Author: Ophelia Benson

  • Square that circle

    The rule: if it’s anything to do with women it has to be made incloooosive so that it’s not for women any more.

    In the 1990s, growing up in the small harbor town of Oban, the only place I ever saw the word lesbian was in my Oxford Dictionary.

    Section 28 (the UK law that prohibited local authorities and state schools from “promoting homosexuality”) loomed large. While Oban was famous for its seafood, whisky, and scenic harbor, it certainly wasn’t known for queer women. I never met anyone openly identifying as lesbian or queer while growing up there.

    Fast forward a few decades, and that same small coastal town has been named by both mainstream and queer press—including DIVA magazine and The Times—as an unlikely lesbian+ capital of Scotland.

    An unlikely what now?

    Every September, hundreds of LGBTQ+ women travel from across the UK, Europe, the U.S., and beyond to attend Oban Lesbian+ Weekend, a joyful celebration of community, adventure, and visibility on Scotland’s wild west coast. And in 2026, the festival celebrates its fifth year.

    Ah. So that’s what the plus sign means. Lesbian plus men. So it’s not lesbian then.

    But the name itself often sparks conversation. People sometimes ask: If the event is inclusive, why call it a lesbian weekend? The answer is simple: We’re reclaiming the word lesbian.

    At Oban Lesbian+ Weekend, “lesbian” isn’t a gatekeeping label. It’s a banner—one that proudly includes LGBTQ+ women, trans women, and non-binary people who feel part of the lesbian+ community.

    Awwwww iddn that sweet. It’s a banner, one that proudly erases lesbians in order to be inclooosive of men. As long as they say they feel part of the lesbian communinny (which part exactly?) then by golly they are part of it, balls or no balls.

    Trans women have been part of the festival from the very beginning, including on our crew, and the space we create is intentionally inclusive.

    At a time when the word ‘lesbian’ can sometimes be used to exclude, our festival flips the narrative. We use it as something joyful, visible, and welcoming. And in a small town like Oban, visibility matters.

    In other words lesbianism is forbidden and heterosexuality is imposed. New boss just like the old boss. Brilliant move, visible chumps.

    My journey to creating the festival has been shaped by more than two decades spent bringing queer women together. In fact, 2026 marks 21 years since I first launched my events business, starting with lesbian speed dating in Brighton. I’d recently moved there and spotted an advert in g3 Magazine for a lesbian speed dating event in Manchester. I remember thinking: Why isn’t there something like that in “gay Brighton”?

    Yes but when you said “lesbian speed dating” you meant actually lesbian, right? You didn’t mean trans lesbian, because that would be just same old same old: women not allowed to have anything just for women. You didn’t mean that, right? Or did you?

    The events sold out quickly. And I discovered something that has guided my work ever since: Queer women love spaces designed intentionally to help them meet each other. Whether those connections lead to friendships, flings or lifelong partners doesn’t really matter—the magic is in the meeting.

    The meeting of lesbian women, right? That’s what you mean? But you’re afraid to say it? If you do say it you have to cancel it immediately by saying LGBTQ+?

    Guests explore historic castles, take boat trips across the Atlantic waters surrounding the Inner Hebrides, and dance at our now legendary LGBTQ+ women’s ceilidh (a traditional Scottish social organized around music, pronounced KAY-lee)-which we believe is the only ceilidh in the world designed specifically for LGBTQ+ women and non-binary people.

    Aka for everyone, so it’s probably not the only one in the world.

  • Advice booklet claims women are people

    Wouldn’t it be nice if no one had to be told any of this?

    Migrant advice booklet explains what rape is

    Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone on the planet already knew that you can’t just help yourself to someone else’s body?

    Asylum seekers arriving in Britain are being handed official booklets explaining what rape is and that men and women in Britain are “equal”.

    The nine-page document, published by the Home Office, tells migrants they must understand that “laws and customs here may be different from your home country”.

    On one page headed “Gender Equality”, arrivals are told that women can work, study, and travel freely without needing permission from a man in the UK.

    “In the UK, men and women have equal rights. This is an important part of UK culture and is protected by law,” says the booklet, which was produced for newly arrived asylum seekers.

    In a section on sex and consent, they are told that if they have sex with someone without their consent, “this is called rape”.

    Wouldn’t it be nice if all that were not our bizarre local custom but just obvious basic not being a shit? Wouldn’t it be nice if women were considered people everywhere on the planet?

  • Azza proud anti-Zionist trans woman

    Not a parody. Hard to believe.

