Author: Ophelia Benson

  • It depends where you start

    Emily Manuel at Religion Dispatches talks to Adam Kotsko about his new book, which is about atonement. She mentions someone posting on his blog that “we haven’t really thought through a proper atheism yet.”

    Right. I think that you can see this with the New Atheists. Dawkins’ and Hitchens’ and Dennett’s books are a kind of simplistic critique of religion that’s basically not going to change anyone’s mind. I think there has to be more to say about religion other than the fact that it makes no sense as an empirical claim. That’s just too obvious to be interesting. I think that we as a society deserve a better form of atheism.

    The claim that the simplistic critique of religion is not going to change anyone’s mind is, frankly, simply ridiculous. He hedges it with “basically” but it’s not clear exactly what the hedge is – the simplistic critique will superficially change anyone’s mind but just not basically? I have no idea what that means.

    The claim is ridiculous because it’s not true, and it’s easy to find out that it’s not true.

    It’s also not even plausible. Why would the simplistic critique of religion not change anyone’s mind? Is everyone’s mind changeable only by complicated critiques? Certainly not. Most of the time it’s the other way around, surely – a clear easily-grapsed critique with few moving parts is the best way to change someone’s mind. That’s true even for clever people. “I’m going to take Lilac Road.” “Lilac Road is closed for repairs.” “Ah – I’ll go via Pepperville Drive then.”

    The thing about the simplistic critique of religion is that lots of people have never been exposed to it. A lot of religious belief is what people have because no one has ever offered them a critique of it, simplistic or otherwise. Sometimes just realizing that there are people who don’t think the magical being exists at all is indeed enough to change anyone’s mind.

    That doesn’t mean that’s all there is to it, of course, but it does mean it’s a lot too hasty to announce that it’s not going to change anyone’s mind.

    Sure, there’s more to say than that religion makes no sense as an empirical claim, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth saying that religion makes no sense as an empirical claim. By all means say more if you want to, but don’t ignore the value of saying that. It may be too obvious to Adam Kotsko to be interesting, but that doesn’t mean it’s too obvious to everyone to be interesting. If you’ve never thought of it before and then you do, it can be quite interesting.

  • Matt Taibbi on Michele Bachmann

    Bachmann is a religious zealot whose brain is a raging electrical storm of divine visions and paranoid delusions.

  • Farzana Hassan on burqas and bans

    The women’s rights activist explores whether the burqa is a symbol of religious expression or a tool of oppression.

  • The real problem is new atheism

    Nick Cohen has a terrific, ferocious piece on Trevor Phillips’s failure, indeed refusal, to do anything about caste discrimination in the UK. Since Phillips is the head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, this failure/refusal is striking as well as tragic.

    Nick starts by clearing some stupid lumber out of the way.

    You can tell that speakers are preparing to say something scandalous when they assert that “militant atheists” are the moral equivalents of the religious militants that so afflict humanity. Trevor Phillips, whose flighty management of the Equality and Human Rights Commission is becoming a scandal, was no exception when he announced last week that British believers were “under siege” from “fashionable” atheists.

    …

    Trevor Phillips’s attack on “fashionable” atheists for exercising their right to speak their minds shows he does not begin to understand modern sectarianism. From his ignorance flows a cowardly refusal to face down those who would bully and harass others, as a story that deserves more attention than it has received shows.

    Phillips also, I would add, does not begin to understand people’s right to speak their minds. The endless flow of crap about #BadNewAtheists demonstrates that a lot of people don’t begin to understand that, because the whole “omigod #BadNewAtheists” thing depends on the assumption that there is something obviously Bad about atheists spelling out what they don’t believe.

    Faced with the prospect of confronting the prejudices of core supporters, the Labour government preferred holding on to seats to living by liberal principles and backed away from extending anti-discrimination law to cover caste. With Labour gone, campaigners for just treatment for tens of thousands of British Asians have a glimmer of hope.

    They are trying to persuade the coalition to take seriously a study of bullying and harassment conducted by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research. It is a dispiriting read – little more than a list of pointless cruelties. The Indian supervisor of an NHS worker discovers that he is from a lower caste and makes his life such a misery he becomes ill under the pressure and is suspended; a social services care worker refuses to help an elderly woman wash herself because the old lady is from a lower caste and so it goes on through dozens of examples.

    But Trevor Phillips doesn’t want to know.

    A search of the Equality and Human Rights Commission records shows that it ignores caste discrimination in Britain.When I phone its press office to ask why, its public relations officers fail to return my calls.

    Why tf not? Seriously: why? As it’s a press office, they must know Nick will report the failure, and where he will do so. Are they content with that? An article in the Observer noting that they can’t be bothered to pay attention to a report on caste discrimination? Too busy opposing “fashionable” atheists are they?

  • Nick Cohen on “fashionable atheism”

    Trevor Phillips’s attack on “fashionable” atheists for exercising their right to speak their minds shows he does not understand modern sectarianism.

  • Tel Aviv buses mandated to “go religious”

    New transportation “reform” means buses will no longer be allowed to operate before the Shabbat ends.

  • Eric MacDonald on the wolf in sheep’s clothing

    They may not eat you up like wolves, but they will, like taxidermists, certainly stuff you with unfounded beliefs and display you.

