Author: Ophelia Benson

  • “Psychic” says a sanctuary croc ate 2 missing children

    So many of the crocs in the sanctuary were killed, and the sanctuary was demolished. Good work.

  • Robert Fisk on “honour” killings

    How should one react to a man who rapes his own daughter and, when she becomes pregnant, kills her to save the “honour” of his family?

  • Muslim stonemason models for church gargoyle

    A far-right group pitches a fit; no one else is perturbed.

  • Bernard-Henri Lévy updates news on Ashtiani

    Only one thing, in fact, is sure. The stoning has been suspended, not canceled.

  • What about evidence?

    I don’t understand what Tim Crane is trying to say. Maybe it’s just the usual (the ingredients of which are present): religion isn’t science, it’s about meaning; the end. Maybe, but Crane says more than that, and some of what he says doesn’t go well with “religion isn’t science, it’s about meaning.”

    Atheists, he says, ask for evidence for religious claims, and reject the claims when the evidence is not forthcoming. Yes that’s right. Then he says in their view those claims are

    a bit like scientific hypotheses. In other words, they are claims — like the claim that God created the world — that are supported by evidence, that are proved by arguments and tested against our experience of the world.

    Yes, but it’s not just scientific hypotheses that match that description. Crane at one point admits this.

    It is absolutely essential to religions that they make certain factual or historical claims. When Saint Paul says “if Christ is not risen, then our preaching is in vain and our faith is in vain” he is saying that the point of his faith depends on a certain historical occurrence.

    Theologians will debate exactly what it means to claim that Christ has risen, what exactly the meaning and significance of this occurrence is, and will give more or less sophisticated accounts of it. But all I am saying is that whatever its specific nature, Christians must hold that there was such an occurrence. Christianity does make factual, historical claims. But this is not the same as being a kind of proto-science.

    But it doesn’t need to be “a kind of proto-science,” whatever that may mean; but it is still a matter of evidence. Factual, historical claims depend on evidence, and if the evidence is not there, then the claims are just bogus. If the evidence is disputed, the claims are disputed. If the evidence has been faked, the claims are blown out of the water and the claimant may be disgraced, or may just be suspended for a year with pay. At any rate the evidence matters, and without it, all you have is stories. This is an important point, and Crane has put it at the center of what he’s saying, but he never actually makes it again. I don’t understand why.

    He turns the whole thing into a false choice between science on the one hand and religion on the other, ignoring the great swath of empirical inquiry that’s not science but nevertheless depends on evidence. Why does he? I really don’t know.

    It is true, as I have just said, that Christianity does place certain historical events at the heart of their conception of the world, and to that extent, one cannot be a Christian unless one believes that these events happened. Speaking for myself, it is because I reject the factual basis of the central Christian doctrines that I consider myself an atheist. But I do not reject these claims because I think they are bad hypotheses in the scientific sense. Not all factual claims are scientific hypotheses.

    But they don’t have to be; you still reject them, when there is no evidence, for reasons. You reject these claims – don’t you? – because you think they are bad hypotheses in a broader sense, and you think that because there is no evidence to back them up…don’t you? You say it is because you reject the factual basis of the central Christian doctrines that you consider yourself an atheist, and you reject the factual basis of the doctrines because there is no evidence for them – don’t you? So why make such a point of the “scientific” aspect while not mentioning the lack of evidence?

    Religions do make factual and historical claims, and if these claims are false, then the religions fail. But this dependence on fact does not make religious claims anything like hypotheses in the scientific sense. Hypotheses are not central. Rather, what is central is the commitment to the meaningfulness (and therefore the mystery) of the world.

    Maybe so, but the claims are false (in the sense that there is no evidence for them) and so, according to Crane, the religions fail. Saying the commitment to meaningfulness is what is central doesn’t change that.

    So, I don’t understand what he’s getting at.

  • 52 victim cards per deck

    The Catholic church is pitching another fit, this time complaining that the BBC is anti-Christian and liberal and secular when it should be pro-Catholic and reactionary and theocratic like – well like the Catholic church.