  • Guest post: A chain too long for Trump

    Originally a comment by Whimster Gap on Baffled and concerned.

    There’s a lovely – probably apocryphal – story about James I & VI and his relationship with money that’s relevant here. James could be lavish in his spending and patronage, but also had a reputation for stinginess. If he was warned about his spending on something, it’d bounce off him; and so one day he was shown how much he’d spent on a project by having the equivalent value in coin tipped on the floor in front of him.

    He was horrified. Seeing the money made it real and so got around an intellectual block. Very clever though he may have been (and he was), his brain simply didn’t do money or big numbers. That’s probably true for most of us: big numbers are difficult to imagine.

    Trump is analogous here. He likes things he can see and that can be put in a ledger. Does spending on security cost? Yes. Does it yield an income in a way that a double-entry bookkeeper might be able to write it down? No. And so Trump doesn’t believe it’s real.

    You could try explaining to him that American military hegemony allows the US to write the rules of international trade and diplomacy, and that what we used to call the West is happy to go along with that because those rules are the continuation of a system that’s much older than American hegemony and that makes us all very wealthy.* You could try explaining this, but you’d fail, because he doesn’t have that kind of higher-level thinking. In his world, if you spend money, you get a thing in return.

    Spending money to secure peace to secure law to secure institutions to secure trade to secure wealth is just too long a chain.

    * Well, OK: not to write the rules, but to maintain and develop them. That was the deal at Bretton Woods. We Brits couldn’t sustain the system any more, but everyone agreed that it was a good system, and so we just moved it from London to New York, a bit like the Romans shifting power to Byzantium.

  • After comments HE made

    Well, this is one reason it matters.

    Rachel Amery at The Scotsman:

    There has been a great deal of discussion this week about how we look at rape.

    Q Manivannan MSP hit the headlines after comments they made in a podcast resurfaced, where the Edinburgh and Lothians East MSP said rape is a “spectrum” and rapists are “demonised”.

    There. Right there. The first two sentences of the piece, and we can see why.

    Q Manivannan is a man, who calls himself “non-binary”. How very convenient! He’s a man trying to make life easier for rape, so we absolutely need to know that he’s a man and not be tricked by some bullshit about how he’s nonbinareeeee. Men have a lot more motivation to belittle the importance of rape than women do, to put it mildly. How convenient it is for manly Manivannan that he is nonbinareeeee so he gets to say rapists are demonized without getting yelled at. If he were really nonbinareee he would have at least some understanding of how women view rape, but in reality he obviously has zero idea of what it’s like to be a woman.

  • Bad law guy loses

    Good news about Sarah Phillimore’s long-running resistance to Jolyon Maugham’s campaign to punish her.

    There was never any compelling evidence for him to make his accusations, let alone publicise them widely, to do me harm.

    I hope he will reflect, particularly in light of all he has said about the tragic death of Mr Arday.

    I don’t think he knows how to reflect.

    It will be interesting to see what Joly does next.

  • Readers added context

    Jolyon punching himself in the face again.

    Pompous barrister rebuked for lying on TwitX.

  • Really?

    Is it puzzling that humans have pets?

    Pets have long posed an evolutionary enigma for researchers. We have to feed them, house them, cut their toenails, clean their teeth and scratch behind their ears. A relationship like that could be considered a poor return on investment.

    “Lavishing resources on members of other species we have no evolutionary stake in seems to make no evolutionary sense,” said Hal Herzog, a psychologist and animal expert at Western Carolina University who was not involved with the research. Yet many cultures across the world have pets and cherish them dearly.

    Does it really seem to make no evolutionary sense?

    The many practical reasons for having pets (rodent control, guarding, protection, assistance in hunting and so on) aside, doesn’t well-being/happiness make evolutionary sense?

    Maybe this is just journalistic over-simplification of what makes evolutionary sense.

    “There are theories that pet-keeping began either because animals were useful for tasks like hunting and protection or because humans have a natural tendency to care for and bond with other living beings,” said Zoë Goldsborough, a behavioral ecologist at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior who was not involved with the research.

    Or both, ffs. Your dog can help with hunting and guard the pack and be a companion.

    Maybe this is just drastically oversimplified for a broad audience, but it seems simplified to the point of absurdity.

  • Goodbye 45 million acres of forest

    When in doubt, destroy everything.

    The Trump administration on Tuesday advanced a plan to open nearly 45 million acres of wilderness in national forests to road construction and logging, removing protections that had been in place for a quarter century.

