Author: Ophelia Benson

  • Most attend their local madrassa

    The BBC is so stupid sometimes – so conformist and reactionary and authoritarian. There’s this piece on UK madrassas “modernizing” for example.

    Most mosques have their own madrassa or religious school. Larger mosques can have a number of them, and they all form an integral part of the local community.

    In close knit neighbourhoods most Muslim children regularly attend their local madrassa, in part due to peer pressure, as everyone living near the mosque does so.

    See what they did there? (I say “they” even though the article has a byline, Sanjiv Buttoo, because the Beeb has a house style and this piece is typical.) See how they dressed up the situation by invoking “the local community” and “close knit neighbourhoods,” which sound cozy and loving rather than stifling and coercive? They did admit that there’s peer pressure, but they softened that blow by first tucking us into the arms of the local close knit community neighborhood.

    There’s also a total failure to question the value of what is learned in madrassas.

    Unlike older mosques, children sit at desks and chairs, instead of the floor,
    and although everyone has to learn Arabic so they can read the Koran, classes are taught in English.

    Mohammed Sarfaraz is one of the teachers who works here. He said: “It’s
    different to when we grew up when we could not understand Urdu very well. In my class we all speak English as it is the mother tongue of all the students.

    “The benefits are that they learn quicker and they remember more, and at the end of the day what they learn, they can put to use in their everyday lives.”

    In other words they can learn The Rules as laid down by a guy who lived in the Arabian peninsula 14 centuries ago. Totes modern.

  • BBC says UK madrassas are “modernizing”

    “In close knit neighbourhoods most Muslim children regularly attend their local madrassa, in part due to peer pressure, as everyone living near the mosque does so.”

  • Sabir Hussain jailed for child assaults at Keighley mosque

    The madrassa teacher admitted four charges of assaulting boys at the Markazi Jamia
    Mosque in Keighley as they learned the Koran.

  • Chief rabbi: consumerism bad, “faith” and family good

    “The consumer society was laid down by the late Steve Jobs coming down the mountain with two tablets.” Only Moses is supposed to do that.

  • Gulnaz on CNN

    Raped and impregnated; imprisoned for being raped; threatened with death; may marry her rapist.

  • Afghan women have continued to struggle

    Grim news from Afghanistan:

    A law meant to protect Afghan women from a host of abusive practices, including rape, forced marriage and the trading of women to settle disputes, is being undermined by spotty enforcement, the UN said in a report released Wednesday.

    Afghanistan’s Law on the Elimination of Violence Against Women was passed in August 2009, raising hopes among women’s rights activists that Afghan women would get to fight back against abuses that had been ignored under Taliban rule.

    The law criminalised many abuses for the first time, including domestic violence, child marriage, driving a woman to resort to suicide and the selling and buying of women.

    Yet the report found only a small percentage of reported crimes against women are pursued by the Afghan government.

    Only 26% of complaints investigated, only 7% prosecuted – 155 cases out of 2,299 complaints.

    Sometimes victims were pressured to withdraw their complaints or to settle for mediation by traditional councils, the report said. Sometimes prosecutors didn’t proceed with mandatory investigations for violent acts like rape or prostitution. Other times, police simply ignored complaints.

    In one such instance in Kandahar in March, a woman reported that after her daughter got married, in-laws used the young woman as an unpaid servant and forced her into having sex with visiting men. She committed suicide by setting herself on fire in her room and the mother brought the case to the police.

    Bad.

  • Thinking about thinking about thinking

    More discussion of facts and belief, of Ward and Coyne, of science and philosophy, of evidence and reasons to believe. Jean Kazez did a post a couple of days ago, which I didn’t see until today, and Russell Blackford did one at Talking Philosophy.

    I find Jean’s post very interesting because it talks about the same things I talked about in Ward’s brief Comment is Free piece replying to Julian Baggini. Ward’s piece might seem too slight to bear all this examination, but it’s about the place where some fundamental and important disagreements are born, so it’s worth all the close peering.

    One interesting item:

    So what’s left is Coyne’s puzzlement that atheist philosophers come to the
    defense of people like Ward.

