Author: Ophelia Benson

  • Iran: 26 people in imminent danger of execution

    The Iranian authorities are trying to spread fear to prevent new protests on the anniversary of the elections.

  • Gita Sahgal talks to Asaba Post

    When identity claims are smuggled in as part of non-discrimination norms, the goal of equality can easily be derailed.

  • Update on CFI

    There’s been a lot of unhappy and unfortunate stuff going on at the Center for Inquiry lately. I’m not going to link to any sources because I haven’t been able to find any that seem at all impartial (and also because several of them are at Facebook rather than at more public sites). To summarize briefly – Paul Kurtz was ousted or removed or set aside (see? I can’t even find an impartial verb) as CEO, and Ron Lindsay took over that job. There were changes. There were funding cuts or re-allocations. (See? Depends what you call it.) Senior people left, for various reasons. (See?) Paul Kurtz resigned altogether, and published an open letter about his resignation and the changes at CFI. There were pointed editorials in Free Inquiry; there were pointed blog posts at the CFI blog and elsewhere, which generated long threads full of pointed comments from CFI staffers and former staffers and members.

    Stuff. Lots and lots of stuff. Competing and conflicting accounts; resentments; bad blood; gossip; attempts to tamp down all these; repeat. Public linen-washing. Recrimination.

    On June 1 CFI issued an urgent fundraising appeal. That’s an exception to the no links, because it’s a press release and it’s unambiguous. They need money. By all means donate to them if you’re so inclined.

    They had a donor who had forked over 800 grand every year; the donor has stopped giving and has also not responded to communications from CFI.

    CFI was forced to lay off some people. One of them was Norm Allen, who among other things ran the African Americans for Humanism program. He was also – this is my addition, I haven’t seen it mentioned anywhere – their liason with Leo Igwe. I don’t mean “Leo will be cut off from CFI now!” – I just mean that’s another valuable thing he was involved with, and one that I know a little about. Debbie Goddard is taking over much of Norm Allen’s work, and I’m confident that Leo will not be cut off from CFI – though I can’t say I’m confident that whatever money they were spending on their Nigerian branch is safe. I don’t know what their Nigerian branch involves – maybe it’s just a notional branch that really means some part-time volunteers, and maybe it will be no worse off than it was. I hope so.

    At any rate, all this did not go smoothly. That’s not surprising. That’s you updated.

  • HolfordWatch on fish oil excitement

    The finding is interesting, but it does not show that fish oil pills help with concentration, ADHD or depression.

  • Ben Goldacre on the return of fish oil

    More excited reporting of not so exciting research.

  • Murders of Congolese activists must be investigated

    Chebeya was an outspoken critic of corruption and human rights abuses.

  • DRC: police chief admits role in murder of Chebeya

    Floribert Chebeya, head of the human rights group Voix des Sans Voix, was found dead on Wednesday.

  • Australia: doctors oppose FGM

    That includes ‘ritual nicking.’

  • Always look on the bright side of FGM

    Nicholas Kristof tells off Ayaan Hirsi Ali because of course he knows far more about Islam than she does.

    To those of us who have lived and traveled widely in Africa and Asia, descriptions of Islam often seem true but incomplete.

    Including, apparently, descriptions by people who grew up immersed in Islam, genitally mutilated under Islam, beaten up by their teachers of Islam, issued death threats from adherents of Islam. The descriptions are true – but Kristof wants more. He wants to hear about the pretty calligraphy.

    The repression of women, the persecution complexes, the lack of democracy, the volatility, the anti-Semitism, the difficulties modernizing, the disproportionate role in terrorism — those are all real. But if those were the only faces of Islam, it wouldn’t be one of the fastest-growing religions in the world today. There is also the warm hospitality toward guests, including Christians and Jews; charity for the poor; the aesthetic beauty of Koranic Arabic; the sense of democratic unity as rich and poor pray shoulder to shoulder in the mosque.

    That first list is quite a doozy! Repression of women, no democracy, anti-Semitism, anti-modernism, affinity for terrorism [and he forgot homophobia, hatred of outsiders and “infidels,” madrassas, the death penalty for leaving, and a few more large items] – with all that is it really surprising that Islam gets some criticism? It sounds absurd to admit to all that and then say yes but, especially when the yes buts are themselves dubious. Hospitality to Christians and Jews? What – they get a nice meal before they get driven out of town? And as for the sense of “democratic unity as rich and poor pray shoulder to shoulder” – well it may be democratic unity but it sure as hell isn’t gender unity; women are banished to the back of the bus. Forgive me if I can’t get too sentimental because Kristof gets dewy about rich and poor men praying shoulder to shoulder in the mosque.

