Greta Christina points out what I’m always noticing – that there’s a mob of people out there calling atheists every kind of name and it’s pretty much always just for existing. The mob says it’s for being shrill strident mean fundamentalist rude zealous you can finish the song, but in fact by “shrill strident mean fundamentalist rude zealous” they really just mean atheist, period. Don’t ask don’t tell, know what I mean? The only decent atheist is a secret atheist.

And if these op-ed pieces and whatnot were all you knew about the atheist movement and the critiques of it, you might think that atheists were simply being asked to be reasonable, civil, and polite.But if you follow atheism in

What about Paul Sims’s question? Should atheists be talking to believers? Well sure. But should atheists be talking to Catholic Voices? That’s a different question.

Around the time of the Pope’s visit to the UK, I wrote a couple of posts on here (notably this and this) in which  I questioned the tone of the Protest the Pope campaign and the debate around Catholicism and the Pope…An unexpected outcome of my posts was an invitation from the Central London Humanist Group to take part in a small round table discussion with representatives of Catholic Voices, an organisation set up to argue the Catholic case during the Papal Visit.

I had a look at Catholic Voices. Until I looked, … Read the rest

Bishop Thomas Olmsted is helpfully forthright. He’s up front about the fact that the Catholic church is adamant that women must die rather than terminate their pregnancies. He’s also up front about his absolute rule over Catholic hospitals.

St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix, Ariz., will be stripped of its Catholic status on Friday unless Catholic Healthcare West meets several demands outlined in a Nov. 22 letter from Bishop Thomas Olmsted…The issue stems from the 2009 decision by the hospital to authorize an abortion to save the life of a pregnant woman.

Catholics are not allowed to save a woman’s life at the expense of an 11-week-old fetus. They have to say No, and let her die. … Read the rest

From Paul Berman’s The Flight of the Intellectuals, p. 146:

Qutb, in launching his anarchistic odes to freedom, means to say that, under his proposed resurrected Islamic Caliphate, human beings will no longer be tyrannously ruled by other human beings, but only by God, as interpreted by God’s representatives.

As interpreted by God’s representatives, who of course are other human beings, but free of the restraints and accountability that secular politicians are subject to.… Read the rest

I was amused to see that former bishop Richard Holloway has the same objection to Karen Armstrong’s book on compassion that I do.

The bishop:

The second plank in her platform is that compassion is, as it were, the distilled essence of the world’s great religions…

But is she correct in suggesting that, au fond, the essence of the main religions boils down to compassion? It is probably correct where Buddhism is concerned and it is from Buddhism that her best insights and examples come. I think she is on shakier ground when she applies it to Christianity and Islam. Christianity and Islam are redemption religions, not wisdom religions. They exist to secure life in the world to

To expand on the point about the difference between checking the world and not checking the world – to repeat –

Science has to check itself against the way the world is, and religion doesn’t. Science is about what is there whether humans can figure it out or not, and religion isn’t. (It claims to be, but it isn’t.)

What you get with an institution that doesn’t require itself to check against the world, is authority. You get the fiat, the Bull, the decree, the encyclical, the Index, the excommunication, the anathema, the charge of blasphemy or apostasy. You get the arbitrary.

Science has to show its work, and religion doesn’t.

This difference certainly doesn’t cash out as the first … Read the rest

It’s the fifth anniversary of the Kitzmiller decision, so perhaps you would like to celebrate the day by re-reading the contemporaneous comments of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Paul Kurtz, Steve Jones, Matt Ridley, Barbara Forrest (an expert witness at the trial itself, of course), and Susan Haack.

Enjoy.… Read the rest