Author: Ophelia Benson

  • NHS survey asks: how cool was Hitler?

    Dude, he was wicked cool.

  • Many women believe they don’t have the right to have rights

    Deepa Shankaran on the politics of religious fundamentalism:

    In these politics, the key platforms are grounded in “morality”, “the family” and gender roles, and fundamentalist campaigns often call for a return to “traditional” values, speaking to the fear of social upheaval brought about by women’s growing autonomy, sexual liberation and the increasing visibility of LGBTQI people. According to women’s rights activists, a major fundamentalist strategy in every region is the use of discourse that blames social problems on a “decline in morality” or the “disintegration of the family”; and that presents rigid gender roles within the family as “natural.”…As these discourses translate into fundamentalist campaigning on specific laws, policies and practices, they give rise to concrete consequences for women’s human rights.

    Quite. This is essentially the subject matter of Does God Hate Women?

    Fundamentalist movements also exert a profound and long-lasting psychological impact – a reality that often goes unacknowledged. As Lucy Garrido in Uruguay remarks, “the most serious impact is that many women believe and feel that they don’t have the right to have rights, that decisions about themselves, their minds and bodies, are influenced by and can be made by others.”

  • Sam Harris reads the Ryan report

    Sam Harris has been (belatedly, he says) considering the unpleasant ways the Catholic church has with children, and the reasons therefore.

    Consider the ludicrous ideology that made it possible: The Catholic Church has spent two millennia demonizing human sexuality to a degree unmatched by any other institution, declaring the most basic, healthy, mature, and consensual behaviors taboo. Indeed, this organization still opposes the use of contraception, preferring, instead, that the poorest people on earth be blessed with the largest families and the shortest lives. As a consequence of this hallowed and incorrigible stupidity, the Church has condemned generations of decent people to shame and hypocrisy — or to Neolithic fecundity, poverty, and death by AIDS.

    That sums it up pretty nicely. The church prides itself on this ideology, which takes great care not to think about sex and sex-related issues in a reasonable way but instead simply recycles dogma year after year, decade after decade, century after century. This makes the church “our better conscience” – because it has this hypertrophied ability to invent stupid cruel useless moral rules that make nearly everyone worse off than they have to be.

    Harris has been reading the Ryan report, and like everyone who reads that blistering document, he is staggered and horrified. And he is taking (joining) action:

    I would like to announce that Project Reason, the foundation that my wife and I started to spread scientific thinking and secular values, has joined Hitchens and Dawkins (both of whom sit on our advisory board) in an effort to end the “diplomatic immunity” which the Vatican claims protects the Pope from any responsibility.

    Hear hear.

  • The right to have rights

    A major fundamentalist strategy globally is blaming social problems on a “decline in morality” or the “disintegration of the family.”

  • Sam Harris has been reading the Ryan report

    And considering the ludicrous ideology that made the church’s abuse of children possible.

  • Cultural attitudes drive HIV infections in Africa

    Because a man buys a wife from her father for cows or cash, he “owns” her. If she refuses sex or insists on a condom, he may beat her.

  • And pigs may have wings

    “Pope’s visit to Portgual may shed light on Third Secret of Fatima.”

  • Texas’s creationist dentist

    Don McLeroy’s views would matter little were he not chairman of the Texas State Board of Education.

  • Ireland: no secularism in education

    The credibility of all churches were damaged by the Ryan and Murphy reports, therefore…um…

  • Sholto Byrnes regrets the loss of Evan Harris

    Harris has not trimmed and tacked to the centre-right as New Labour did.

  • How many little girls are slaughtered unnoticed?

    Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow and the implications for morality and universalism.

  • The Regime in Iran has silenced the voice of five more activists!

    The Islamic state of Iran today, May 9th, 2010, hanged five more activists to further their goal of terrorizing the people in Iran. We are well aware that the regime’s crimes will not end until people in Iran, along with concerned citizens globally, put these murderers and all those who have helped this regime on trial in an international court.

    We demand an immediate expulsion of the Islamic Republic of Iran from all international agencies, and prosecution of the regime’s leaders for their daily heinous state crimes.

    Homa Arjomand, Coordinator of the International Campaign to Close Down Iranian Embassies, is calling a press conference where she and other activists will demand that Prime Minister Stephen Harper and all members of the Canadian parliament support the people of Iran and break all diplomatic relations with the Iranian Regime.

    “We declare that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the head of state terrorism and controls the state terrorism machinery in Iran. He is responsible for summary trials, Islamic retribution, execution and torture.

    “We further declare that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the principal sponsor of the Political Islamic Movement, not only in the region but also globally,” said Homa Arjomand.

    The protestors claim the entire regime of Iran is responsible for terrorizing people globally and sustaining terrorism in every way Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his government can. They further declare the recent hanging of five activists and defenders of human rights is an expansion of the 150,000 executions done by this regime.

    Human Rights Activists will gather at the following locations:

    Location: Mel Lastman Square, 5100 Yonge Street
    Date: Sunday, May 9,2010, at 5:00 pm

    Location: Queen’s Park, Toronto
    Date: Monday, May 10, 2010, at 12:00 Noon

    An open microphone will also be available for other concerned individuals attending the protest. They will be able to expose the crimes and human rights abuses of the Iranian regime and the leading terrorist – President Ahmadinejad.

