Now anyone with a public platform can expect to face constant harassment, especially anyone who is a woman or a member of an ethnic minority.
Author: Ophelia Benson
-
Chiropractic may damage arteries along the spine
“Chiropractic manipulation of the cervical spine can produce dissections of the cranial and cervical segments of the vertebral and carotid arteries.”
-
Millennials’ Religious Doubts Double, Causing Campus Atheism Boom
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/#generationAnd a word from your editor: Donate to the SSA!
About the Author
The Secular Student Alliance (www.secularstudents.org) is a 501(c)3 educational nonprofit that organizes and empowers nonreligious students around the country. Our primary goal is to foster successful grassroots campus groups which provide a welcoming community for secular students to discuss their views and promote their secular values. -
Intestinal fortitude
On a pleasanter note, Ron Lindsay has a post suggesting dropping the word “balls” for “courage” and the like. Yes to that. I generally pick fights with people who do that here, and sometimes elsewhere.
More dogmatic feminism, I suppose.
-
A tedious correction
One small item of housekeeping that will interest pretty much no one among regular readers here – by which I mean, people who read B&W for pleasure or interest or reasons of that kind, as opposed to reading it for ammunition against teh eevil feminazis – but that I want to do anyway because it’s been floating around for awhile and it annoys me. It’s one example of mendacity out of the many perpetrated by the anti-mangina crowd, and I want to correct it for the record. Correct it again for the record.
It appeared in a comment by John Greg on that Ask an Atheist thread.
I have yet to witness an FfTB blog commenter be banned for “encouraging” or proposing that someone be anally raped by a dead porcupine. Neither have I witnessed an FfTB blog commenter be edited, deleted, or banned for making death threats — julian’s made several over the last couple of years beginning on Ophelia’s older B&W blog.
That’s not true. julian said “die in a fire” once that I know of at B&W1. I told him not to do that as soon as I was aware of it, and I drew a line through it in the comment where he said it and added an editorial “don’t do that.” If I had seen it right after he said it I would have deleted it and then told him “don’t do that,” but he said it after I had gone offline for the day and there were a great many comments after it, some of them about it. It would have created confusion if I had deleted it, so I drew a line through it as the next best thing.
It was on Getting and not getting, posted on July 5 last year. In addition to the editorial injection on the comment, I did a separate comment saying don’t do that. It was a blanket rule. There was discussion. Everybody got that it was a blanket rule, and agreed with it, including julian, who apologized. I didn’t ban julian, that’s true, but I did edit his comment, and I emphatically disavowed it and said I don’t want comments of that type. There was some discussion of what these rhetorical “threats” really are (“threatoid” was one suggestion), but whatever they are, I didn’t and don’t want them. I don’t want anything about
rape byanal insertion of a dead porcupine here, either, and I’ve never seen any – or if I have seen it, I’ve deleted it. I don’t want suggestions about sideways knives. I don’t want any of that kind of thing, and I mostly don’t get it, and when I do I delete it.The issue was complicated by the fact that julian also made a parallel threat (or “threatoid”) in a comment on Miranda Hale’s blog the same evening.
“Most people who dared to dissent at Pharyngula, for example, were met with some variety of “STFU YOU SEXIST IGNORANT PRIVILEGED FUCKER!!”.”
About 40 posts after every point they had raised had been answered by everyone present. You can join prometheus in that fire, Ms. Hale. And no, no pretending you’re some paragon of fairminded civility and respect.
Miranda unfortunately included me in her reply.
You seriously think it’s acceptable to come to my blog and tell me that I should die in a fire? (See his comment at B&W for reference: https://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2011/getting-and-not-getting/#comment-96588) That’s vicious and has no place in this discussion. You’re banned. Ophelia might be okay with having those kind of threats on her blog, but I’m sure as hell not, whether they’re against me or anyone else.
The next day, I pointed out (in all caps) that I hadn’t been there, and Miranda apologized and withdrew the claim that I was okay with threats of that kind. Good. That particular misunderstanding got straightened out at the time. Good.
But it didn’t stay straightened out. I saw a very distorted version of the whole thing – which reverted to the account in which I smile approvingly on julian telling people to die in a fire – on one of the ERV threads a few months ago, when I still occasionally took a look at the rants about kicking me in the cunt and how off the charts ugly I am and all the rest of it. John Greg’s abbreviated version of that yesterday is based on the distorted account. This is the accurate account. The thread is there for the reading; I haven’t touched it since last July.
