Jerry Coyne’s post on Francis Collins versus Primo Levi on theodicy prompted me to read Survival in Auschwitz again. So I am. I read this passage earlier today, on p 41, in which Levi reports something another prisoner told him:

…precisely because the Lager was a great machine to reduce us to beasts, we must not become beasts; that even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness; and that to survive we must force ourselves to save at least the skeleton, the scaffolding, the form of civilization. We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death, but we still possess one

Poor bishop. He may have just meant something like ‘Take the Taliban seriously,’ but he said more than that.

There’s a large number of things that the Taliban say and stand for which none of us in the west could approve, but simply to say therefore that everything they do is bad is not helping the situation because it’s not honest really. The Taliban can perhaps be admired for their conviction to their faith and their sense of loyalty to each other.”

Yes but…pretty much everything they do that is relevant to this discussion is bad. They probably manage to sleep and scratch itches in ways that are not bad, but their public activities are bad. They do bad … Read the rest

Sad.

[T]he Qur’an’s message of equality resonated in the teaching that women and men have been created from a single self and are each other’s guides who have the mutual obligation to enjoin what is right and to forbid what is wrong. But, then, there are those other verses that Muslims read as saying that men are better than women and their guardians and giving men the right to unfettered polygyny and even to beat a recalcitrant wife. To read the Qur’an in my youth was thus to be caught up in a seemingly irresolvable and agonizing dilemma of how to reconcile these two sets of verses not just with one another but also with a view of God

The archbishop is miffed. He’s irritated, he’s annoyed, he’s wounded, he’s upset. He thinks it’s all a mistake. He can’t understand, he just can’t understand.

The Archbishop of Canterbury has accused the Government of treating all religious believers as “oddities” and “eccentric”. Dr Rowan Williams said ministers were wrong to think that Christian beliefs were no longer relevant in modern Britain and he criticised Labour for looking at religious faith as a “problem” rather than valuing the contribution it made to society.

But whether religious beliefs are ‘relevant’ or not is not the only issue, nor is it necessarily the most important one. ‘Relevant’ is notoriously a weasel-word anyway – it’s really just a stand-in for majority will. Christian … Read the rest