    Really – he should know better. He should know better to admit repression of women, no democracy, anti-Semitism, anti-modernism, affinity for terrorism and then go on to say “but it’s not all bad.” Fuck that. With that list, it’s bad enough, and good liberals shouldn’t be cobbling together feeble excuses for it.

  • More tinkling cymbal

    But that’s not all, of course. Odone has more to say than that. Odone has a lot to say.

    First of all she complains that Channel 4 chose, to present a show on paedophile priests, a guy who is “an avowed atheist” and who has “no knowledge of the contemporary Catholic Church,” as if both are obvious disqualifications for presenting a show on paedophile priests. Her thinking seems to be that you have to believe in god and be an expert on the Catholic church in order to present a tv show on a concentration of child rapists in a particular profession. In other words her thinking seems to be that only someone who starts out with some sympathy for clerics in general and Catholic priests in particular can do a good job of presenting the subject. But that kind of sympathy is just what has allowed rapists to hide behind the robes of the church for so long. Sympathy is not what’s wanted; what’s wanted is the kind of stony unsympathy that Johann Hari so beautifully demonstrated on the BBC a few weeks ago. You don’t want people who will make allowances and excuses, you want people who will say this is criminal and outrageous and has to stop right now.

    Then she goes on to complain that Peter Tatchell is presenting a show on the pope.

    How appropriate, huh? Tatchell, the gay rights campaigner, getting his hooks into his favourite hate figure. Who cares that in doing so he will be offending the more than four million Catholics in this country?

    Ugly, isn’t it – “his hooks.” Who is accusing whom of having a hate figure? And then the self-pity about offending Catholics – because Peter Tatchell presents a show on the reactionary head of a reactionary church. If the four million Catholics don’t want to be “offended” then they should have a better church. (Yes, that’s irony. They can’t have a better church, of course, because they don’t get to decide. But this is why their being “offended” is so beside the point. They aren’t the church, they didn’t create the church, talking about the pope is not talking about them. They’re to blame for sticking with it; others are not to blame for saying what’s wrong with it.)

    As for Channel 4, there is a very clear way for it to show itself to be in good faith, rather than bad: it must commission a programme on gays presented by Anne Atkins.

    That’s simply disgusting. “Gays” are not the pope; “gays” do not tell millions of people what to do; gays are not the Catholic church or any other church, gays have no institutional power over other people; a programme on gays would not be the same kind of thing as one on the pope, so there is no need to have a homophobic presenter for the sake of “balance.”

    Milk of human kindness eh.

  • A duel at sunrise

    Seriously. Cristina Odone must feel very sure that Richard Dawkins won’t sue her for libel, or she wouldn’t say “Richard Dawkins is responsible for peddling a lot of lies about faith” in her blog at The Telegraph, and the Telegraph wouldn’t let her, either. She wouldn’t just casually risk a money-devouring and time-devouring lawsuit just for the hell of it, or for the tiny fun of accusing Dawkins of peddling lies in a Telegraph blog. She writes for the national press in the UK, so she can’t possibly be unaware of the UK’s insane libel laws and how they are used. She can’t possibly be unaware of Simon Singh and the BCA and the word “bogus” – so it’s surely fair to say that she simply would not use that word if she were not very confident that she and her paper would not be sued when she did. That’s fair isn’t it? I’m not being uncharitable? She can’t have thought “Risky word – libel – lawsuits – Singh – two years – hundreds of thousands – better not – oh what the hell, I’ll risk it, because it’s worth it.” Can she?

    No. So she must have felt safe. How could she have felt safe other than because she knows Dawkins was part of the campaign against the libel laws and for Singh’s right to say what he said? Or perhaps because she knows more generally what his principles are. At any rate she clearly did feel safe, and feeling safe, she went right ahead and accused him of lying.

    She’s not a good person. She is apparently a “good Catholic,” in the sense that she is blindly loyal to the Catholic church and will stoop to almost anything to defend it – but she is not a good person. She takes advantage of other people’s principles in order to defame them.

  • Cristina Odone demonstrates Catholic liberality

    Says Dawkins “peddles lies.” Clearly she knows he won’t sue for libel, so she feels free to libel him.

  • Kristof’s strident review

    ‘Hirsi Ali denounces Islam with a ferocity that I find strident, potentially feeding religious bigotry.’

