Author: Ophelia Benson

  • Jerry Coyne Refuses Science Festival Invitation

    One of the Festival’s sponsors was The Templeton Foundation, so after discussion and thought, he said No.

  • Jerry Coyne and WSF Discuss the Issues

    Dance and literature don’t contradict science; faith and religion do.

  • Johann Hari on Theocratic State Education

    Forcing children to take part in religious worship every day is a law worthy of a theocracy, not a liberal democracy.

  • Refugees Flee Fighting in Swat

    UN refugee agency said 200,000 people may have been displaced, with another 300,000 on the move.

  • Ben Goldacre on Tamiflu

    You get better 16 or 17 hours sooner if you take these drugs. They’re not miracle cures.

  • Pig-headed Mullahs

    I guess it was predictable. Divine retribution had to rear its ugly head over swine flu. Yes, in case you didn’t know, some mullahs claim that God gave us swine flu. They say the virus will devastate the pig-gobbling-West. Yankee infidels will be doomed, and the faithful spared.

    Cries from the mosques have this far resulted in culling pigs, along with spurning their owners and, of course, anyone with a penchant for pork chops. Even in Egypt, which hasn’t reported a single case of swine flu, over 300,000 pigs were butchered. Perhaps not so incidentally, their Christian owners were refused compensation. No doubt more ugly acts will follow wherever excuses can be found to wield power and create rifts between people – this is the stuff that some clerics thrive on.

    But how can such people remain blinded to the facts?
    Swine flu is one of scores of diseases that have evolved from other life forms to humans. Look up zoonosis. Did we blame cholera on God? Anthrax? Mad cow disease? Avian flu? Perhaps we did. But surely in this age we can demand more from community leaders – hold them accountable, and to a higher standard? Is it too sinister to mention that misinformation on fatal diseases can result in death? Or that if such persons really cared about people’s welfare they would be offering information to help prevent infection?

    Some mullahs clearly don’t heed the call to read or to track developments in the epidemic they are otherwise obsessed with; they don’t or won’t understand that the latest information suggests that we are more likely to contract swine flu from another human than from a pig. Thus far, there isn’t a single confirmed pig to human transmission (see FAQs for swine flu on the WHO website). You can’t get the virus from cooked pork. Apparently, the virus hasn’t even been isolated in swine – at least not at this point in time – but got its name due to some similarity between its genome and a virus in pigs.

    What happens when the first incidents of swine flu occur amongst these bearded folk? Will they band forces with rabbis in Israel lobbying for the flu to be renamed – thus avoiding the scandal of being tainted? More to the point, will they pray for a cure or will they scurry to their doctors for help?

    I wonder who will get the last laugh as the misnomer “swine flu” gets supplanted by the less emotive: “Influenza A virus subtype H1N1”. No doubt these mullahs will conveniently forget all they’ve said on the subject and find some other scam to take its place.

    Fawzia Rasheed, 7th May 2009

  • National Prayer Day is Even for Unbelievers

    And hair gel is for people of all hair styles, and even for bald people.

  • Max Dunbar on Fish on Eagleton on God

    Liberalism, enlightenment and all those cerebral shibboleths can be halted at the barrel of a gun.

  • Quantum Arguments for God as Mumbo-jumbo

    Thanks to quantum mechanical uncertainty, scientists can’t detect stuff, so that could be God.

  • Muslims in Britain: Zero Tolerance of Homosexuality

    None of the 500 British Muslims interviewed believed that homosexual acts were morally acceptable.

  • David Aaronovitch on Voodoo Histories

    Many English-language websites have sprung up to proselytise for the 9/11 Truth movement.

  • There are people like that

    Russell encounters an Eaglefish and has one of those epiphanic moments when a few things suddenly “click”.

    [A]mong our friends on the political Left – which is where I have my roots – there are people, not just a few but many, who despise everything I hold dear. These are supposed to be my allies, but they despise liberalism, reason, science, progress, and the Enlightenment. They hate the so-called “New Atheism”…because they see people like Richard Dawkins as providing a rallying point for … yes, liberalism, reason, science, progress, and the Enlightenment…It’s not some sort of accident or coincidence that their commitments so often have them opposing liberalism and all the values associated with it. They know that that’s what they’re doing; they actually see those values as disvalues.

    Yeah. And that’s why I would so love to see them magically turned into women and transported to Swat so that they could ponder the absence of liberalism, reason, science, progress, and the Enlightenment up close and personal.

    I despise and detest their frivolity. Their stupid, shallow, giggling lack of responsibility; their treating subjects that are very literally life and death to billions of people as mere toys for them to play with. They don’t even offer any serious reasons for their hatred of liberalism, reason, science, progress, and the Enlightenment – that’s what’s so frivolous about it. They just take it for granted, and offer at most silly lightweight pseudo-reasons, like the fact that their grandparents had religious beliefs. These guys aren’t children – they should know they need better reasons than that. They should pay better attention to the world, they should look around them, they should yank their heads out of their own stifling little egos.

    Stanley Fish and Terry Eagleton, for example, are not just isolated, idiosyncratic sentimentalists who believe in belief. They really do hate the things that I value, and they see themselves as in a struggle to resist the very things that I am fighting for in all my work. When Eagleton says that Richard Dawkins is standing in his way, he actually means it. What’s more, such Eaglefish don’t see themselves as expressing a view that their colleagues and acquaintances will find alien and bizarre. They expect their views to seem familiar and attractive to many readers; they expect to find an audience for which such views will have the ring of truth.

    Quite. This is why Butterflies and Wheels was created and why it still exists – because Eaglefish don’t see themselves as expressing a view that their colleagues and acquaintances will find alien and bizarre. B&W has been working hard (that is, I’ve been working hard, but it sounds grander to call myself B&W, as if I were a committee) for nigh on seven years now to make the Eaglefish view seem alien and bizarre to as many people as possible.

  • Melanie Phillips is All ‘It’s a Secular Inquisition!’

    Everyone who said she was wrong about ID is so totally wrong.

  • Martin on Fish on Eagleton on God

    In the new war against Enlightenment liberalism, pro-faith Marxists and post-modern relativists unite.

  • ASA Ruling on Duchy Originals: Complaint Upheld

    The ad must not appear again in its current form. Duchy told not to make claims they could not substantiate.

  • Reproof to Costly Duchy Detox Tinctures

    Regulator found Duchy advert breached the code in substantiation, truthfulness and medicinal claims.

  • Stuck With ‘National Prayer Day’

    US Congress in 1988 set date for presidents to issue proclamations asking Americans to pray.

  • Maine Governor Signs Gay Marriage Bill

    Maine’s Senate voted 21-13 in support of a bill that redefines marriage as the legal union of two people.

  • Russell Blackford on the Frightening Eaglefish

    People on the Left who despise liberalism, reason, science, progress, and the Enlightenment.

  • Oprah Winfrey is Promoting a Vaccine Skeptic

    Jenny McCarthy’s campaign spreads misinformation that could bring back once-controlled diseases.