A tincture of dandelion and artichoke doesn’t do anything to detoxify your body and therefore it is a snake oil.
Author: Ophelia Benson
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Istanbul cracks down on outdoor restaurants
Ramadan starts next week; it’s always a time of tension in Turkey between the pious and the secular.
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FFRF will keep fighting Perry prayer rally
FFRF maintains that coercion into a religious practice is not required in order to bring suit under the Establishment Clause.
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Chris Hedges is still frothing at the mouth
Chris Hedges is as nasty as ever. It’s a wonder he has any spittle left, he’s expended so much of it on people he hates.
The gravest threat we face from terrorism, as the killings in Norway by Anders Behring Breivik underscore, comes not from the Islamic world but the radical Christian right and the secular fundamentalists who propagate the bigoted, hateful caricatures of observant Muslims and those defined as our internal enemies. The caricature and fear are spread as diligently by the Christian right as they are by atheists such as Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens. Our religious and secular fundamentalists all peddle the same racist filth and intolerance that infected Breivik. This filth has poisoned and degraded our civil discourse. The looming economic and environmental collapse will provide sparks and tinder to transform this coarse language of fundamentalist hatred into, I fear, the murderous rampages experienced by Norway.
Hitchens and Harris peddle racist filth, says Hedges mildly. Really? No, but that’s ok, Hedges writes for Truthdig, so he can’t be just making it up out of his own bile and bad-tempered mendacity.
Our secular and religious fundamentalists come out of this twisted yearning for the apocalypse and belief in the “chosen people.” They advocate, in the language of religion and scientific rationalism, the divine right of our domination, the clash of civilizations. They assure us that we are headed into the broad, uplifting world of universal democracy and a global free market once we sign on for the subjugation and extermination of those who oppose us. They insist—as the fascists and the communists did—that this call for a new world is based on reason, factual evidence and science or divine will.
No they don’t; no they don’t; no they don’t; no they don’t.
All fundamentalists, religious and secular, are ignoramuses. They follow the lines of least resistance. They already know what is true and what is untrue. They do not need to challenge their own beliefs or investigate the beliefs of others. They do not need to bother with the hard and laborious work of religious, linguistic, historical and cultural understanding. They do not need to engage in self-criticism or self-reflection. It spoils the game. It ruins the entertainment. They see all people, and especially themselves, as clearly and starkly defined.
Unlike Chris Hedges, who does such a brilliant job of seeing people as complicated and various and difficult to pin down, not to mention his genius for self-criticism and self-reflection.
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Chris Hedges rants about Hitchens and Harris
Secular fundamentalists, bigoted, hateful, racist filth and intolerance, poisoned and degraded, blustering, utopian visions, infatuation with the apocalypse.
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Sam Harris replies to Chris Hedges
“The man is not only wrong in his convictions, but dishonest. I trust this is a consequence of his most conspicuous quality: sanctimony.”
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Judge dismisses FFRF suit against Perry’s prayers
If people don’t like Perry’s use of his governorship to promote religion they can just ignore it.
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UN body criticizes restrictions on free expression
UN Human Rights Committee says anti-blasphemy laws and restrictions on criticism of governments are incompatible with existing norms.
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Breivik wants a theocracy
In his manifesto, titled “2083 – A European Declaration of Independence”, Mr Breivik argues for the establishment of a strict, patriarchal society.
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Vatican is annoyed at reaction to Cloyne report
The Murphy commission asked the nuncio for documents; he did not reply. Twice. So the Vatican is annoyed about what exactly?
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Claiming to speak for
One strange meme that has turned up in the recent wars is the idea that feminists are “claiming to speak for all women” and that that’s why feminism is so bad and awful.
That’s a ridiculous claim. All political and moral views do that; they all say this is better than that, and not just for me but for everyone in whatever the relevant group is, from the neighborhood to the species. Feminism has always made large claims about what women should be and do, and it has never had unanimous agreement from all women. Of course in some sense feminism claims to speak for all women, but it’s not unique or weird in doing that.
Feminism has never meant “whatever all women agree on” or whatever the majority of women agree on. It’s never meant agreeing with all women because they’re women. It’s always been demanding – it’s always urged women to be more than they currently are, which is guaranteed to be annoying and irksome. Reformist movements are like that.
The recent disturbance has triggered an astonishing amount of sneering and jeering at feminism and feminists, so much so that it has created a glaring example of the very problem it’s busy denying and sneering at: the sense that women are alien to “the atheist movement.”
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Asking Dawkins to observe the evidence
The culture of subtle sexism can be altered when people have their attention drawn to it.
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New Statesman asks atheists to say why
Maryam Namzie, Kenan Malik, Polly Toynbee, Susan Blackmore, A C Grayling, Ben Goldacre, Victor Stenger, P Z Myers, Andrew Copson, more.
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Jailed in Singapore for writing a book
Alan Sheldrake was convicted of “scandalising the judiciary” – writing a critical book that could undermine public faith in Singapore’s judicial system.
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Thechurchissorry
The church in Australia is also saying how sorry it is. Sorry sorry sorry. Oh dear, so sorry. It doesn’t know what came over it. It was a moment of carelessness that lasted for decades. It’s terribly sorry, unless anyone can think of a way it can dodge culpability of course, in which case it isn’t.
It is believed at least 150,000 Australian women had their babies taken
against their will by some churches and adoption agencies between the 1950s and 1970s.Think about that for a minute. A period of thirty years, in which the church yanked away the babies of 150,000 women.
But hey, the church is sorry. Maybe.
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Oh look, an escape hatch
The Vatican feels really really really really bad about what its priests did in Ireland. Really it does. It’s so so so so so sorry. It’s wounded to the core; it’s devastated; it’s super-upset; it’s crying into its pillow every night; it can hardly eat.
Unless…
What if it can say that what Catholic priests do is nothing to do with it?
Ah. Well in that case, it feels perfectly fine, because after all, it didn’t do anything. Yay!
Victims of sexual abuse by priests will no longer be able to sue the Catholic church for damages if a landmark judgment rules that priests should not be considered as employees.
In a little publicised case heard this month at the high court, the church claimed that it is not “vicariously liable” for priests’ actions. The church has employed the argument in the past but this was the first time it had been used in open court and a ruling in the church’s favour would set a legal precedent.
The use of the defence raises further questions about the church’s willingness to accept culpability for abuse.
Well yes, it does, rather, but be fair – you can’t expect the church to accept culpability for abuse if there’s some way they can wriggle out of it do you?
That would be silly.
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Johann Hari in more and worse trouble
The Telegraph accuses him of inventing an atrocity in the story that won him the Orwell Prize.
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Johann Hari stripped of Orwell Prize
The organizers of the prize announced that they had reached a “clear and unanimous decision” on Monday.