    The proposal by the U.S. Forest Service would repeal the 2001 “roadless rule,” enacted during the Clinton administration to preserve the wild nature of forest land. It comes as President Trump pressures the agency to increase logging and to thin forests to reduce wildfire risk.

    If thinning forests reduces wildfire risk then that’s a reason to do it. Increasing logging until all the logs are gone, not so much.

    The repeal would hand a major victory to Republican-led states and industry groups that have argued for years that the prohibitions have hindered economic development. More than a dozen lawsuits have unsuccessfully sought to strike down the rule.

    Well you see economic development isn’t the only good. It’s one of them for sure, and a major one, but still there are others. Forests are a good. Forests that have not been denuded of most of their trees are a good. They are pollution sinks, just for one thing.

    During his first term, Mr. Trump stripped protections from Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, the largest intact temperate rainforest in the world, only for the Biden administration to restore them in 2023.

    This time, the Forest Service is eliminating protections for the nine million undeveloped acres within the Tongass, as well as millions more acres of pristine wilderness across the rest of the United States.

    When in doubt, destroy. When in doubt use up something that can’t be replaced. When in doubt, create a desert and call it development.

    Environmentalists said the plan would destroy untouched landscapes, including crucial habitats for migratory species and headwaters for major municipal water supplies. Multiple advocacy groups are expected to sue to block the repeal.

    “By ripping protections from some of our oldest intact forests, the Trump administration is endangering the drinking water supplies of tens of millions and threatening wildlife habitats and recreation opportunities in almost every state,” said Drew McConville, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a liberal research organization.

    Just buy bottled water.

  • Declaring

    The way to get what you want is to post an image of it.

    Trump posted an image of a map on social media Tuesday that labeled the Strait of Hormuz a “new” U.S. territory.

    Trump’s post — which was presented without additional comment — came after he said last week that he would “pretty soon” be “declaring the Hormuz Strait a territory of the United States.”

    Yeh that too. Declare, and post an image.

    Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi responded to President Donald Trump’s posting of a map labeling the Strait of Hormuz as a U.S. territory by saying the image amounted to a “delusion.”

    But a nice delusion! A comforting delusion. A happy delusion.

    Special Envoy Jared Kushner said Iran is “not showing any interest” in making a deal that makes sense for the U.S., but noted that dialogue between the two countries is more “robust” than ever.

    And by “robust” he means shouty.

  • Terms and conditions may vary

    Absolutely classic Jolyon.

    Check the fine print.

  • Baffled and concerned

    Some people are just a tiny bit curious about Trump’s hostility to South Korea and warm affection for its neighbor to the north.

    South Korea’s president said Tuesday a solid alliance with the United States underpins national security, after U.S. President Donald Trump’s abrupt order to “substantially reduce” joint military exercises left many many South Koreans baffled and concerned.

    Trump made the surprise announcement in a social media post just before U.S. and South Korean soldiers began Monday’s annual Ulchi Freedom Shield exercises, which are largely designed to sharpen readiness against North Korean threats.

    Trump cited what he said was a good relationship with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and South Korea’s refusal to join the U.S. war against Iran.

    Which is so Trump. He thinks he has “a good relationship” with Kim Jong Un (which of course he doesn’t: Kim is playing him like a fiddle) and that the imagined “relationship” with the boss is all there is to relations between the two countries. He’s mentally a child, and that child gets younger and dimmer every day.

    Trump’s move was apparently taken without consultations with South Korea and meant to reach out to Kim, deepening concerns about the reliability of the U.S.-South Korean alliance forged in the turmoil of the 1950-53 Korean War.

    That is, concerns about Trump’s understanding of that alliance and what his dimwitted understanding will prompt him to do.

    A weakening of the U.S. defense commitment could shake South Korea’s national security as it has no nuclear weapons and is under the U.S. “nuclear umbrella” protection, which guarantees a devastating American response in the event of an attack on its ally by nuclear-armed North Korea. The U.S. has about 28,500 troops in South Korea.

    Confidence in the U.S. has already eroded among many South Koreans because of Trump’s tariff war and last year’s immigration raid in the U.S. state of Georgia that led to the detention of hundreds of South Korean workers.

    …

    In his social media post, Trump said the military exercises with South Korea are not only costly but “send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile” to North Korea, which he said “has been unthreatening and respectful” during his time in the White House.

    By which he means Kim Jong Un has pretended to be his buddy and he’s stupid enough to believe the pretending.