    Cardinal Keith O’Brien said the BBC’s news coverage is contaminated by “a radically secular and socially liberal mindset”…

    “Senior news managers have admitted to the Catholic church that a radically secular and socially liberal mindset pervades their newsrooms. This sadly taints BBC news and current affairs coverage of religious issues, particularly matters of Christian beliefs.”

    They certainly do think they’re owed a great deal of deference and air time, don’t they, especially for people who are mired in an institutional scandal about pervasive child-rape and obstruction of justice. Perhaps they would like the BBC to spend more time on that subject?

  • Cardinal says BBC has anti-Christian bias

    Complains of “a radically secular and socially liberal mindset”; demands more air time for clerics.

  • Tim Crane on religion, mystery and evidence

    Science and religion are different, yet religions rest on historical claims, but – uh – whatever.

  • Vatican tools say gay marriage is like decaf coffee

    “A gay relationship is like decaffeinated coffee, you do not wake up,” said a priest/bioethics professor at Regina Apostolorum U.

  • Lose Your Illusion: Essays by Joumana Haddad

    Here are a few statistics you may or may not be familiar with. The 2002 Arab Human Development Report estimated that the Arab world translates around 330 books annually, one fifth of the number translated by Greece. Taking the long view, the authors also estimated that the Arab world had translated 100,000 books since the Caliph Ma’mun in the ninth century. This is just under the average number translated by Spain in a year. How many books are actually produced? We don’t really know. While they admitted that there were ‘no reliable figures’, the researchers indicated that ‘many indicators suggest a severe shortage of writing; a large share of the market consists of religious books and educational publications that are limited in their creative content.

    The Arab world was a civilisation of great literature and creativity before it got hijacked by an absurd and stupid religion. Like all Arab independent voices, Joumana Haddad lives under the constant thread of murder and acid attack. Yet a muscle unused won’t always atrophy and something that’s choked won’t always die. There are sentences and paragraphs in Haddad’s book of which no British intellectual is capable. One of the many reactions to read I Killed Scheherazade is a kind of embarrassment at the poverty of Western liberal thought. There’s more insight and poetry in these 160 pages of Haddad, than there is in a pulped rainforest’s worth of Armstrong, Eagleton, Gray, and all the other quacking equivocal voices on the op-ed pages and panel shows.

    I Killed Scheherazade is mainly about the hypocrisy and ugliness of separation. The theocratic world incorporates the most extreme kind of puritanism in its scripture and policy, yet allows its male citizens to carry out appalling acts of sexual degeneracy that would never be tolerated in the decadent and godless West. As Haddad puts it, Islamic governments will burn copies of Lolita but won’t prohibit child brides. The theocratic world denies sexuality yet also magnifies it to a degree far beyond the Western supermodel and billboard culture. Its clerics claim to be above base desire, and yet their laws on vice and virtue are detailed to a prurient and ludicrous degree (the Iranian artist Marjane Satrapi remembers being told off by the Revolutionary Guards for running in the street; the officers were concerned that the pistoning motions of Satrapi’s buttocks could arouse passing males). Haddad quotes an old Lebanese saying: ‘We want something and we spit on it.’

    Sexual schizophrenia stretches far beyond Islam, of course. We portray ourselves as strong, high-minded men and women, and never betray the amount of imagination and thought devoted to the beast with two backs. Sex is something that most people think about a great deal, yet culturally it’s left to the admen and the stand-ups. In Arab poetry and prose, Haddad says, sex is described mainly in geographic or botanical metaphor (flower of paradise, bud of heaven, etc) and she recalls her father’s distress when Haddad, then in her mid twenties, used the word ‘penis’ in a poem. ‘How can you write such an atrocity, and publish it under your own name?’ he cried. ‘Couldn’t you have used the word ‘column’ instead?’

