Author: Ophelia Benson

My friend Claire told me about Zentangle. It’s way exciting, and apparently can pretty much change your life from top to bottom altogether. It’s timeless, it’s portable, it’s empowering. Also it has benefits, which the Zentangle people list for you. Among them are ‘journalling,’ self esteem, modify behavior (I don’t know, that’s what it says!), anger management (oh I doubt that), home schooling (in what?), stretching, team building. Yes but what is it, you wonder? Something about drawing patterns. Who knew that was such a miraculous type thing?

This is my favourite part, which is on the Theory page:

Quantum

With no correct answer, Zentangle offers both a freedom and a challenge. Unlike crossword, jigsaw, or Sudoku puzzles, there is no predetermined right answer. You cannot fail to create a Zentangle. At first this freedom can be a bit unnerving. Soon it becomes a freeing and uplifting experience as you realize you can create never-ending, ever-changing “solutions.”

Did you know that was what ‘quantum’ meant? No, neither did I. But it is so.

Eluana Englaro has been in a coma for 17 years; a high court in Italy ruled last week that doctors could reduce her feeding and allow her to die.

But

Silvio Berlusconi, after consultation with the Vatican, has issued an emergency decree stating that food and water cannot be suspended for any patient depending upon them, reversing the earlier court ruling…Justifying his campaign to save Englaro’s life, the prime minister added that, physically at least, she was “in the condition to have babies”, a remark described by La Stampa newspaper as “shocking”.

Yes, it is. It is in fact one of the most repellent things I’ve heard in some time. It is (perhaps – I don’t actually know this) physically possible to cause babies to grow inside her and then to remove them after nine months – but so what? What difference does that make to anything? It’s already known that part of her body is still alive, but it’s also known that the part of her that makes her what a person is has been dead for 17 years – so what difference does it make that she could still be used as an incubator? There’s a combination of sexism and morbidity in that thought that makes the blood freeze.

The case has deeply divided Italian society and raised concerns over the influence of the Vatican. Yesterday Pope Benedict indirectly referred to Englaro in a message delivered to mark the World Day of the Sick, stating that society had a duty to defend “the absolute and supreme dignity of every human being” even when “weak and shrouded in the mystery of suffering”.

Oh the blindness of sanctimony. What dignity?! Where is the dignity in being kept around as an animated corpse? Where is the dignity in occupying a bed while having no mind? Where is the dignity in being a mindless brain-dead thoughtless dreamless hopeless lump of flesh? That’s not dignity. And defending that idea is not compassion – it’s a perverted backwards distorted idea of it which actually promotes suffering instead of preventing it.

Bastards.

Giles Fraser demonstrates Christian generosity and clear thinking.

Contributors to Thought for the Day mustn’t attack the beliefs of others. It’s a basic BBC rule. This is not a place where Christians can fire pot shots at Hindus or Muslims have a go at Judaism. Which is why it’s just not appropriate for atheists. Not that they haven’t important things to say. The problem is that atheism is defined by what it’s against, that it is not theism.

Even before we get to the substance, that passage is odd for a grownup writer. All those short sentences. When they could perfectly well be made into longer sentences. Surely Fraser is sophisticated enough to do that.

But leaving style aside, consider the content: the assumption 1) that atheism is fundamentally about theism as opposed to being about all kinds of things in the absence of theism and 2) that atheism has nothing to do but attack theist beliefs. That assumption is wrong on both counts, and especially so in the context of a program like ‘Thought for the Day’ which is about anything and everything, from a theistic point of view. There is no obvious reason why an atheist ‘Thought for the Day’ couldn’t be about anything and everything from an atheist point of view. Ronald Aronson’s book Living Without God is like that, for instance; it doesn’t attack theist beliefs, it discusses various issues and questions about life from a nontheist point of view.

As individuals, atheists may have opinions. But on TftD I speak as a representative of a body of opinion that has a definable literature, a major place in world history and billions of adherents.

The stupidity of that first sentence is so obvious (whether it means he’s allowing us to have opinions or is conceding that we may be capable of having them) that I won’t say any more about it. But as for the rest: we too speak as representatives of a body of opinion that has a definable literature and a major place in world history, and if we don’t have billions of ‘adherents’ that will be partly because atheism isn’t about ‘adherence’ any more than it is about submission or veneration or spirituality or transcendence or any other of the pious sludge that theists like to pour over their commonplaces – and partly because theists won’t allow it. So if that sentence is offered as a reason to continue to exclude atheists from ‘Thought for the Day’ it’s a train wreck.

Then he gets downright snotty – but no more cogent.

I wish atheists would get a life and stop following believers wherever they go, demanding to join in. Perhaps they are incapable of leaving us alone. For atheism is parasitic upon religious belief, united only by what it is against. Just as TftD should not include religious fundamentalists denouncing heathens, so it should not include atheists denouncing believers. This is a place for a very different, gentler sort of reflection – and that’s why so many people continue to love it.

Yes and I wish theists would get a life and stop telling everyone to believe that which there is no good reason to believe. We wouldn’t ‘follow them around’ (which I take to mean disagree with them and/or dispute theistic monopolies of public media outlets) if they weren’t always telling us what to do or how to think or both. And to repeat, atheists are perfectly capable of engaging in gentle reflection, and I would even say (since this is not ‘Thought for the Day’ and I am allowed to be ungentle here) that we do it better than theists do.

In any case, Fraser himself points out that it is ‘a basic BBC rule’ that Contributors to Thought for the Day mustn’t attack the beliefs of others, so the rule would take care of any putative atheist propensity to attack the beliefs of others, thus there is no need to exclude them as a category in advance. So…what’s his point? Nothing, apparently, except to be rude and muddled about atheism. Once again theism shoots its own self in its own foot.

And Caroline Petrie is the same kind of thing. She refuses to stop thrusting her religion on patients. The trust says she can pray over them if they ask her to – but that’s not good enough, she has to force it on them unasked, blind to the discomfort that this would cause people who don’t happen to be like her.

“It is me, it is a natural thing for me to do,” she said. “If I am nursing, I would offer prayer to somebody and I am not going to change.”…Yesterday the mother-of-two said she would behave in exactly the same way: “I cannot divide my faith from my nursing care, I have to be the person I want to be.”

Note the Telegraph’s none-too-subtle nudge – she’s a mother of two, therefore she’s a nice warm normal person, who shouldn’t be expected to divide her ‘faith’ from her nursing. Note also the self-centered appeal to Being Me and having to Be The Person I Want To Be – note that it’s about her, not about other people.

The trust said:

“It is acceptable to offer spiritual support as part of care when the patient asks for it. But for nurses, whose principal role is giving nursing care, the initiative lies with the patient and not with the nurse. Nurses like Caroline do not have to set aside their faith, but personal beliefs and practices should be secondary to the needs and beliefs of the patient and the requirements of professional practice.”

But no, that’s not good enough. It’s up to Nurse Petrie to decide what patients have to put up with from her, it’s not up to her employers. Nurse P has god on her side.

“If they said ‘please don’t ask patients to pray’ then I am sorry, I can’t promise that, so where do we go from there? I would have to contact my lawyer.”

Because theism is mandatory and freedom from theism is not allowed, and if you don’t agree, we’ll sue. Got that?