    Well, it’s like this:  when I teach a philosophical argument, I take my task to have two parts.  First, I’ve got to fairly represent the argument, capturing exactly what the philosopher had in mind. It’s a deep-seated occupational habit, I think, to take this duty very seriously, and try to execute it without regard to whether I’m for or against what the philosopher is arguing for. So: we’ve got to understand what Ward’s saying, before we object. Second, it’s a sacred duty to be adversarial–strongly inculcated by the guild of philosophers. We need to figure out if there are problems with an argument (whatever we think of the conclusion), and if so, exactly what they are.

    I asked if philosophers experience those two parts as pulling in different directions, if it’s hard to do both and do them well. I asked because sometimes (not to say often) in arguments people actually obscure their own meaning, by accident or by design, and that can make it very difficult to do both: to take seriously the duty to capture exactly what the interlocutor had in mind and to figure out if there are problems with the argument and if so what they are. Ward does that a lot. That makes it difficult to do both for practical reasons – it’s just plain hard to pin down exactly what he meant – and for emotional ones: it’s hard to damp down the irritation enough to make the effort to be fair.

    Another interesting item was directly about this place I mentioned, where the disagreements are born. Jean broke Ward’s argument into stages.

    Stage 2 is this: “A huge number of factual claims are not scientifically testable.” Why? “Many historical and autobiographical claims, for instance, are not repeatable, not observable now or in the future, and not subsumable under any general law.” Somebody a long time ago saw something, and told someone else, and we’ve been playing whisper down the alley for 2,000 years. Science can’t go back and confirm or disconfirm. According to Ward, whether we believe the report–for example, about Jesus healing the sick–will depend on “general philosophical views, moral views, personal experience and judgment.”

    I read Ward as allowing here that someone like me is going to reject Jesus healing the sick as having occurred, because I’m philosophically disinclined to believe in miracles. But someone open to the possibility of miracles might think there really is a reliable chain of reports going back to Jesus healing the sick, and so may think “Jesus healed the sick” not only purports to be fact-stating but states a fact. At any rate, our reasoning about this long ago event falls at least partly outside the domain of science. That’s the main assertion in the column–Ward is not here trying to defend specific Christian beliefs.

    …

    My take on all this is–  Stage 1, check.  Stage 2, check. Stage 3, groan.

    Jerry Coyne (11/6) reacts very differently.  Stage 1, check.  Stage 2,
    groan.      Stage 3, groan.

    I said I lean toward the groan at Stage 2. Jean said “our reasoning about this long ago event falls at least partly outside the domain of science” – and that’s the place – the spot where the paths veer off and fundamental disagreements start. I think what it boils down to is whether that reasoning really falls outside the domain of science – or what is meant by “outside”; on where and how the borders are drawn. I think the domain is right next door and the border is sloppily marked and unpatrolled. I think “outside” isn’t really outside but rather beside. The two are related. Massimo Pigliucci was talking about this yesterday – on Twitter! the worst possible place to talk about such a thing, as he pointed out himself – and he said something to the effect that “Coyne wants to make science mean all of empiricism, and that’s not kosher.” The idea, I think, is that scientists need to be able to recognize when they’re doing philosophical reasoning, partly so that they’ll do it better. I get that, I think. But at the same time, people in general need to be aware that the two ways of reasoning are related and genuinely compatible, while religious reasoning may not be.

    Jean said she is ”philosophically disinclined to believe in miracles” and other people aren’t, and I pointed out that her reasons for being philosophically disinclined are better than other people’s reasons for being inclined, and those reasons are as it were next door to science. I think that relation is where the break is, not between science on the one hand and philosophical reasoning on the other. I’m thinking Barbara Forrest on methodological naturalism here: because it has such a good record, it provides good reasons to buy into philosophical or metaphysical naturalism too. There’s a relationship. I think Ward and people like Ward want to suggest that there’s a radical discontinuity.

     

     

  • UN report on violence against women in Afghanistan

    A law meant to protect Afghan women from abusive practices such as rape and forced marriage is rarely enforced.

