Author: Ophelia Benson

  • Obama admin will appeal Prayer Day ruling

    “I would have expected something better from a legal scholar,” FFRF co-president Annie Laurie Gaylor said.

  • God we beseech thee bless this bullet

    Okay, I give up – what is the Pentagon doing having a “special Pentagon prayer service”? Even before we ask what is it doing having Franklin Graham appearing at such a thing, what is it doing having such a thing in the first place?

    And yet people wonder why atheists “proselytize” to the extent of pointing out that there are no genuinely good reasons to believe the things that make a “National Prayer Day” seem like something that an entity called God expects us to have once a year.

  • Franklin Graham uninvited to Pentagon ‘Prayer Day’

    What is the Pentagon doing having a ‘Prayer Day’?

  • Cristina Odone offers theocratic bullying nonsense

    Dr Death, abortion, euthanasia, faith schools, all life precious.

  • The terrible case of Lucia de Berk

    A Dutch nurse who has spent 6 years in jail on a life sentence for murdering 7 people, in a killing spree that never happened.

  • A spectacular reputational car crash for the BCA

    Until they sued, most people thought chiropractors just did backs, Ben Goldacre notes.

  • Pope named in Milwaukee abuse lawsuit

    His lawyers want the Church to release any files it has on abuse cases involving priests.

  • A gentle tactful loving reminder

    Use the formatting tools at the top of the comment box, willya! Half of you are typing in html, after Josh went to all the trouble of giving us tools, and you’re doing the wrong ones so they’re showing up and it looks stupid and bad. Whatsa matta wichoo?

    I don’t mean it; you know I love you; but pull yourselves together.

    (No I know, it’s not really half. It’s just a few. But we don’t want to embarrass The Few, so let’s say it’s half.)

  • 50 Voices of Disbelief Review in First Things

    New atheism, pooh pooh, new atheists, yawn, new atheism, sheer banality, new atheists, will go away soon, new atheism, we all hates it.

  • Your mission, should you choose to accept it

    “New” atheism is often accused of proselytizing, but I don’t think that’s right.

    It’s not really proselytizing. We don’t have the explicit goal of turning everyone atheist. We don’t even really have the implicit goal of doing that. We know it’s vanishingly unlikely, and not necessarily desirable (most of us know that – maybe all of us do – it probably depends on exactly what is meant). Our goals are short of that – speaking broadly.

    The most basic is probably to humble the claims somewhat – to chip away at the public assumption that there is nothing dubious about theism – that it’s perfectly reasonable to talk about God as one would talk about Gordon Brown or Sarah Palin. It is to remind everyone that belief is not necessarily the default option – that there are reasons not to believe – that the reasons not to believe are better than the reasons to believe – that it is better to restrict belief to claims that can be tested and investigated and that any claims that are officially beyond the competence of science are thereby rendered at least less reliable.

    So, related to that and stemming from it, another goal is to push back against all this incessant public goddy talk and “faith”-mongering. It is, frankly, to discredit public goddy talk – to make it more obvious that it is not likely to be true – in an effort to reduce it. It is an effort to get all this god stuff out of our faces.

    Now that perhaps does look like proselytizing in the sense meant. But I don’t care. We’ve had years of this nonsense, and we’re tired of it. We’re not raiding churches – but we’re arguing with the Washington Post and the BBC and the Guardian and National Prayer Day. Should we stop doing that because it may be true that on average religion makes people happy? No.

    Another, overlapping goal is to make more space for atheists – to de-delegitimize atheism – to de-other it – to point out there are lots of us and we have the better case so stop trying to bully us. It is also to point out and rebuke the lies people tell about us – unblushing brazen hardened lies.

    The very presence and energy of the lies is a sign that this goal, at the very least, is hard to gainsay. Atheism is neither criminal nor immoral, yet it is steadily and noisily demonized. That points to something poisonous about theism. We do get to resist – we do get to call out the lies – we do get to defend ourselves.

  • Uncredible Hallq disputes Pigliucci

    Why try to turn these disagreements into proof that the New (read: Bad) Atheists are screwing everything up?

  • Herr Bischof, the tan suits you and I love the brooch

    A really nice touch – it’s not just that Bishop Walter Mixa has now admitted that he used to beat the children in a Bavarian orphanage –

    Accusations have also surfaced of financial irregularities at the orphanage’s foundation.

