Author: Ophelia Benson

  • Irish Abuse Victims March

    ‘It was as if you were inside prison and you don’t talk about it. You didn’t dare speak out against a religious order.’

  • Bishops Met to Discuss Fallout from Ryan Report

    Said it would be wrong to remove religious orders from the managing of schools.

  • The law of the Brothers

    Hitchens too sees flaws in Obama’s Cairo speech.

    Take the single case in which our president touched upon the best-known fact about the Islamic “world”: its tendency to make women second-class citizens. He mentioned this only to say that “Western countries” were discriminating against Muslim women! And how is this discrimination imposed? By limiting the wearing of the head scarf or hijab…The clear implication was an attack on the French law that prohibits the display of religious garb or symbols in state schools.

    He then quotes ‘from an excellent commentary by an Algerian-American visiting professor at the University of Michigan Law School, Karima Bennoune, who says’

    I have just published research conducted among the many people of Muslim, Arab and North African descent in France who support that country’s 2004 law banning religious symbols in public schools which they see as a necessary deployment of the “law of the republic” to counter the “law of the Brothers,” an informal rule imposed undemocratically on many women and girls in neighborhoods and at home and by fundamentalists.

    This is what people who are horrified by bans on wearing the hijab so often neglect to mention, what they so often in fact obscure by calling the hijab a free choice which simply ignores the fact that in some places women are beaten or murdered for not wearing it. That’s an important fact and it shouldn’t be ignored.

  • Baptist Pastor Offers ‘Imprecatory Prayers’

    Wiley Drake is asking the deity to kill Obama.

  • Malaysia: Islamists v Sisters in Islam

    Sisters in Islam should be investigated and declared ‘haram’ if it is found to be anti-Islam.

  • Hitchens on Obama in Cairo

    Does the president think that the veil and the burqa are also freely chosen fashion statements?

  • MHRA Licences Homeopathic ‘Therapy’

    Pills are labelled ‘a homoeopathic medicinal product used with the homoeopathic tradition.’

  • Blair Begins ‘School Faith Scheme’

    ‘Tony Blair Faith Foundation’s Face To Faith project’ does God with a vengeance.

  • Blair Thinks ‘Religious Literacy’ Will Help

    Dialogue, different faiths, understanding, peace, Islamophobia, communities, deeper, beliefs.

  • More Emetic ‘Faith’ Blather from Blair

    ‘Faith matters. Even if you are not of religious faith yourself.’ Heavy, dude.

  • Dublin: Solidarity March for Abuse Victims

    The scandal of the abuse was described as Ireland’s mini holocaust by several campaigners today.

  • Alternative ‘Medicine’ Goes Mainstream

    An underground medical system with millions of people using it on blind faith.

  • Man Jailed for ‘Honour’ Killing of Sister

    Hasibullah Sadiqi gunned down his sister Khatera and her fiancé Feroz Mangal.

  • Save the Salinger Archives

    It seems possible he could be typing out the Bhagavad Gita in Sanskrit over and over again.

  • Somalia: al-Shabab Destroying Graves

    Sufi Muslims embrace music, dancing and meditation and are appalled at desecration of graves.

  • Islamist ‘Justice’ in Kismayo

    Hundreds of people flocked to Freedom Park to see a man’s hand chopped off.

  • Align Those Chakras

    A visit to the Mind, Body, Spirit Festival: strapped in for some top-shelf bullshit.

  • BNP Leader Pelted With Eggs

    Number of people voting BNP went up slightly, with the party benefitting from collapse in Labour vote.

  • One of me, two of them

    This will amuse you – I’m going to be on Nightwaves on Thursday. A ‘debate’ – more or less about the book, as I understand it. The Other Side will be represented by two people – which perhaps hints at where the BBC’s sympathies lie.

    I won’t tell you who the other people are now, because I prefer to tell you later.

  • The transparency project

    One reason religion is not good for women.

    God represents an absent, unknown, unknowable, unaccountable, arbitrary power – which makes God a tyrant. To quote from the book, it’s a bad principle to expect humans to obey a putative god that is inaccessible and unknowable, just as it
    would be to expect us to obey human legislators who were equally
    hidden and unknowable and unaccountable. The God of most believers is a God that no one has
    ever seen, that does not make appearances, that sends no messages;
    this God is hidden, secretive, permanently and inviolably locked away
    from all living people; this fact alone is enough to disqualify it as a source of laws or morality.

    It’s surprising, in a way, that so many people are happy to take orders from an unavailable unaccountable God; it’s especially suprising in the case of people who are consigned to inferior status by that unavailable unaccountable God. Habit, custom, training, and inertia explain a lot, but it’s still surprising.