  • He had expressed views

    Think before you cancel.

    A venue has accepted that it discriminated against a Jewish comedian when it cancelled his show at last year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

    Stand-up comic Philip Simon had been due to perform a solo show called Shall I Compere Thee In A Funny Way at The Banshee Labyrinth, on the city’s Niddry Street. However, the venue pulled his act over what it said were his views on the conflict in Gaza.

    His views were too Jewish. Now what does that remind me of…?

    In a statement given at the time to industry magazine Chortle, the venue said Mr Simon had expressed views on social media and elsewhere that it said “align with the rhetoric and symbology of groups associated with humanitarian violations”.

    Say what? “align with the rhetoric and symbology of”? It’s a venue saying all this? Since when are venues in the business of sniffing out “views” that “align with” a string of pompous quasi-academic verbiage?

    Mr Simon took legal action against the venue’s owner, Morrison Bros Ltd, claiming it had discriminated against him on the grounds of “unlawful belief-based discrimination”.

    And used pompous verbiage to do so. The pompous verbiage is important here. It allows and encourages people to think they’re saying something both reasonable and important, when they’re not.

  • Unless

    There’s always new dirt. The avalanche of dirt outpaces our ability to keep track of it.

    Exactly one year ago this week, Donald Trump threatened to impose “harsh measures” on the state of Colorado unless it agreed to release election denier Tina Peters from prison several years before her sentence runs its course. The degree to which the president was serious is still coming into focus.

    The New York Times reported late last week, for example, that as Trump publicly condemned the Rocky Mountain State for incarcerating a convicted felon, the White House organized an urgent “brainstorm call” with five federal agencies, with the goal of exploring ways to curtail federal support to Colorado. The meeting, evidently, was a success — at least as far as the administration was concerned.

    That’s…not how this is supposed to work. It’s just unabashed racketeering. “Cut her loose or you’ll have Johnny Filth on your tail for the rest of your life, which may be short.”

    The [day after the “brainstorm call”] the Department of Transportation and the Department of Energy, whose representatives were invited to the brainstorm, announced they were canceling hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants for Colorado projects.

    State officials say the email, which was revealed in a federal court hearing on Tuesday, is the clearest evidence yet that the Trump administration marshaled government resources to retaliate against Colorado over its use of mail-in ballots and its conviction of Ms. Peters, a county clerk who was found guilty in a plot to tamper with voting machines after the 2020 election.

    So we’re not allowed to prosecute election fraud now if it’s Trump who benefits from the fraud.

    The Times summarized late last year, “Miffed at Colorado’s votes against him in three successive elections and furious at its refusal to free Tina Peters, a convicted election denier and ardent Trump supporter, Mr. Trump has opened an assault against the Democratic-run state. His administration has cut off transportation money, relocated the military’s Space Command, vowed to dismantle a leading climate and weather research center and rejected disaster relief for rural counties hammered by floods and wildfires.”

    That last one is particularly nice. No disaster relief for you because this one crook went to prison.

    A few months later, the Republican administration also took steps to dismantle a renowned science lab in Colorado, which also appeared to be an extension of an aggressive retaliation scheme.

    But while the pattern is not new, what is new is the newly disclosed document: We’re now aware of an email, sent by White House special assistant Emily Underwood just days after the president published a series of messages related to Peters, which reinforces rather obvious suspicions that the administration’s campaign against Colorado was not a mere coincidence: Team Trump set out to punish the state, and then took a variety of steps to execute that plan.

    They’ll be arresting and torturing people’s children next.

  • The few Republicans

    Will they?

  • His very good relationship

    Yes but that’s not what any of this is about.

    Trump announced Sunday that the United States would reduce military exercises with key regional ally South Korea, just hours before they were due to get underway, citing his positive relationship with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Seoul’s lack of assistance with Iran.

    “Based on my very good relationship with Kim Jong Un, of North Korea, I am not happy with the fact that the United States has, long ago, agreed to participate in Joint Military Exercises with South Korea,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

    But his “relationship” with Kim Jong Un is beside the point, even if you are as gullible as Trump is about the reality of that relationship. Even if the two of them were great friends, that would not translate to North Korea’s being a friend and ally. At all. Not even the tiniest little bit.

    “These exercises are not only costly, with much of these costs paid for by the United States of America (as usual!), but send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile, to a Country that, as long as Donald J. Trump has been President, has been unthreatening and respectful.”

    North Korea is not a person, and Kim Jong Un is not actually a loving friend of Trump’s.

