The Andrew Brown discussion, or wrangle, raises an interesting issue – interesting and pervasive yet obscure. Much of the wrangle has been about whether Dawkins actually said or meant or both that parents who impose harmful beliefs on their children (what is meant by ‘harmful’ is of course part of the wrangle, I’ll get to that, be patient) should be forcibly removed by the state. Brown didn’t even bother to wrangle, he simply said that Dawkins had simply said that, which was and is not the case. Commenters have been wrangling about whether he meant it and if so how strongly (and about what beliefs are ‘harmful’). A strong claim that several people have made is that it’s mere evasion … Read the rest

If Wikipedia has it right there are currently around forty thousand madrassas in Pakistan. If they’re all full-time pseudo-schools as opposed to an hour or two in the afternoon, that’s an appalling figure, because they don’t teach anything, they just inject the Koran in Arabic, which is useless for anything except doing the same thing to the next generation of doomed children. And that’s before we even get to the political and, shall we say, combustion-related aspect.

A 14-year-old who was trained to kill by radicals in the tribal regions of Pakistan now sits in a crowded classroom at a detention facility in Kabul. His only wish is to see his parents again…”I didn’t want to do it

Andrew Brown is still at it – still being shameless. It’s been pretty thoroughly shown by now that he misrepresented what Dawkins said on the infamous page 326. So what is his response? A frank apology at last? No.

Richard Dawkins himself has been in this thread a few times. If he had wanted to, he could have stated quite clearly that he does not believe the state should have the right to intervene to remove children from their parents simply because of their theological beliefs.

Interesting. Brown misrepresents what Dawkins wrote. Several commenters point that out, and at least one pastes in the whole passage by way of evidence. Brown simply reiterates his misrepresentation. Commenters go on pointing out … Read the rest

And for another clever-stupid ‘joke’ there is Dieudonné cutting up again. He’s such a card.

Dieudonné, who is known for making anti-Semitic remarks in his shows, handed the spoof award for “social unacceptability and insolence” to Robert Faurisson, an academic with a string of convictions for denying the existence of Nazi death camps in the Second World War. Among the audience of 5,000 at Le Zénith theatre in Paris were the far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, several figures of the far left…A stagehand dressed as a Jewish deportee with a yellow star on his chest gave M. Faurisson the award.

Wow, that does sound like a real thigh-slapper, doesn’t it.

[I]n the past five years, his shows have come to

Imagine someone commenting on a philosophy blog, ‘Black people understand a good story and only get confused by the minutiae of history.’ Or for ‘black people’ substitute ‘Jews’ or ‘women’ or ‘foreigners.’ You’d blink, right? You’d be a little surprised, and a little repelled. But substitute ‘Americans’ – and apparently that’s no longer a gratuitous insult, it’s some kind of sophisticated bit of ‘irony.’

There’s this guy called Michael Reidy who comments regularly at Talking Philosophy, a blog run by the editors of The Philosophers’ Magazine; he seems very clever and well-informed, though often snide, but he also likes to amuse himself periodically with a random, magisterial announcement about the stupidity of Americans. That was the latest one… Read the rest

I re-read the chapter of The God Delusion which contains page 326, this morning, in order to find out (having forgotten since I first read it) what the context is in which Dawkins quotes that passage by Nicholas Humphrey. In reading it I became more angry with Brown than ever, for the simple reason that he completely leaves out the context which is one of angry compassion for the mental suffering religion can cause to children and their parents. The chapter starts with the 19th century case of a six-year-old Jewish boy in Bologna who was forcibly removed from his weeping parents by officers of the Catholic Inquisition, to be raised by the church. His parents never saw him again … Read the rest