The Huffington Post (who else?) gives a woman named Sumbul Ali-Karamali a space in which to say “what is all this fuss about sharia, sharia is perfectly fine, and besides it’s not the law anywhere, and besides everything is culture, and besides islamophobia, and besides you have to interpret.”

There are six principles of shariah. They are derived from the Qur’an, which Muslims believe is the word of God. All Islamic religious rules must be in line with these six principles of shariah…The Qur’an is old. The fiqh books of jurisprudence are old. To modern eyes, they can look just as outdated as other ancient texts, including the Bible and Torah. That’s why, just like the Bible and the Torah,

Julian Baggini points out “an inconvenient truth about science that religion would prefer to ignore”:

[A]lthough it is true that science doesn’t rule out a role for religion in providing meaning, or a God who kick-started the whole universe off in the first place, it does leave presumed dead in the water anything like the God most people over history have believed in: one who is closely involved in his creation, who intervenes in our lives, and with whom we can have a personal relationship.

Most people over history, and to this day. People who believe in the attenuated hand-wavy god of Karen Armstrong and Terry Eagleton are a tiny minority of believers.… Read the rest

Update: comments were closed by accident; there’s nothing special about this post that made comments undesirable. Beg pardon.

Norman Birnbaum said in a review of two books on Norman Podhoretz

In the end, the indignation of the critics reinforced Podhoretz’s tendency to think of himself as isolated, his antipathy to other intellectuals. He saw arguments with others as proof of his own virtue.

Yes indeed; there is always that risk, in having opinions that are in some way unpopular or unorthodox or otherwise combative. One can come to think that the more indignant one’s opponents are, the more virtuous One is Oneself.

This is an excellent reason for the Haters of Gnu Atheists to stfu. They don’t want to make … Read the rest

The Republicans must be spending money like water (thanks to the Citizens United decision). I got a phone call last night from someone who claimed to be doing a “poll” but it transparently wasn’t a poll at all, it was a ridiculous stealth advertisement.

The guy asked a few neutralish questions at first, then asked if, if I were voting today, I would vote for the Democrat candidate for the US senate or the Republican candidate ditto. “You mean Democratic?” I said. He repeated the question. I repeated my question. “Ma’am, I have to read the question exactly as it is.” Right; well only Republicans use “Democrat” as an adjective that way, and they do it to annoy, so we … Read the rest

If you haven’t seen the merengue dog…well it’s a life-altering thing.

Don’t miss it.

Really.… Read the rest

Joan Smith is very happy to live in the “geopolitical epicentre of the culture of death” that is contemporary London. Of course she damn well is. She’s allowed to go out in public with without a chaperone there; she won’t be stoned to death there; she won’t be whipped for not wearing hijab there. She can ignore the pope there.

Frankly, I’m tired of hearing religious bigots running down this country….Britain is still one of the most civilised places in the world to live. It’s not Iran, where prisoners are subjected to rape and mock executions; it isn’t Saudi Arabia either…The Catholic Church has picked up this habit of dissing secular culture from hardline Muslims, who dislike pretty much the