Author: Ophelia Benson

  • The Christian churches are the conscience of our country

    Lawrence Lessig notes that the pope told victims of priestly rape in Malta last week that the church “was doing all it could to investigate abuse accusations and find ways to safeguard children in the future.”

    But it’s not, Lessig says. In fact it’s doing the opposite. It’s defending a New Jersey statute immunizing charities against negligence even if their employees acted “willfully, wantonly, recklessly, indifferently — even criminally.”

    What was truly astonishing was the appearance of the New Jersey Catholic Conference in the case. As its Web site explains, the conference “represents the Catholic bishops of New Jersey on matters of public policy,” because “the Catholic Church calls for a different kind of political engagement: one shaped by the moral convictions of well-formed consciences and focused on the dignity of every human being, the pursuit of the common good and the protection of the weak and the vulnerable.”

    Yet the “well-formed consciences” of the conference had not entered the case on behalf of the weak and the vulnerable. The Catholic Conference had filed a brief in support of the insurance company, to defend a rule that would have left institutions — like the church — immune from responsibility even if employees “criminally” protected an abuser.

    Meanwhile in New York state there is an effort to reform the statute of limitations for child sexual abuse, which currently gives victims all of five years after turning 18 to sue.

    At the core of the opposition to this bill is heavy lobbying by the New York Catholic Conference; according to published reports, the conference has hired top-dollar lobbyists to kill the bill. At least one bishop is reported to have threatened to close schools and parishes in legislators’ districts if they vote for the bill. And as Marci Hamilton, a law professor at Cardozo University, has written, bishops “publicly rail against statute of limitation reform as though it were the equivalent of mandatory abortion.”

    Once again we find that there is no bottom to this story. It just keeps going farther and farther and farther down. The Catholic church is a sanctified Mafia, which means it is a Mafia with enormous political power and clout. It is a Mafia that gets to veto women’s rights in the US by writing health care legislation to exclude abortion. It is a Mafia that exhales endless fraudulent rhetoric about its concern for the weak and vulnerable, all the while grinding the weak and vulnerable to powder.

    Gordon Brown however is still telling us that

    The Christian churches are the conscience of our country, always ready to bear witness to the truth and to remind us of our responsibilities to what the Bible calls ‘the least of these’. I am incredibly grateful for all that you do to ensure our public square is more than a place of transaction and exchange and remains always, as it should be, a place of shared values and social justice.

    No bottom in sight; bullshit all the way down.

  • The church is campaigning to block compensation

    It is lobbying hard against statute of limitation reform.

  • For the record

    It gets more and more tedious, but it can’t be helped – or it can be helped but it shouldn’t be. The relentless brainless dishonest denigration of “New” atheists has to be shown up for what it is every damn time it happens. It may be futile to say “That’s a lie, and that is, and that is, and that’s another”; it may just entrench the lies even deeper (depressingly, there is research that indicates this is what happens); but it has to be done, if only for the record. (What record? Oh shut up.)

    Michael McGhee, Comment is Free (sugar and tea, rainbows at sea, la de da dee).

    I am not a believer. I incline towards a secular humanism that leaves space for “spirituality” – conceived as the disciplined search for self-knowledge – and recognises that we can sometimes and beyond the exercise of our will transcend the narrow perspective of ego-centric self-enclosure.

    That sets the scene. He’s not a believer, yet he chooses to call something entirely this-worldly and secular by the means-everything-and-nothing word “spirituality,” thus establishing himself as better and wiser than people who don’t call their thoughts by that elevated name. Then having done that, he moves right into the “New” atheist-bashing.

    But my wariness of “belief” is matched by an equal wariness of the new atheists’ rejection of belief. It is not just that their popular polemic shows a juvenile comprehension of religion as altogether “a bad thing”, nor that they are silent about self-knowledge and transcendence.

    There: that’s for the record. A stupidly sweeping and false generalization, closely followed by a stupidly sweeping and false generalization.

    After that there’s a lot of guff which boils down to some this-world morality bolted clumsily onto hand-waving about spiritual transcendence and transcendent spirituality for the sake of…I don’t know, separating himself from the “New” atheists or something.

