First Boko Haram threatened him, now the government is threatening him.
Author: Ophelia Benson
-
Florida atheists scrub Polk County “anointed” roads
Last week, Polk Under Prayer campaign members buried bricks engraved with Psalm 37:9-11 beside 12 major roads, praying for criminals to become Christian or be incarcerated.
-
One dead, six rushed to hospital from faith healer rally
The deceased was discharged from an ICU before attending the rally where televangelist Chris Oyakhilome was said to perform miracles and cure the sick.
-
‘Honour’ crime victims living in fear in the UK
Qawal had freedom in Pakistan but that all changed when she came to England and was beaten not only by her husband but his mother as well.
-
Redefining marriage ‘will lead to accusations of hate crimes’
The Iona Institute reports “UKIP’s openly gay London Regional Chairman” as warning.
-
Nick Cohen on the spectre of militant secularism
‘Militant secularist’ has become the ‘neo-con’ of the 2010s: a know-nothing label that signifies extremism, without explaining where the extremism lies.
-
Samira Ibrahim and Egypt’s virginity test trial
Blaming it all on the woman for being present at a demonstration seems to be a satisfying solution for some sectors of Egyptian society.
-
Toulouse: gunman kills 4 at Jewish school
“He shot at everything he could see, children and adults, and some children were chased into the school,” Michel Valet, the local prosecutor, told journalists.
-
Theocrats spy an opening
Who do they think they are, the theocrats? Who do they think made them boss?
At least 200 Anglican primaries and secondaries could be established within the next five years as part of a major expansion plan outlined by the Church.
A report – to be published later this week – will also recommend rebranding existing Anglican schools to “reinvigorate” them in the face of competition from new academies and free schools.
So these will all be state schools, taxpayer-funded schools, run for the benefit of churches and their priests. Why?
The Bishop of Oxford, the Rt Rev John Pritchard, chairman of the Church’s board of education, said major reform was needed to tackle “the level of religious illiteracy in our society”.
He also said the changes – to be formally outlined in a report released on Friday – would allow faith leaders to confront the growing influence of secularism.
But why should they be confronting the influence of secularism at all? Especially at taxpayer expense? Secularism doesn’t mean the bulldozing of churches, it means No Theocracy Thank You.
Bishop Pritchard said: “The whole national context is one in which secularist debates, whether it be on equality, gay marriage, employment in schools, a whole range of things, are bringing up the issues of secularist versus [religious] approaches to society’s life.”
Yes it does, and why should the Anglican church be helped to push its approach to society’s life by indoctrinating children at taxpayer expense?
Currently, the CofE runs 4,800 out of 23,000 state schools in England.
But the Church is keen to expand its influence on the back of the academies and free schools programme, which takes schools out of direct local authority control and places them in the hands of charities, entrepreneurs and faith groups.
Grab grab grab.
-
CofE schools expanding to combat “aggressive secularism”
Because theocracy is so obviously preferable.
-
Vatican launches criminal probe into unauthorised leaks
Not child rape, not concealment of child rape, but leaks that allege corruption. That’s Vatican morality for you!
-
Lauryn Oates on bad excuses for doing nothing
At what point does our own society reach perfection, giving us permission to worry about the problems of others?
-
Reducing the influence of religion in the world
Victor Stenger’s talk on the panel at Moving Secularism Forward is at the Huffington Post, and I think it’s clear that he doesn’t think religious belief should be “eradicated” by sword and fire, but rather that it should be undermined and diminished over time by better ways of getting at the truth.
Scientists have to help the rest of the secular community to work toward reducing the influence of religion to the point where it has negligible effect on society. I don’t believe this is impossible. Astrology and the reading of sheep entrails are no longer used to decide on courses of events, such as going to war. Why can’t we expect the same for the imagined dialogues with an ancient tribal sky god that at least one recent president has used to justify his actions?
See? That’s not about force, or literal eradication. Divination and astrology haven’t dwindled to minority pastimes through coercion, they’ve been displaced by better methods and (up to a point, alas) by education.
Most scientists do not realize that science and religion are fundamentally incompatible. This is not because they have thought about it. It is because they prefer not to think about it.
Fundamentalists know science and religion are incompatible, since science disputes so much of what is in the Bible, which they take as the literal word of God. To them, science is simply wrong and must be Christianized. A well-funded effort exists to do just that, while most scientists sit on the sidelines because they prefer not to get involved.
But science and religion have always been at war, and always will be. One of yesterday’s speakers said that he did not like to use the word “religion” but rather called it a “belief system.” Well, there are different kinds of belief systems. Science is a belief system based on reason and evidence. Religion is a belief system based on bullshit.