Update: I got a note from Miranda because she saw this post via the trackback to her post last summer. She told me to feel free to share her sentiments. She confirms that she was shocked by julian’s comment, which is entirely reasonable. That’s why I don’t want comments like that! They’re meant to shock, and they do. The hell with that. (It’s not a salutary kind of shock, like the “shock” of being told that the bible is just a book written by humans.) She also said she has no clue who “John Greg” is, and that she’s not all that pleased to learn that he’s pointing to what julian said as supposed evidence of my hypocrisy. That might come as a shock to “John Greg” but that’s life for you.
-
No appeal of Christian Science faith healing ruling
Christian scientist parents can refuse to get medical treatment for their children in Washington state, but other religions cannot.
-
Reciprocity
Taslima has a great post on 19th century reactions to education for women in Bengal. She includes two satirical paintings, one of a woman beating a man with a broom, and the other of a man nursing a woman – at least that’s the caption Taslima has on it, though he’s portrayed just standing there with an implement I don’t recognize.
What a hateful world to live in. One, there’s the idea that men are supposed to beat women instead of the other way around, instead of the idea that nobody should beat anybody. And two there’s the deeply sad idea that a woman should nurse a man but not the other way around. Seriously? So if she’s ill, he’s supposed to just shrug and go off with his friends?
Sad, sad, sad.
-
Salam Azad
Maryam did a blogathon today. All you need for an arrest is hurt religious sentiment is a good one (as are all the others). The first example she offers is a Bangladeshi writer.
A Bangladeshi court has issued an arrest warrant for the writer of a 2003 novel that allegedly contains insulting remarks against the Prophet Mohammed, a lawyer said Tuesday.
The court in Dhaka issued the order in response to a petition from a Muslim activist accusing author Salam Azad of hurting religious sentiment in his banned book “Bhanga Math” (“Broken Temple”).
“We told the court that the book contained slanderous remarks against the Prophet Mohammed and Islam. The judge accepted the petition and issued a warrant of arrest,” the petitioner’s lawyer Ekhlas Uddin told AFP.
I apologize for pointing out the obvious yet again, but sane legal systems do not have laws against “slander” of people who have been dead for centuries. I can say anything I want to about Socrates; so can you; so can anyone. Sane legal systems also do not have laws against “slander” of religions, even the local religion. Only insane legal systems have those.
The very idea is simply infantile. What next? Somebody slandered a building? A piece of fruit? Pluto? (planet or cartoon dog, I don’t care) The weather?
You saw it predicted here first.
-
Both sides
A weekly podcast called Ask an Atheist devoted the episode recorded yesterday to what it calls “The Problem of Dogmatic Feminism”.
It got some things wrong.
At the beginning Becky and Sam (the hosts, along with Eileen who said only one thing) said that both sides in the dispute over feminism and atheism/skepticism were “doubling down”; it’s not as symmetrical as that. They said good men are getting shot down and men are being demonized; that’s way too sweeping.
After they said this in general terms for awhile Sam pressed Becky for specifics, so she named Rebecca, me, Stephanie, and Jen. She sort of kind of blamed the Women in Secularism conference. She talked about the more recent dispute with DJ, and said that he had apologized for the “gossip after regretted sexual exploits” remark; that’s entirely wrong, he hasn’t apologized for that. She said that we ”dogmatically” say that male speakers who hit on women are automatically predators; no we don’t. What Stephanie and Jen have argued is that speakers at events are as it were one up; they have a status that resembles that of teachers in relation to students – or, one might add (but they haven’t, that I’ve seen) priests in relation to parishioners. There’s also therapists in relation to patients, ditto doctors. I don’t think it’s dogmatic to argue that it at least can be exploitative to leverage that position to get moar sex. The complication, obviously, is that plenty of people will be perfectly happy to have sexual attention from a speaker, just as plenty of students will be perfectly happy to have sexual attention from a teacher. The role itself is inherently seductive. Becky may have this complication in mind when she calls it “dogmatic” to say that speakers should just refrain from hitting on audience members, but she didn’t spell it out, and given the rest of what she said in that part of the podcast, that’s unfortunate.
It improved a little after that, and Stephanie called in and corrected them on some points. But of course the ERV gang is flooding the comments, so that will make intelligent discussion impossible there. Anne C Hanna gives it a good shot though.
-
Better news, but not in English yet
Javier Krahe has been acquitted of “hurting religious feelings” in a movie he made nearly 40 years ago.
-
Sblongathon
Crommunist is doing the blogathan by taking pledges for learning songs and then posting a video of himself performing them. What a brilliant way of doing it!
Go cheer him on or donate all of your money or both.
-
What the bishops say
For our final item for this brief but exciting miniature blogathon – David Gibson at Religion News Service looks at the way bishops strain at imaginary gnats while gulping down very large smelly camels.
