Author: Ophelia Benson

  • God gonna torture you so ha

    Update: I missed the date, which is 2009. I probably blogged about it three years ago. Possibly word for word, in which case I think I’ll take up basket-weaving.

    More entitled bleating from an entitled Christian about the requirement to “respect” her religious beliefs no matter how vicious they are.

    A five-year-old child at a school in Devon told a classmate she would go to hell if she didn’t believe in god. The school told the child not to do that kind of thing, and the child told her mother, and her mother pitched the usual kind of fit.

    Mr Read defended the school’s treatment of the matter and said they encouraged all children to “think independently”, but would not condone one child “frightening” another.

    He said: “We have 271 children in our school from a diversity of backgrounds.

    “We encourage all our children to think independently and discuss their beliefs with their teachers and classmates when it is appropriate to do so.

    “What we do not condone is one child frightening a six-year-old with the prospect of ‘going to hell’ if she does not believe in God.

    “We conveyed to her mother, in a perfectly respectful manner, that we do not expect it to happen again.”

    Sharp intake of breath in shock-horror. The school dared to tell the child’s mother that threats of hell are not wanted in the school??! How dare they!?

    [Jennie] Cain, who has worked part-time at the school for two-and-a-half years, said her and her children’s beliefs had not been respected.

    “My daughter said, ‘My teacher told me I couldn’t talk about Jesus’ — I couldn’t believe what I was hearing,” she said.

    “She said she was taken aside in the classroom and told she couldn’t say that. I was so shocked, I didn’t know what to do.”

    Cain added: “I feel my beliefs are so central to who I am, are such a part of my children’s life.

    “I do feel our beliefs haven’t been respected and I don’t feel I have been treated fairly.”

    She does feel her beliefs haven’t been respected to the point that her children are allowed to thrust them on other children at school, no matter how frightening, squalid, bossy, depressing, and wrong they are. She feels it is not fair for her children to be told not to thrust frightening threatening “beliefs” on other children.

    What if another child with a vivid imagination and a sadistic streak made up a story about a troll that lived under a nearby house and caught the occasional child and ate it, slowly, for lunch? Would it be unfair for the school to tell the child not to do that?

    I say no. I don’t know what Jennie Cain would say.

  • School tells children not to threaten each other with hell

    Result is uproar about failure to “respect” religious beliefs.

  • The control-freaky ways of Mars Hill Church

    To seal the deal, the prospective member must formally agree to submit to the “authority” of the Mars Hill leadership.

  • Nick Cohen on a culture that pretends to be brave

    At the Rally for Free Expression.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lffXO_LLWo

  • Nick Cohen at the Rally for Free Expression

    In 1936 no newspaper would publish news of Wallis Simpson; now no newspaper will publish the Danish cartoons. This is not progress.

  • Another nightmare

    Another story of children whose parents think they are witches, sent to me by Leo Igwe.

    Seoul (CNN) — A pastor and his wife are in custody accused of killing three of their children by starving them to ward off evil spirits, police in South Korea said Wednesday.

    The couple told police the children — aged nine, seven and three — had been ill, which they believed was a sign they were invaded by evil spirits after eating too much on Lunar New Year.

    They then cut the children’s hair to chase the spirits out and starved them from January 24 until February 2, only allowing them to drink water. Local media reports said the parents had beaten the children with a belt and a fly swatter numerous times.

    The pastor, named only by his surname Park, and his wife, Cho, told police they tied the children’s arms and legs with stockings. All three died on February 2, the first around 2am, the second at 5am and the third at 7am…

    The horror of it.

  • First order of business

    Whatever else we do, whatever metaphysical view gets us there, the first order of business has to be shackling women. We always have to make sure women don’t have too many rights. We have to make very damn sure they’re not as free to decide how to live their own lives as men are.

    We have to carve away their genitals so that they won’t have sexual feelings.

    In the rural areas of Egypt, in Upper Egypt, however there is scant respect for the law. You hear the words “tradition”, “custom”, “honour” uttered like a mantra when people justify their decision to circumcise their daughters.

