Parrot).

***

Of all the comedians at the GAC other than Stella Young, Tom Ballard managed to pace his routine the best, with the least desperation. His material was all quite fresh, even referencing goings on this far into the convention, yet in a way that made his material look as if it had been run through days of polishing, and numerous trial performances.

It made a refreshing difference from the comparatively… aged routine of Ben Elton. (‘How about those spam emails, kids?’)

Ballard of course was preparing the audience for Catherine Deveny.

***

I have to confess I have a chip on my shoulder when it comes to Deveny’s work. When she was sacked as a Fairfaxcolumnist some time back, I was quite open with my belief that she didn’t deserve the column in the first place (which is not to say I thought she deserved nothing).

(Deveny, I am told, was instrumental in gaining what women appearing at the first GAC in Melbourne had in the way of prominence – this prior to involvement with ‘No Chicks, No Excuses’; making Deveny worthy of more than ‘nothing’.)

Her angle in writing, passed off as ‘edgy’, to me comes across as entirely conventional, unsympathetic bogan (aka ‘chav’, aka ‘white trash’) bashing. Odd considering her background – but then again, she’s got new middle class friends to impress now.

Enough of the past, I’ve made my point – I’m prejudiced.

I’ve never seen Deveny live before. I’ve been told not to judge her until I do. Well I have now, and…

…I liked most of her act. It was quite good, especially the moment’s silence for Christopher Hitchens,. during which Hitchens’ quote concerning the overrated reputation of lobster, champagne, anal sex and picnics was displayed on-screen.

‘Maybe he shouldn’t have tried them all at once!’ announced the end of the moment of silence.

I was almost willing to call this performance near-flawless, until the end…

‘But just remember people, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists …. are all human, so treat them with respect. Except the Hindus; they’re cunts! Goodnight!’ (I paraphrase).

At least I won’t have to eat my hat.

I kept my eye on Dawkins and Dennett during this performance, because I could see them more or less, face to face to judge their reactions. Dawkins had loudly applauded an earlier portion of the routine addressing the clerical buggery of children, but he seemed quite disengaged by the end, and while Dennett was politely clapping at the conclusion, he wore an expression that said ‘what was that, that just happened?’

Lost in translation from Strine, exhaustion from jetlag and performing, dislike for crass humour, or all these and more? It’s hard to tell. Something was cool about the way Deveny was received by the horsemen at the final moment.

~ Bruce

In Mali, there are strong links between Islam and the problem of street children in the country. Mali is predominantly Muslim. Around 90 percent of the population profess Islam. But Islam in this West African country is said to be ‘moderate and tolerant’. Unlike their counterparts in Nigeria, Muslims in Mali live in relative peace and harmony with themselves and with adherents of other faiths and beliefs. Constitutionally, Mali is a secular state and freedom of religion is guaranteed for all citizens. But this does not mean that all is well in this country in terms of what is perpetrated or condoned in the name of this religion as I noticed during my recent visit. Below the thin layer of Mali’s moderate and tolerant Islam are some deep, enthrenched and festering social problems.

As is the case in the muslim majority states in Northern Nigeria, Mali has a problem of street children. And this problem is linked with the way lslam is practiced in the country. The problem persists due to the way Islam is percieved and privileged in the society.
We need to shine the light on this dangerous link in order to combat this social scourge which has a lot of development and security implications for Mali, for West Africa and the world at large.

In March, I met Issuf(14), Issuman(10) and Ibrahima(10) on the streets of Bamako. They were begging for alms. The trio looked dirty and unkempt. They might not have heard their bath for days. Issuf, Issuman and Ibrahima were among thousands of children who I was told roam the streets of Mali everyday.

The children are called Manya in local Bambara language. In Northern Nigeria they are called almajiri.

[media id=44984 title=”DSC06312″ width=”150″ height=”150″ class=”aligncenter size-thumbnail wp-image-44984″ ]

The Manya, I was told, are children from poor families who are sent to learn Koran and Arabic by their parents at local Madrassa schools in Bamako. These schools are headed by Koranic teachers who exploit the children-force them to go and beg on the streets- in order to sustain themselves and the schools. Actually, these children spent around 3 hours –between 7.00am and 10.00am learning Koran/Arabic, and the rest of the day-and night- roaming the streets and scavenging for survival.

At the end of the day, the children hand over what they got to the Islamic teacher and the next day they are back on the streets. The Manya  are subjected to this cycle of abuse and exploitation for years. They face so many hazards- infact many of them die due to lack of medical care, hunger, or accidents. Some of the children I saw on the streets of Bamako had sores on their bodies. It was evident that nobody was catering for them.

Some of the street children who survive end up as thieves or criminals. Since Koranic and Arabic education do not equip these children with useful skills, some of them may end up being recruited by terrorist and jihadist networks. For me the Manya are social time bombs that would explode on the face of Mali and the world at large. Most of the people I spoke to sounded hopeless, and thought that the Manya phenomenon had come to stay in Mali. And because the issue is connected with Islam, many people were slow and careful in condemning it for fear of being portrayed as a critic or enemy of Islam.

Local authorities appear to be doing nothing to address the problem. They have literally turned a blind eye on it. These children are a common sight on the streets of Bamako. So no one would say that they are not aware of the presence of ‘les enfants des rues’. The government I was told is very knowledgeable of the issue. I think that they do not care. Or rather, it is not a priority to the politicians-after all, the children do not vote. But their parents do.

The government of Mali need to rise up to this challenge and take drastic measures to tackle the problem head on. The government should arrest and prosecute Koranic teachers who send children to beg on the streets. Their Madrassa schools should be closed down. The government should condemn in no uncertain terms the exploitation of children in the name of koranic teaching or Arabic learning. Local authorities should penalize parents who allow or condone their children begging on the streets. For instance, Issuf, Issuman and Ibrahima told me that their parents were aware that they were begging on the streets .

