Author: Ophelia Benson

That unrepentant one has thought deeply and then pronounced. He has expanded on the elegant brevity of ‘How appropriate that a smug, shitty, rightwing publication like “Butterflies and Wheels” shares the name of a sentence in a book that is key to the plot of an idiotic movie like “Shattered”‘; he has explained what is shitty (smug and rightwing we can figure out for ourselves) about B&W.

[A] fountainhead of Islamophobia…There is the usual defense of the Danish Mohammad cartoons, etc. There are attacks on other religions as well…

So maybe ‘Islamophobia’ is a little inaccurate? Never mind.

In addition to religion, the website mounts attacks on multiculturalism…Kenan Malik, a Spiked Online regular, seems to be a designated hitter when it comes to such matters.

No. Kenan’s an occasional contributor, I’m pleased to say, but there are plenty of other contributors who are skeptical about multiculturalism, as well as plenty of other contributors who write about other things. There are no ‘designated hitters’ around here.

This clever phrase is just the sort of thing you can find on New Criterion, a magazine edited by the neoconservative Hilton Cramer or any other rightwing standard bearer in the “culture wars”.

Ah yes! And therefore they are all the same kind of thing, and no further thought or investigation is required.

It took about five years to figure out that things were not so simple.

Ah did it. Imagine my surprise.

The B&W website is not particularly concerned with such issues, preferring to bash religion rather than environmentalism. There is one exception, however. They do seem to get worked into a lather when it comes to the animal rights movement, which they obviously consider an impudent assault on the absolute rights of Scientific Research. They have taken up the cause of Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS), a company that has been the target of the Animal Liberation Front.

Funny the way he makes a plural of everything, as if nothing were signed around here. Who’s this ‘they’? He’s obviously referring to my republished article on the ALF, which wasn’t written by ‘them,’ it was written by me. And it’s not about ‘taking up the cause’ of HLS, it’s about questioning the tactics and morals of the ALF. Different thing. I don’t think there is such a thing as the absolute rights of scientific research, and I certainly don’t think animal research should be beyond question and protest. But it doesn’t follow from that that the ALF is without flaw.

I would not be surprised to discover that B&W gets some funding from Huntington and other such animal torturers.

Oh, wouldn’t you? Well I would! I would be surprised to discover that B&W gets funding from anywhere at all. B&W gets zero funding of any kind, thank you.

I was just going to point this out, but (of course – I should have known) I got intrigued by the absurd claims. Lenny’s at it too but I can’t be bothered to tease that one.

Tom Clark points out that ‘an essential disagreement between secularists and their opponents is epistemological, about how we hold and justify our factual beliefs.’

Are they arrived at empirically, by consideration of public evidence potentially available to any observer (so that the evidence is intersubjective, not merely subjective), or are they more a function of religious tradition or faith? Are beliefs held to be fallible and thus corrigible by open inquiry and empirical testing, or are they held to be the infallible and unquestionable deliverances of authority, whether scriptural or institutional?

Yup; that’s an essential disagreement all right. In fact without that disagreement the others kind of drift away like smoke, because they are at least in principle resolvable through further discussion and inquiry. But with that disagreement, they aren’t.

On what basis do we choose between these opposing epistemologies? Why should we, or anyone, side with Dacey and the secularists, not the Iranians and other fundamentalists in deciding where to place our cognitive bets? To defend secularism, this root issue of our epistemic commitments must be brought into the public square…The beginning of such an argument is obvious but too often left unstated. It is simply that beliefs arrived at via publicly available (thus intersubjective) evidence, science, critical reason, logic, and open debate – what we might call open intersubjective empiricism – are far more reliable than beliefs based in faith and non-empirical modes of justification, such as appeals to scriptural authority.

Just so. And, Clark goes on to say, even fundamentalists know this when dealing with quotidian matters. I’ve pointed this out a few times myself. Nobody mumbles about faith when she wants to know how to get from Buffalo to Skaneateles, or when to plant tomatoes, or what to put on poison ivy. There are double standards in play. When we actually want to know something in the real world, we do what we know we have to do to find out. When we just want to believe something, we use completely different (and noticeably lax) methods.