    The belief there is that it is the female who is sexually rampant and that her sexual desire must be arrested at a young age, before she can disgrace the family.

    It is important that she loses that part of her body that awakes sexual desire. If not, she may play with herself or ask a boy to touch this part for her, not specifically a stranger, but one of her cousins for instance, and she might enjoy it,” Olla told me. “When she feels the pain of it she will be more careful about this part.”

    We have to give a fertilized egg full human rights so that the woman the egg is inside of will lose many of her human rights.

    Virginia lawmakers took a step on Tuesday toward trying to outlaw abortion by approving “personhood” legislation that grants individual rights to an embryo from the moment of conception.

    The Republican-controlled House of Delegates voted 66-32 in favor of defining the word person under state law to include unborn children “from the moment of conception until birth at every stage of biological development.”

    The woman that putative “person” is occupying becomes less than a person; she becomes an incubator, with truncated rights over her own body and life.

    Whatever else you do, keep those women down.

  • Egypt: FGM is rife despite ban

    “Of course we fear this new parliament won’t tackle issues like FGM because already there are extremists who want FGM unlike the previous regime.”

  • Saudi religious cops arrest over 140 for Valentine’s Day

    The Organisation for Promoting Virtue and Discouraging Evil says officers have punished those caught so far.

  • Virginia House passes fetal personhood bill

    The House of Delegates voted 66-32 in favor of defining the word person under state law to include unborn children “from the moment of conception.”

  • Carl Elliott on ghostwriting and plagiarism

    University administrators sometimes compare themselves to corporate executives, who are not generally criticized for having ghostwriters on staff.

  • Eric MacDonald on Michael Ruse on Darwin Day

    Ruse wants us to leave a little protected reserve for otherworldly thoughts that can be shielded from the deep quest for knowledge on which science is founded.

  • The non-skeptical “Skeptiko”

    Ah, this brings back memories – Jerry Coyne did an interview with Alex Tsakiris of “Skeptiko”– which is “Skeptiko,” please note, not “Skeptico.” There’s a difference. I didn’t know that in September 2010, which is why I accepted Tsakiris’s invitation to do an interview.

    It was a complete dog’s breakfast. The guy’s an asshole. He’s not a skeptic at all, and the name is pretty obviously meant to trap people in just the way that several people – including me – have been trapped. He’s a woo-meister. He didn’t tip his hand for the first few minutes, so we had an amicable conversation for that long, but then he did, and we hit a brick wall.

    He bullshitted Jerry Coyne, too.

    When I first agreed to the interview, I was told we’d talk mainly about my book and about evolutionary biology.  Several readers acquainted with the show warned me that Alex was a woo-meister who was into things like parapsychology and near-death experiences. Forewarned, I emailed Alex and he verified that we would indeed talk about evolution with perhaps a bit of discussion on the side about free will. He told me I wasn’t going to be “sandbagged.” LOL!

    Quite. He’ll tell you anything. He’s an asshole.

    Here’s a bit of the one I did:

    Alex Tsakiris: [Robert Price] was on the show a couple episodes back. A very, very smart guy, funny guy, entertaining guy. Very competent New Testament scholar and also an Atheist. But the kind of dirty little secret, if you really read, is from a historical perspective we have to accommodate the idea that these visions, these kinds of experiences, these kinds of miracles, are well attested historically. Now, they’re not well attested in the way that Christians might want to fit them in, or they’d want to take this one and leave those ones out.

    But from a historical perspective, even historians who are Atheistic agree that from the normal means that we have for looking at history-analogy, and how well the accounts are corroborated by different sources–we’ve got a lot of miracles there that we have to deal with. And this idea of…

    Ophelia Benson: Wait, wait, wait, wait. Historians agree to that?