  • The rules

    TLC, the “Yay religion!” channel, has a new show called All-American Muslim. Guess what it’s about! Guess what its take is!

    Well in one way its take is fine. Good, show people that Mulims aren’t some weird alien species; excellent; promote fellow-feeling and peace; great. But…

    Well I’ve only managed to watch a few minutes of it, a couple of times, because it’s so annoying. It may be more annoying than it needed to be – it may have gone out of its way to be annoying, by seeking out hyper-observant Muslims. I don’t know. I don’t know what’s normal in Dearborn.

    Anyway my point isn’t actually about TLC or the show overall, it’s about the bits that I did see – both of which, as it happens, featured women going on and on and on and on about will they put on the hijab or not, along with women already in the fucking hijab and men saying well you really ought to put on the hijab. Both featured a lot of hijab. There was also a little about fasting during Ramadan, for variety.

    What was so irritating about it was the settled assumption that there are rules, there’s a right way to do Islam, and that’s that. This was a theme that kept recurring even in the tiny fractions of the shows that I saw: that a good Muslim follows the rules and does it the right way. There were discussion scenes with people sitting around on couches discussing “hijab: yes or no” and “fasting: yes or no” and always there was this assumption: there are rules, and you can obey them or not obey them, but they are the rules.

    Some of the time someone was being all “liberal” and saying “it’s none of my business” – but it was still always The Rules. What’s the point of being a Muslim if you’re not going to do it right? Why convert to Islam (which someone was doing, or thinking about doing) if you’re not going to do it right? One woman said she didn’t fast during Ramadan because it was difficult with her job and then taking care of her children. (Of course it is! Going without water and food all day for a month is unhealthy.) A man replied that whether she fasted or not was her business, not his. How noble, but of course the implication was there that she was not following the rules.

    There was another depressing bit where a woman decided to start wearing the hijab, and she was all smiley and kind of trembly, as if she were announcing a pregnancy, and she told her husband and he was all happy…And she said they should take all the photos off the living room wall, because of course it would be silly to wear a hijab but let people see her without one in photos all over the wall…so they took them all down (and there were a lot).

    It’s all so depressing – handing themselves over to these stupid, bad, anti-woman, anti-human, antiquated rules for no good reason except that it’s “religious.” They don’t question whether or not they are rules, and if so why it matters; the most they can manage (that I’ve seen) is to say things along the lines of “well if you want to be a bad Muslim that’s your business.”

     

  • Strolling cop pepper spraying everywhere

    Jason collected some photoshopped pepper-spraying cops.

    My favorite is

    Check them all out. Commenters have more. Don’t miss George W’s.

     

  • No billboard for YOU

    Mid Ohio Atheists had a contract with Lind Media Company for two billboards (of the atheist variety, of course). At the last minute Lind Media Company dropped Mid Ohio Atheists a line to say “Oops we changed our minds sorry thx bye.”

    No fair.

     Granted, if I were putting up an atheist billboard in Ohio I would start smaller than that. I would start with something it’s easier to defend on a billboard*. But Lind Media Company shouldn’t string them along and then go “ha ha HA ha” at the last second.

     See that one’s much better. Less dogmatic. Easier to defend. Also offering solidarity in place of a scolding or command. Better billboard material. But either way Lind Media Company shouldn’t play nasty tricks.

    *I said that before I saw the churchy billboards that Lind Media is happy to display. I take it back.

     

  • A lawyer in Iran writes to Maryam Namazie

    A child born of adultery (non Islamic marriage) shall not belong to the adulterer. (1167. Civil code) Marriage before puberty with the permission of the male Guardian is legal and possible. (1041.Civil code)

  • The Bombay massacre

    I haven’t been paying enough attention. (So often the case. There is so much to pay attention to, and it’s very difficult to pay attention to everything – ok it’s not very difficult, it’s impossible – so in paying attention to L, M and N, you miss S, T and U.) I missed David Coleman Headley. I missed the fact that an American

    was one of the leading planners of the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, which killed 166 people over three days at two five-star hotels, a train station and a small Jewish community center.