  • Believers don’t believe in God

    Oh and by the way new atheists are bad and wrong.

  • Believers without belief

    The idea is going viral: Michael McGhee, Theo Hobson, Andrew Brown all claim that belief is practice.

  • On dryness

    Kenan Malik points out that fundamentalism is an idea, not a biology.

    Secularism and fundamentalism are not ideas stitched into people’s DNA. They are not born so. Secularist ideas and religious beliefs are like any values: people absorb them, accept them, reject them. A generation ago there were strong secular movements within Muslim communities and fundamentalism was a marginal force. Today secularism is much weaker, and Islamism much stronger. This shift has been propelled not by demographic trends but by political developments. And political developments can also help reverse the shift.

    Kaufmann doesn’t deny any of this. But, he insists, nothing can stop the inevitable demographic triumph of the fundamentalists. Why? Because ‘we inhabit a period of ideological exhaustion’. The ‘great secular religions have lost their allure.’ In their place we have ‘relativism and managerialism’, outlooks that ‘cannot inspire a commitment to generations past and sacrifices for those yet to come.’

    This gets us to the heart of the problem. For the real issue at stake is not demography but politics. I do not accept the secular ideologies amount to ‘religions’. But Kaufmann is right to suggest that in our post-ideological age, secularists find it much more difficult to inspire a sense of purpose and collective direction.

    Yes, and ironically, fundamentalism itself fills the gap – fundamentalism does a brilliant job of reminding secularists why secularism is worth having and defending.

    Not just the obsession with demography but the very fear of Islam expresses the lack of conviction in a progressive, secular, humanist project. The spectre of ‘Eurabia’ is really an admission that the critics of Islam lack the wherewithal to challenge the fundamentalists. Or, as Kaufmann puts it, ‘Dry atheism… can never compete with the rich emotions evoked by religion.’

    I’m not so sure about that…But if it is right, then that’s another way “New” atheists are not such a bad thing after all. Part of what the Be Quieters hate about us is precisely our lack of dryness – our energy, our enthusiasm (in the older sense, the one that Hume and Mill senior were so wary of), our heat, our zeal. I can understand all that – enthusiasm and zeal are of course one short step away from more sinister qualities, or to put it another way, like so many things (respect, tolerance, liberty), they are only as good as they are: used for the right purposes they are good but used for bad ones they are a nightmare.

    But all the same – I think in fact the current revival (so to speak) of atheism really is useful for altering the perception and perhaps the reality that atheism is dry while religion is full of rich emotions. I think we are doing at least a little to make it clear that atheism is not dry; that it too can evoke rich emotions. Atheism – at least in a context where the alternative is so visible and ambitious and competitive – is not just a negation, not just a no-god shrug. It is a liberation. It is the rejection of authority, tyranny, patriarchy, of bossdom of all kinds. It is the repudiation of the idea that there is a Superbig male Boss squatting at the top of everything and that we have to obey and worship and grovel to it. Freedom from that idea brings a lot of good things with it. Kenan indicates why.

    The irony is that, for all their poisonous hostility towards Islam, the Eurabists express considerable admiration for Islamist arguments. Melanie Phillips is militantly opposed to what she sees as the ‘Islamic takeover of the West’ and ‘the drift towards social suicide’ that supposedly comes with accepting Muslim immigration. Yet she is deeply sympathetic to the Islamist rejection of secular humanism, which she thinks has created ‘a debauched and disorderly culture of instant gratification, with disintegrating families, feral children and violence, squalor and vulgarity on the streets.’

    Phillips is talking idiotic nonsense. What does she think the culture was like before? What does she think 19th century culture was like? Or 16th century, or 11th century? What does she think life was like when the vast majority of people were dirt poor and illiterate and without rights? Does she think the whole world was a drawing room out of Jane Austen? This debauched and disorderly culture is one that is capable of improvement over time, and fairly short time at that; it is flawed but reparable; it comes with freedoms and rights and responsibilities that used to be reserved for one or five or ten percent of the population. Secularism is a big part of the reason for that; secularism makes belief in progress (not perfection, John Gray please note, but progress) more tenable and realistic.