  • His good buddy

    Ummmm…yeah.

    What could possibly go wrong?

  • Forced to consider genner idenniny

    The SNP just will not stop defying the law.

    Public bodies will be forced to consider gender identity under a proposed Scottish human rights bill that threatens to undermine the Supreme Court’s ruling on sex.

    The draft Human Rights Bill for Scotland, due to be discussed at Holyrood in the coming weeks, contains a clause that would force public bodies to consider “gender identity” when forming policies and delivering services.

    …

    That would directly contradict the Supreme Court ruling in April 2025, which clarified that the definition of a woman is based on someone’s biological sex, not what gender someone feels they are.

    On account of how biological sex is real and inescapable, while what _______ people feel they are can be anything and everything and is of interest only to the feeler.

    SNP ministers have repeatedly attempted to frustrate how the Supreme Court ruling is implemented by fighting legal challenges over its schools and prisons policies. 

    On both occasions, the campaign group For Women Scotland (FWS) has successfully argued the policies, which allowed for biological males to enter female-only spaces, were unlawful.

    Do two occasions amount to “repeatedly”? Clumsy writing is clumsy.

    FWS said a Scottish human rights bill could become the latest example of the Scottish government attempting to bypass the Supreme Court ruling. The group warned that it was “almost guaranteed to be another law that will end up in the courts”.

    A FWS spokeswoman said: “Putting gender identity into Scots law is hugely problematic. The Equality Act recognises the right not to believe in the concept of gender identity yet the Scottish government plans to legislate for a compulsory belief in it and for public bodies to take it into account.”

    Which will be like legislating for a compulsory belief that people are whatever movie star or footballer or rock star or charismatic tv host they say they are.

  • Guest post: A clever and stupid political strategy

    Originally a comment by The Whimster Gap on A clause.

    Part of me wonders what the Scottish Government – and, in particular, the SNP-Green majority – is playing at; and part of me thinks that it is simultaneously a clever and stupid political strategy.

    Here’s the thought. The SNP now has several years’ experience trying to pass TRA-inspired hooooman rights legislation. Irrespective of the merits or demerits of these instruments, cooler heads within the Party must know that its attempts are doomed to founder on the rocks of the wider constitutional arrangements of the UK. So what gives?

    Well, there’ll be a good chunk of the SNP vote that is simply wedded to the idea of Scotland leaving the Union, and they’ll vote SNP irrespective of its other policies. Another chunk will be protest voters: they don’t particularly like Labour or the Tories, and are looking for an alternative. That explains why there’s a nontrivial group of Reform voters, too – it’s just a matter of whether your protest vote is left-facing or right-facing. Neither of these constituencies is necessarily be-gendered. But by embracing genderwang, the SNP has mopped up that constituency, too.

    Why, though? Why are the cooler heads in the party willing (with just a couple of exceptions) to go along with that?

    And the answer is that it’s precisely because it runs into, and is incompatible with, the law not just in the rest of the UK, but of the rest of the UK.

    Let’s say you’re a Holyrood government that wants to leave the Union. One part of doing that is to erode the legitimacy of UK institutions. But you can’t really complain that they’re undemocratic – not straightforwardly, granted that the Scots have twice as many elected representatives as the English – and so the national liberation stuff won’t wash. What you can do, though, is to get your devolved parliament to pass laws that you know will be unacceptable to the Scotland Office, or will be challenged in the UK Supreme Court. And you’ll lose.

    But in losing, you win something else. Now you’ve got an arrow to shoot: here’re institutions based in Westminster, or UK-wide, that are undermining the policies of, and laws passed by, the elected Scottish government. And that’s going to breed resentment, and to strengthen the calls for more devolution and for leaving the Union entirely. You could even throw in a few claims about colonialism if you wanted. They’d be bollocks, but that doesn’t really matter.

    It’s not quite a matter of engineering a constitutional crisis, but it is a matter of scraping away layers of legitimacy.

    And if that is the strategy, it’s quite clever. It’s also quite stupid, because imagine your manifesto for a new nation-state being tethered to such a daft idea. But that’d be a problem for another day.

    By the way: the Bill is intended to include CEDAW, so I’m really interested to know how they’re going to square that with the TRA stuff.

  • Guest post: Such a talentless fuck-up

    Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on About that Dormition thing.

    Is everything that exists the product of one supernatural guy who gave an order? (If so, doesn’t that require another supernatural someone, and another for that one, and infinite regress?)

