Author: Ophelia Benson

  • Tom Clark Disputes Ray Tallis on Free Will

    Determinism is compatible with being recursively self-modifying beings that have reasons and intentions.

  • Feminism al-Qaida Style

    Islamist women are challenging al-Qaida’s refusal to include women. Right on, sista!

  • Expanding Wahhabi Influence in Australia

    Griffith University offered to ‘reshape’ its Islamic Research Unit in accordance with Saudi wishes.

  • More Comedy from West Midlands Police

    Cop sees preachers in a ‘Muslim area,’ says they are committing a hate crime.

  • Kenan Malik Reviews Raymond Tallis

    Tallis can digress entertainingly on anything from Heidegger to hiccups, from Beckett to the basilar membrane.

  • Jane O’Grady Reviews Raymond Tallis

    Tallis uses meditations on the head and its functions as his entrée into what we are.

  • Good and Bad Ad Hominem Arguments

    An ad hominem is valid when the claims made about a person’s character or actions are relevant to the conclusions being drawn.

  • Mark Pagel on Kenan Malik and Marek Cohn

    Our ability to co-operate with unrelated others enables us to move beyond the politics of race.

  • She baked a date cake as a thank-you

    But of course the real crime is the murder of Leila Hussein – a story I can hardly make myself read.

    Leila Hussein lived her last few weeks in terror. Moving constantly from safe house to safe house, she dared to stay no longer than four days at each. It was the price she was forced to pay after denouncing and divorcing her husband – the man she witnessed suffocate, stamp on, then stab their young daughter Rand in a brutal ‘honour’ killing for which he has shown no remorse. Though she feared reprisals for speaking out, she really believed that she would soon be safe. Arrangements were well under way to smuggle her to the Jordanian capital, Amman. In fact, she was on her way to meet the person who would help her escape when a car drew up alongside her and two other women who were walking her to a taxi. Five bullets were fired: three of them hit Leila, 41. She died in hospital after futile attempts to save her.

    She was so close.

    ‘She had not been able to sleep the night before. I stayed up talking to her about her plans after she arrived in Amman. I gave her some clothes to take with her and she was packing the only bag she had. She was too excited to sleep.’ Mariam said that when she awoke Leila had already prepared breakfast, cleaned her house and even baked a date cake as a thank-you for the help she had been given.

    And then they shot her.

    As she lay in her own hospital bed receiving treatment, Mariam said that she heard someone saying that Leila had been shot in the head. But there were other mutterings that were clearly audible. ‘I could hear people talking on the corridors and the only thing that they had to say was that Leila was wrong for defending her daughter’s mistakes and that her death was God’s punishment. ‘In that minute I just had complete hatred in my heart for those who had killed her.’

    Yeah. And I still do – and for the hateful malicious vindictive brutal shit god they invoke. I hate them all.

  • Crime wave

    Another shocking crime – some slag got married and it turned out she wasn’t a virgin.

    The wedding night party was still under way at the family’s home in Roubaix when the groom came down from the bedroom complaining that his bride was not a virgin. He could not display the blood-stained sheet that is traditionally exhibited as proof of the bride’s “purity”. Mr X went to court the following morning and was granted a annulment on the grounds that his bride had deceived him on “one of the essential elements” of the marriage. In disgrace with both families, she acknowledged that she had led her groom to believe that she was a virgin when she had already had sexual intercourse. She did not oppose the annulment.

    Sounds like a fun party, doesn’t it? But what was the judge thinking? This was a secular court in France, not a jirga. Are French women legally required to be virgins when married? If so, who does the testing? Maybe they call in the pope.

  • A crime, I tell you

    Good good. The Vatican is still alert, it’s on the job, making sure nobody sneaks anything past..

    The Vatican insisted Friday that it is properly following Christian tradition by excluding females from the priesthood as it issued a new warning that women taking part in ordinations will be excommunicated…”The church does not feel authorized to change the will of its founder Jesus Christ,” Amato said…The reference is to Christ’s having chosen only men as his Apostles.

    Yes, but as I’ve murmured before, JC did a lot of things, and the Vatican doesn’t feel compelled to imitate all of them. (Poverty springs to mind, and then settles down there and makes itself at home.) It is not as self-evident as the Vatican would apparently like to think that JC’s choice of apostles was intended as a sex rule for all time.

    The decree was published Thursday by Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, which in a headline called the ordination of women a “crime.”

    Yeah, and an exceptionally vicious crime at that.

    Pope Benedict…has consistently rebuffed calls to change traditional church teachings on divorce, abortion, euthanasia, gay marriage and the requirement that priests be male and celibate.

    No kidding. That’s presumably what they chose him for – the ability to rebuff calls to change ‘traditional church teachings’; the narrowness and malice to call the ordination of women a crime; the blindness and authoritarianism to insist on continuing an all-male clerisy that presumes to tell women what to do and what to be.

  • McClellan is Sad About McClellan

    If I did not support the policies I advocated – such as making things up – why didn’t I say something at the time?

