Author: Ophelia Benson

  • The Iona Institute’s stealth patriarchy

    It finds “experts” to say policies that benefit working women are “unfair” to “women who want to stay home with their children.”

    Keynote speaker Dr  Catherine Hakim of the London School of Economics told the audience that social policies which assume all women want to work are unfair and act against the actual wishes of most women.

    What about social policies that assume all men want to work? Is it only women who should benefit from social policies which assume some women don’t want to work? How about social policies that assume no one wants to work? Wouldn’t that be the fairest thing?

    Swedish  social policy expert Jonas Himmelstrand told the audience that Sweden’s  experiment with daycare had failed. Swedish policy in this regard is  frequently held up as a model for other countries to follow.

    Mr  Himmelstrand said: “Sweden is the pioneering nation in comprehensive  highly subsidized daycare, a model which was put into practice 35 years  ago. Today a full 92pc of all 18 month to 5 year olds are in daycare.”

    However, while Sweden topped many statistics, including welfare with low child  poverty, high life expectancy, low infant mortality and an admired  social welfare system, in other areas the picture was not so bright, he  added.

    Yes we know, it gets dark way early there in winter.

  • Not to defend the Catholic Church but to smear the New atheists

    As long as we’re on the subject of Brendan O’Neill…let’s stay on it a little longer. I neglected him last year when he was making contorted attacks on critics of the pope and the Vatican. Allow me to make amends now.

    He made a heavy-breathing correction to claims of how many priestly rapes there had been, then he explained why he did that.

    Why point out these basic facts? Not to defend the Catholic Church, which  clearly has a sexual abuse problem, or to minimise the suffering of those  individuals who ”only” suffered being verbally abused, shown dirty photos or  fondled over their clothing by priests – all of those acts are abhorrent and  potentially punishable by law.

    No, it is worth pointing out the reality of the extent of allegations against  the Catholic Church to expose the non-rationalist, anti-humanist underpinnings  of the current fashion for Catholic-baiting among the liberal, opinion-forming  classes. The wildly inaccurate claims suggest that modern atheism has zero interest in applying the tools of rational investigation and critical questioning, and is hellbent on using the politics of fear to invent a fantastical rape-happy ogre, in contrast to which it can pose as the pure defender of childlike innocence and integrity.

    What a ridiculous specious malicious perverse claim. The people who oppose the Catholic church’s habit of protecting child-molesting priests are not doing anything anti-humanist. It is the Catholic church’s habit of protecting child-molesting priests that is anti-humanist. Opposing that habit is not “Catholic-baiting” and it’s sheer demagoguery to say it is. It’s not just atheists who oppose that habit – at least I certainly hope it’s not, for the sake of the self-respect of non-atheists – and opposing the habit is hardly slam-dunk evidence of zero interest in applying the tools of rational investigation and critical questioning. As for the politics of fear – really? It’s “atheists” who go in for that in contrast to the Catholic church? Please. And spare us the crap about “the pure defender of childlike innocence and integrity”; there’s no need for sentimentalism about children to think they shouldn’t be sexually abused by adults in positions of ulitmate power.

    What a crappy crappy thing to do – defend the sinister self-interested self-protecting thugs and smear the people who would like to make them stop the thuggery. What a shameful toady Brendan O’Neill is.

    In the past, it was the Catholic Church, especially during the Inquisition,  which demonised its enemies as depraved perverts. Now, the so-called New  Atheists have adopted these tactics in their drive to depict religion as the  greatest evil of our age.

    Shameful. Toady.

  • Can al-Shabab retake Mogadishu?

    Probably not, but it can keep on killing people.

  • Religious freedom in Turkey

    “Turkey may look like a secular state on paper, but in terms of international law it is actually a Sunni Islamic state,” a leader of the country’s Alevi minority charged.

  • “Secularism” in Turkey

    Burak Bekdil explains why Turkish secularism isn’t.

    A majority of Turks, Sunni Muslims, overtly or covertly believe that they should be “more equal” than the others because they constitute the majority. They think that it is their natural right to enjoy preferential treatment in terms of governance and law enforcement. Remember how the crowds in Istanbul last year, trying to attack the Israeli consulate, shouted at the police who were trying to prevent bloodshed? “Leave the Jews to us! What kind of Muslims are you?” A simple search will produce thousands of examples of this nature unveiling the conscious or subconscious desire of the Sunni Turk for preferential treatment in public administration.

    It’s not unlike the US that way. A great many Christians in the US also believe that they should be “more equal” than the others because they constitute the majority.