    Alex Tsakiris: Well, the New Testament scholars like Bob Price and people of that ilk and I’d imagine other folks who you’d-I mean, this is really what you find from the Jesus Project if you really read what they’re saying…

    But what they say is probably true is that these different people had an encounter with someone who is dead. In this case, it was Jesus. They had some kind of experience that they thought was very real, with someone who died. So that has to be incorporated in and yet it’s kind of glossed over depending on which side. Glossed over if you’re of that ilk and you want to see things that way.

    Ophelia Benson: Yes, it doesn’t seem glossed over to me. It’s more a matter of saying that having an experience that you think is X is not the same thing as actually having the experience of X.

    Alex Tsakiris: Yeah, maybe.

    Ophelia Benson: But the people who saw Jesus could have been hallucinating it. Plus, the record differs in different accounts. None of them are historical accounts as properly-as normally understood.

    Alex Tsakiris: Now, there’s a couple different things to tease out there. Yeah, there’s differences. Yeah, there’s contradictions. But this is a pretty well-for that much of ancient history, we have pretty good records. We have pretty good testimony on the different accounts in terms of what historians would normally piece together. And…

    Ophelia Benson: I’m not sure that’s right. The way I understand it is that Mark is the earliest one and Mark doesn’t say anything about a vision. And the other stuff came after that and was a development of it. So it was basically confabulation. It was storytelling.

    Alex Tsakiris: Okay, I’m going to cut it off again here because on this show we haven’t talked too much about this New Testament scholarship stuff and it can get really geeky and really detailed.

    So he simply edited out part of the interview. He edited out quite a lot of it, in fact, and substituted his own after-the-fact commentary.

    The guy’s an asshole.

  • The barmaid praises Jesus and Mo for ingenuity

    They are grateful.

  • Less mealy-mouthed about their beliefs

    Now I’ve seen everything – now that I’ve seen an editorial in the Telegraph saying how swell Islam is compared to those other timid religions that won’t stand up for themselves.

    It’s another Warsi-flatter, saying how right she is to order everyone to be intrusively religious and to go urge the pope to be more intrusively religious along with her.

    It is unsurprising that it has taken a Muslim member of the Cabinet to speak out clearly and forcefully on the importance of faith in the life of the nation; followers of Islam tend to be less mealy-mouthed about their beliefs than many Christians.

    Why yes, yes they do. Some are so much less mealy-mouthed that they threaten cartoonists and novelists with death for failing to submit to their god and their prophet. Some actually try to do the killing themselves. Some actually succeed. Countries governed by “followers of Islam” are all nasty authoritarian places at best, vicious theocracies at worst. Is that really what the Telegraph is admiring and promoting?

     …politically correct fawning by public bodies over the sensitivities of other faiths has left many Christians feeling inhibited about asserting and celebrating their own beliefs. It has also left many wondering exactly when it was that Britain stopped being a Christian country. Combine that with the aggressive intolerance of the militant secularists, and it is little wonder that the Church of England frequently feels beleaguered.

    Diddums. It “feels beleaguered” while it has bishops in the House of Lords and quite a lot of air time on the BBC. It doesn’t get to shove people off the sidewalk the way it used to, but it has hardly lost all of its very real power.

    Last week, we had the perfect illustration of this baleful process, when the National Secular Society succeeded in a High Court attempt to prevent Bideford Town Council doing something it had done for centuries – holding a short prayer service at the start of its meetings. The atheist former councillor who pressed the case argued that the council had no right to “impose” its religious views on him, conveniently ignoring the fact that no one had forced him to attend the prayers, and failing totally to see that it was he who was seeking to impose his views on others, not the other way round.

    That atheist former councillor is “an evil little thing,” isn’t he. Theocracy speaks the same language everywhere. No one “forced” him to attend the prayers but it’s awkward and inconvenient to opt out. That’s how majoritarian bullying works. The Telegraph’s approval of majoritarian bullying is a squalid spectacle.

    Such instincts, Baroness Warsi notes, are “deeply intolerant”, and have historically been the hallmark of totalitarian regimes. Her warning that the removal of faith from the public sphere is dangerous is, therefore, both timely and right, and all credit to her for sounding it. It is high time that many of our religious leaders were similarly assertive, and stopped seeming so apologetic about their faith.

