Author: Ophelia Benson

Wow, that was a shock. I was at the county library today – at a branch of the county library system, that is – and on my way out I passed a catalogue terminal and had a wild and crazy impulse to look up Why Truth Matters. I didn’t think they’d have it of course, just thought I’d make sure. But what a shock I got – they’ve ordered three copies. That’s a lot of copies.

One is for Redmond. Maybe that’s Bill Gates’s copy.

Speaking of libraries – last Saturday I went to a talk-book signing thing at a local branch (of the city library this time) with Marjane Satrapi, who wrote and drew Persepolis and Persepolis 2. I kind of didn’t expect very much – maybe out of caution. Partly I just didn’t expect her to speak much if any English, because I know she lives in Paris (and went to school in Vienna) so it seems a bit much to expect her to speak English on top of Farsi, French and German (and, it turns out, Swedish and Italian). Anyway I just had modest expectations. But she was amazing. She was amazing. She looked like her cartoons of herself, for one thing. She has a strong face, strong eyebrows, and a great wicked smile. And she speaks English just fine, thanks, and has a lot to say, and what she says is worth hearing. It was exhilarating. The place was packed. It was good.

Oh and I found out how to pronounce her name, which I’d wondered. It’s Marzhahn.

Update: outeast pointed out in comments that the article linked is, shall we say, long on rhetoric and short on evidence; or perhaps a joke; anyway that it seems to misrepresent what the game is actually like. Somebody play it for me and find out, okay? I certainly don’t want to play it.

Did you look at the Christian dominionist video game items? Exciting, aren’t they? Thrilling to know there are people with views like that out there, planning, planning, planning…

Imagine: you are a foot soldier in a paramilitary group whose purpose is to remake America as a Christian theocracy, and establish its worldly vision of the dominion of Christ over all aspects of life. You are issued high-tech military weaponry, and instructed to engage the infidel on the streets of New York City. You are on a mission – both a religious mission and a military mission – to convert or kill Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, gays, and anyone who advocates the separation of church and state – especially moderate, mainstream Christians. Your mission is “to conduct physical and spiritual warfare”; all who resist must be taken out with extreme prejudice.

That sounds like a fairly large number of infidels. In fact it sounds like everyone except dominionist Christians. How long before they take to hijacking planes, one wonders.

This game immerses children in present-day New York City – 500 square blocks, stretching from Wall Street to Chinatown, Greenwich Village, the United Nations headquarters, and Harlem. The game rewards children for how effectively they role play the killing of those who resist becoming a born again Christian.

New York – obviously. Home of the infidel. The UN. ‘New York intellectuals’ which is code for Jews. Jews. Atheists. Intellectuals. Catholics, Muslims, foreigners, queers, arty types, people with a sense of humour, free women, journalists – oh the place is a sewer, I tell you.

The designers intend this game to become the first dominionist warrior game to break through in the popular culture due to its violent scenarios and realistic graphics, lighting, and sound effects…Could such a violent, dominionist Christian video game really break through to the popular culture? Well, it is based on a series of books that have already set sales records – the blockbuster Left Behind series of 14 novels by writer Jerry B. Jenkins and his visionary collaborator, retired Southern Baptist minister Tim LaHaye.

In other words, yes, easily. Oh well. Antarctica might be warm enough to live in before too long.

PZ has a comment here.

Someone told me the other day that argument isn’t, shall we say, my strong suit – by which I think was meant I’m terrible at it. Oh, I thought, and picked up the classifieds to look for another job. This time I might even try to find one that pays money, however little. That’s what I get for leaving school in the seventh grade. Not that I regret it – those years on the streets were the making of my character.

But so I was amused to see this entry on a philosophy-type blog (a transgendered one at that) that’s full of recommendations of good skeptical, philosophical, scientific and similar sites, and says in a paragraph on logic-oriented sites –

If you lack familiarity with the basics of the subject then The Fallacy Files is a good place to start – it categorises the major logical faults and gives clear illustrative examples. The list sits alongside a blog which subjects news items to argumentative criticism. A similar site, although not a blog, which does the same thing for mathematics, is Numberwatch which has a regular Number of the Month page lambasting innumeracy in the media. My favourite blog, however, in this field is the Notes and Comments of the Butterfliesandwheels site which is dedicated, as they put it, to “fighting fashionable nonsense”. Most (all?) of the entries are written by Ophelia Benson with just the right amount of righteous [indignation] and rigorous logic.