    Most recently, the Istanbul Chief Prosecutor’s Office charged a cartoonist with “insulting the religious [Muslim] values adopted by a part of the population [Muslim],” demanding that the artist receive up to a year in prison in its indictment. That cartoon may or may not insult part of the population. And yes, blasphemy laws are not exclusively Turkish. But a state, or in this case, law enforcement, that is equal to all faiths should ensure that similar cases are opened against, say, the Sunni majority when they insult, say, other monotheistic or atheist parts of the population. Can anyone imagine a Muslim Turk having to stand trial for writing a book that insults atheists?

    Secularism combined with a healthy respect for free speech combined with an ability to live with perceived “insults” to beliefs and ideas would be the way to go.

  • Democracy and secularism in Turkey

    A majority of Turks, Sunni Muslims, overtly or covertly believe that they should be “more equal” than the others because they constitute the majority.

  • Sigmund on an unholy alliance

    Between “the Iona Institute” and Brendan O’Neill of Spiked. Reactionary Catholicism pairs up with reactive ex-Trotskyist libertarian posturing.

  • Insulting the religious values

    Oh noes, a cartoonist did a cartoon. Call the cops!

    A Turkish cartoonist will be put on trial for a caricature he drew in which he renounced god, daily Habertürk reported on its website Wednesday.

    The Istanbul chief public prosecutor’s office charged cartoonist Bahadır Baruter with “insulting the religious values adopted by a part of the population” and requested his imprisonment for up to one year.

    A mild and liberal response.

    Baruter’s caricature depicted an imam and believers praying in a mosque. One of the characters is talking to God on his cellphone and asking to be pardoned from the last part of the prayer because he has errands to run.

    Within the wall decorations of the mosque, Baruter hid the words, “There is no Allah, religion is a lie.” The cartoon was published in the weekly “Penguen” humor magazine.

    And some bossy controlfreak pious meddling Fans of Allah filed complaints. No cartoons for you, no jokes for you, no irony about religion or praying or gods for you. Shut up and kneel.

     

  • Turkish cartoonist to be put on trial for teasing ‘God’

    Istanbul chief public prosecutor charged cartoonist Bahadir Baruter with “insulting the religious values adopted by a part of the population.”

  • New atheists think people are just monkeys so nyah

    Frequent commenter Sigmund alerted me to another entity crying out for scrutiny and derision: the Iona Institute, an Irish “institute” (can any old thing call itself an institute? The Faraday Institute, the Tobacco Institute, the Iona Institute – are there any gates, any gatekeepers? is it just anarchy around here?) dedicated to saying how great the Catholic church is.

    The amusing thing (amusing in a rebarbative kind of way) is that the Iona Institute invited dear auld Brendan O’Neill to give a talk, and he obliged. From Trotskyist splinter group to libertarian “contrarian” faitheist pope-cheering what-the-hell-is-that – that’s Spiked and its editor Brendan O’Neill. So the Trotskyist libertarian pope-fan told the Iona Institute…you’ll never guess what. That’s it’s all the fault of The New Atheism.

    O’Neill, who also writes for The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph among other publications, said [there] was widespread antagonism “towards strong belief or solid faith”.

    He said: “In our relativistic era of ‘anything goes’, when we are expected to respect all cultures as equally valid, a religion that considers itself the ‘one, true faith’ and as ‘universal’, is looked upon as dictatorial if not fascistic.”

    Yes that’s right. A religion that considers itself the ‘one, true faith’ and ‘universal’ is bound to consider itself entitled – indeed mandated – to impose that ‘one, true, universal faith’ on everyone. Since Catholicism is not “true” in any sense that matters, that imposition is as dictatorial as it gets.

    Speaking about the New Atheism, he said: “The New Atheism regards not only religious faith but any view which considers mankind as more than a monkey as suspect, strange, deluded.”

    Well that’s just a stupid falsehood.

    He continued: “New Atheists’ real problem with religion is its treatment of mankind as special and distinctive, as the governor of the Earth, as having ‘dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and every other living thing that moves on the Earth’.

    No it isn’t. That’s one problem, especially when it’s the kind of “dominion” that entails treating all other living things as human property to do with as it likes, but it’s not “the real problem” – there are lots of real problems, many of them worse (at least from the human point of view) than that one.

    “At a time when we are increasingly seen as mere bundles of genes, little more than DNA, sharing 90 per cent of our genes with bananas, religion’s sanctification of man is seen as perverse.”

    Religion’s what?! Religion doesn’t “sanctify” humans – religion scolds atheists and humanists for focusing on human beings instead of imaginary gods; religion tells human beings they can’t understand god’s ways and reasons so they just have to obey; religions tells human beings they are nothing compared to god.

    Concluding, he said: “The end result of the crashing together of these trends is a creeping and sometimes shrieking intolerance of Catholicism in particular, and religion in general. This has led even me – a lapsed Catholic and immoveable atheist – to worry about the illiberal streak to modern-day atheism, and to want to stand up for the absolute freedom of religion.