    Haddad went on to set up an erotic magazine, Jasad, with the aim ‘not to help men ejaculate when masturbating, rather to inquire intellectually into the consciousness of the body, and its unconsciousness.’ She questions the Christian separation of body and soul: ‘Life, to me, is a physiological, physical, instinctual, sensory experience, in as much as it is also an emotional, psychological and intellectual one.’ Contra the poet, you are not a soul strapped to an animal: the animal is the soul. And it’s because we are made of matter that we can experience the great rushing moments that we call spirituality.

    Many feminists hold on to the convention that vanity is a sin: think Germaine Greer, denouncing the British journalist Suzanne Moore for her ‘fuck-me shoes and three fat inches of cleavage.’ There’s an impression in Western liberalism that you can be beautiful and intellectual but not both. For Haddad, the symbol of powerful feminity is ‘the Sonia Rykiel boutique in the St Germain neighbourhood in Paris: extremely beautiful, stylish and seductive dresses can be seen side-by-side with selections of books and new releases by novelists, thinkers, poets and philosophers.’ Yet feminists in the West tend to downplay sexuality, seeing it as contaminated by males. This attitude only reinforces the stud/slut double standard that endures to this day: ‘If a woman writes of sex among other things, she is described as a daring ‘erotic writer’… If a man writes of the same subject, it is just a topic among another, completely normal.’

    In I Killed Schehezerade such lazy assumptions fall like blasted ducks. To those who claim that religious dress is liberating: ‘isn’t the defeminisation of women an act of surrendering par excellence to men’s blackmail and their shallow view of the female entity as a sum of thighs, tits, asses, lips, and so on and so forth?’ To those who believe that progress only comes through diplomacy: ‘The person who courts consensus has no colour, no taste, no smell. We shouldn’t need an obsequious court to feel safe. We shouldn’t need to please ALL the others to feel pleased about ourselves.’ To those who encourage people to believe in an afterlife:

    What could paradise be other than a wonderful illusion invented by a few geniuses (sometimes they are called prophets, other times saints and mystics, depending on the cultural and social contexts) in order to control the masses, promising them a reward that they will never be able to grant?… Do you really want to bet your life, and principles, and behaviour, and choices, on THAT? Wouldn’t it be healthier, and more rewarding, to set for yourself an earthly life ethic and morality, based on decency, respect and universal humanistic values?

    To read Joumana Haddad is to lose your illusions and discover your dreams.

    I Killed Scheherezade: Confessions of an Angry Arab Woman, Joumana Haddad, Saqi 2010

    About the Author

    Max Dunbar was born in London in 1981. He lives in Manchester and writes fiction and criticism.

  • From the other direction

    Here’s something a good deal better than the BBC and its revolting pandering to the mullahs in Iran and their friends – here is Network against honour related violence. I met a splendid woman who works with it – perhaps she founded it and runs it, I’m not sure – at the book launch in Stockholm. The launch took place starting at 7 pm the day I arrived, so my memory had gone to bed by that time – I don’t remember most of the launch very clearly. This means I don’t remember what she told me, or if she told me her name, or what I told her, apart from something about wanting to be sure to retain some grip on all of this when I woke up the next day; fortunately she gave me a card, which has the name and the URL on it.

    Anyway there it is, and it is indeed a network, so it’s an excellent place to find all the related links and names in one place.

    Solidarity.

    Addendum: she was very nice to me, I do remember that – very warm and enthusiastic. She gave me a hug along with the card. I remember her face – and her kind smile – I just don’t remember what we said! Jet lag, eh.

  • The BBC defends the mullahs, silences their critics

    Update: RDF provides the video for non-UK viewers, so I’ve seen it now, and so can you.

    The BBC has outdone itself this time. BBC1’s Sunday Live did a programme on whether it is right to condemn the Iranian regime for the stoning of Ashtiani. Maryam Namazie was supposed to take part (and it is not difficult to guess what she would have said, and how firmly she would have said it), but somehow the programme never got around to her. It did get around to two people who said the other thing, but it did not get around to Maryam. Yes that’s right. It found the time to talk to two apologists for the fascist reactionary mullahs’ regime in Iran but it could not find the time to talk to a secular feminist who thinks women shouldn’t be buried up to their necks and stoned to death for anything and especially not for “adultery.”