When the bishops gathered under intense public pressure in Dallas in June 2002, they seemed determined to take dramatic steps, and to a degree they did. Their Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People developed a “one-strike” policy to remove priests credibly accused of a single act of abuse, and jump-started efforts to have the Vatican streamline the process for defrocking abusive clerics…
Yet after all was said and done in Dallas, the bishops exempted themselves from any real sanctions. That self-absolution was considered outrageous at the time, and the passing years have not eased the anger.
“The Vatican also needs to do its job. It appears to have no problem investigating nuns and theologians, but investigating mismanagement by a bishop is not a priority,” the Rev. Thomas Reese, a well-known Jesuit commentator, told a symposium last month at Jesuit-run Santa Clara University to mark the 10th anniversary of the Dallas charter.
“Even when a bishop is indicted, no one has the sense to tell him to take a leave of absence until the case is over,” Reese said.
Quis custodiet, eh? Eh? It’s very like the bankers and hedge fund managers getting themselves put in charge of everything so that all the people who had nothing to do with all that gambling with other people’s money get to lose their jobs and houses and savings, while all the people who had everything to do with it continue to pocket millions every year, much of it via taxpayers. It’s very like that. We will fix all the things except the ones that have anything to do with us; those, of course, we will carefully bracket and put aside, because we want to be happy. Thank you for your understanding in this matter.
And so my part in the blogathon comes to an end and I get to rush outside for fresh air and rapid motion.
It is 1:58. This is post 13 of 13.
-
Poetry before they sleep
Maureen Brian (whom I met at QED, much to my delight) makes an eloquent point on the government’s education plans. It’s so eloquent that it gets the 1:30 slot.
In an ideal world we would have the active encouragement of all a person’s natural languages throughout life, GCSE and A Level exams available in most of them and an end to the notion that passing an exam 20 years ago beats speaking the language every day to your Granny.
We will not be getting that ideal world under the current government whose aim seems to be to have people reciting infant school poetry before they sleep, unpaid and in fear of losing benefits, under the bridges of the nation.
Zing.
-
Out and spoiling for a fight
Ron Lindsay points out in the Huffington Post that coming out as an atheist is significantly different from coming out as LGBT.
True. Nobody is saying that being straight is based on a lot of unexamined and untenable beliefs. Nobody is saying or hoping that straightitude will wither away. A good many atheists are saying that religion is based on mistaken beliefs and that it does harm as a result, and should either wither away or become very much less obtrusive and demanding and Special.
I don’t foresee a best-selling book entitled “The Straight Delusion” or “Heterosexuality Poisons Everything.” The LGBT community wants acceptance; they don’t want to persuade others to join their “team,” and even if they had that objective, they would strive for it in vain.
By contrast, the amount of literature that has been produced in the last decade criticizing religious belief is extensive and continues to grow. Moreover, these critiques of religion seem to have had some effect.
So the fact that we don’t have two heads or spikes isn’t enough to make us acceptable, and we might as well get used to it. In fact it’s what we want. (“We” as usual are gnus, or outspoken argumentative atheists.) We want to chip away at social deference to religion, and we can’t combine that with claims to be jes’ plain folks like everybody else.
12:49. I can spend a luxurious 11 minutes eating lunch.
-
A bit of dessert
-
Just look at the pretty birdeez, children
Uh oh, it’s 11:50. That’s cutting it too fine.
The UK education secretary has decided to fuck up science education.
All children are to be taught a foreign language – which could include Mandarin, Latin or Greek – from the age of seven under reforms to the national curriculum being unveiled by the education secretary, Michael Gove.
In other reforms, children will be encouraged to learn science by studying nature, and schools will be expected to place less emphasis on teaching scientific method.
Less emphasis on teaching scientific method? What the hell? Why would they do that? They might as well say they’re going to place less emphasis on teaching children critical thinking and just stuff them with a Box o’ Facts.
The science curriculum is expected to emphasise using the natural habitat around schools – learning biology by studying the growth and development of trees, for example.
There will be less of a focus on doing experiments. Instead, children will be taught to observe their surroundings and learn how scientists have classified the natural world.
Seriously? Seriously? Forget experiments, just look at stuff and learn some lists?
That sounds like me at my teenage worst. “Uhhh, I like to look at stuff, that’s good enough.”
One of the first few comments captures it nicely.
Learning foreign languages from age 7 using songs and poetry and learning about science by spending time outside observing nature – that’s not news, my step-son did that at school 15 years ago. But then he did go to a Steiner school…
Precisely.
Whew – 11:58.
-
Not the way to make the world a better place
This just in – today’s installment of Boko Haram attacks on churches in Nigeria. Body count for this week: 4 so far.