I mean, such cases of parental irresponsibility should not go unpunished. Concerned citizens, local and international organizations should help shine the light on the problem. Unicef should lobby and engage the government of Mali and of other countries like Nigeria, Niger, Senegal with similar problems in finding a lasting solution to this menace. The government of Mali needs to review madrassa school system and consider closing down such schools since they appear not to be adding any value to the life and development of children. It should ensure that all children both from poor and rich families receive formal education that equips them with useful skills and competencies.

Children are the future of any society. Whatever jeopardizes the future of children endangers the future of the society. The authorities in Mali must strive and eradicate the problem of the street children and the madrassa school system that fuels, aids and abets it .

Afghanistan is a complicated place.

It’s full of fierce, brave people challenging entrenched traditions and trying to forge a new kind of society in the wake of the Taliban years. Its government is endemically corrupt and somewhat too keen to flirt with misogynists, but it’s blissfully moderate compared to the theocracy to its west, and the frightening common xenophobic opinions of the population to its east.

But some Afghans – or Afghan men I should say – are easily fooled into embarrassing themselves.

To date, nine people have been killed in violent demonstrations across Afghanistan in reaction to the discovery by some Afghan labourers that two Americans were incinerating bags of books that included copies of the Quran. The two were reportedly unaware that they were burning the Quran.

A simple accident. And the absolutely last thing that NATO or US forces would ever intentionally do in the current context, when the reactions are sadly predictable, putting their soldiers—and indeed all foreigners working in the country, not to mention Afghan civilians—at heightened risk. Last spring, 12 UN workers were slaughtered by an angry mob who attacked the UN compound in Mazar-i-sharif, incited by a Florida pastor’s threat to burn a Quran. In May 2005, 17 people were killed in Afghanistan after a Newsweek article reported that US soldiers had flushed a Quran down a toilet at Guantanamo detention facilities.

In each case, these tragic outcomes were followed by a chorus of smug commentaries in western media: those Americans should have known better. This time was no exception: both implicit and explicit statements of disapproval in news articles from the usual apologist suspects on up to the mainstream reporting. Angry comments were posted in response, suggesting the US must have done it deliberately (regardless of the fact that from a tactical military perspective, this makes no sense whatsoever).

Appalled reactions all round. But not towards the ludicrous violence with which offended protesters react to these incidents, but at the inconceivability that US forces in Afghanistan haven’t yet learned their lesson.

But the absurdity here is that there are sufficient numbers of Afghan men who allow themselves to get so wound-up over an accidental desecration of a symbol of their religion, that they feel compelled to take to the streets, armed with stones and/or other weapons, with the intent to maim and to murder. That is what’s appalling. That is what’s absurd.

The media, and much of the public in the west, is getting the story tragically wrong. We are so consumed in our cultural relativism that we take all religious practices as weighted equally: as worthy of serious respect and polite tolerance. We discard our criticism in favour of not stepping on toes (or setting off triggers). We get mixed up about who is actually instigating the violence: not US soldiers who did or did not damage a Quran nor even a batty pastor who most definitely did threaten to burn one. We stop seeing the obvious: that it’s the direct perpetrators of the violence who are responsible. They are the adults who make choices about how to respond to being upset. As with temperamental children, we no longer hold them to the same expectations that we would our own fellow citizens, to respond lawfully, and control their anger to the extent that they don’t need to kill others for the rage to subside.  And we ultimately fail to see the utter senselessness of taking human life on account of harm to a book. That’s the story. It’s that senseless, violent reaction that should shock you, not that there is anyone left in the world with the gall to do it.

But the Quran is not just some book, someone will no doubt wish to remind me. It’s the very foundation of the Islamic faith. It represents Islam itself for believers. It’s holy for god sake!

Certainly some of my insensitivity comes from the fact that I’m not a believer – in any faith. But if I were, I would hope that the way my religion was manifested in my actions might be more critical than reverence for physical objects symbolic of my faith. I’d like to think that how I lived my religious values would carry more weight than how they were represented. (But I suppose once one starts to feel that way, there is little role left for religion anyway).

It seems to me that the continued obsession over physical objects—whether with reverence or disdain—has a whiff of the mass hysteria of 17^th century Salem to it- paranoia about black cats, belief in magic ointments, evil plants, and protective amulets. Objects and symbols come to embody religious significance, rather than religious practice. Don’t the ardently faithful generally insist that their faith is about larger-than-life spiritual questions, its purpose lofty and its meaning well above the grasp of the physical world? Yet for the Afghan Muslim men who gathered in the streets these past few days, the transgression most worthy of the grimmest response is the desecration of a physical object. That seems, well, pretty shallow. Are other Muslims not embarrassed by the protesters’ rather narrow view of their own religion?

In any case, for a faithless person like me, it’s just a book. But for a Muslim, can it not be a valuable, important, symbolic—even magical—book, without also being a book that ever justifies bloodshed? In the vitriolic reactions that swept Afghanistan in 2005, in 2011 and in 2012, it was not only foreigners, but Afghan Muslims too, who were killed. Is the Muslim book more precious than Muslim lives?

Further violence in the foreseeable future may be prevented by exceptional care by US and other foreign forces in Afghanistan in their handling of Qurans. But this isn’t a real solution, leading to real peaceful co-existence. A real solution is one where the pious learn to live with sometimes having their sensitivities offended, rather than erupting into rabid tantrums so severe they resort to carnage and inhumanity; and where outside observers are brave enough to put a plug on their cultural sensitivity when things go too far.