    There is nothing like a vivid sense of the alternative for making secularism and atheism seem about as dry as Niagra Falls.

  • Kenan Malik on “Eurabia”

    Secularism and fundamentalism are not ideas stitched into people’s DNA. They are like any values: people absorb them, accept them, reject them.

  • Open Democracy on Fred Halliday

    For 40 years his knowledge of global politics and forensic analytical skills were in the service of rational argument and universalist political values.

  • Fred Halliday 1946-2010

    His twenty plus books and his wide ranging, powerful essays and journalism provided a constant source of inspiration.

  • A sufficiency of delight

    Grayling’s reply to Gray is a much better read.

    Anxious to appear original while in fact pushing a familiar counter-Enlightenment line, Gray has often entertained us with his assaults on logic and historical fact, each time repeating the two tenets of his faith, one acquired from Isaiah Berlin and the other from his Sunday school, namely, that we are condemned to live with the conflict between irreconcilable goods, and that we owe everything of significance in human achievement (not, he gloomily adds, that there has been much) to religion.

    Concise, sly, cutting, and funny – also accurate. Gray is extraordinarily repetitive and predictable. I knew what his “review” would say before I read it. “Gray has often entertained us” reminds me irresistibly of Mr Bennett’s “You have delighted us long enough” to his middle daughter when she had bored everyone rigid with her relentless piano playing singing.

    That Gray endlessly wears his own two old hats does not get in his way here. But I don’t mind this. What I mind is his attributing to me the idea that the scientific and social advances of the post-sixteenth century Western world are the road to perfection, and that if only we could be reasonable, accept pluralism, respect human rights, defend the rule of law, and apply the findings of science to the improvement of mankind’s lot, we would realize Utopia. No: though I do and always will champion these things (“shrilly” and “peevishly,” with “adamantine certainty” and “high-minded silliness” Gray shrilly, peevishly and high-mindedly complains), I don’t confuse Meliorism with Perfectibilism as Gray persists in doing, though I have before now, in print, tried to help him understand the difference.

    That’s important. Gray is risible, but he’s also sinister. The idea that we should not be reasonable, accept pluralism, respect human rights, defend the rule of law, and apply the findings of science to the improvement of mankind’s lot is no joke, and Gray’s endless flirtation with it is a lot more repellent and more dangerous than conformity in Hampstead.

    If nevertheless it is high-minded silliness to champion the cause of trying to conduct our affairs sensibly, and to free our minds and lives to the greatest extent conformable with our being social animals who owe one another moral regard, I embrace it with enthusiasm. Gray, with his shallow and rather aimless hostility to this view, is the least likely fellow to talk me out of it.

    You have delighted us long enough, John Gray.

  • Grayling replies to Gray

    Anxious to appear original while in fact pushing a familiar counter-Enlightenment line, Gray has often entertained us with his assaults on logic and historical fact.

  • The well thinkings

    John Gray makes a familiar point.

    SEEING THEMSELVES as fiercely independent thinkers, bien-pensants are remarkable chiefly for the fervor with which they propagate the prevailing beliefs of their time.

    Prevailing where? Prevailing among whom?

    Bertrand Russell, John Stuart Mill’s godson and a scion of one of England’s great political dynasties, exemplified this contradiction throughout most of his life. British philosopher A. C. Grayling can now be counted amongst his number.

    Okay – he means “prevailing among people who think similar things” – which is a tautology. He’s pointing out that independent thinkers (fierce or otherwise) are not usually so very independent that they think things that no one else anywhere thinks. Right. Well we knew that, actually. If you’re such an independent thinker that no one on the entire planet agrees with you about anything, you’re a paranoid schizophrenic.

    He’s letting us know that independent thinkers too form clumps, or groups, at least in the sense that one can point out ideas that they have in common. Yes – that’s true – but who thought it wasn’t?

    His point perhaps is that you can’t claim to be an independent thinker if you have ideas in common with other self-proclaimed independent thinkers, because ideas-in-common rules out independent-thinking.

    It doesn’t though, because the ideas could be in common and also independent in the sense of examined, thought about, questioned, critically considered, analyzed.

