Author: Ophelia Benson

  • One hand is enough

    It doesn’t matter what you believe. The important thing is how you live.

    An Islamic sharia court in Nigeria has sentenced two men to amputation at their right wrists for stealing a bull, with the amputation to be carried out in
    public if it is given final approval.

    The sharia court in the village of Nassarawan Mailayi in the northern state
    of Zamfara on Thursday ordered that Auwalu Abubaka, 23, and Lawalli Musa, 22,
    have their right hands chopped off for stealing a bull worth 130,000 naira
    ($867, 628 euros).

    A man shows his amputated hand (archive shot)

  • Sharia court in Nigeria sentences two to amputation

    The sharia court in Zamfara state ordered that Auwalu Abubaka, 23, and Lawalli Musa, 22, have
    their right hands chopped off for stealing a bull.

  • Don’t think, just live

    Via PZ, I find the latest iteration of John Gray’s world-weary anti-liberal schtick.

    Most of it is the familiar Armstrongesque “religion is not belief it’s practice.” Silly atheists are barking up the wrong hydrant trying to say the beliefs are all eyewash because the beliefs don’t matter so ha. Art and poetry aren’t about establishing facts and religion is like that so ha. Myths aren’t silly and wrong, they’re great stories, except the one about science being a good thing, which is silly and wrong because humanity isn’t marching anywhere because it forgot to bring its boots so ha. You know the kind of thing.

    Human beings don’t live by argumentation, and it’s only religious
    fundamentalists and ignorant rationalists who think the myths we live by are
    literal truths.

    Evangelical atheists who want to convert the world to unbelief are copying
    religion at its dogmatic worst. They think human life would be vastly improved
    if only everyone believed as they do, when a little history shows that trying to
    get everyone to believe the same thing is a recipe for unending conflict.

    We’d all be better off if we stopped believing in belief. Not everyone needs
    a religion. But if you do, you shouldn’t be bothered about finding arguments for
    joining or practising one. Just go into the church, synagogue, mosque or temple and take it from there.

    What we believe doesn’t in the end matter very much. What matters is how we
    live.

    I bothered with this just because I wanted to point out the howling absurdity of that final paragraph. As if how we live could float free of what we believe! What we believe damn well does matter very much because it influences how we live.

    For instance – if we believe that what we believe doesn’t matter very much then we live without paying much attention to what we believe and whether it’s well-founded or not and whether it could motivate us to do damage or not – we live according to Dunning-Kruger – we don’t know, we don’t know that we don’t know, and we don’t care that we don’t know, because we believe it doesn’t matter.

    And by contrast, if we believe that what we believe does matter and we believe that female human beings are created inferior and subordinate by God, then how we live will be shaped by that belief. If we’re men we’ll fuck up the lives of any women we have power over, if we’re women we’ll let our lives be fucked up, in both cases because we’ll think it’s what God wants.

    John Gray needs to take a closer look at the world.

  • Teach evolution, not creationism!

    Creationism and ‘intelligent design’ are not scientific theories, but they are portrayed as such by some fundamentalists who try to have their views promoted in publicly-funded schools.

  • Scientists want tougher guidelines on creationism in schools

    A group of 30 UK scientists have signed a statement saying it is “unacceptable” to teach creationism and intelligent design, whether it happens in science lessons or not.

  • With X at the center

    A non sequitur.

    Led by the biologist Richard Dawkins, the author of “The God Delusion,” atheism has taken on a new life in popular religious debate. Dawkins’s brand of atheism is scientific in that it views the “God hypothesis” as obviously inadequate to the known facts. In particular, he employs the facts of evolution to challenge the need to postulate God as the designer of the universe. For atheists like Dawkins, belief in God is an intellectual mistake, and honest thinkers need simply to recognize this and move on from the silliness and abuses associated with religion.

    Most believers, however, do not come to religion through philosophical arguments. Rather, their belief arises from their personal experiences of a spiritual world of meaning and values, with God as its center.

    The first paragraph talks about “scientific” atheism and the known facts, but then the second paragraph criticizes that view by talking about philosophical arguments. Gary Gutting, the Notre Dame philosopher who wrote the post, makes a kind of transition from the first to the second with the remark about “an intellectual mistake,” but still, it seems like a muddying of the waters to imply that Dawkins is guilty of “scientism” and then once that’s taken care of, shift to philosophical arguments.

