Author: Ophelia Benson

  • Lawrence Krauss on the familiar taboo

    Lawrence Krauss notes that the NSF does a survey on US science literacy, and always finds that adults in the US tend to say “No! I won’t believe that!” when asked about evolution and the big bang. Until this year, when the NSF fiddled the survey.

    the National Science Board, which oversees the foundation, chose to leave the section that discussed these issues out of the 2010 edition, claiming the questions were “flawed indicators of scientific knowledge because responses conflated knowledge and beliefs.” In short, if their religious beliefs require respondents to discard scientific facts, the board doesn’t think it appropriate to expose that truth.

    A 2009 Pew survey found that “the most devout are on average least willing to accept the evidence of reality.” Which is the opposite of the “science and religion are compatible” dogma that we’re all supposed to “accept” for no very convincing reason.

    I don’t know which is more dangerous, that religious beliefs force some people to choose between knowledge and myth or that pointing out how religion can purvey ignorance is taboo. To do so risks being branded as intolerant of religion.

    Oh yes indeed it does. It also risks being branded as a gnu atheist, and then called a witch-hunter, shouted at, run out of town, fired, and kicked out of the tennis club.

    Keeping religion immune from criticism is both unwarranted and dangerous. Unless we are willing to expose religious irrationality whenever it arises, we will encourage irrational public policy and promote ignorance over education for our children.

    Dear me, he won’t be invited to the Accommodationists’ Picnic.

  • Waking up one morning

    Lashings of extraordinary writing in Hitchens’s cancer piece in Vanity Fair. For one thing, there’s the opening, about waking up in a New York hotel room.

    have more than once in my time woken up feeling like death. But nothing prepared me for the early morning last June when I came to consciousness feeling as if I were actually shackled to my own corpse. The whole cave of my chest and thorax seemed to have been hollowed out and then refilled with slow-drying cement.

    That final (frightening) sentence is an homage to a parallel scene in Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, about a much younger man waking up with a hangover. It’s a set-piece about what a hangover feels like, and it’s funny as hell. It and the Hitchens passage also have a whiff of Wodehouse – Hitchens is Bertie describing his sensations in some awkward spot.

    He managed to get to the phone and summon the emergency services.

    They arrived with great dispatch and behaved with immense courtesy and professionalism. I had the time to wonder why they needed so many boots and helmets and so much heavy backup equipment, but now that I view the scene in retrospect I see it as a very gentle and firm deportation, taking me from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady. Within a few hours, having had to do quite a lot of emergency work on my heart and my lungs, the physicians at this sad border post had shown me a few other postcards from the interior and told me that my immediate next stop would have to be with an oncologist.

    Beautiful writing. Do admit.

     I love the imagery of struggle. I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient. Allow me to inform you, though, that when you sit in a room with a set of other finalists, and kindly people bring a huge transparent bag of poison and plug it into your arm, and you either read or don’t read a book while the venom sack gradually empties itself into your system, the image of the ardent soldier or revolutionary is the very last one that will occur to you. You feel swamped with passivity and impotence: dissolving in powerlessness like a sugar lump in water.

    Yes; just what I hate. It’s bad enough in airports and on planes.

    If there were an Intelligent Designer, someone who writes that well would live to be ninety. But there isn’t.

  • Lawrence Krauss on faith and foolishness

    Religious beliefs force some people to choose between knowledge and myth, while pointing out how religion can purvey ignorance is taboo.

  • Abortion ad angers exactly the right people

    ASA received 1,054 angry complaints about Marie Stopes advert from precisely the sort of hectoring Christian freaks it was designed to piss off.

  • The Daily Beast on Obama and the Saudi lobby

    The desert kingdom remains a draconian dictatorship that prohibits even the most basic of liberties.

  • Terry Glavin on liberalism’s long walk

    Principled commitment to democracy, universal values and  multilateralism will either define liberalism or be disavowed in favour of dead-end isolationism.

  • Afghanistan is a great place for women

    “The trendier option involves incorporating Afghans into modernity by teaching them to live in a globalised present.”