    There’s another thing: I don’t actually know anyone who goes around saying “I am a fiercely independent thinker.” How does John Gray know that’s how bien pensants see themselves? I don’t think he does know; I think it’s his interpretation. There may be some truth in it, but his flat-footed announcement is a trifle smug, especially for the purposes of deriding the putative smugness and bien pensantness of other people.

    His real point, stated more neutrally and clearly than he managed, is that people can pride themselves on being independent thinkers while still in fact conforming closely to the norms of their own social group. True. It is possible to be critical and skeptical in one direction and conformist and credulous in another, or the former in some directions and the latter in others. It’s as well to be aware of that.

    But then again, it’s also as well not to get too hung up about it. Being an independent thinker isn’t the only good, or an absolute good, or the highest good. There are some parts of the bien pensant Book of Rules that are worth conforming to. Sometimes conformity is better than independent thinking. Traffic is one example – but equality is another. That’s at the heart of Gray’s sneer, I think – the terrible bien pensant herds of Hampstead all think alike on the subject of equality; they are all sheeplike in their aversion to racism and sexism and homphobia. Well, good. Independent thinking that takes the form of belief in social subordination is no loss.

  • Eugene Volokh on Harry Taylor’s sentence

    An appalling restriction on freedom of speech; not a content-neutral prohibition on leafleting in particular places: the conviction was based on the content and viewpoint of the speech.

  • John Gray Reviews A C Grayling

    The inevitable ‘Hampstead dinner party’ is cited.

  • Be Quieters v atheists

    It reminds me of the old Bugs Bunny line – “Of course you know, this means war.”

    This means war. The grotesque punishment meted out to Harry Taylor might as well be an official government announcement that atheists have no rights.

    It is a common accusation that the “new” atheists are bullies who gang up on poor innocent bystanders like Mooney and De Dora and other Be Quieters.

    Well – not so fast. Let’s pause and consider. Who exactly is bullying whom?

    Which is the majoritarian view? Which is the conventional wisdom? Atheism? Hardly. No, the majoritarian conventional wisdom is, at the very least, that religion deserves an almost infinite amount of “respect” and that any atheist who falls short of that heightened “respect” is automatically a “New” aggressive militant brash extreme atheist and subject to being called just that by people with prominent soapboxes like…Mooney and De Dora.

    The dissenting view is a minority one, and it is somewhat odd to accuse people with minority views of bullying people with majority views. Only somewhat odd; it is of course literally possible that, say, an atheist could physically bully a theist or a Be Quieter. But to see the disagreements between Be Quieters and atheists as the latter bullying the former seems warped to me. To me it looks much more as if various prominent Be Quieters with lots of media access started shouting at atheists and calling them names, and then atheists fought back. I don’t consider fighting back “bullying.”

    This always happens when people start to feel their oats and speak up, you know. It happened with the civil rights movement, it happened with the women’s movement, it happened with the gay rights movement. There are always anxious people hopping up and down on the edges saying, “Oh dear oh dear I agree with you, I support you, I’m on your side, but for god’s sake slow down, and ssshhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, don’t say it so loudly, be careful, watch out, keep your head down, you mustn’t be so extreme. I fully support you but be patient! Extremeness never got anyone anywhere. Be patient, be respectful, be well-dressed and punctual and neatly brushed, and in a few decades, or it may be generations, things will start to get better, I promise you.”

    Fuck that. (I should work up a “fuck that” dance to go with Stewart’s “go fuck yourself” dance.) Things are starting to get better, Harry Taylor notwithstanding, but that’s because we have been making noise rather than being quiet. Annie Laurie Gaylor says as much.

    “It used to be a lot worse,” said Ms. Gaylor, 54, an atheist whose organization, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, recently won a suit in federal court here that declared the National Day of Prayer to be a violation of the First Amendment. “Things are changing. Society is becoming more secularized. It’s becoming acceptable to be atheist and agnostic. And there are more of us.”

    And there are more of us. Not fewer – not quieter – not more apologetic – but more, and more vocal, and more forthright. And that’s how change is made.

