Author: Ophelia Benson

  • Yes, it is a sin

    Cristina Odone is worried. What’s she worried about? She’s worried that Ireland is planning to change its abortion law – to legalize abortion when it’s necessary to save the woman’s life – on the basis of a mistake about what happened to Savita Halappanavar. Oh noes!

    I’m a Catholic but I believe abortion has to be legal. Yes, it is a sin; and yes, there are women who use it as contraception. But the risk of having a long roll call of tragic deaths like Savita’s is too cruel to contemplate. Like divorce, abortion should be available, but reserved as a last-resort nuclear option – and when the mother’s life is in danger is precisely such a scenario.

    The Irish U-turn over Savita’s death worries me, though. Is this the right result based on the wrong premise? As I have written here before, listening to the radio interview with the journalist who broke the story, we’re left with the distinct impression that she is not sure that Savita or her husband actually asked for, and were refused, a termination. Nor does she explain what condition the mother-to-be was in when she was admitted to hospital: in other words, was she healthy and her death was preventable by an abortion, or was she suffering from some other condition, which eventually killed her?

    And that’s the thing to worry about, clearly. Could Parveen Halappanavar be all wrong, or lying, about what happened at Galway University Hospital? Or could Savita have had some other mortal illness that had nothing to do with her pregnancy and that nobody knew about or mentioned to Praveen? That’s the thing to worry about, rather than the possibility (or likelihood) that this has happened many times in Ireland without a Praveen to go to the media about it, and rather than the need to make sure it doesn’t happen in the future.

    That kind of thinking is the real “sin.”

  • Cristina Odone worries about Ireland’s changed abortion law

    Because when in doubt, let the woman die.

  • Ireland to legalize abortion when mother’s life is at risk

    Up until now the government has not enacted legislation to give certainty to doctors as to when terminations can be carried out and under what circumstances.

  • They would regret helping the “infidel” campaign against polio

    First, do no harm.

    First, don’t be evil.

    It’s strange how easily a lot of people lose sight of that basic thought, or never entertain it in the first place.

    What would be high on a list of harms not to do? Killing people who are working to prevent polio in a country where 35 children have been infected with polio this year, when nearly all other countries in the world are polio-free.

    High high high on the list. One, polio is bad; very very bad. Immunizing people against it is an unqualified good. Two, people who are working to immunize children against polio are doing a good thing, and don’t deserve to be killed for doing it.

    And yet, there are people who murder young women who are working to immunize children against polio in Pakistan, where 35 children have been infected with polio this year. The immunization campaign has been suspended in Karachi as a result.

    Three women were killed and a man was wounded in two separate attacks on health workers in Karachi on Tuesday, said senior police superintendent police Imran Shaukat.

    The team had received telephone calls warning workers they would regret helping the “infidel” campaign against polio, said health official Gul Naz, who oversees project in the area where the women were shot.

    An anti-polio worker in Karachi was shot dead on Monday, the United Nations said.

    In the northwestern city of Peshawar on Tuesday, gunmen on a motorbike shot a 17-year-old girl supervising an anti-polio campaign, said government official Javed Marwar.

    She died of her wounds in hospital, a doctor said.

    All of the victims were Pakistanis working with a U.N.-backed program to eradicate polio, which attacks the nervous system and can cause permanent paralysis within hours of infection.

    It has been eradicated in all but a handful of countries but at least 35 children in Pakistan have been infected this year.

    In Karachi, provincial Health Minister Saghir Ahmed said the government had told 24,000 polio workers it was suspending the anti-polio drive in the province.

    It’s monstrous.

  • Pakistan: gunmen shoot five anti-polio workers

    Four women killed, one man injured for helping the “infidel” campaign against polio. At least 35 children in Pakistan have been infected this year.

  • “Married” six times in one night

    The Islamists in Northern Mali are getting more unpleasant.