But of course these same true believers abandon the epistemic commitment to intersubjective empiricism when deciding about matters of god, human nature, human flourishing and ethics – all the traditional domains of religious belief. They have a double standard of justification, falling back on intuition, faith, scripture and authority when it comes to the basic metaphysical and moral content of their worldviews. The fundamentalist/authoritarian proposition is that we are warranted, when considering matters of ultimate import that make up our worldview, in carving out an exception to the basic epistemic norms that rule our everyday lives.

But we’re not warranted in doing that. The world isn’t divided into two parts, one knowable via intersubjective empiricism and the other knowable via guesswork and fantasy and wishes. It’s odd to think it is.

The question that should be raised publicly, while we still have the chance, is whether and why this exemption is warranted. What is its rational basis? Why are we suddenly permitted to abandon the normal empirical constraints on belief when deciding about such things as god, life after death, the soul, free will, and the status of women, homosexuals, and those of other races and creeds? Is it because there are means of deciding the truth of such matters that are superior to logic, science, public evidence, and critical inquiry? If so, what are these and why are they trustworthy?

No, there are no such means. We know what the proposed alternatives are and we know they’re not trustworthy.

The nut of the article:

The future of secularism may depend on using the open public square to expose the epistemic weakness of faith and non-empirical justifications for belief.

Send me in, coach.

Okay this is a joke.

Clerics need to “restore the dignity of women,” Juan Jose Tamayo, director of theology at Madrid’s Juan Carlos III university, told a roundtable on Thursday, July 17…”Women have been forgotten and marginalized in religions,” Tamayo said as reported by the AFP news agency. “They are organized hierarchically and patriarchically, excluding women in all fields of knowledge and religious matters.”

Yes indeed – and Juan José Tamayo is urging the Vatican to reverse its position on women in the church and allow them to become priests and bishops and popes, is he? He’s urging Muslim clerics to do the same? I don’t know, maybe he is, but since this conference was organized by the World Muslim League, it seems unlikely.

Ahmad Ibn Saifuddin, a Saudi professor of theology, agreed that women’s role had been misunderstood and that it was time to re-examine the issue. “Eve was born from Adam, so women and men are the same,” he said.

Um…no. Eve was born from Adam, so women are inferior to men – that’s how that goes. Jeez, you’d think a Saudi professor of theology would know that. Don’t the Saudis teach their professors of theology anything any more?

The Egyptian Centre for Women’s Rights did a study on sexual harassment.

Sexual harassment of women in Egypt is on the increase and observing Islamic dress code is no deterrent, according to a survey published this week…ECWR head Nihad Abu El-Qoumsan said that even veiled women who were victims of harassment blamed themselves. Western women who took part in the study demonstrated a strong belief in their entitlement to personal safety and freedom of movement, she says, but this was totally absent among Egyptian respondents. No-one spoke about freedom of choice, freedom of movement or the right to legal protection. No-one showed any awareness that the harasser was a criminal, regardless of what clothes the victim was wearing.

So…’Western’ women believe strongly that they ought to be able to walk around outside without being pestered by men, and Egyptian women don’t believe that. Well I guess I’m one of the first kind then, because I certainly believe I ought to be able to walk around outside with no pestering or opposition or impertinent interruption of any kind. I think I was almost born with that belief. I’m serious – I had a habit of bolting when I was a child. I did it once when I was about three – we lived in the country and one evening I was playing innocently outside among the apple trees and then simply turned that into a long walk up Bedensbrook Road and along the Great Road. I was brought home by a stranger, which must have been exciting for everyone. I did it again when I was about five, we lived in town then and were walking up Mercer Street and I just turned around and rushed off for a more private walk of my own. I’ve been like that ever since. The idea that women are in some way public property, subject to interference from strangers, as soon as they go outside, has always been anathema to me. We’re not children, we’re not broken, we’re not feeble in our intellects, we’re not ill, we’re not weak, we’re not damage, we don’t need help or supervision or attention or moral instruction, and we don’t need men just helping themselves to us. Women of Egypt: tell them all to piss off.

After Noha’s story was published in the Badeel daily, editor-in-chief Muhammad El Sayyed Said wrote that the behaviour of the crowd was characteristic of oppressed societies, where the majority identified with the oppressor. He blamed the increase in sexual harassment on what he said were “three decades of incitement against women” from the pulpits of some of Egypt’s mosques. “This verbal incitement is based on the extremely sordid and impudent allegation that our women are not modestly dressed. This was, and still is, a flagrant lie, used to justify violence against women in the name of religion.”

Women of Egypt: push back.