Obama has an ‘adviser on Muslim affairs,’ Dalia Mogahed; she appeared on a British tv show hosted by a member of Hizb ut Tahrir, Ibtihal Bsis. Mogahed is on ‘the President’s Council on Faith-Based and Neighbourhood Partnerships,’ which is something the president shouldn’t have in the first place. On this tv show she said, according to the Telegraph, that the Western view of sharia is ‘oversimplified’ and ‘the majority of women around the world associate it with gender justice.’

Well if they do they’re crazy, but I don’t believe they do. The majority of women around the world aren’t Muslim, for a start, and not all Muslims are fond of sharia, so Mogahed’s statistic sounds made up.

Mogahed appeared

Epistemology is difficult. (Remember that long discussion between G and Ben the other day? Shop talk. Difficult shop talk.) This morning I was trying to figure out the meaning of a comment by Josh Rosenau on Jerry Coyne’s post last week on Dawkins and accommodationism and I followed a link to a three-year-old post by John Wilkins on agnosticism. It’s good, and interesting, and much of it I don’t understand. This for instance:

Probabilities are based in this case on prior assumptions – one uses Bayes’ theorem to determine whether or not the hypothesis under test is likely to be true, given other assumptions we already accept. And here is where the problem lies – which assumptions? To adopt

Hey the Family Research Council has gone all Darwin and sciencey on us.

Some people believe that religious dogma is the only reason why anyone opposes same-sex marriage. Those who believe the human race began with Adam and Eve, and that their relationship was God’s model for marriage, believe marriage should be between a man and a woman. But those who don’t believe in the Bible, who think Adam and Eve are a myth, and who don’t accept a Christian view of the human person, have no reason to believe marriage is an opposite-sex union. Right?

Well, no, not exactly. Those who don’t believe the Bible is some kind of magic rule-book and who don’t want Christians telling them … Read the rest

So the Church Times review of Does God Hate Women? is considerably more favorable than was Sholto Byrnes’s in the Independent or Cristina Odone’s in the Observer, to say nothing of Madeleine Bunting’s reception. There’s a profound irony in that, which I will not belabor.… Read the rest