    Of course most atheism combines the two, and most non-philosophers don’t worry much about keeping them separate. At any rate, that second paragraph doesn’t make much sense to me, for the usual kind of reason. It seems circular. Most believers get their belief from personal experiences, with God at the center. But “God” is the very item that’s in question, so how can “God” be at the center before there is any reason to think “God” exists? Gutting slots “God” in there as if it were perfectly natural and inevitable, but “God” is what atheists don’t believe exists, so it’s question-begging to slot “God” in anywhere.

    A spiritual world of meaning and values is a very general category, and could mean anything or nothing. “God” is much more specific, despite its convenient flexibility for purposes of argument. It doesn’t work to claim or imply that belief in God is not an intellectual mistake by talking about personal experiences of a spiritual world of meaning and values, with God as its center. Gary Gutting is a philosopher so I’m confident that he knows that much better than I do…yet he said it anyway. (Maybe he just meant “with the idea of God at its center” – but he didn’t say that.)

  • Is the Australian Christian Lobby dominionist?

    Dominionism has already made huge inroads into every aspect of American government and society and is now spreading its tentacles across a number of third-world countries.

  • Yet another “beyond ‘new’ atheism”

    “Mere liberation from theism is not enough.” Well no kidding.

  • New ex-Muslims tell their stories

    Read them.

    Lastly, I discovered the beauties of Science That really opened my mind to new possibilities. There was just so much wonder in the world that Islam seemed too petty and small.  Why would Allah who creates the Universe worry about little things us humans do? Surely he has better things to do, and don’t tell me he watches over us because he cares for us and loves us. Have you read the Quran? If anything, Allah hates us considering the only ability he has shown in the Quran is the ability to find any excuse to torture you and bring you pain.  Islam seemed to diminish the beauty of the Universe by teaching that you are born into a pointless test which is rigged to make you fail. Allah apparently created us, just to see if we’ll worship him and find out which of the hundreds of religions was the real one. That began to seem if not absolutely pointless, then to be honest, rather stupid. What kind of a test is it in which most people only pass just because they were born into the winning team? If life is a test, it seems the most unfair test imaginable. If that is the meaning of life, to pass a pointless quiz, I would rather live a meaningless life.

    My view exactly. Why would a god create humans with some cognitive abilities and “test” us on our willingness to refuse to use them for the sake of “faith”? A god like that is a cheat; it’s an outrage to worship it.

    Noshina Fawad, Leeds

    I grew up in a household where my father was an atheist and my mother, a liberal Muslim. We were taught ethics and morality and were raised as Muslims. The more I learnt about Islam, the more I became aware of its many restrictions and how I was totally against them. Islam preaches peace and serenity and yet encourages the murder of ‘kafirs’, those who have said anything against it. Islam prohibits listening to music and yet many of the surats and ayats of the Quran are in musical form. Islam conveys equality for both men and women while men are allowed to have four wives, and this liberty is not mutual. Living in Pakistan, I witnessed how women were brainwashed to believe that they only existed to be of service to men, how children were scolded to memorise verses that they didn’t even understand. Religion limits an individual to a certain way of life; it restricts us to grasp any other possibilities of existence. I believe in justice and freedom and I am proud to say I have renounced religion!

    No longer quivering.

  • Steven Pinker argues humans are becoming less violent

    Pinker shows that, with notable exceptions, the long-term trend for murder and violence has been going down since humans developed agriculture 10,000 years ago.

  • Which twin has the Toni?

    Now it’s time for an ironic juxtaposition. Are you ready?

    First, from Vision Forum –

    Housewives Desperate for God

     

    Next, from lawyer-turned-designer Duncan Quinn –

     

  • Good girls don’t

    They laughed when I pointed out that Laundry Girl’s mouth and lower face were hidden (artistically) by her pile of laundry.

    Well…

    Coincidence? I think not!

  • Dramatic interlude

    I’m reading Patricia Churchland’s Braintrust, with much interest and profit.

    There’s a great bit at the beginning of chapter 6, “Skills for a Social Life.”