    On a sweltering afternoon, Islamist police officers dragged Fatima Al Hassan out of her house in the fabled city of Timbuktu. They beat her up, shoved her into a white pickup truck and drove her to their headquarters. She was locked up in a jail as she awaited her sentence: 100 lashes with an electrical cord.

    “Why are you doing this?” she recalled asking.

    Hassan was being punished for giving water to a male visitor.

    Grabbed, beaten up, abducted, “sentenced” to 100 lashes with an electrical cord, for giving water to a man. Fatima Al Hassan does something ordinary and sociable, and a bunch of men commit a whole set of violent crimes against her to punish her for that.

    “The people are losing all hope,” said Sadou Diallo, a former mayor of the northern city of Gao. “For the past eight months, they have lived without any government, without any actions taken against the Islamists. Now the Islamists feel they can do anything to the people.”

    So they do.

    Why do people want to do shit like that? Why don’t they hate their “god” and run away from it?

    Refugees fleeing the north are now bringing stories that are darker than those recounted in interviews from this summer. Although their experiences cannot be independently verified — because the Islamists have threatened to kill or kidnap Westerners who visit — U.N. officials and human rights activists say that they have heard similar reports of horrific abuses and that some may amount to war crimes.

    The refugees say the Islamists are raping and forcibly marrying women, and recruiting children for armed conflict. Social interaction deemed an affront to their interpretation of Islam is zealously punished through Islamic courts and a police force that has become more systematic and inflexible, human rights activists and local officials say.

    …

    “They are going around asking every pregnant woman who made her pregnant,” said Alkaya Toure, an official with Cri de Coeur, a Malian human rights group. “They also rely on spies inside the populations in Gao, Timbuktu and elsewhere.”

    But as a reward for loyalty, the Islamists have found a religious loophole. They have encouraged their fighters to marry women and girls, some as young as 10, and often at gunpoint. After sex, they initiate a quick divorce. In an extreme case that has shocked the country, a girl in Timbuktu was forced last month to “marry” six fighters in one night, according to a report in one of Mali’s biggest newspapers.

    A positively papal level of hypocrisy.

    In a telephone interview, a senior Islamist commander conceded that his fighters were marrying young girls.

    “Our religion says that if a girl is 12, she must get married to avoid losing her virginity in a wrong way,” said Oumar Ould Hamaha, the military leader of the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa…

    And a “wrong” way of course is one without “marriage” – but “marriage” is whatever we say it is, so we can whip you or stone you or fuck you and then divorce you, whichever we choose.

    And they treat boys and men like crap too.

    I’m so sick of thugs.

     

  • Mali: Islamists’ attacks on people grow more brutal

    A woman is sentenced to 100 lashes with an electrical cord for giving water to a male visitor.

  • Delhi: woman gang-raped on private bus

    The woman was travelling with a male friend on Sunday night when they were attacked. They were brutally beaten, stripped and thrown out of the vehicle.

  • What dialogue?

    The pope has his message of peace for the new year all written and typed up and translated and posted online. The pope is way ahead of the game! The pope can kick back and watch some football.

    Well it won’t have been very difficult. It doesn’t break any new ground. Somebody could have put it together by cutting and pasting from previous messages of peace for the new year.

    It’s not very rich in what you might call self-awareness or self-knowledge.

    In addition to the varied forms of terrorism and international crime, peace is also endangered by those forms of fundamentalism and fanaticism which distort the true nature of religion, which is called to foster fellowship and reconciliation among people.

    Oh? Religion is called to foster fellowship and reconciliation among people? Is it really? Does the Catholic church have a long history of that?

    No, of course not. Quite the reverse…unless of course you take “fellowship and reconciliation among people” to mean “fellowship and reconciliation on our terms.” Fellowship and reconciliation provided you surrender and submit. Fellowship and reconciliation provided you join our club, and endless war and revenge if you don’t.

    That’s become less popular over the last three or four centuries, so the church has gradually gotten into the habit of talking emollient fluff about fellowship and reconciliation. It doesn’t mean it though. It wants to be the boss of all of us.