    Funny that he decides to worry about the putative “illiberal streak to modern-day atheism” and not the well-known and very obvious illiberal streak in Catholicism. Chump.

  • Divination, not research

    Frederick Crews has a fascinating pair of articles in the New York Review of Books on Freud’s cocaine addiction and its connection to his work.

    According to the official version of Freud’s career, sexuality scarcely entered his mind as a topic of interest until, to his shock and embarrassment, it was forced upon him by his patients’ indecent confessions. His early psychological papers and his letters to Wilhelm Fliess, however, show just the opposite: it was a sex-obsessed Freud who tried to harangue those patients into admitting that they harbored the perverse desires and guilty secrets that were already on his mind. But when and why had sexual issues become paramount for him? His surviving letters from adolescence are those of a moralizing, misogynistic prude,  and the same qualities appear in his early engagement letters, beginning in 1882.

    Perhaps the best-known result of taking cocaine is sexual disinhibition.

    Crews makes a compelling case that the cocaine use and the sex-obsession are connected. And then there’s the grandiosity…

    [T]hanks to Fleischl’s exhilarating influence and to his own solitary cocaine ingestion, Freud was beginning to feel that a choice was looming between directly intuitive, audacious knowledge and narrowly focused laboratory science. Returning from one nocturnal rendezvous with a suffering but voluble Fleischl, he wrote excitedly of “the intellectual elation, the stimulation and clarification of so many opinions,” and added,  “This magic world of intellect and unhappiness contributes a great deal, of course, to my estrangement from my surroundings.”

    …

    Given the well-known touchiness and grandiosity of habitual cocaine users, it is hard to avoid the inference that the drug contributed to the subsequent prominence of the contentious, self-dramatizing, and persecution-minded side of Freud’s personality.

    …

    Already by 1886, then, Freud was displaying premature certainty, impatience with methodological safeguards, truculence, and a belief that he was destined for great things. Those weren’t traits that blossomed after he developed psychoanalysis and felt a need to defend it. They were the very engine of invention.

    Guru attributes, you might call them. Dunning Kruger for the gifted.

    The use of cocaine favored a certain manner of thinking—associative, self-confirming, visionary, and all-explanatory—that was inappropriate to the traditional practice of science and medicine but well suited to the original mode of inquiry that Freud increasingly favored…Freud’s psychoanalytic inquiries put into play a deliberate lowering of his empirical guard: suspending skepticism, ignoring the judgments of his peers, and ascribing cryptic meaning to his own presumptive memories and to words tendentiously plucked from his clients’ rambling. If a metaphor or a suggestive pun came to his own mind, he would assume it had emanated from his patient’s unconscious and that it constituted evidence for whatever supposition he was favoring at the time. And, still more self-indulgently, he believed that such insight gave him veridical access to the patient’s traumatic past. That was divination, not research, and it entailed the same erasure of commonsense boundaries that occurs in drug states.

    People who are convinced they know things that they can’t possibly know – they never cease to amaze me. It’s interesting to learn that it’s like a cocaine high.

  • Far from being in thrall?

    Is secularism really winning in the US?

    The US is increasingly portrayed as a hotbed of religious fervour. Yet in the homeland of ostentatiously religious politicians such as Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry, agnostics and atheists are actually part of one of the fastest-growing demographics in the US: the godless. Far from being in thrall to its religious leaders, the US is in fact becoming a more secular country, some experts say. “It has never been better to be a free-thinker or an agnostic in America,” says Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the FFRF.

    Well, it depends on what you mean by “in thrall” and “fast becoming” and the like. It also depends on what you mean by ”a hotbed of religious fervour” and “the homeland of ostentatiously religious politicians.” In other words it’s some of both. The US is becoming a more secular country in some ways, but it’s also becoming a less secular country in other ways. The US is in thrall to its religious leaders in the sense that religious zealots get elected to public office, including high public office, and several are running for president, with considerable success so far. The fact that agnostics and atheists are part of  growing demographic doesn’t rule out the fact that religious leaders entrance many people.

    The exact number of faithless is unclear. One study by the Pew Research Centre puts them at about 12% of the population, but another by the Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture at Trinity College in Hartford puts that figure at around 20%.

    Most experts agree that the number of secular Americans has probably doubled in the past three decades – growing especially fast among the young. It is thought to be the fastest-growing major “religious” demographic in the country.

    Good, good, but that still leaves a lot of people. The article goes on to admit that.

    Yet there is little doubt that religious groups still wield enormous influence in US politics and public life, especially through the rightwing of the Republican party. Groups such as Focus on the Family are well-funded and skilful lobbyists.