    A lawyer hired by the foundation has raised questions about thousands of dollars spent on wine, art, jewelry and even a tanning bed while Bishop Mixa was chairman of the foundation’s board, from 1975 to 1996, while he was a priest in the town of Schrobenhausen.

    Isn’t that just typical. The Irish Catholic church sent a lot of the money the government gave it for the care of children in its prisons to Rome while the children slept in the cold and wore rags and ate crap and got next to no schooling. It’s interesting to see that the Bavarian Catholic church apparently used its money-intended-for-child-prisoners on luxury items for itself – at least one supposes it wasn’t hanging the art in the children’s dormitories and giving them pretty bracelets for their birthdays and serving them wine at dinner and letting them use the tanning bed when they were looking a little pallid.

  • Halal, Haram, and Negis

    If you walk at random in a Muslim district in the West, especially in Western Europe, you will certainly find somewhere, at least in one corner, an Islamic butcher’s shop with the word “halal” written on its shop-window. For the products of meat, the word “halal” is a badge of Islamic quality.

    Muslims believe that since blood is not ritually a pure substance, slaughter is necessary to promote the thorough draining of all of the animal’s blood. Furthermore, the verse “Bismillah al Rahman Al Rahim”, in the name of Allah the Beneficent the Merciful, is necessary to render the meat halal or lawful to eat.

    The word halal refers, here, to meat killed and prepared in line with Islamic dietary laws. Jewish and Islamic religions require slaughter to be carried out with a cut to the neck or throat, rather than the more widespread method of stunning with a bolt into the head before slaughter.

    Generally, halal means anything permissible under Islamic law, in contrast to haram, that which is forbidden. This includes behaviour, speech, dress, conduct. The term halal is also used to judge the right of sexuality after marriage, even temporary marriage, that is a Shiite tradition called “Sigheh,” which is blamed by other sects of Islam as a “legalised” prostitution. Vaginal intercourse or rape by a man of his female slave, a married woman whose husband has been killed by Muslim invaders, and a non-Muslim prisoner of war is halal — in this light, many political female prisoners of the Islamic Republic of Iran who were considered “non-Muslims” were” legally” raped by their guards before being executed.

    In an extended sense, halal means fairness of business dealing or other types of transaction or activity. Therefore, it represents values that are held in high regard by Muslims. It contains standards for social norms, morals, foods and other services that meet Islamic regulations. Needless to say, in Islamic countries, these are the only available standards for Muslims and non-Muslim minorities alike.

    Slaughter is an old tradition of Jewish and Islamic clan society. As a matter of best practice, the killed animal is supposed to be distributed among the members of the clan right after being slaughtered so that each family can have fresh meat to eat. Like many other traditions, this one was also taken over by Islam.

    Halal bloodshed can be also a reason for honour killing in Islamic societies. Honour killing is committed by male family members against female family members who are perceived to have brought dishonour upon the family. A female can be targeted by her family for a variety of reasons, including: refusing to enter into an arranged marriage, having sex outside marriage, or even being the victim of rape.

    Halal has nothing to do with prophylactic, hygienic, precautions or medical meaning. To better understand halal, we must see what its opposite term “haram” means. Haram has roots in revulsion which is an old instinct of evolution. Revulsion is a sense of loathing without any logical reason or clear explanation. As an instinct, it was a necessary reaction of early human beings when exposed to an unknown food, unknown object, or an unconventional situation.

    The object of revulsion is culturally conditioned. It means whatever is repulsive for the members of a given society do not necessarily provoke the same revulsion for others. In a historical sense, the terms like halal and haram are nothing but the instinctive reflections which were integrated into Islam. In many cases, Islamic commandments and rituals are not only the traditional reflections of desert dwellers of pre-Islamic Arabia, but also based on the Prophet Muhammad’s habits, his sexual preferences, his favourite things, and his dietary habits.

    Since sexuality is taboo in Islam, sexual organs, vaginal secretion and sperm are considered as “negis” (loathsome and impure). Therefore, they should not be touched – if they are unintentionally touched, ceremonial washing and rituals must be done. Not only urine and excrement of human and carnivores, but also blood and any slimy substance secreted by a mucous membrane of the body have more or less a similar sense of negis. Needless to say, all these secreted or mucous substances, regardless of their odour and colour, belong to healthy functions of our bodies.