    In every person the desire for peace is an essential aspiration which coincides in a certain way with the desire for a full, happy and successful human life. In other words, the desire for peace corresponds to a fundamental moral principle,
    namely, the duty and right to an integral social and communitarian development, which is part of God’s plan for mankind. Man is made for the peace which is God’s gift.

    See what he does there?

    He talks in two completely different and opposing veins, as if they were one and the same. He’s cheating.

    He talks in secular terms, about what human beings want and need, and then he sticks god in it, when god has nothing to do with it. Then at the end he simply gives god credit for the thing we want and need and don’t have. What tf does he mean “peace is god’s gift” – what gift?! Where is it? I mean, there’s peace where I am, and I’m very fortunate that way, but there are millions of pockets all over the world where “god’s gift” either never arrived or got smashed up lately.

    He does it throughout the “message” of course. It’s what he does; it’s what they do. But it’s cheating.

    To become authentic peacemakers, it is fundamental to keep in mind our transcendent dimension and to enter into constant dialogue with God, the Father of mercy, whereby we implore the redemption achieved for us by his only-begotten Son. In this way mankind can overcome that progressive dimming and rejection of peace which is sin in all its forms: selfishness and violence, greed and the will to power and dominion, intolerance, hatred and unjust structures.

    Dude – how am I supposed to “enter into constant dialogue” with someone who has never given me the slightest reason to think it is there? Why is the onus on me? Why are you telling me to talk to someone who doesn’t answer? Seriously. Why are you telling me to talk to someone who doesn’t answer? Why do you call it a dialogue? You know very well it’s not a dialogue, so why do you call it that?

    Yes he does. Of course he knows. Does he ever record god talking? Does he ever quote any of god’s recent sayings? He quotes putative old sayings of god’s, but that doesn’t count as a dialogue. I can quote Shakespeare, but I don’t call that a dialogue with dear Will.

    It’s all a cheat. It’s just habit that makes that non-obvious to some people.

  • The pope has a fancy new hat

    It’s got pictures of people on it. Carmen Miranda would be jealous. Oh and btw same sex marriage threat to peace blah.

  • Kuwait introduces death penalty for ‘cursing God and prophets’

    Kuwaiti MPs approved a death penalty for Muslims who curse God, the Koran, all prophets and Mo’s wives. Non-Muslims get a minimum of 10 years.

  • A scientific pioneer and a reluctant role model

    “I have not set myself up to be a role model for women, but it does seem to be more of an issue than it used to be,” cognitive neuroscientist Dr. Brenda Milner explains.

  • Epidemics of accusations

    I re-read some of Michael Shermer’s Why People Believe Weird Things this morning, to refresh my memory. I’ve read that and Why We Believe and the odd article here and there. I’ve never liked his writing much. It’s not bad, but it’s a little loose and lazy. Characterless. Journalistic.

    I was interested to see that chapter 7 is titled Epidemics of Accusations: Medieval and Modern Witch Crazes. The modern ones are the panics about “Satanic” abuse in the 1980s and about “recovered memory” in the 90s. They’re interesting subjects and ones I’ve read a fair bit about, thanks to Frederick Crews and Elizabeth Loftus among others. It’s terrible stuff – people’s lives ruined by ridiculous beliefs about Satanic rapes that never happened and “recovered memories” of Daddy committing a murder for which he was sent to jail with no other evidence. (He was let out after more than six years.)

    While re-reading that chapter I became quite…annoyed that Shermer had accused me of witch hunting. He compared me to people who put innocent people in prison on the basis of absurd beliefs.

    Think about it. I said he had perpetuated an insulting stereotype about women by saying that wanting to stand up and speak about atheism and be intellectually active about it was “more a guy thing.” He said I was a witch hunter.

    Not quite proportionate.

    Anthony K said a good thing on Crommunist’s post A Response to Lee today.

    And this is what it comes down to.