  • It’s even more of an outrage than I thought

    Manic street preacher reports that

    Mr Taylor seemed like a perfectly rational, intelligent and calm man who wanted to put his point across and was certainly not the “crackpot” that several bloggers, including myself to an extent, had presumed him to be. He was clearly still deeply affected by his horrendous childhood experiences of a strict Catholic upbringing by the Christian Brotherhood and was so distressed by the prospect of receiving a custodial sentence that he had to leave the courtroom midway through the hearing after nearly fainting.

    He also quotes the Telegraph with more and even nastier details:

    Judge James told him: “Not only have you shown no remorse for what you did but even now you continue to maintain that you have done nothing wrong and say that whenever you feel like it you intend to do the same thing again in the future.”…

    He was sentenced to six months in jail suspended for two years, ordered to perform 100 hours of unpaid work and pay £250 costs.

    Remorse – why should he show remorse for something so minor, so non-criminal, so victimless, so basically anodyne? What is all this monstrous bullying in the name of ever more abject “respect” for religion?

  • Put out an APB for Cardinal Bernard Law

    Hitchens gently suggests that the pope should be questioned like anyone else.

    His apologists have done their best, but their Holy Father seems consistently to have been lenient or negligent with the criminals while reserving his severity only for those who complained about them.

    As this became horribly obvious, I telephoned a distinguished human-rights counsel in London, Geoffrey Robertson, and asked him if the law was powerless to intervene. Not at all, was his calm reply. If His Holiness tries to travel outside his own territory—as he proposes to travel to Britain in the fall—there is no more reason for him to feel safe than there was for the once magnificently uniformed General Pinochet, who had passed a Chilean law that he thought would guarantee his own immunity, but who was visited by British bobbies all the same.

    The law is not at all powerless to intervene. This is very good to know.

    Also being considered are two international approaches, one to the European Court of Human Rights and another to the International Criminal Court. The ICC—which has already this year overruled immunity and indicted the gruesome president of Sudan—can be asked to rule on “crimes against humanity”; a legal definition that happens to include any consistent pattern of rape, or exploitation of children, that has been endorsed by any government.

    Now that is very interesting – because the Vatican wants to be considered a state, with Ratzinger as its (flagrantly unelected and unaccountable) head. Well if it is a state, then it is a state that has endorsed (by protecting) child rape, and apparently that makes it subject to the ICC. That is fascinating.

  • Masons bring down innocent Catholic church

    It gets crazier and crazier every day. Now a Colombian Cardinal tells us what’s what.

    A senior cardinal defended the Roman Catholic Church’s practice of frequently not reporting sexual abusive priests to the police, saying Thursday it would have been like testifying against a family member at trial…

    “The law in nations with a well-developed judiciary does not force anyone to testify against a child, a father, against other people close to the suspect,” Castrillon told RCN radio. “Why would they ask that of the church? That’s the injustice. It’s not about defending a pedophile, it’s about defending the dignity and the human rights of a person, even the worst of criminals.”

    The cardinal seems to be confused. The human rights of criminals are not taken to include the right not to be reported to the police by anyone “close” to them. The UDHR makes no mention of the human right to be shielded by colleagues when one has committed a crime. The worst of criminals do have human rights, of course, but not the ones the cardinal is claiming.

    While the church stands by “those who truly were victims (of sexual abuse),” he added, “John Paul II, that holy pope, was not wrong when he defended his priests so that they were not, due to economic reasons, treated like criminal pedophiles without due process.”

    More confusion, I’m afraid. That holy pope wasn’t making sure his priests had due process, he was making sure they would have no contact with the law at all. One hopes the cardinal has some vague sense of the difference, but one is not confident.

    The cardinal also accused unnamed insiders and enemies elsewhere of feeding the sex abuse scandals hurting the Catholic Church.

    Yes…Masons, Jews, fags, atheists, secularists, Protestants; we know. You keep telling yourself that, Cardinal. Blame Canada.

  • Colombia: cardinal defends church secrecy

    Reporting rapist priests to the police would have been like testifying against a family member.

  • Legal victory raises profile of Gaylor and FFRF

    ‘Society is becoming more secularized. It’s becoming acceptable to be atheist and agnostic. And there are more of us.’