Author: Ophelia Benson

So I guess Tennessee schools must not be very good – not if the mayor of Arlington is anything to go by. He’s on Facebook, so he shared some thoughts there.

Ok, so, this is total crap, we sit the kids down to watch ‘The Charlie Brown Christmas Special’ and our muslim president is there, what a load…..try to convince me that wasn’t done on purpose. Ask the man if he believes that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and he will give you a 10 minute disertation (sic) about it….w…hen the answer should simply be ‘yes’….”

See that’s why I’m not a big fan of religion and the claims it makes – I don’t like being told (even in a newspaper story about a small town mayor’s Facebook rant) that the answer to that question should simply be yes. I also don’t like elected officials claiming that other elected officials should answer yes. We’re not supposed to have a religious test for public office.

…you obama people need to move to a muslim country…oh wait, that’s America….pitiful…you know, our forefathers had it written in the original Constitution that ONLY property owners could vote, if that has stayed in there, things would be different……..

What a pinhead. What an ugly dirty squalid little mind. How sad for Tennessee.

Austin Dacey points out an interesting document.

In 2006, ISESCO [the Islamic Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization] published a Guide for the Incorporation of Reproductive Health and Gender Concepts into Islamic Education Curricula, obviously a critically important subject area where some scientific facts are in order. The Guide, which can be found on ISESCO’s Web site, is addressed to curriculum developers, textbook writers, and those responsible for training instructors in formal Islamic education for students aged six to nineteen. Its introduction stresses the need “to supply, at the proper time, adolescents with appropriate health information on the biological aspects within the framework of Islamic rulings and values” and emphasizes “the fact that Sharia, whether in its original or interpretative sources, is the only source for establishing, interpreting, clarifying, and incorporating reproductive health issues, including adolescent health, in the programs of formal education.”

There’s a lot that could be said about that, but one thing in particular is quite important. Defenders of Islamism and Islam and Sharia often like to rebuke critics of same by saying that Islam and Sharia cannot be essentialized because they are not just one thing – they are rather, in some versions of this rebuke, the practices and/or beliefs of all Muslims – which in effect means they are everything and nothing, because there is no way to know what that would be, or what it would not be either.

At any rate, the rebuke and the claim are wrong, as shown by documents like this. ISESCO is an official body of some sort, and ISESCO decidedly assumes there is such a thing as Sharia, ‘whether in its original or interpretative sources.’ It assumes there is such a thing as Sharia, and then having assumed that, it assumes that everything has to be in compliance with it, and then having assumed that, it goes ahead and lays down the law about how to do that. So it’s really somewhat futile for outsiders to claim that Sharia isn’t so bad really because it isn’t any one thing, let a hundred flowers bloom, so…well so there’s just no problem, that’s all. In the real world, official bodies maintain that Sharia is one thing, ‘whether in its original or interpretative sources,’ and that all other things have to do what it says. There is a problem.

In this Guide, as in numerous other documents, ISESCO is only doing its job. Rather than seeking Muslim integration with the global research and academic communities, its stated mission is to advance science “within the framework of the civilizational reference of the Islamic world and in the light of the human Islamic values and ideals.” In this case, ISESCO does not even do students the service of setting forth the relevant empirical evidence for the purpose of beating it senseless with religious precepts.

An organization for Islamic Science is an organization for a contradiction in terms.

The Vatican is restless, and fretful, and aggrieved. The Vatican thinks it’s all most unfair.

the Vatican is concerned about the way in which human rights are being used to regulate the activities of church organisations or to restrict religious displays in public places. For example, the decision of the European Court of Human Rights to order the removal of crucifixes from the walls of state schools in Italy was greeted with dismay by Catholics.

Why? What business do ‘Catholics’ have being dismayed about such a thing? Do the state schools belong to them? No. Do they have authority over state schools? No.* So what business would they have sticking their paraphernalia on the walls of classrooms in state schools? And why, looking at the matter from a wider perspecitve, would it be a good thing for classrooms to have lethal torture machines nailed to their walls? They’re nasty, ugly, sick things if you look at them from outside the religion – yet a particular religion wants to impose them on state school classrooms. It’s a peculiar religion, too – it frets about its right to impose lethal torture devices on the attention of school children, but it’s debonair about the rights of school children to be protected from priestly rapists. It has disordered priorities, if you ask me.

*Do they? Is Italy worse than I realize?

Beautifully put:

This rejection of the theistic God, and acknowledgment that the problem of evil cannot be swept away through theodicy, might sound like music to atheists’ ears…But rather than characterizing such a position as a significant concession to the new atheists, Armstrong insists on continuing to regard them as her primary opponents. Moreover, she is unable to hold herself consistently to her own apophatic view…[O]n her understanding the apophatic position, rather than discouraging metaphysical speculation, in fact licenses and encourages it…In other words, it is precisely our lack of knowledge of God that enables us to say, well, pretty much whatever we want about God…This is mysticism and metaphysical hand-waving raised to a truly objectionable level. If you do not know what you are denying then you also do not know what you are asserting; our inability to conceptualize cannot, on the one hand, prevent skeptics from denying Christ’s divinity while at the same time allowing the faithful to assert it.