    And they can’t/won’t even avail themselves of the claim that it’s turtles all the way down.

    Why does it make more sense to claim the eternal existence of an uncreated, all-powerful, supernatural intelligence than it is to theorize the emergence of the entire universe from nothing (or whatever it arose from)? The god hypothesis introduces an unnecessary step. And introduces problems they can’t address. An eternal supernatural being waited for, essentially, to the closest approximation, an infinite amount of time before creating the universe. What was he/she/it/they doing before coming up with the bright idea of making…everything. Must have been awfully boring and/or lonely. And, given all the prep time they had, you’d think that they’d have come up with something more perfect, without all the ad-hoc, jury-rigged contrivances (especially the biological ones) that you’d expect from an undesigned universe that had arisen naturally, all on its own.

    The best you might be able to hold out for is a deistic position, wherein your supernatural First Cause sets up initial conditions to get things started, and then buggers off and leaves the universe the hell alone to unfold as it will. But that’s not what all those supposedly sacred books claim. They all assert the existence, and the continuing influence and interference, of a god with an all-too-human personality, who gets pissed off when humans don’t worship him (it’s always a “him”) enough, or in the right way, and who blames humans for choosing incorrectly when exercising the “free will” with which he has so thoughtfully burdened us.

    [In one of the oldest horror stories ever, this god does such shitty job of world-making on his first attempt that he destroys it ALL (save for one family and all the animals they could cram on an impossible, wooden boat) and boots up Earth 2.0 using those few designated survivors (with no regard for the inevitable inbreeding depression that would have been brought about by the absolute narrowest of genetic bottlenecks possible). Not only was this god such a talentless fuck-up in his first attempt, necessitating (in his own thin-skinned, blinkered view,) a complete rewrite, he used the bluntest of instruments possible: omnicide. No drone strikes for him (hello, LIGHTNING?). He didn’t even go postal, but went right to the nuclear option, without discriminating between the guilty and the innocent, drowning all those animals and plants (who, being supposedly lesser, lacked by definition human free will, and could not be at all guilty of any of the human crimes and blasphemies which had caused this god to repent of his own handiwork). Over-reaction much? Why anyone would think this is a good story for children, or that this could possibly be used as a positive portrayal of their god is beyond me. This is the story of the ultimate abusive relationship. OBEY ME AND LOVE ME, OR I WILL KILL EVERYTHING. Oh, and take this pretty rainbow as a symbol of my promise that I won’t do this again.]

    If we think that can’t be right, and we point to all the reasons for thinking so, is that monoculture or is it just…well, thinking?

    These academics aren’t interested in leveling the playing field. They want to raze the stadium and muzzle or kill all of the opposing teams. If they had the power they wish they had, they would (c.f. any officially Islamist state in the present, any officially “Christian” state in the past). Because once they’ve silenced science, they’ll go after all of the other religions which are not the officially sanctioned on (c.f. most of recorded history). To paraphrase the key line from The Conversation, “They’d kill us if they had the chance. These sects do not worship the same god, and they’ll happily, joyously turn on each other to prove it. “Religion” is not monolithic, except in its fictionality.

    Most Christians, Jews, and Muslims have managed, for the most part, to start quietly disregarding some of the most of barbarous commands and prescriptions laid down in their scriptures, exchanging the cruel, unanswerable diktats of an absentee god acting through “his” priests and imams, in favour of the manifest benefits of a secular, multi-cultural armistice. But this progress is neither inevitable or irreversible. We have in the last century alone, multiple examples of constitutional breakdowns leading to political extremism, which can be seen, in their obvious cultishness and demands for total authority and obedience, as examples of religious extremism wearing the guise of politics, as the humans in question have aspired to god-like power. Stalin, Hitler, Mao, the Kims, Trump, all have sought the path of power laid out by religious precedent. They claim omniscience and omnipotence (though claiming and possessing are two quite different things, with the latter being, admittedly, at least in the sphere of human affairs, a bit easier than the former). And of course it’s all for the “common good” or the “worthy” or the “loyal,” with the evil, unworthy, or disloyal righteously punished. Even unto death.

    But while these megalomaniacs rise and fall, as they die and disappear, the abrahamic religions these mere mortals envy and mimic are able to carry on, generation on generation, millenia after their founders have died. Now that’s persistence. When will these structures and templates, enacted and perpetuated solely through human agency (there is no god behind the curtain, only men), be seen as distant, quaint, harmless fictions like the Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Norse pantheons?