Well, in that case, I’ll put the classifieds back in the zebra’s cage for now.

Next up. Bush’s bizarro non sequitur.

Mr Bush said: “Ages of experience have taught us that the commitment of a husband and a wife to love and to serve one another promotes the welfare of children and the stability of society.”

Okay – and? So what? What’s your point? What follows from that? How, exactly, do you get from that to a need to forbid gay marriage? What’s the deal? Are you thinking that the existence of gay marriages will exert some kind of sucking effect on straight marriages, causing them gradually but surely to – um – become something other than straight marriages? To turn into poker dens, or iron smelters, or Manolo Blahnik shoes? But how? How would gay marriages do that? What exactly is the mechanism you think is operating here?

I know, I know; silly question. Silly because it doesn’t matter; silly because irrelevant. The people who pay attention to that kind of drivel won’t notice or think about the non sequitur, and Bush and his caretakers know that, so of course it’s irrelevant. But what the hell. I wanted to point it out anway.

People do keep trampling on the rights of religious believers, don’t they. Have you noticed that? Exhibiting paintings that some Hindus don’t like, putting on plays that some Sikhs don’t like, drawing cartoons that some Muslims don’t like, refusing to give arbitrary unequal treatment to people that some Christians would prefer to see getting arbitrary unequal treatment – there’s just no end to it. So naturally the religious believers are speaking up. Wouldn’t you?

Consider for instance these UK proposals to ‘protect gays and lesbians from being denied “goods, facilities and services” because of their sexual orientation.’

Lord Mackay of Clashfern and the Bishop of Rochester, the Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, said in a statement issued by the Lawyers’ Christian Fellowship that the proposals could also undermine people’s rights to exercise their religious beliefs…Lord Mackay said: “For people of religious faith who believe that the practice of homosexuality is wrong, these proposals seem to me to carry a serious threat to their freedom in their voluntary and charitable work and in relation to earning their livelihood in a number of occupations.”

Yes – true. Laws and regulations are like that. They carry of their nature serious threats to freedom. That’s rather the point of them. If they weren’t meant to stop people doing things or to make them do things, they wouldn’t be laws and regulations, they would be something else, like polite advice, or gentle urging, or poetic rumination. The freedom of murderers is badly dented by laws against murder. Is this news to Lord Mackay?

Senior Muslims were also critical. Dr Majid Katme, the spokesman for the Islamic Medical Association, argued that the proposals demonstrated that the Government was prepared to discriminate against faith communities in order to promote “equality”. “The right to hold deep faith convictions that affect the way people think and behave in every aspect of life is sacrificed in these regulations,” he said.

The scare-quotes on ‘equality’ are interesting. Did Dr Katme make the little finger-hooks in the air when he was talking to the Telegraph, or what? How did the Telegraph know to put the scare-quotes on? Whatever. However that happened, it’s fascinating to see people catching on. Ohhhhhh – guess what, there’s a big fat tension in all this cuddly droning about ‘communities’ (I put those scare quotes on myself) and ‘faith communities’ and ‘rights’ and ‘the right to hold deep faith convictions’ on the one hand, and equality and freedom on the other. Guess what, the two don’t always mingle smoothly; guess what, you can’t always have both; guess what, your freedom to hold deep faith convictions that women should be imprisoned and subordinated and silenced conflicts rather sharply with my freedom to be a person like other people. We got a problem here, dude. Same with the gay stuff. Your right to hold deep faith convictions that gay people are wrong and bad and sinful conflicts rather sharply with gay people’s freedom and equality. Unless of course you can bring yourself simply to have the deep faith convictions without trying to enforce them or act on them in any way – but apparently you can’t, or you wouldn’t be complaining about these regulations. You’re not actually talking merely about deep faith convictions, you’re talking about putting them into practice. You’re trying to defend your desire to apply special unequal rules to gay people by calling that unpleasant desire ‘deep faith convictions’ and associating the whole package with freedom and rights. You’re complaining that your right and freedom to treat people unequally is under threat, and you’re dressing it up with talk of deep faith convictions and faith communities and people of religious faith. It’s a low trick. You guys need less in the way of deep faith convictions and a lot more in the way of rational thought about morality.