    I missed the fact that

    Headley gave specific evidence about the close alliance between the ISI,
    Pakistan’s intelligence force, and the Lashkar terrorist group.

    …

    Headley described meeting with both ISI and Lashkar officials before the
    Mumbai operation. He also described meeting a Pakistani military official at Lashkar headquarters. The officer gave Lashkar advice on how to carry out a maritime attack.

    “Because of his evidence, the U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago indicted
    Major Iqbal, [a Pakistani intelligence official], which is the first time you
    have a serving Pakistani intelligence officer charged in the murder of
    Americans,” says Rotella.

    Mark that. A Pakistani intelligence official helped people plan a mass murder in Bombay. Not a battle in a declared war, but a mass murder of non-combatants in hotels and railway stations and a community center.

    Furthermore, one of the guys arrested for the Bombay massacre is using a cell phone to this day.

    During a meeting overseas last summer, a senior U.S. official and Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the chief of Pakistan’s armed forces, discussed a threat that has strained the troubled U.S.-Pakistani relationship since the 2008 Mumbai attacks: the Lashkar-i-Taiba militant group.

    The senior U.S. official expressed concern that Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, a terrorist chief arrested for the brutal attacks in India, was still directing Lashkar operations while in custody, according to a U.S. government memo viewed by ProPublica. Gen. Kayani responded that Pakistan’s spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), had told prison authorities to better control Lakhvi’s access to the outside world, the memo says. But Kayani rejected a U.S. request that authorities take away the cell phone Lakhvi was using in jail, according to the memo to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the National Security Council.

    Staggering, isn’t it? They won’t take his cell phone away.

    What are they going to do next? Give him a small nuclear weapon for his very own?

  • Sebastian Rotella on the Bombay attacks and the ISI

    Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, a terrorist chief arrested for the brutal attacks in India, is still using a cell phone while in prison. Watch out.

  • Where’s the harm?

    Via Gnu Atheism at Facebook – a new bus ad –

  • Another foundation

    I have another treat for you: R J Rushdoony’s Chalcedon Foundation. It has edu in its url, which is kind of funny. Anyway, it’s Dominionism. I chose an item almost at random – Joy as a Tool of Dominion for the Abused Woman. By Mrs. Gerald (Jennifer) W. Tritle – boy, you don’t see that much any more. Here is my article that I wrote, by Mrs Man’s Name (but you can call me Jennifer). So anyway here’s the Dominionist wisdom about what to do if you’re an abused woman, also why you are an abused woman in the first place. I bet you can guess – it’s because of feminism.

    Few greater challenges exist for the Christian woman who has experienced verbal, physical, and/or sexual abuse in her life than for her to obey God’s Word with a guilt-free and undefiled joy from a pure heart, a good conscience, and a sincere faith (1 Tim. 1:5). To truly enjoy God, a Christian woman who has experienced abuse must, as every other believer, obey God’s Word and allow it to transform her mind.

    It is certain that abuses are not new under the sun. Nonetheless, this
    century has been characterized by fathers who have failed to lead and to
    discipline their families and by feminism, which has attempted to reverse God’s perfect creation order regarding male and female roles, and abuse in families is highly prevalent.

    See? That’s where abuse of women comes from – fathers who fail to boss and punish their families enough, and feminism.

    There’s Andrea Schwartz on god’s rules for women.

    God’s design for women is in a complementary and supportive role. Were men sufficient to carry out God’s dominion mandate alone, there would have been no need for a helpmeet.  The balance and insight that women provide allow men to fully step into their dominion roles. Yet, the Tempter’s plan continues to seduce women away from their God-appointed functions to arenas of life that distract them from their created design.  To remove women from their high calling in God’s basic institution of the family spells disaster.  It is noteworthy that, despite all attempts at eliminating gender designations in our culture, the method by which new people enter the world remains through a woman’s womb.

    Oh damn, she’s right! We forgot to fix that! God that was sloppy – we totally meant to, but I guess we got so hung up on explaining that no actually cooking one meal a week (and not cleaning up afterward) doesn’t count as sharing the domestic duties that it just slipped our tiny little girly minds.