But that is of course how Armstrong attempts to use her claims about metaphors and non-literalism and apophaticism – as a stick to beat the atheists while mostly leaving the theists to their own devices. It’s a transparent ploy, and yet it works.

If the concept of “God” is genuinely empty, as it needs to be if evidence and rational criticism are to be considered irrelevant to God-talk, then in a quite literal sense people who talk about God cannot say and do not know what they are talking about.

Precisely. This is what I keep saying. I said it in the little essay I wrote for 50 Voices of Disbelief:

We’re told, in explanation of these puzzles, that we’re merely humans and we simply don’t understand. Very well, but then we don’t understand – we don’t know anything about all this, all we’re doing is guessing, or wishing or hoping. Yet we’re so often told things about God as if they were well-established facts. God is “mysterious” only when sceptics ask difficult questions. The rest of the time believers are cheerily confident of their knowledge. That’s a good deal too convenient.

Troy Jollimore goes on:

In her more radical mode, Armstrong wants to preserve religious talk from questions of truth—in our ordinary sense of “truth”—by draining them of content. But when we lose content we do not only lose truth, we lose meaning as well. The apophatic retort to the skeptic, then, seems to reduce to: “You don’t know what you’re talking about—indeed, I don’t even know what I’m talking about. So how dare you contradict me!”

Read the whole thing – it’s terrific. (Thanks to Karel De Pauw for sending the link.)

The Irish Times notes how globally the Vatican thinks and acts.

Ultimate responsibility for the way in which the safety of children was so recklessly ignored does not lie with any individual bishop. It does not lie even with the Irish hierarchy as a whole. It lies with the Vatican. We know this because the approach to allegations of child abuse was consistent, not simply between bishops or across Irish dioceses, but around the world. There was a way of doing things – keeping the crimes secret and moving the abusers on to another parish until the whole pattern began to repeat itself.

World government with a vengeance, that is – a theistic institution that has managed to make itself a state yet has global authority, and is focused on its own well-being before that of anyone else on the planet.

It is in the light of the primary role of the Vatican that we must see the unwillingness of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and of the papal nuncio to respond to requests for information from the Murphy commission. The Taoiseach, in a painfully deferential statement in the Dáil, has endorsed these refusals as acts of “good faith” consistent with diplomatic norms. This submissiveness is entirely inappropriate to the leader of a republic, some of whose most vulnerable citizens have been grievously harmed by the policies and practices of the Holy See.

Depressing, isn’t it? Once again, the powerful prosperous men of the church and the Vatican are protected and the vulnerable people are thrown to the wolves – by their own government. The prosperous men of the church and the Vatican matter, and the mere people don’t.

The Vatican does not do things lightly. When it refused to deal with the commission except through diplomatic contacts at the level of one state to another, it was not being precious. It was asserting a claim that is crucial to its efforts to avoid the consequences of its own policies. The insistence on being treated as a state rather than as a church is the key to its claim of sovereign immunity.

Which is a thing that it shouldn’t want to have. Yet it does want to have it. It wants to do bad things to people and get away with it. It wouldn’t put it that way, of course, but that’s what it wants and what it’s been doing.

It is quite disgraceful that the Taoiseach should play along with this manoeuvre by endorsing the Vatican’s behaviour towards the commission. If the Vatican is indeed to be regarded simply as a foreign state, then it is a state that has colluded in the commission of vile crimes against Irish citizens.

Quite.

Good ol’ Rick Warren. He’s a trip. None of that soppy good Samaritan crap for him. None of that ‘let him cast the first stone’ nonsense. No sir. Rick Warren knows what kind of people he likes, and who’s worth saving and who isn’t. He also knows who’s on his team and who isn’t. He keeps track, and he’s not such a fool as to bother helping people who aren’t on his team. That would be foolishness! No flies on Rick.

In recent days, Pastor Rick Warren has come under fire for refusing to condemn an Anti-Homosexuality Bill in Uganda that would make some homosexual acts punishable by death. “[I]t is not my personal calling as a pastor in America to comment or interfere in the political process of other nations,” said Warren. On his Twitter feed, Warren is now trying to change the subject, claiming that “no one” cared when 146,000 Christians died last year.

Well sure. Uganda’s all the way over there somewhere, in the middle where we can’t even find it; it’s not our job to worry about what happens to people all the way over there. What do we look like, charity workers? Get real. And what did those people all the way over there and their bleeding-heart friends do about all those Christians? Huh? So why should we help them? Bastards.

Yup, that’s our Rick. Walk by on the other side, dude.