    …

    However, it is still a brave US politician who openly declares a lack of faith. So far just one member of Congress, Californian Democrat Pete Stark, has admitted that he does not believe in God.

    Well quite. We’re making progress, but it’s a mistake to exaggerate it.

  • Rising atheism in US puts religious right on the defensive

    Most experts agree that the number of secular Americans has probably doubled in the past three decades.

  • Pakistan’s blasphemy laws: even judges fear for their lives

    The mixing of religion and politics has long troubled Pakistan, but over the past 30 years that dangerous cocktail has been spiked by the army’s policy of nurturing extremists.

  • Meeting in Oslo

    Narendra Nayak has an article in Nirmukta about his experiences at the Humanist Congress in Oslo – which included getting – to his great surprise – an award for distinguished service to humanism, and getting his picture taken with one of Freethought Blogs’ overlords (who also got such an award, also to his surprise).

     

  • Test of honesty

    Despite profound disagreements about elevatorism and its fallout, I can’t ignore useful investigations of the Templeton Foundation and similar at Why Evolution is True, like today’s post on Templeton’s ridiculous stealth “Faraday Institute” and its hot new “Test of Faith” project.

    The “Test of Faith” project has a Study Guide. The study guide has an introduction. The introduction explains things.

    The challenge that has been put forward so many times recently is that God is a delusion and science has removed the need for faith in anything. But there are many practising scientists who have a sincere Christian faith, even at the highest levels of academia. They have all been trained to think and test ideas to the limit. If their faith and their science are both genuine searches for truth, we need to hear from them.

    Yes if; but are they?

    No, they’re not; not in the same sense. Claiming they are is equivocation; it depends on treating different meanings as if they were the same. Science’s search for truth is not the same kind of thing as “faith”‘s search for truth. The criteria are different. The willingness to admit failure and error is different. The expectation of evidence is different. The very definition of truth is different.

    Why bother thinking about science and faith?Ask two or three friends, family members or colleagues if they can think of a situation where science and religion (or beliefs) affect each other. What issues or questions arise?For example, what about:

    In medicine? (Religious beliefs often affect ethical decisions.)

    In education? (Children sometimes ask questions like ‘Who made human beings, God or evolution?

    In politics? (E.g., the Archbishop of Canterbury is campaigning on climate change.)

    Ah yes the archbish is campaigning on climate change…and the pope is campaigning on (i.e. against) condoms, secularism, reporting of priestly child rape to law enforcement, ordination of women, all abortions including pregnancies in which the fetus would die anyway and so would the mother. Funny that Templeton/Faraday/Test of Faith picks an example of right-on campaigning as opposed to the other kind.

    Never trust a Templeton creation.

  • Without religion

    One important step away from theocracy.

    The court ruling last week that granted the writer Yoram Kaniuk the right to be registered with the Interior Ministry as “without religion” rather than as Jewish, is a step in the direction of separation of religion and state. Such is the view of Irit Rosenblum, who heads the New Family organization, which favors making civil marriage more easily available in the country.

    Currently Jewish Israelis can only marry other Jews in the country under the auspices of the Orthodox rabbinate. A law was passed last year that allows civil unions and considers them as marriage for all intents and purposes – but only under special, limited circumstances in which both parties are registered as having no religion. The legislation was criticized for not allowing people to marry in a religious ceremony because they are not of the same religion, and for not allowing people who do not want a religious ceremony to get married in Israel.

    God’s messengers meddle with people’s lives again.

  • If you start now to let women drive, let them go wherever they want…

    So, Nawwaf, tell us why you think women should not drive – or rather, tell us why you think “we” should not “let” “them” drive.

    If you start now to let women drive, let them go wherever they want, let them do whatever they want, we will be in the same position some day. Then Saudi Arabia will be like New York.

    It’s not good for some girl to show her body, wear very short skirts. This
    is not about Saudi Arabia, it’s about Islam. We’ve got a generation who were
    raised watching Gossip Girls and other series. They only want to be
    like that, dress like that, drive like that. It’s not about need.

    Now it’s driving. After five years it will be taking off the abaya, after 10 years they will ask to be allowed to wear short skirts. This is how it’s going, that is how I feel.

    Because we are we, and we get to decide what they are allowed to do. They are just they, so they don’t get to “go wherever they want”; they have to get our permission for everything.

    I believe it will hurt our community. I understand the US traditions and I
    respect them so other people, outsiders, need to understand our traditions and
    respect them.

    Our traditions – not theirs, of course. We decide and permit, they ask and obey.

  • Israel: a victory for separation of state and religion

    “Israel is the only country in the Western world in which Jews don’t have freedom of religion.”

  • Why “we” should not let “them” drive cars

    “If you start now to let women drive, let them go wherever they want, let them do whatever they want, Saudi Arabia will be like New York.”