And one way for religion as a belief system to loosen its grip is for more people to point out that it’s based on bullshit.
Religion would not be such a negative force in society if it were just about going to church socials and celebrating rites of passage. However, the magical thinking that becomes deeply ingrained whenever faith rules over facts warps all areas of life. It instills superficial beliefs which, having been adopted without reason, cannot be displaced by reason. Magical thinking ignores evidence and favors whatever opinion is the most convenient or socially acceptable.
And by doing that, it gets things wrong. There really is a downside to getting things wrong. I can’t stress this enough.
Science is not going to change its commitment to the truth. And religion is not going to change its commitment to nonsense. And that is why I call upon scientists and all thinking people to focus their attention on reducing the influence of religion in the world, with the goal of the eventual fall of foolish faith. The future depends on it.
See? Reducing the influence, not eradication.
It seems like a good goal to me.
-
Last Sunday afternoon at the Manchester Mercure
Saturday night at QED one of the prizes was for Best Podcast, and it was won by The Pod Delusion. I felt enthusiastic about this, because they had asked to interview me at QED. Hooray for ME, thought I, I get to be interviewed by the WINNAZ.
And I did. We went into a nice quiet little room off the main area which alas turned out to be a little room on the way to another little room where the QED people were keeping things. That’s why if you listen you will hear several breaks for editing. It’s not because I burst into a flurry of oaths for no apparent reason.
-
Belief as pickpocket
I’m amicably disagreeing with Ron Lindsay at his CFI blog, where he is amicably disagreeing with Vic Stenger and PZ Myers about something both of them said at the Sunday morning panel in Orlando two weeks ago. (I was on the same panel.)
Both Stenger and Myers made various recommendations about objectives on which secularists should concentrate, but they both agreed on one point: they both asserted we should aim to eliminate or eradicate religious belief…
As I have argued at greater length elsewhere, our primary objective as secularists should be to bring about a secular society, that is, one in which public policy is free of religious influence and discussions and decisions about public policy are based entirely on secular considerations. This is an achievable goal, at least in the developed world. Furthermore, it’s a goal that does not require us to convert all or even most of the religious. We only have to ensure that a critical mass of people support the concept of a secular society, whether they are religious or not.
If religion were truly a private matter—well, then, it would be a private matter. I don’t think we should be that concerned about people having beliefs or engaging in practices that are not rationally grounded, if in fact those beliefs or practices do not result in conduct harmful to others.
It’s that last bit that I amicably disagree about. I do think we should be that concerned about people having beliefs that are not rationally grounded, if the beliefs are of a certain kind. Beliefs in fairies, ghosts, astrology? Well, maybe not that much, but some. Beliefs in an omni god with moral claims on us? That much and more.
But even beliefs in fairies or astrology – some of us, at least, are and should be that concerned even about those: teachers, for instance; journalists, for another instance. We do care about beliefs about the world that are not rationally grounded and that there are good reasons to think are mistaken, because we think people in general should have access to reliable knowledge about the world.
Ron makes a comparison to team fandom, which is also not rationally grounded. Yes but – a commitment is not the same kind of thing as a truth claim. Religion tends to blend the two, of course, but then what Ron cites PZ and Stenger as saying is that “we should aim to eliminate or eradicate religious belief” – not commitment, but belief. Team fandom is independent of belief. I’ve recently discovered that I actually like watching football (soccer football), and I watch it here, and the result is that I want the Sounders to win – I have a little bit of team fandom. It’s got nothing to do with any belief though, it’s just that they’re the home team where I watch. I don’t need my preference to be rationally grounded. But religious beliefs aren’t detachable in that way.
Ron concluded with:
As should be clear, I’m not advocating an “accommodationist” position. I’m not suggesting we should tone down our criticisms of religious beliefs. Integrity demands we be candid in our criticism of religion whenever the occasion for such criticism arises. Instead, I’m merely suggesting that we be clear about our goals. To paraphrase Jefferson, it doesn’t pick my pocket if a person believes in one god or twenty gods, so beliefs by themselves shouldn’t concern us. Religious beliefs should concern us only to the extent that they cause harm, in particular, the extent to which they prevent achievement of a secular society. What efforts we expend on disabusing people of their religious beliefs is a pragmatic question, to be answered by determining what is necessary to obtain a secular society—for that should be our primary objective.