    From the beginning of time, God has decreed that people be defined in
    terms     of their gender rather than apart from it. For example, rather than
    describe myself as  an offspring, sibling, adult, spouse, and parent, it is
    Biblically correct  to identify myself as  a daughter, sister, woman, wife, and
    mother. Each of these clearly identifies the fact that I am female.

    Biblically correct? Really? The bible says women aren’t allowed to say they’re adults? The bible says women have to use words that clearly identify the fact that they are female? Where does it say that?

    One wonders if she’s ever met any feminists. She apparently thinks they say things like ”I am Kate’s sibling” and “I am Henry’s spouse.” No wonder she’s terrified!

    The Bible clearly states that women are not to serve as elders in the church.
    This mandate in no way indicates that men are superior to women in character or ability. This is an organizational difference by God’s design, outlining His hierarchy of authority and responsibility, not to mention jurisdiction. A woman’s role in the immediate and extended family is of such paramount importance, that to assume roles outside these areas is wasting her as the valuable resource she is. There’s simply too much to do in this arena for her to abdicate her position to areas of lesser importance.

    Riiiiiiiiiight. Everything except family work is of lesser importance…Is that what they told her? And she believed them? That would be funny if it weren’t so tragic.

    So that’s the Chalcedon Foundation. It’s some articles. Maybe I should start calling B&W a foundation – ya think?

     

  • Take that, rabble

    The UC Davis police chief has been placed on leave after the pepper spraying of students on Friday.

    On Sunday, the university said that two police officers had been placed on administrative leave with pay pending an investigation into Friday’s incident. In videos that were widely distributed over the Internet, two police officers in riot gear were seen dousing about a dozen protesters with pepper spray as they sat on a sidewalk with their arms entwined.

    Yup. That’s what happened.

  • UC Davis police chief put on leave

    After two campus police officers sprayed seated protesters with pepper spray during a demonstration aligned with Occupy Wall Street.

  • Having to promise

    A new thing for Christianists to worry about.

    Girls wanting to become Guides, Brownies or Rainbows currently promise to “love” God when signing up to the 101-year-old organisation.

    However, the association is considering reviewing the wording of its affirmation for new members, to remove religious references.

    The NSS says the story is bogus, but taking it as true for the moment…What of it? Why should children have to promise to love “God” in order to join a group that does fun things? Why should even children who do in fact love “God” have to do that? Why should even children of “devout” parents have to do that? Why have a requirement of that kind at all? It seems surplus to requirements. It seems intrusive and bossy.

    Atheists don’t make children promise to hate “God,” after all. Atheists don’t make anyone promise to hate “God.” Atheists don’t try to extort emotional commitments of that kind. Why do scouting organizations do so? What’s the attraction?

    I suppose the question is otiose, because the promise dates from 1910, so it’s a “why did they” question rather than a “why do they” one, and it’s not really pressing to know why they did. But it ought to be possible to re-think a social practice of that kind, and then why-questions do become relevant. “Why should we keep doing this? Hmmm, can’t really think of a good reason. Let’s bag it.”

    The promise is optional but only girls who have taken it can be awarded the movement’s highest badges.

    Christian campaigners yesterday warned that the 600,000-member association risks losing its values if it abandons the religious element of the oath.

    “It would be terribly sad,” said Mike Judge, spokesman for The Christian Institute.

    “The Girl Guides has always embraced all people but has its roots in Christian values, which is what has made it so popular and successful.

    “It will be very difficult for it to maintain its values if it removes the ethics from where those ideas spring from. It would change the character of the Guides for the worse.

    “Sadly, I think this is symptomatic of a much wider problem in Britain, which stems from a culture of embarrassment about being Christian.”

    How would it change the character of the Guides for the worse? It wouldn’t stop anyone from being Christian, or loving “God.” It would just stop requiring a promise to do so, which shouldn’t be its business in any case.

     

     

  • DR Congo is a failed state

    Ordinary citizens are poor, hungry and under-informed. The government can’t provide decent education or health services. Rape is endemic in eastern provinces.