Author: Ophelia Benson

Holy shit.

More extremist posters have been discovered in the East London borough of Tower Hamlets.

It is understood the posters were found last Thursday morning at council-managed housing blocks in Shadwell, next to the DLR and Overground station.

They state: “You are entering a Shariah controlled zone. Islamic rules enforced.”

Underneath, images declare that smoking, alcohol, music, drugs, prostitution and porn are forbidden.

In other words, good morning, the Taliban has arrived in Shadwell. If you live here, your life is now hell. Have a nice day.

Islamic preacher Anjem Choudary, who said in 2008 that gays should be stoned to death, has claimed responsibility for the campaign.

Ah. Well that’s a relief. If it’s true, that means it’s just one loon as opposed to a group; a Taliban of one. Choudary seems to be a “preacher” who preaches to no one in particular; one who has, in short, no followers.

Still. It’s not one of London’s pleasanter features.

Guest post by Patrick O’Malley.

I wrote 2 apologies for the Archbishop in Ireland, who is preparing to give an apology after the scathing Cloyne report, which showed that in 2011 the Catholic church continues to be criminally negligent about clergy child sex. Both apologies are completely honest, so they are inadmissible in today’s Catholic church:

1) Let’s be honest. We don’t care. A few of our priests raped your kids. We don’t care. It’s a nuisance. They’re only kids. Let’s get back to fighting women priests, condoms, and gays, and fixing everyone else in this world. Now shut up, go home, and don’t bring this up again. God bless, fools.

2) I’m so embarrassed to be a Catholic priest today. We raped tens of thousands of children. We hid the truth. We lied about it. We ignored the children. I am so sick to my stomach about how we disgraced God, that I can’t forgive myself or anyone else in the Catholic church. For the future of the church, we have all decided to resign.

Pope Benedict decided that the only way to save the church was to have us all resign. Today. We are going to use church money to enact laws to force all of us to be put in jail for the rest of our lives. Benedict (who has dropped the title Pope, effective immediately) is knocking on the door of a jail today asking to be put in the general population. The rest of us think that the only way for God to save our souls after the way we’ve disgraced the church is to spend the rest of our lives trying to save the souls of prisoners, the worst people on earth. I’ve cried all day about the fact that we didn’t try to save the souls of the best people on earth – the poor, innocent children that we raped.

We have hired financial people to sell all of our churches and to purchase replacement buildings that are smaller and cheaper. We have invested well – we’re going to make a ton of money. Half will be set up in an open account for therapy for victims of child rape. If you were raped by a priest, go to therapy any time. We’ll pay. We are so sorry for what we’ve put you through. If you weren’t raped by a priest and go anyway, we’ll pay. That’s part of our Christian contribution to show the world how sorry we are. We never earned that money, and we hope the parishioners think it’s a good investment in the future.

The other half of the money will go to cure hunger. We’re crying that we didn’t think of this earlier. Children around the world are dying because they can’t eat, and we are in buildings that are so expensive, that we could have fed them by trading down. We’re finally doing it. We also promise that all current priests will never eat more than the most underfed person on earth.

We’re hoping we don’t go to hell for taking so long, and letting so many children suffer.

For whoever continues the church, it’s actually so simple – please follow the 10 Commandments, and do What Jesus Would Do. If any of us had done that, none of this would have happened. Forget the importance of money. It works out God doesn’t care about money.

We’re so sorry we have disgraced you, and set such a horrible example for you, and we are mortally sorry we have disgraced God. God bless you. We were fools.

Christopher Shea on Patricia Churchland.

“It all changed when I learned about the prairie voles,” she says—surely not a phrase John Rawls ever uttered.

She told the story at the natural-history museum, in late March. Montane voles and prairie voles are so similar “that naifs like me can’t tell them apart,” she told a standing-room-only audience (younger and hipper than the museum’s usual patrons—the word “neuroscience” these days is like catnip). But prairie voles mate for life, and montane voles do not. Among prairie voles, the males not only share parenting duties, they will even lick and nurture pups that aren’t their own. By contrast, male montane voles do not actively parent even their own offspring. What accounts for the difference? Researchers have found that the prairie voles, the sociable ones, have greater numbers of oxytocin receptors in certain regions of the brain. (And prairie voles that have had their oxytocin receptors blocked will not pair-bond.)

Prairie voles. Oxytocin receptors. It’s not…this person is kind and generous while that person is cruel and ruthless. It’s oxytocin receptors. It is disconcerting. Shakespeare and Austen suddenly seem beside the point.

“As a philosopher, I was stunned,” Churchland said, archly. “I thought that monogamous pair-bonding was something one determined for oneself, with a high level of consideration and maybe some Kantian reasoning thrown in. It turns out it is mediated by biology in a very real way.”

Kant and Austen turn out to be beside the point.

Again a top cleric – excuse me, a “faith leader” – frankly admits that religion is the opposite of egalitarianism. Once again a “faith leader” (male, of course) admits that he and his religion consider equality legislation incompatible with “religious liberty.”

Seems a bit stupid, doesn’t it? To come right out and say that your religion is opposed to equality?

The “chief rabbi” said

I share a real concern that the attempt to impose the current prevailing template of equality and discrimination on religious organisations is an erosion of religious liberty.

We are beginning to move back to where we came in in the 17th century – a whole lot of people on the Mayflower leaving to find religious freedom elsewhere.

Some far distant land, populated only by funny little people who can be brushed aside, where they will be free to treat women and homosexuals like dirt. The city on a hill.