  • Catholic church fighting sex education in Philippines

    Bishop does not agree that a high birth rate traps people in poverty. Easy for him.

  • A dispatch from the front

    Sorry posting is a bit light. I’ve been busy trying to pull knives out of my back (no use, they’re stuck), and now I have a sudden avalanche of subbing to do for The Philosophers’ Mag and a mere few hours to do it in, so it’s hard to find a spare moment.

    Will try to do better.

  • Jason Rosenhouse on what the civility police really want

    Which is rudeness directed at their enemies instead of at them and their friends.

  • Hitchens on being a new citizen of the sick country

    ‘In whatever kind of a “race” life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.’

  • If music be the food of love, issue a fatwa

    Ayatollah Ali Khamenei says music is permitted but bad and nasty.

    Khamenei said: “Although music is halal, promoting and teaching it is not compatible with the highest values of the sacred regime of the Islamic Republic.”…”It’s better that our dear youth spend their valuable time in learning science and essential and useful skills and fill their time with sport and healthy recreations instead of music.

    Because…music, while permitted, is not a healthy recreation. It’s a recreation, but not a healthy one. It’s permitted, but it’s ungood. Why? Well because it’s pretty, and pleasurable, and emotive, and often sexy, and often exciting. We can’t be having any of that. It’s not healthful. Or useful. Or good. Or compatible with the highest values of the sacred regime of the Islamic Republic. Which are established by a guy with a black cushion on his head, who looks as if he doesn’t rock out much.

    Khamenei’s views are interpreted as administrative orders for the whole country, which must be obeyed by the government. Last month Khamenei issued a controversial fatwa in which he likened his leadership to that of the Prophet Muhammad and obliged all Iranians to obey his orders.

    Controversial – really? I can’t imagine why. Guy says he’s like Mo and all Iranians have to do what he says. What’s the problem? It simplifies life. So does not having music. Simplicity is good, because it keeps people out of badness. Complicated things are bad.

  • Want some theophanies?

    Comment is Free Belief asks “Can we choose what we believe?” Usama Hasan answers briskly right from the outset.

    God exists, obviously.

    Oh; all right then! Nothing further to think about. He goes on to point out that the Qur’an says so, and give the sura where it says so. Then he gets to the thinky part.

    God is a given, and our lives are an opportunity to learn about and experience God in countless different ways because the universe is a collection of theophanies: God’s infinite variety of names is manifested throughout the diversity of nature that includes our complex, intertwined lives.

    He forgets to explain how he knows that.

  • Khamenei declares music not Islamic enough

    Last month he “issued a fatwa” saying he’s like Mo and all Iranians have to do what he says.

  • Only scientist MP alarmed at MPs’ ignorance

    Julian Huppert says political leaders tend to come up with a stance and then try to make the evidence fit it.

  • Government ignored advice on homeopathic “remedies”

    On the grounds that refusal to fund homeopathy would limit patient choice.

  • David Colquhoun on fake medicine at taxpayers’ expense

    The Government said it is fine for doctors to give you pills that contain nothing whatsoever and charge them to the NHS.

  • Julian Baggini on whether we can choose what we believe

    You don’t choose what you believe moment to moment, but choices you have made do shape what you come to believe.

  • Some things deserve a sneer

    Creationism, for example.

  • The bill was not ‘male-friendly’

    Pakistan’s parliament last year passed the Domestic Violence (Prevention and Protection) Bill, but then

    it was rejected by the Senate, reportedly because of the objections of one senator, preventing it from becoming a law.

    According to insiders, Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam – Fazl  senator Maulana Muhammad Sherani (presently the chairman of the Council of Islamic Ideology) had objected that the bill was not ‘male-friendly’ and was contradictory to Islamic law.

    Later, the Council of Islamic Ideology also termed the bill “unnecessary”, adding that the implementation of this law would increase the rate of divorce in the country.

    In other words, the law might make it possible for women to divorce men who beat them up, and that would be bad, so the law must not be passed, because women have to stay with men who beat them up.

    It’s interesting that the Council of Islamic Ideology wants to go on the record as thinking that women should not be allowed to leave men who beat them up.