  • Andrew Roberts on Nicholas Kristof on Ayaan Hirsi Ali

    For true stridency one should read Kristof’s almost unhinged response to Hirsi Ali’s book.

  • My owner knows what’s best for me

    There’s Rowdha Yousef, who is worried about this alarming trend for Saudi women to start making a few faint gestures toward acting like human beings. She is outraged.

    With 15 other women, she started a campaign, “My Guardian Knows What’s Best for Me.” Within two months, they had collected more than 5,400 signatures on a petition “rejecting the ignorant requests of those inciting liberty” and demanding “punishments for those who call for equality between men and women, mingling between men and women in mixed environments, and other unacceptable behaviors.”

    Her guardian knows what’s best for her, therefore she wants to help see to it that all women will continue to be required to have guardians whether they want them or not. She is not, apparently, content to have a ‘guardian’ herself (at age 39, with three children), she wants all women to be forced to have them. She doesn’t seem to be slowed down by the thought that the fact that her guardian knows what’s best for her doesn’t automatically mean that all guardians know what’s best for women. It would be expecting far too much to think she should suspect that requiring women to have ‘guardians’ indicates a view of women that is not altogether egalitarian.

  • But is there a common ground to be found?

    Eli Horowitz of Rust Belt Philosophy finds the Templeton Foundation and its everlasting questions irksome. The World Science Festival has its Science ‘N’ Faith panel, as we know, which asks rilly deep questions:

    For all their historical tensions, scientists and religious scholars from a wide variety of faiths ponder many similar questions—how did the universe begin? How might it end? What is the origin of matter, energy, and life?

    Ooh yeah, how, how? Eli adds a few more deep questions.

    How many years can some people exist before they’re allowed to be free? Who put the “bop” in the “bop-shoo-bop-shoo-bop”? Why do we drive on parkways and park on driveways? What’s eating Gilbert Grape? Who framed Roger Rabbit?

    Ooh yeah, who, what, how? I bet Chad Orzel would know.

    Meanwhile – Josh Rosenau’s claim, in his post on why there shouldn’t be any atheist scientists on the panel, tells us what the panel will be about:

    The premise of a panel on “the relationship between science and faith” is, after all, that there is a relationship…The whole point Affirmative Atheists are making is that there is no dialogue to be had. Which means that the panel would descend into a metaconversation about whether there should even be conversations like the one they were supposed to be having.

    But Josh’s description doesn’t match the description given by the World Science Festival itself:

    The modes of inquiry and standards for judging progress are, to be sure, very different. But is there a common ground to be found? ABC News’ Bill Blakemore moderates a panel that includes evolutionary geneticist Francisco Ayala, astrobiologist Paul Davies, Biblical scholar Elaine Pagels and Buddhist scholar Thupten Jinpa. These leading thinkers who come at these issues from a range of perspectives will address the evolving relationship between science and faith.

    The question mark after the word ‘found’ seems to indicate that the panel has not been given orders to start from the certainty that there is a common ground to be found, but rather to discuss whether there is or not; that being the case, it is entirely unobvious that an atheist would send the discussion careening off into obsesso-crazy land, as Josh claims.

  • More irregular verbs

    Jason Rosenhouse has an excellent post on the science ‘n’ faith panel at the World Science Festival.

    He notes that Chad Orzel says, “The simple fact is that people with fixed and absolute views do not make for an interesting conversation,” and comments

    Right, because it’s only New Atheists that have fixed and absolute viewpoints. When someone like Francisco Ayala writes,

    I contend that both — scientists denying religion and believers rejecting science — are wrong. Science and religious beliefs need not be in contradiction. If they are properly understood, they cannot be in contradiction because science and religion concern different matters.

    there is nothing fixed or absolute in his views? To declare bluntly that any conception of the science and religious dispute different from his own is an improper (as opposed to merely different) view is every bit as absolute as anything the New Atheists say.

    And he gets to say it louder than most of us, thanks to the Templeton Prize. Not because he wrote a book that appealed to a lot of people, as several of the New Atheists did, but because Templeton gave him its prize. Templeton gave him its prize because he could be relied on to say things that Templeton wants said – in other words, because his view is pretty fixed and absolute.

  • Peter Tatchell to do C4 documentary on pope

    Widdecombe, Odone, Jack Valero of Opus Dei pitch fits.

  • Vatican wants to engage with atheists

    But only with the ‘noble’ ones, not the polemical kind – no Onfray or Dawkins or Hitchens thanks.

  • The Nation looks at Templeton

    ‘Scholars aren’t quite sure what the “science of Godly Love” means, exactly.’