The trouble with Jefferson’s quip is that it isn’t just about my pocket. It’s about education for everyone. The ability to see when beliefs – not commitments, but beliefs – are not rationally grounded, is a useful one, which shouldn’t be confined to an elite. Religious beliefs do cause harm to people’s intellectual functioning, and that by itself is a good reason to want them to erode.
I think actually Ron and I don’t really disagree about this, but are talking about slightly different things. I could be wrong though!
Go Sounders.
-
Entry 47235
Yet more from the misogyny files.
On Saturday morning, after getting the news that President Obama would be giving the commencement address at Barnard College this May, graduating senior Marly Faherty did what her generation does: she went online, to a Columbia University blog called Bwog. But as she watched the comments pouring in, her excitement turned to shock, and then despair. “It was the first time I’d seen something get that nasty that quickly,” she told The Daily Beast. “It was like watching a train wreck. I couldn’t take my eyes off it.”
…commenters started attacking Barnard, Columbia’s all-women’s sister school across the street, and accusing its students of academic inferiority and much, much worse. Using terms like “feminazis” and calling Barnard “Barnyard,” commenters said the school was just a back door to Columbia, and its students deserved neither Obama as a speaker nor affiliation with the university as a whole.
…
By the end of the day, comments like this one, posted under the name “Blue and White Vagina,” started to appear: “While you guys were perfecting your deepthroating techniques and experimenting with scissoring and anal play, we were learning Calculus (usually by sophomore year of High School). Trust me, if you actually deserved to go to Columbia and put in the work it required, you would understand our resentment. Moral of the story is that feeble, ugly Barnyard women need to shut their jizz holes and just be happy that Columbia let Barnyard pretend it was affiliated for this long.”
Right.
Natalie Reed has an eloquent post on hipster misogyny which seems highly relevant.
Amongst hipsters, indie rockers, punks, metalheads, etc. you’ll hear all kinds of “ironic” horrendously sexist shit (“bitches be crazy”, “stop being such a pussy bitch”, “haha Cheryl is such a cunt”, “what are you, on your period or something?”, “how about I shut you up by shoving my dick in your mouth”, “make me a sandwich LOL”, “man, Ellen Page is hot! I would totally rape her in a bathroom!”, “Ann Coulter looks like a fucking tranny”) or see all kinds of horrendously sexist behaviour, (“hold my jacket while I mosh”, blatant sexual harassment, sexual objectification of any and all female musicians or artists or members of a scene, evaluating them all on the basis of appearance first, implying that women can’t possibly do certain things right like audio engineering or DJing a party, sexual assault and date rape, talking over and interrupting women, repeating a woman’s idea and taking credit for it, talking down to women, gender segregating conversational spaces, paying lip service to feminism while only actively supporting ideologies that allow them to get away with not directly confronting any actual issues of gender, allowing the “leaders” of a scene or movement to be completely dominated by men without noticing or questioning it, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.)
…
… but the men involved “aren’t sexists”. They’re cool. They’re totally down with feminism. That stuff about Newsom? That because they “respect her as a female artist”. And when they say things like wanting to rape Ellen Page, they mean it “ironically”. They’re “making fun of sexism”. They can do, say, believe or think all the sexist shit they want, because as long as they’re not “them”, “the sexists” (who vote republican and stuff), they’re exempt from criticism. And if you do criticize them? Well that’s because you’re hypersensitive, or sex-negative, or have no sense of humour, or don’t understand nuance, or are just being a drama queen, or a petty bitch, or you’re on your period, or you have some kind of personal issue, or you’re trying to co-opt the conversation, or you’re disrespecting cultural differences, or you just don’t “get” the issue or what someone meant and what’s really going on, or it’s “art” and you’re trying to “censor” it, or you’re being too politically didactic / too politically correct, or there’s a worse problem somewhere else which makes this complaint irrelevant, or “first world problems!”, or blah blah blah. Because if sexism is only done by sexists, who explicitly think men and women shouldn’t be equal, and I don’t explicitly think that, then I’m not a sexist, so I can’t be being sexist, so therefore whatever stupid cunt is saying I’m being sexist MUST be wrong. QED, bitch!
Or you think words inherently mean X or Y when in fact the meaning of words is always social, so wow are you ever dumb.
-
That would be never
Um………no.
Bill Maher explains that it’s fine for him to call Sarah Palin a cunt.
No it isn’t.
In a brief interview with ABC’s Jake Tapper, Bill Maher explains why calling Sarah Palin a “cunt” or a “twat,” as he has, is in no way equivalent to calling Sandra Fluke a “slut” or a “prostitute,” as Rush Limbaugh did.