  • Well, because he is a man

    Brendan O’Neill is a piece of work. You knew that, but I’m saying it anyway. He had himself a good time defending the pope against the evil atheists last year, but I didn’t know he’d recently amused himself by defending Dominique Strauss-Kahn against “the feminists”; but it was so.

    I can’t help feeling that his arrest on charges of sexual assault is being turned into a modern-day medieval drama, a kind of reality-show version of the witch trials of old, in which DSK has been assigned the role of all-purpose hate figure rather than suspect in a crime.

    Oh, sure you can. Did you try? Really try?

    And feminists hate DSK because… well, because he is a man, and even worse than that he’s a man who has reportedly flirted and engaged in saucy dialogue with his female staff in the past.

    Oh, yeah – those pesky puritanical prim humorless “feminists” who hate all men because they are men, and especially they hate men who flirt and engage in saucy dialogue with their servants.

    What he means, of course, is that feminists are less than keen on men who attempt to rape maids in hotels. He neglects to explain why he finds that distaste so risibly contemptible. What a shit he is.

  • Does everybody hate women?

    Yes we just can’t ever hate women enough, there always has to be a new way to hate them even more.

    At least 38 of the 50 states across America have introduced foetal homicide laws that were intended to protect pregnant women and their unborn children from violent attacks by third parties – usually abusive male partners – but are increasingly being turned by renegade prosecutors against the women themselves.

    South Carolina was one of the first states to introduce such a foetal homicide law. National Advocates for Pregnant Women has found only one case of a South Carolina man who assaulted a pregnant woman having been charged under its terms, and his conviction was eventually overturned. Yet the group estimates there have been up to 300 women arrested for their actions during pregnancy.

    That’s some serious hatred.

  • Lawbreaking schools failing to teach religion

    It’s the law, dammit. They’re breaking the law. The law says they have to. They’re breaking it.

  • Misleading money-saving claims help no one

    Ben Goldacre shows why.

  • US: women prosecuted for having miscarriages

    Yes really.

  • Cuomo signs marriage equality bill into law

    Wall Street donors and gay-rights advocates demonstrated more muscle than a Roman Catholic hierarchy and an ineffective opposition.

  • A show called “Leave it to Jesus”

    Jesus is like any kid next door…but he’s different. The ABC sitcom that got wiped.

  • Like discussing the rules of quidditch

    There’s nothing like a good healthy sense of priorities, is there. What could be more urgent for Irish Catholics than to pitch a huge fit about an art installation that has something to do with “the Virgin Mary”?

    In Our Lady and Other Queer Santas, Chicana artist Alma Lopez will exhibit her picture Our Lady, a digital pastiche of Our Lady of Guadeloupe, a 16th-century Peruvian manifestation of the Virgin Mary…The Madonna in a bikini, basically…

    On last Friday’s Liveline, one of Ireland’s most popular radio shows, presenter Joe Duffy was flooded with calls from irate Catholics mortified by this “blasphemous” artwork.

    You see what I mean. That’s what these irate Catholics are irate about – a picture of something labeled “the Virgin Mary.” Not Magdalen laundries, not child rape by priests, not industrial schools, not the Catholic church’s relentless stranglehold on the people of Ireland for generation after generation – but a picture of a putative “manifestation” of a putative woman who lived (if she lived) two thousand years ago in unblemished obscurity like nearly everyone else in human history.

    Cork South Central TD Jerry Buttimer chimed in, saying the university should not be supporting an event that was “overtly blasphemous and blatantly disrespectful” and that “those in charge at UCC should consider whether or not it is appropriate to permit this exhibition to take place on its campus without affording others the opportunity to present an alternative and balanced point of view”.

    Point of view? Alternative point of view? Balanced point of view?

    ………….What would that be? A kitsch “Mary” from a souvenir shop? Our Lady of Guadeloupe in a burqa topped by a full set of sealskins suitable for winter in Barrow? Joseph in a Speedo?

    Lopez has been under attack for her artwork since it was first exhibited in California in 2001. The current campaign is headed by America Needs Fatima, a Mariolatrous US group that organises anti-abortion and anti-blasphemy rallies…Ireland, meanwhile, is facing its first blasphemy controversy since the Fianna Fáil/Green government introduced a new blasphemy law. Buckley’s claim that all Irish people revere Mary chimes dangerously with that law’s definition of blasphemy as something likely to cause “outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of [a] religion”. UCC could yet have a case on its hands.

    Priorities, people. Fix them.

  • Padraig Ready on Ireland’s ludicrous blasphemy law

    Catholic bullies are pitching a fit about a Mary-tease at University College, Cork.

  • Parents to be sentenced in faith-healing case

    The Wylands followed their church’s method of treatment: prayer, anointing with oil and the laying on of hands. It failed.

  • How to change a state school to a “faith” school

    First change it to an academy, then get easy permission to convert the non-sectarian academy to a “faith” academy.

  • Salil Tripathi reviews Arundhati Roy

    Her critique is almost comic-book like, with sharply edged “good” and “evil” forces.

  • Last 3 abortion clinics in Kansas may close

    Onerous new “facility standards” the clinics have to meet within 90 days may force them to close.