Author: Ophelia Benson

  • Language reform

    Really, there is something faintly disgusting about all the serious newspapers talking about bin Laden’s three “widows.” For one thing – three? Three widows? If there are three, they’re not “widows” in the usual sense of the word. It’s too much “respect” for polygamy to call them widows (or wives) – you need different words for a system in which men can have lots while women can have no more than a fraction of one.

    For another thing – widows? That assumes they were genuine wives first, having been genuinely married. In fact, from what I’ve read, at least one of them was simply given to him by her father or some other Important man, like a bottle of vodka.

    Come on. These women weren’t wives or widows, they were slaves.

  • US will talk to the three bin Laden “widows”

    That is, to the three women bin Laden bought and held in slavery in his compound.

  • Texas senate: guns ok on state college campuses

    All Texas students will be above average, or else.

  • Meet the deity

    I’d forgotten this. It’s quite funny (if I do say so myself).

  • Eman al-Obeidy has escaped to Tunisia

    After her release from police custody, she was detained in Tripoli and prevented from leaving the country or going home to Benghazi.

  • Knowing is deciding

    Via Jerry Coyne, I find Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, which in turn is the “flagship” of the Southern Baptist Convention, which is the notoriously reactionary outfit that Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter abandoned when it ruled that married women are subordinate to their husbands – I find Albert Mohler, I say, turning and rending a Christian less doctrinaire than himself.

    In making his case, Giberson uses the old argument that God has given humanity two books of revelation — the Bible and the created order. This is one of Giberson’s most frequently offered arguments. It is a theologically disastrous argument in his hands, for he allows modern naturalistic science to silence the Bible, God’s written revelation.

    Right. My question is, how exactly does Mohler know the bible is God’s written revelation? Of course I know roughly how he “knows”: he just does. But I want to know exactly how he knows.

    How, for instance, would he know if it were not? How does he know how he would know if it were not? What, exactly, are his criteria? What would the bible be like if it were not God’s written revelation, and how is that different from what the bible is like?

    Do they ever say, people like him? Do they ever give any actual reason for “believing” the bible is God’s written revelation?

    I don’t think they do. Correct me if I’m wrong. As far as I know they just “believe” it, as one might sign a contract. They sign up to it. It’s not cognitive at all, it’s an act of will.

    That’s not the right way to know things.

  • Photoshopping women out of history

    A Hasidic newspaper slices the Secretary of State out of that photo in the Situation Room. Nobody here but us guys.

  • Hitchens on losing his voice

    One can become quite used to the specter of the eternal Footman, like some lethal old bore lurking in the hallway at the end of the evening, hoping to have a word.

  • Simon Leys on Orwell in diaries and letters

    “I know from experience that once I have met & spoken with anyone I shall never again be able to show any intellectual brutality towards him, even when I feel that I ought to.”

  • Australia: teachers protest goddy comic

    Shows a callous teacher ignoring bullying, urges prayer instead – on the website of Access Ministries, which runs 96% of RE classes in Victorian primary schools.

  • BHA on Nadine Dorries’s abstinence bill

    Teach girls to keep their knees together because boys will be boys.

  • “An expert weighs in” on bin Laden’s afterlife

    The moment martyrs die, they’re given new bodies in paradise and enjoy a blessed existence, “expert” says.
  • Debating creationism, ID and Holocaust denial

    Creationists and Holocaust deniers require a rejection of overwhelming scientific/historical evidence and thus rule themselves out of any serious discussion.

  • Pseudo-historian David Barton has a good week

    The New York Times treated Barton and the world of scholars who’ve devoted their lives to disciplined historical analysis as though their analyses are of equal weight.

  • “Progressive” Xian group rejects LGBT ad

    Sojourners said “we don’t want to take sides.” Progressive my foot.

  • Apology for Spanish Inquisition executions

    Thousands of “heretics” were burned at the stake after Ferdinand and Isabella set up the Inquisition to root out remnants of Islam and Judaism.

  • Templeton buys whole Oxford colleges? Srsly?

    Ah Templeton Templeton Templeton, how it does creep in everywhere, like mildew.

    There’s this Oxford professor saying why thenewatheists are stupid and wrong. Guess where he comes from.

    While “new atheists” Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have been grabbing headlines with their bold claims that modern science has killed off God, an Oxford professor has been quietly chipping away at the ground they stand on. John C Lennox, Professor of Mathematics and Fellow in the Philosophy of Science at Oxford’s Green Templeton College, has been popping up at debates around the globe to take issue with the most prominent new atheists.

    At what? At Oxford’s what? Oxford’s Green what?

    Can’t be, I thought. Must be just a coincidence of name. Some Admiral Green who showed Napoleon what’s what and some Viscount Templeton who carried the chamber pot for George II. Must be.

    So I hastened to look it up…and no. It’s not Viscount Templeton of Steeple Magna, Hampshire. It’s not Georgiana Templeton of Ladbroke Grove, founder of hospitals. It’s not gallant Captain Templeton, protector of women and children during the Siege of Jenkinsabad. It’s just same old same old John moneybags Templeton of Pennsylvania.

    1965 Oxford Centre for Management Studies established under the Chairmanship of Sir Norman Chester…

    1983 Major benefaction received from Mr (later Sir) John Templeton.

    1984 Name changed to Templeton College and first students are matriculated…

    2008 Merger with Green College.

    2011 Professor publishes book saying why thenewatheists are stupid and wrong.

  • Science hasn’t buried god so ha

    A professor at Oxford’s Templeton-Green College (yes) finds lots of gaps for god to sit in.