    This is why the skeptical movement has been largely so unsuccessful. If Lee, or Shermer, were at all interested in the putative goals of the skeptics movement, namely to make the world a more rational place, they’d be much less interested in justifying why they think skepticism is a “guy thing”, and much more interested in making it as much an “everybody’s thing” as possible.

    But of course, they’re not.

    The skeptical movement has never been about outreach. It’s never been about helping to make the greater community outside the skeptics movement itself more skeptical, or rational.

    It’s always been a clubhouse for those who think of themselves as smarter than average.

    This is why Jenny McCarthy cleaned the skeptical movement’s clock. This is why Sylvia Browne still makes money hand over fist.

    Good luck with your little guild, Shermer.

    It’s all leather chairs and humidors.

  • A Facebook page named “Allah”

    An Egyptian blogger wrote about Waleed Al Husseini more than two years ago, when he was arrested by the Palestinian authorities.

    Palestinian blogger Waleed Al Husseini has been detained by the Palestinian authorities for creating a Facebook page named “Allah”! it was reported and shut down and Waleed created this page, that page, and that page, that is already hacked, to fight those who keep censoring his thoughts.

    Waleed Khalid Hasayen is a 26 year old blogger who was arrested in the West Bank city of Qalqilya by the Palestinian authorities on the grounds of religious contempt and promoting atheism. On his blog “Nour Al Akl” or The enlightened Mind, he refuted all religious arguments – specially Islam – and he wrote long detailed posts on the fallacy of religions.

    Now he’s out of jail, and at a distance from the people who arrested him, but his situation is precarious. I’m hoping we (the community) can help him.

  • If only

    Well this sums it up…

    via Dr Jim’s Thinking Shop.

  • So I commented under the name “James”

    It’s not just mouthy atheist feminist women. It’s not just mouthy atheist feminist me. It’s not just mouthy feminist gamers, or programmers, or columnists. It’s everywhere.

    Like theology, for instance, I see via Marlowe Filippov. JTB at rudetruth:

    I’ve been following with some interest, given my previous interaction with the blog on the limerick thing, the conversation on Theoblogy in response to Tony’s question, “where are the women.” My first reaction to this post was positive–despite what some criticized as a prejudicial phrasing of the question–because, after all, concern about the unintended homogeneity of our communities, particularly our Christian communities, is a commendable concern. Moreover, it seemed clear from the post that Tony felt the absence of women’s voices on his blog commentary to be a lack and that he was asking for feedback to rectify what he considered a problem.

    Very quickly, as the comment thread spun itself out, a couple of things became clear. The first was that many women did not feel like the comment threads were a space they could enter and be heard or respected; various reasons were offered for this. The second was that Tony was quick to defend his good intentions against these proffered possible reasons for the lack of women’s voices in the blog comments.

    Since I myself had dared to enter the fray on the limerick discussion, and had been hard put to defend my (and Julie’s) critique of the limerick contest in conversation with Tony and others, including having to absorb without retaliation more than a few unconstructive and personal comments, I think the suggestion that the general atmosphere of the blog as hostile to women’s voices is pretty accurate. That’s not to suggest that this is anyone’s intention; on the contrary–it’s clearly unintentional. But it is something that can be intentionally addressed, which is what I took Tony’s post “where are the women”
    to be a step toward.

    It is something that can be intentionally addressed – or it can be called a “witch hunt” and vigorously shouted down by furious defensive men.

    JTB decided to do an experiment.

    So I commented under the name “James.” And wrote exactly what I would have written as JTB. That is to say, I was myself. With a pretend penis.

    And lo and behold! Not only was I respectfully engaged, I actually won agreement from someone who challenged my original comment.

    As JTB, in response to my numerous comments on the limerick contest post, I was told my critique was ludicrous; that to  hold my opinion suggested I lacked even a modicum of common sense; that I labored under various mistaken assumptions; that I was a buzz kill; that I was vaginal retentive (as opposed to anal, that’s for boys only?); I was even limericked about (a particularly sly dig, given the context); I was never acknowledged by name or as a colleague; and genuine follow-up questions went unanswered completely.