    The BBC gives a voice to fascist reactionary mullahs and denies a voice to secular feminists who defend human rights.

    Seriously.

    In the live debate, they managed to interview Suhaib Hassan from the Islamic Sharia Council defending stoning and someone from Tehran saying she faces execution for murdering her husband but somehow there was no time in the debate for me.

    Even the presenter, Susanna Reid, said stonings were rare and that none had taken place since the 2002 moratorium! In fact 17 people have been stoned since the moratorium; also there are court documents provided by her lawyer specifying her stoning sentence for adultery. BBC had all this information. Without providing evidence to the contrary, BBC Sunday Live took as fact the regime’s pronouncements on her case. They failed to mention that the man charged with her husband’s murder is not being executed and that the trumped up murder charges are an attempt by the regime to silence the public outcry and kill Sakineh. As Sakineh herself has said: “they think they can do anything to women.”

    It beggars belief.

  • Mark Vernon tells such a cute little story

    All about Stephen Hawking, and his daddy, and not knowing where everything came from, and the name for that is “God.”

  • The Guardian endorses God

    God is too superior to be interested in our arguments about “Him” but the Graun knows all there is to know on the subject.

  • BBC’s pathetic coverage of stoning in Iran

    Talked to two people defending stoning but somehow never got to Maryam Namazie.

  • Ashtiani receives new sentence of 99 lashes

    Because the Times published a picture purportedly of her without a headscarf.

  • Interview with Ashtiani’s son Sajjad

    The outside pressure works. “You’re all we have. There is no one else, except for you, to give us a hand.”

  • Atheists are murderers and terrorists

    PZ Myers “vandalized sacred religious property”; run for your lives.

  • Kenan Malik reviews Tariq Ramadan

    There is a willfull shallowness about this work, a refusal to think deeply or to pose difficult questions, that is truly shocking.

  • Hooray for sharia

    The Huffington Post (who else?) gives a woman named Sumbul Ali-Karamali a space in which to say “what is all this fuss about sharia, sharia is perfectly fine, and besides it’s not the law anywhere, and besides everything is culture, and besides islamophobia, and besides you have to interpret.”

    There are six principles of shariah. They are derived from the Qur’an, which Muslims believe is the word of God. All Islamic religious rules must be in line with these six principles of shariah…The Qur’an is old. The fiqh books of jurisprudence are old. To modern eyes, they can look just as outdated as other ancient texts, including the Bible and Torah. That’s why, just like the Bible and the Torah, the Islamic texts must be read in their historical context.

    In other words, it’s the same old have-it-both-ways bullshit. On the one hand it’s the word of god, but on the other hand we can’t help noticing that some of it is disgustingly savage so we sagely observe that it’s old and therefore has to be read “in its historical context,” which being interpreted means altered so that the disgusting savagery gets ignored or turned into a metaphor or otherwise sidelined. But then why not just admit that what you’re doing is trying to shape laws to what is best for human beings (and perhaps animals and the planet) rather than obeying rules handed out many centuries ago by a god? Because we want to have it both ways, that’s why.

    Shari’a is a set of religious principles and is not the law of the land anywhere in the world. The 50-some Muslim-majority countries are all constitutional states and nearly all of them have civil codes (many of these based on the French system).

    …And? She doesn’t say. The implication seems to be that all those constitutions bar sharia as law, but in fact, that’s far from the truth. Some majority-Muslim countries already make their laws “sharia-compliant” and others are working on it.

    The Qur’an contains many verses advocating religious tolerance, too, though the anti-Islam protesters won’t believe it.

    Yes we’ll believe it, but we’ll also point out that it contains many other verses advocating much nastier things and that those verses are not a dead letter.

    I wonder – in all seriousness – if Sumbul Ali-Karamali herself would actually like to live in Swat or Afghanistan or Somalia or Sudan or Algeria or Saudi Arabia or northern Nigeria. If she wouldn’t, she should think hard about why. If she would, she and I inhabit different universes, and I don’t know how to address her.