    Totalitarian regimes is it? You mean like Franco’s Spain? Like Saudi Arabia? Like Iran? For that matter, like Elizabethan Britain?

    Does the Telegraph really want that? If it doesn’t, what the hell is it playing at?

     

  • Sahara TV on Helen Ukpabio

    Sahara TV talks to Pastor Godwin Umotong of Liberty Gospel Church in Houston about the “deliverance” mission of Helen Ukpabio.

    Where are the mermaids, by the way? Are they in the Gulf of Mexico?

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5BeYr0V__0

  • Valerie Tarico on Plan B and motivated beliefs

    Remember the caring sensitive Mummy whose disabled daughter was raped and who decided not to let her have Plan B? Because “It’s about taking the life of an innocent child”?

    Well Valerie Tarico has an excellent post on The Big Lie about Plan B.

    Plan B doesn’t cause abortion. It stops or delays ovulation. No egg, no fertilization, no pregnancy – no abortion. It’s that simple.

    Well then why did the caring sensitive Mummy say it did? Why did she get all maudlin about the innocent child whose life had to not be taken?

    So why does the Religious Right keep telling us that post-coital contraceptives function by aborting teeny babies? Because in the minds of many true believers, when you’re on a mission from God the end justifies the means. That’s one reason religious belief has such inconsistent moral consequences, including wildly inconsistent effects on truth seeking and truth telling. Chris Rodda’s book, Liars for Jesus, focuses primarily on the way that Christian fundamentalists are rewriting history to justify theocracy. Katherine Stewart’s book, The Good News Club, sheds light on the deceptions fundamentalists use to woo grade school children for conversion. A NARAL investigation exposed a host of deceptions that are the stock in trade of Crisis Pregnancy Centers including the falsehood that abortions causing breast cancer. Different lies for different ends.

    Not that they necessarily know they’re lies, Tarico adds. Self-deception is a powerful thing.

  • The Women’s Ministry should exist to improve the lives of women

    Houzan Mahmoud will soon have a statement on Iraq’s Women’s Minister Ibtihal Kasid Alzaidi, who thinks and says that women are not equal to men. Not a good thing for a Women’s Minister to think.

  • More than one valence

    Something I’m ambivalent about:

    On the one hand, there’s the value of being reasonable, and trying to see all sides of a question. There’s the value of not getting things wrong by being too one-sided; by confirmation bias; by seeing everything the way you see everything and so becoming blind to other ways of seeing everything. That’s different from the more political value of giving everybody a fair hearing, and letting people pursue the good in their own way as far as is compatible with the rights of others. The value I mean is epistemic and cognitive.

    On the other hand there’s the value of countering a very loud, dominant, hegemonic, majoritarian, conformist brand of conventional wisdom.

    Those two things are in tension. Hence my ambivalence.

    On the one hand, as an atheist I think I have a duty to try to consider ways in which theism can be a good thing. On the other hand, as an atheist I also think I have a duty to help spread the minority view that theism is on the whole a bad thing, especially with regard to free inquiry.

    Those two things are in tension.

    The trouble is, there are already whole trainloads of people willing and eager to say that theism is wonderful and atheists suck. There are whole trainloads of people like that even in the UK and Australia and Canada and other places lucky enough to be more secular than the US, but in the US they also have a firm grip on the mainstream.

    Given that fact I think we need a lot of unadulterated atheism just to make atheism more available. From that point of view, I actually don’t want to talk about ways in which theism can be a good thing. I want to insist that conventional wisdom notwithstanding, it isn’t.

    But there’s always the nagging little voice in my ear droning away about confirmation bias and group psychology.

    It’s a pain in the ass.

  • Derby: 3 men jailed for distributing gay death call leaflets

    The leaflets showed an image of a wooden mannequin hanging from a noose, quoted Islamic texts, and said capital punishment was the only way to rid society of homosexuality.