  • Vatican: Women Priests Will Be Excommunicated

    ‘The church does not feel authorized to change the will of its founder Jesus Christ.’

  • Bride not Virgin so Judge Annulled Marriage

    Wedding party still under way when the groom came from the bedroom complaining that his bride was not a virgin.

  • In Politicians It Is Judgements That Matter

    Blair wants us to attach ourselves to his sincerity and evaporate arguments over judgement.

  • Glasgow Police Ban Scientology Placard

    Strathclyde Police admitted officers stopped protesters using the word ‘cult’ after a complaint.

  • FLDS Children Ordered Released – Conditionally

    Parents must allow CPS workers to question and examine the children at home.

  • It’s a West Texas Thing

    Without planning ordinances, FLDS was free to build ranch and live in isolation there.

  • Bomb Hits Danish Embassy in Islamabad

    At least six people have been killed and thirty injured.

  • The Jesus Religious Attitudes Survey

    Pollster: Excuse me, sir.

    Jesus: I forgive you.

    Pollster: No, I mean I want a minute or two of your time for a survey I’m doing.

    Jesus: I have all the time in the world. And then some.

    Pollster: We’re surveying religious attitudes–random sample, of 1200 adults. Can I ask, What’s your occupation.

    Jesus: I am a messiah.

    Pollster: Can you spell that.

    Jesus: C-h-r-i-s-t. It’s the Greek form.

    Pollster: Are you Greek?

    Jesus: No, Palestinian Jew. I’ve been working here in the States for ages though. Things in Europe aren’t what they used to be. I find that in America, you can be anything you want—even a humble carpenter’s son who turns out to be divine, or an ordinary reporter for the Daily Planet who wear blue tights and a cape.

    Pollster: Sir, the first question is this: Do you believe in God?

    Jesus: Sure. I believe in the God my people believe in.

    Pollster: You mean YHWH?

    Jesus: Shushhhhh for Pete’s sake. Where I come from you could get us stoned for saying that out loud.

    Pollster: Sorry. Now, do you regard this God – whatever – as having a special relationship with you?

    Jesus: Of course I do. He’s my father.

    Pollster: No, I mean really.

    Jesus: Really.

    Pollster: Like, your mother’s husband?

    Jesus: Not exactly. They weren’t married. She was his handmaid. He just chose her from the village.

    Pollster: She was raped?

    Jesus: Nah, she was happy to do it. He was God Almighty, she was a nobody. Now she’s a big deal. Anyway, it wasn’t Abba, not exactly: it was the Paraclete.

    Pollster: A bird?

    Jesus: No, more of a spirit. I used to think of him as the family pet because he was always morphing into a bird–crashed my baptism party–annoying–but missed my circumcision. The old man said, “the Paraclete is not really a dove and he’s not a tongue of fire either.” So I said, “Well, is he my brother or something?” and Abba said “He is what he is. Now shut up.”

    Pollster: Second question; Do you believe in heaven?

    Jesus: Do you believe in Westchester County? Yes, of course, that’s where Abba lives with the Paraclete. I’m there too except for weekends when I have to be physically and really present in the Eucharist. I sit at his right hand, the Paraclete sits on his left hand. It’s dull, a little uncomfortable, and we don’t talk much. Sometimes we sing. But the old man is really good at sitting. If he needs something special done he sends me.

    Pollster: Like what?

    Jesus: Nothing recently. A few thousand years ago, though, the human race needed redeeming and he sent me. Now the work is pretty dicey—an apparition here, a mystical vision there. Mom does a lot of icon intervention. There’s a lot more for the Paraclete since Abba put him in charge of speaking in tongues, getting born again, inspired preaching and so forth—When the old man wants to say something, he just asks the spirit to do it for him. Once I said, speak for yourself, Pop, but he just rolled his eyes and fell back asleep.

    Pollster: That is a pretty odd picture of heaven.

    Jesus: Not really. Millions of people see it that way. Have for centuries. You never took art history did you?

    Pollster: What I really meant is, Do you believe in an afterlife?

    Jesus: No need. I am the way of eternal life. Others have to believe it. I just have to keep saying it.

    Pollster: Do you believe in hell?

    Jesus: The place where people suffer the torments of damnation in everlasting fire, from which there is no surcease of agony and where all lost souls utterly abandon hope of salvation? You bet your sweet pickle I do. Been there, burned that. Satan is not a nice guy.

    Pollster: You’ve met him?

    Jesus: OK, no art history, no mythology, no Milton, no Joseph Campbell videos either: who hired you? Hell is a lot like a marathon without snacks. Satan invented manga but the Japanese got the credit.

    Pollster: Final question. Do you consider yourself more spiritual than religious?

    Jesus: That’s a hard one—divine and human, that sort of thing. Doesn’t really translate. When I see a sunset–wow!–spiritual, definitely spiritual. The old man won’t even look at them because he says “I didn’t create twilight.” But then on the weekends, it’s hard not to feel as little religious, you know–especially with millions trying to reach the old man through me. So I guess “both” would be my answer.

    Yeah, definitely both.