    Not only non Muslims, ethnic groups, slaves and women, but even animals in Islam are not free from this discrimination. Dogs and pigs are the most negis animals. Term of “negis” characterises their absolute and unchangeable impurity. Pork meat and alcoholic drinks are absolutely haram. The dog as a “negis” animal can never be proper pet in a Muslim house. Touching a dog, especially a dog’s saliva, requires ritually hygienic procedure to get the hand clean — if a dog eats from a dish, the dish must be ceremonially washed seven times, the first time with sand. The dog, despite all its uses in many ways and its irrefutable faith in its master, is discriminated as a negis creature.

    While marriage of Muslim men with women of the Book (Muslims, Christians and Jews), based on Islamic rituals, can be permitted, all other varieties of marriage between Muslim women and non- Muslim men are considered haram. As a patriarchal religion, Islam granted a concession only to Muslim men. Muslim women are not allowed to marry men outside of Islam (unless they convert to Islam). No marriage is permitted between Muslims and “Mushriks” (atheists, polytheists, other members of belief systems which are considered by Muslims negis). The Koran says, “A believing slave woman is better than a mushrik woman”!

    As mentioned, terms like halal, haram, and negis are not more than rituals of particular conditions and environment. These terms have no logic and scientific credentials at all. They are only the legacy of per-Islamic values of the Arabian clan- society which still impose themselves on today’s society.

    About the Author

    Jahanshah Rashidian is an Iranian-born German writer in several languages.

  • Catholic church crumbles across Europe

    Raping or beating children, spending orphanage money on wine and jewelry, refusing to admit – it all adds up.

  • Catholic child rape scandal spreads in Europe

    Walter Mixa, bishop for Augsburg and the German armed forces, offered to resign after admitting he used to hit children.

  • Ireland: Another Bishop Resigns

    Bishop James Moriarty did not challenge Dublin Archdiocese’s concealment of child-abuse complaints from police.

  • Theo Hobson reads Alister McGrath

    McGrath repeatedly claims that “faith entails no departure whatsoever from the rational high ground.”

  • Are you in, or are you out?

    You know how people like Massimo Pigliucci and others like to say that science has nothing to say about the supernatural? And therefore scientists who dispute religion are trespassing on other people’s territory and crossing their own borders without a passport and generally misbehaving? I’ve been thinking about that.

    I googled the two words just now, and found a nice helpful item by Victor Stenger. He quotes the National Academy of Sciences:

    Science is a way of knowing about the natural
    world. It is limited to explaining the natural
    world through natural causes. Science can say
    nothing about the supernatural. Whether God
    exists or not is a question about which science
    is neutral.

    That’s good, because it says exactly what I had in mind, what I’ve been thinking about –

    what I think is a crock of shit.

    Here’s why: there’s no such thing as “the supernatural.” Nobody cares about some general thing called “the supernatural.” People care about particular things that could be put under the heading “supernatural” but are not “the supernatural” themselves. And many or most of the things that people care about and that can be put under the heading “supernatural” are not really supernatural in a sense that would make science unable to say anything about them. And that includes “God” – except when the deist god is meant, which in fact it almost never is.

    “The supernatural” is just the name of a category, but what’s really in dispute is not a category, but a person, an agent. The supernatural is one thing, and “God” is another, and it’s a distraction to pretend that by walling off “the supernatural” from science it is possible to get science to agree that God is beyond dispute. The god that is meant when people say “God” – the god that will be in charge on National Prayer Day, when Obama tells us all to get busy praying – is not supernatural at all but heavily involved in human life. A god that really really is super-natural – altogether outside nature – is not the one that people care about and summon to tell us all what to do. The god of believers is a part of this world, however magic and elusive and tricky it is supposed to be.

    So saying “science can say nothing about the supernatural” is true enough as far as it goes (because it’s true by definition), but it’s irrelevant to god-talk.

  • Rust Belt Philosophy on NOMA

    Since so much of our knowledge supports and is supported by other knowledge, there are networks of dependencies that stretch across nearly all of what we believe about the world.

  • A political climate of nervous deference to ‘Faith’ groups

    We now have a situation in which a religious body representing a tiny number of people is able to cause a serious and expensive inconvenience by invoking their outraged religious sensibilities.