    As James, I was addressed by name; asked genuinely critical questions; received an affirmation of the importance of my point; and when I defended my original point, received a concession from my respectful challenger.

    That’s stereotype in action. It’s obviously poisonous. Yet mention of the problem – if it has the temerity to include an example – is greeted with roars of rage and wild accusations.

     

  • A comrade

    Meet Waleed Alhusseini.

    I ran a blog in Arabic called Nour Alakl. I was also active on Facebook, running a satirical page under the pseudonym of Allah. In October 2010 I was arrested in the street near an internet cafe. I had believed that I had a right to the freedom of speech and to the freedom of belief.

    But in jail I was told that my online statements about religion and Islam were illegal. I was told that society didn’t accept such criticisms. I was beaten by prison guards who demanded to know who had made me write against Islam. In their minds, I could only say these things as the result of some plot, some conspiracy. That I might simply want to express my independent thoughts was alien to them.

    I spent the worst 10 months of my life in a Palestinian jail, facing constant pressure to say I was sorry. I was told they had removed my blog and that I must apologise for publishing it. Even once I free I was told I should never again use the internet, nor meet the media. For months after my release I was harassed by the security services, who further interrogated me and detained me without cause. I received letters from people saying they wanted to kill me.

    It’s a familiar story, but no less horrifying for that.

    He’s not changing his mind though. He’s still an ex-Muslim, an atheist, a believer in human rights.

    Eventually, I left the West Bank for Jordan. I obtained a visa from the French embassy. I am now in Paris, having applied for asylum. I am still awaiting an answer after six months. It has become harder and harder. From here I do have chance to blog in Arabic and in English as “Proud Atheist”. But I am now effectively in exile. I am living alone in a foreign city, cut off from friends and family. All over words.

    I still do not feel safe. If I cannot stay, if I am not protected, then maybe the Palestinian authorities will arrest me again. That is my fear. I want to be active, but safety is my priority. I want the international community to care for those like me who are persecuted simply for speaking their minds, to stand against the laws in any country which limits basic freedoms of thought and expression. For we are human and freedom only means living our lives without hurting others.

    When I had read that far I stopped reading and went to Facebook to see if I could find him. I could, and I did a friend request, and he accepted within seconds. This dude needs allies and friends and solidarity! Make friends with him. Maybe we can help him get asylum. I’ve already emailed people at CFI. We blew it with Alex Aan; let’s try to help Waleed Al-Husseini.

  • The Freedom of Thought 2012 report

    Waleed Alhusseini spent ten months in a Palestinian jail for having kept an atheist blog.

  • Debate on Islam and evolution meets opposition

    “We eventually had to give up of getting any support from student societies because it was seen as simply too controversial.”

  • Such a petty god

    Alyson Miers has a good post on the “god didn’t prevent the shootings at Sandy Hook because secularism” meme.

    To those of us who believe in no God at all, you’re saying that your God is an asshole. You’re telling us that making everyone worship Him is more important to God than saving children’s lives.

    To those who believe in different gods, or different ideas of the same God, you’re telling them that they are part of the problem because they want their children to go to school in a non-sectarian environment. You are asking them to think there would be less violence in the world if they allowed your religious traditions to be honored in the public sphere, at taxpayer expense, above their own.

    The more you think about the claim, the weirder it gets. God is that childish? Really? You want to go with that?

    This is an omniscient god, don’t forget. An omniscient god would be aware of the reasons people have for favoring secularism, including our long history of religious wars and persecution. It seems odd to think that such a god would be so put out by not being invited into public school classrooms that it would simply refuse to prevent Adam Lanza from killing all those children.

    It seems odd to believe in – and worship – a god who would refuse to prevent things like that out of sheer spite. Abortion is supposed to be such a terrible crime, but god letting murders and earthquakes and wars do their worst is perfectly fine.

    They don’t see it that way. I know. But it’s odd that they don’t. (Well, some do, and thus you get Teresa McBains and Jerry DeWitts.)