    The social world and its awesome complexity has long been the focus of performances – informally in improvised skits around the campfire, and more formally, in elaborate productions by professionals on massive stages. Among the cast of characters in a play, there is inevitably a wide variation in social intelligence, sometimes with a tragic end, as in King Lear. [p 118]

    I love that, because it’s not always noticed enough that much of Lear’s problem is that he’s just stupid. He’s stupid in the way that people who have too much status and flattery can be – he’s socially stupid. It’s a special kind of Dunning-Kruger effect that belongs to the rich and/or powerful and/or high-status – their money or power or status deludes them into thinking they are clever and shrewd and wise, and they’re too stupid to realize it’s a delusion. Prince Charles is a classic case of this – he persists in thinking the world wants and needs his views on things, and that they’re good views, informed views, wise views, when if he had the sense of a gopher he would know they’re no such thing.

    Poor Lear is thick as a plank. He says to his three daughters “I’m going to reward you according to how much you say you love me” and then he does just that – because he’s lived a whole lifetime without ever realizing that people can lie?

    He lacks social intelligence, to put it mildly. Cordelia and Kent make a doomed last-minute effort to teach it to him, but since he lacks it, he sees this as a reason to banish them. Dunning-Kruger, you see.

    It’s not really a tragic flaw in the usual sense – it’s not impressive or awe-inspiring, it’s just pathetic and laughable. It’s clever of Shakespeare to be able to make the results tragic all the same…and yet one of the great, blood-chilling things about the play is the way the pathetic laughable aspect is always right there, in your face. Lear is an ancient spoiled baby, like Mr Woodhouse, yet the tragedy is still tragic.

  • We wanted to do a bruised-up Barbie shoot

    Commenter Grace pointed out an interesting fashion shoot by the photographer Tyler Shields…

    Photo of Glee's Heather Morris by Tyler Shields

    Amusing, eh?

    “Even Barbie gets bruises,” writes Shields on his blog, where he’s hawking 100 limited edition prints from the shoot.

    More shocking than the photos’ light-hearted depiction of domestic violence, is the de ja vu factor. Haven’t we seen this before, like, a lot? Only a few weeks ago, we were talking about a Salon ad with a photo of a bruised model. And before that, a handful of high fashion campaigns featuring women being beaten, bruised, and impaled. Domestic violence, it seems, has become the surefire way to get your fashion spread to stand out.

    “In no way were we promoting domestic violence,” Shields tells E! News. “We wanted to do a bruised-up Barbie shoot and that’s exactly what we did!”

    A jokey smirky “playful” “ironic” bruised-up Barbie shoot.

    Let’s see…How about a jokey smirky “playful” “ironic” bruised-up Bobby shoot, in which Bobby is a gay man who’s been beaten up by the local homophobes? Or one in which Bobby is a black man who’s been tied to the back of a pickup truck and dragged? Would that seem like a good idea for a fashion shoot?

    Ah but you see those are not domestic. Domestic violence is next door to a sitcom.

  • Dexter Filkins on the murder of Saleem Shahzad

    Only a few other journalists had written as aggressively about Islamist  extremism in the military, and not all of them had survived.

  • The New Yorker offers God’s blog commenters

    A month old but funny.

  • Lawyer gets rich off “persecuted Christian” suits

    The crusade against secularism pays well.

  • The minister for the menz

    Amity Reed at The F-Word and Cath Elliott have been finding out more about our new friend and regular commenter MRA Tom Martin.

    Reed pointed out a Twitter account of his, Min4Men. One striking tweet is

    MIN4MENThe Missing Minister

    All Muslim women are whores, as The Holy Whoran says men MUST provide for women. If you’re a woman WITH a job, then you’re NOT a true muslim

    15 MarFavoriteRetweetReply

    Elliott found a lot of material, including a lengthy ad for a would-be comedy group seeking members –

    Over the next three months, we are mounting a street-based campaign, in conjunction with a website, to raise awareness and fighting funds, to help a man bring a sexual discrimination damages case against an elite university’s gender studies department, because he found its curriculum grounded in academic misandry – anti-male bias, rhetoric, propaganda, hostility, and anathema (typical across most media). A specialist lawyer and barrister believe the case is very strong, and await further instruction. The Equalities Commission has shown support too.

    He doesn’t seem to have found any takers yet, which is odd, considering what a big thing misogynist “comedy” is at Facebook.

    I await further developments with interest.

  • Ben Goldacre on detecting dodgy stats

    Forensic statisticians have ways of spotting suspicious patterns in the raw numbers, thus estimating the chances that figures from a set of accounts have been fiddled.

  • Tom Martin, LSE, and the Missing Minister

    He has been busy.