The violence Sunday in Jos and Biu, a city in hard-hit northeastern Borno state, comes as almost every weekend this year has seen churches targeted by a radical Islamist sect known as Boko Haram and other shadowy assailants exacerbating the country’s unease. While no group immediately claimed responsibility for Sunday’s dual attacks, they bore the hallmarks of the sect’s previous assaults, which continue unstopped despite a heavy military presence in the region.
You know this idea we were talking about, making the world a better place? This isn’t it.
Killing people isn’t it.
No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attacks. Nigeria faces a growing wave of sectarian violence carried out by Boko Haram, whose name means “Western education is sacrilege” in Hausa. Boko Haram has been blamed for killing more than 560 people this year alone, according to an Associated Press count. The sect’s targets have included churches, police stations and other security buildings, often attacked by suicide car bombers across northern Nigeria.
That isn’t it. Boko Haram are not making the world a better place. The idea that any kind of genuine education is “sacrilege” or blasphemous or haram or Forbidden will not make the world a better place. (Genuine education does not include memorization of the Koran to the exclusion of everything else. That goes double when the memorization is in a language that the memorizer does not understand.) The spread of genuine education to all people will make the world a better place.
Just yesterday I published an article by Leo Igwe on Boko Haram and religious minorities in Northern Nigeria, in which he talks about some of the ways Boko Haram’s attacks will not make the world a better place.
Attacks on religious minorities could spark reprisal killings as has often been the case in the past, particularly in Southern Nigeria where Muslims are in the minority. In this way Nigeria is edging towards religious cleansing. Boko Haram attacks could provoke the cleansing of Christians in the Muslim majority states and of Muslims in the Christian majority communities. Already there are reports of Christians leaving Muslim majority communities for fear of being attacked and killed by militants.
That’s not a better world. People moving away from the places where they live because they are afraid of being killed or made destitute in religious cleansings – that’s not a better world. Boko Haram are doing it wrong.
-
Hamza Kashgari
The final question from Brianne:
Any updates on Hamza Kashgari?
Not of the type “He is free!” alas…but there is what appears to be an update on how he’s doing, from a relative, translated on the Free Hamza Kashgari Facebook page:
We visited Hamza, thank God, he’s in a good mental condition, and he says “hello” to everyone asking about him, he was extremely moved ‘weeping’ when he heard about the Balloon’s launching on his Birthday, may God unite us with him again.
Well “God” kind of got him into this mess, but never mind. However, that’s something, but it’s still Hamza-in-prison as opposed to Hamza in New Zealand living a free life.
-
Inspiration and apparel
Brianne’s topics part 2.
What work/speech/writing of Christopher Hitchens do you find most inspiring? What do you most disagree with?
Most inspiring: the literary/historical/foreign correspondent writing, because of its sheer abundance, erudition, wit, and style. Pretty much all the speech I’ve ever seen, even when he was both hungover and jetlagged, as he was the first time I saw him on a book tour, when he was promoting No One Left to Lie To. It was the morning after the White House correspondents’ dinner, and he’d taken the red eye to Seattle – so he must have been as hungover and jetlagged as it’s possible to be without expiring. It did show, but it didn’t make him slow or boring or unamusing.
I most disagree with just about anything he ever said about women, and in particular the Vanity Fair article that said women aren’t funny (and underlined it by adding you know what I mean, don’t deny it). I disagree with his views on abortion.
what does your superhero costume for Fighting Fashionable Nonsense look like?
To be literal first – I keep meaning to remove that from the logo. I never liked it, I just kept forgetting to remove it once I took full ownership of B&W (apart from the domain name for the old site, which has been witheld).
To stop being literal…hmm. Billie Burke’s outfit in The Wizard of Oz? No maybe not. Mr Greenjean’s green jeans? Ok but what else. Why, an evil little thing T shirt, of course.
-
An alert, curious citizenry
It’s 9:47. I took some time to read things, and have a little coffee, so it’s 9:47. Yikes.
Brianne – awake much too soon after her 24 hour stint – provides topics.
How can we get Americans more interested in world politics? Do we need to get Americans more interested? Does that kind of interest and knowledge set have to start being rolled out in the younger school years?
We certainly need to get Americans more interested – because the US does a lot of [helping/meddling] in the world, and citizens should have more knowledge in order to judge what is helping and what is meddling. Because there are international charities and NGOs, which Americans – like anyone else – can work for, donate to, promote – or criticize and expose – or both. Because the world matters. Because internationalism is better than parochialism. (That will have to be just a flat assertion for now – it’s 9:53.) Because the world is interesting.
It helps to get people started early, but it’s not a now or never thing. I utterly failed to be interested in things like that as a child, but I changed later. On the other hand the need to make a living can get in the way of changing later. (I solved this problem by mostly not actually making a living. Not suitable for all audiences.)
Three minutes to the hour.