I don’t care whether it’s equivalent or not; I care that it’s sexist and bad. Jacob Sullum notes:
Maher seems sincerely oblivious to the fact that “different tastes and different opinions” tend to color people’s views about when sexist epithets are acceptable and when they are so “disgusting” that they are beyond the pale.
And here’s another thing that tends to color people’s views about when sexist epithets are acceptable: being the object of them. It’s easy for Maher to think it’s fine to call Palin a cunt, because Palin’s a woman and he’s a man. It’s a great deal too easy. It’s not attractive for white people to shrug 0ff racist epithets, and it’s not attractive for men to shrug off sexist epithets.
Nick Gillespie – also in Reason – offers more putative liberals talking sexist shit.
At The Daily Beast, Kirsten Powers provides a somewhat more in-depth catalog of vagina dentata imagineering by liberal asshats.
Olbermann, for instance, suggested that that the best way to take Hillary Clinton out of the 2008 presidential race “was to find ‘somebody who can take her into a room and only he comes out.‘” And that conservative commentator S.E. Cupp should have been aborted by her parents. Enchante!
Matt Taibbi, whom Noah tags for calling Andrew Breitbart “a douche” in his obit, is similarly scampish toward the ladies, writes Powers:
Left-wing darling Matt Taibbi wrote on his blog in 2009, “When I read [Malkin’s] stuff, I imagine her narrating her text, book-on-tape style, with a big, hairy set of balls in her mouth.” In a Rolling Stone article about Secretary of State Clinton, he referred to her “flabby arms.” When feminist writer Erica Jong criticized him for it, he responded by referring to Jong as an “800-year old sex novelist.” (Jong is almost 70, which apparently makes her an irrelevant human being.)
Boy, those jokes are fall-down funny, aren’t they?
And then there’s Chris Matthews, the leg-tingled MSNBC host and stalwart JFK defender, who particularly seems to thrive on attacking Hillary Clinton in gender-specific terms:
Over the years he has referred to the former first lady, senator and presidential candidate and current secretary of state as a“she-devil,” “Nurse Ratched,” and “Madame Defarge.” Matthews has also called Clinton “witchy,” “anti-male,” and “uppity” and once claimed she won her Senate seat only because her “husband messed around.”
Sexist shit, all of it. Not ok, any of it. It’s not any more ok because it’s liberals doing it. On the contrary: it’s a deal-breaker. (We know that. We remember all the deals that got broken last summer.)
Update: forgot to h/t skepticlawyer for the link.
-
Leo Igwe addresses the UN on belief in witchcraft
He criticised governments for aiding and abetting belief in witchcraft, leading to the torture and killing of innocent women and children in Africa and around the world.
-
And now a word for the laydeez
Another treasure from @UCCB – a patronizing ode to wimmin, from a boss of an organization that excludes women from all power and thinks its “God” is a man. You know what it says without reading it. Women are special, women are lovely, women raise the children, bless their little hearts and their soft heads.
During this month, our minds turn toward the great gift of what Blessed John Paul II in his letter Mulieris Dignitatem calls the feminine genius and its positive impact on the life of the Church and society.
Uh huh. Let’s have a look at good ol’ muley dig, shall we?
even the rightful opposition of women to what is expressed in the biblical words “He shall rule over you” (Gen 3:16) must not under any condition lead to the “masculinization” of women. In the name of liberation from male “domination”, women must not appropriate to themselves male characteristics contrary to their own feminine “originality”. There is a well-founded fear that if they take this path, women will not “reach fulfilment”, but instead will deform and lose what constitutes their essential richness.
Plus we’ll have to share our toys, and they’ll tell us we’re wrong about stuff. We don’t want them. They have to stay inside with the children. Next question?
We are blessed in our archdiocese that everywhere we look, we see the stamp of women who have responded faithfully to God’s call. First and foremost, in our mothers who nurture the faith of our children. The history of our archdiocese is marked by the many communities of religious women who have established a rich network of Catholic education and welcomed lay women to partner with them in continuing to serve our schools…
As a Church we can take great pride in the fact that hospitals established by religious women remain the largest private provider of healthcare in the country. They continue to be staffed by religious and lay women who faithfully bring the healing love of Jesus to their professional work.
They make just the best assistants. Amen.
-
Normally there’s a big cozy plinth
Interlude. (By the way it’s snowing here right now. Quite hard. This is very odd for March 17 in this particular spot on the globe. A few miles east, in the mountains, it wouldn’t be odd, but down here it’s very odd.) One of the entertainers at QED last Saturday, as I mentioned, was Alun Cochrane, and I thought he was dam’ funny. This is what he’s like.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boy-b0kH-6M