No, it’s not just another ‘choice’.

It may be an unusual case, but it’s hardly the first time that extreme religious belief has resulted in cruelty to children. Now that the “misery memoir” has become a cliché of contemporary publishing, it’s worth remembering that many of the most significant accounts of childhood misery have been associated with religious repression…[I]n Memoir, one of hundreds of books chronicling brutal Irish Catholic childhoods, John McGahern writes of a life in which sudden physical blows were followed by sudden instructions to bow down in front of a crucifix (a fetishisation of extreme violence if ever there was one) and pray. “Authority’s writ ran from God the Father down and could not be questioned,”

Self-flagellation is a good thing.

There are elements of the Zaidi case that will sound familiar to those who grew up in a Punjabi Shia household. There is nothing odd in the father of the household engaging in this particular practice. But I have personally never seen anybody coerced into it, although coercion can, admittedly, take many indirect forms.

Nothing odd, that is, in the father of the household engaging in self-flagellation. Well that depends on what you mean by ‘odd.’ It may be something one has seen before, but that doesn’t mean it’s not odd. I’m going to go right out on a limb here and say that whipping one’s back with knives is, indeed, odd, also stupid … Read the rest

I’m wondering, because of a discussion with Don in the comments, if there is a valid distinction between saying ‘there is no good evidence that “God” (as commonly understood) exists’ and affirmatively claiming that ‘God’ doesn’t exist. I think there is, but I’m wondering if I’m cheating in thinking that.

Surely not, though. Not least because it is perfectly possible to know there is no evidence for something without taking that as evidence for not-something. There is no evidence for an infinite number of things (that someone had a particular thought a year ago, for instance) that may well be true just the same.

God of course is somewhat different, since given the usual definition of God, we know that … Read the rest