    About the Campaign

    Media Contact: Ms. Homa Arjomand 416-737-9500.

    For more info visit :

    www.closedowniranianembassies.com

    www.nosharia.com

    About the Author

    Homa Arjomand is the Coordinator of the International Campaign Against Sharia Court in Canada. She started the campaign against Sharia courts in Toronto in October 2003 with a handful of supporters, and today it has grown to a coalition of 87 organizations from 14 countries with over a thousand activists. In February 2006, the Ontario Government passed legislation which ended the use of religious laws for family arbitration. Since then, the Campaign has focused its efforts on stopping political Islam globally. Homa is now Coordinator of a campaign called “The International Campaign to CIose Down Iranian Embassies” and spokesperson of “Wanted by People”.

  • As though

    A more central part of Harris’s argument:

    …it also seems quite rational for us to collectively act as though all human lives were equally valuable. Hence, most of our laws and social institutions generally ignore differences between people.

    Ah but they don’t. One big social institution doesn’t, at least not necessarily: the family. Some parents believe in equality, but some don’t; sometimes it’s a matter of what the male head of household believes, because that determines the rules for everyone else.

    This is why the claim that maximizing well-being for all can be scientifically shown to be moral or good does not (as far as I can see) get off the ground. It’s because some people’s well-being partly depends on the subordination of other people, and people like that do not consider the de-subordination of “their” subordinates a source of well-being for themselves. Over time that can change, but it doesn’t happen overnight. So the question arises, how would you show such people scientifically that they are mistaken? It can’t be done. You may be able to show them evidence that the subordinates will have more well-being, but that won’t trump their sense of the fitness of things. The issue isn’t factual (though facts can help, or hinder; it depends), it’s emotional.

  • PZ on Sam Harris v Sean Carroll

    Can we use science to justify maximizing the well-being of individuals? No.

  • Is there anyone who would?

    Sam Harris has a new article on a science of morality at the Huffington Post. There’s a lot there, but one observation in particular snagged my attention.

    I wonder if there is anyone on earth who would be tempted to attack the philosophical underpinnings of medicine with questions like: “What about all the people who don’t share your goal of avoiding disease and early death? Who is to say that living a long life free of pain and debilitating illness is ‘healthy’?

    Wonder no more! There is indeed. There is the anthropologist Frederique Apffel Marglin, who once wrote* that

    In absolutely negativizing disease, suffering and death, in opposing these to health and life in a mutually exclusive manner, the scientific medical system of knowledge can separate in individuals and in populations what is absolutely bad, the enemy to be eradicated, from what is good, health and life. In the process it can and does objectify people with all the repressive political possibilities that objectification opens.

    And she meant it. She wasn’t writing a parody of postmodernist science-skepticism, she was writing the thing itself. I observed in 2003

    There is something a little breathtaking in a level of science-phobia that can see ‘negativizing’ disease, suffering and death, as harmful and repressive. One is reminded of Woody Allen’s retort to a character’s reproach, in ‘The Front’, that he really wanted success: ‘So what should I want, a disease?’ Does Marglin seriously think that disease, suffering and death (the death of other people, remember, as well as one’s own) would be a source of joy and pleasure if only it weren’t for the ’scientific medical system of knowledge’? Has the postmodern left become so tone deaf that it can hear no echo of the complacent droning of landowners and priests (and colonialists, surely) about the rich man in his castle and the poor man at his gate?

    *F.A. Marglin, ‘Smallpox in two Systems of Knowledge’, in Dominating Knowledge: Development, Culture and Resistance, eds. F.A. Marglin and S.A. Marglin (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990).

  • Sean Carroll on Sam Harris and a science of morality

    There’s no simple way to aggregate well-being over different individuals.

  • Sam Harris: Toward a science of morality

    His goal is to start a conversation. “Few things would make this goal harder to achieve than for me to speak and write like an academic philosopher.”

  • Metamagician: tone does matter

    Many readers don’t get tone, but the cure for that isn’t less discussion of tone; it’s more intelligent discussion of tone.

  • Evan Harris is no stranger to principle

    Harris was a rare voice in Parliament for reason and evidence and against quackery and nonsense.

  • Gloating for Britain

    George Pitcher, Anglican vicar and Telegraph columnist, is just beside himself with glee that Evan Harris lost his seat in the election. Why is Pitcher so delighted? Because Harris is a secularist, and because he thinks terminally ill people should be able to choose when their suffering ends. That’s not exactly how Pitcher puts it though.

    For a doctor, he supported the strange idea that terminally ill people should be helped to kill themselves…His political demise will be mourned only by those with a strange fascination for death, those euthanasia enthusiasts whose idea of care for the elderly and infirm is a one-way ticket to Switzerland.

    Stupid, stupid man, and dishonest besides. (And he can’t even write. “For a doctor, he supported the strange idea” – sheesh!) Harris did not support the idea that “terminally ill people should be helped to kill themselves” nor was his idea of care for the elderly and infirm a one-way ticket to Switzerland (i.e. euthanasia). Stupid malicious man – as if he can’t tell the difference between having the option of euthanasia and having euthanasia imposed!

    I wish I could gloat that George Pitcher had lost his seat on the Telegraph.