Author: Ophelia Benson

Paween Mushtakhel loved acting, and was very successful at it; now she wishes she had never discovered the stage.

In December her husband was murdered by unknown gunmen outside their home after defying months of telephone warnings to stop his wife appearing on television. “I killed my husband with my acting,” [she] says…She has spent the past three months in hiding, fearful for her life and those of her two young children. Her only option, she says, is to flee the country. She is not alone. There is an unease bordering on dread among many working women as the restrictions of the Taleban era begin to encroach again on the relative liberalism of Afghanistan’s cities. “The atmosphere has changed,” she said. “Day by day women can work less and less.”

Well god hates women, after all, so what do you expect.

Mushtakhel reels off a list of high-risk professions for Afghan women: serving in parliament, working for foreign aid agencies, journalism, medicine, teaching, performing as an actress, singer or dancer. The Taleban justifies its attacks on such women by alleging that they are a cover for immoral acts and prostitution. Western employers and managers concur privately that women Afghan employees have begun to resign rather face the risks…The murder of Afghanistan’s most celebrated female police officer, Malalai Kakar, in September was a grim milestone. It was followed by a stream of killings of women journalists, teachers and workers, including four Western female aid workers in the past year.

All in the name of justice, compassion and mercy, no doubt.

Well which is it? Cherie Blair seems to want to have it both ways, or all ways. She says Christians are ‘marginalized in society.’

‘Everywhere you look today churches are being closed, Christians are often being marginalised and faith is something few people like to discuss openly.’…She added: ‘People used to suggest that Tony and George would actually pray together and that never happened of course.’

But why ‘of course’? If it’s worrying or upsetting or unfair that ‘Christians are often being marginalised’ then why is it ‘of course’ that Tony and George would not actually pray together?

The problem here is that there are very good reasons for citizens to be alarmed if their heads of state are praying together, because it would seem to imply that they are handing some of their duties and decisions over to a non-existent deity. But then that would be why ‘Christians are often being marginalised,’ too. If it’s true that Christians are being marginzalized, then that is at least partly because the rest of us think Christianity lacks rational foundations – but Cherie Blair seems to be at least partly aware of that when she says ‘of course’ Tony and George would never pray together. If Christianity were self-evidently reasonable, then why would it be a problem if Tony and George did pray together? She can’t have it both ways. She can’t pretend ‘faith’ is perfectly sensible and not worthy of being marginalized and at the same time treat as ludicrous the idea that Tony and George would pray together.

[Cherie] Blair said women were “virtually invisible” in the public face of Christianity and that its failure to recover from the social changes of the 1960s was one of its “fundamental weaknesses”. “Until the traditional churches fully resolve their relationship with the female half of the population, how can they expect Christianity to have a future in the modern world?” she asked.

Quite. So why does Cherie Blair expect the rest of us to refrain from ‘marginalizing’ (i.e. ignoring, dismissing, disagreeing with, mocking) Christianity? She doesn’t say, at least not in this piece. She doesn’t seem to be terribly reflective on the subject, frankly.

Nicholas Beale notes on his blog, ‘Quite a favourable review in the FT by Julian Baggini.’ The funny thing about that is that Julian said in his Talking Philosophy post that the FT rejected his first two drafts partly because they were ‘not sufficiently even-handed’ – which, when you compare the review to the TP post, clearly means not favourable enough. Yes it’s quite a favourable review in the FT, because the FT demanded a quite favourable review.

That’s funny in light of Beale’s post but it’s annoying in light of reality and justice. It’s annoying that media outlets commission reviews and then tell the reviewer what to say. It’s annoying that this book by Polkinghorne and Beale got a better review than it would have without FT nudging, especially in light of what we have seen of Beale’s way with an argument. I must be naïve, I thought reviews in responsible newspapers and magazines were supposed to be what the reviewer actually thought, not what the editors specified. I thought the reviewers were supposed to say what they found, not find what the editors told them to find in advance. Another illusion shattered.

Jeremy is going to move B&W to a different server this week (now you know why we needed the extra cache, just to make triply sure), so B&W may disappear for a day or two. Now you know this so you won’t turn pale and faint if it happens.

I jumped into the argument with Nicholas Beale, and – like several other people there, ended up surprised and a little shocked at his evasiveness, or shiftiness as Eric called it. NB said on Thursday about the putative Loving Ultimate Creator:

If a LUC exists then (s)he is unlikely to be incompetent and will therefore have some communication with the people (s)he loves. So if (s)he exists it’s reasonable to suspect that at least one of the major religions has a substantial core of truth.

I pointed out that the LUC hadn’t communicated with me, for one. He replied:

of course God communicates with you. But he doesn’t force you to listen or respond. That is freedom – and love.

I find that kind of thing annoying – downright rude in fact. No God does not communicate with me, and it’s presumptuous for strangers to tell me it does. Then of course what NB said is silly nonsense besides. I retorted, and got an even sillier response:

Surely you have heard of Jesus of Nazareth? A really fundamental difficulty that a lot of atheists seem to have is that they don’t seriously consider the possibility that Christianity is true…I’d hope that everyone on this blog would (at least on reflection) agree that if C is true then the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth is a genuine communication from God.

No, I don’t. Even if ‘Christianity is true’ (and it’s not clear what that means) the fact remains that I have received no communication from God. It can’t be called a communication if I remain unaware of it and/or don’t believe in its validity. I don’t take the stories in Mark, Matthew and Luke to be anything other than stories with perhaps some traces of truth in them about what Jesus said. They’re words in a book; books can be wrong, they can be faked, they can be corrupted in transmission, they can be garbled. I don’t take some words in a book to be a communication from God, and I don’t think it’s sensible for anyone to take them that way – yet it proved to be impossible to get Nicholas Beale to deal with that question instead of a different one of his own choosing. He didn’t answer anyone else’s question either. Altogether it was not a very impressive performance.

Amartya Sen considers the importance of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

[T]he Declaration took the firm view that human rights do not depend on legislation for recognition. People have these rights simply by virtue of being human. The contention here was that the acknowledgment of a human right is best seen not as a putative legal instrument, but as an important ethical demand–a demand that everyone should have certain freedoms irrespective of citizenship, nationality, and location. Such a recognition would lead to fresh legislation rather than await it. The Declaration championed the priority of morality to law.

That’s useful – the idea that the acknowledgment of a human right should be seen as an important ethical demand rather than as a legal instrument. The ethical demand comes first, then the legal instruments are drawn up in accordance with it.

Such a recognition would lead to fresh legislation rather than await it. The Declaration championed the priority of morality to law. It constituted an open invitation to all to re-organize the world in such a way that the basic freedoms recognized as rights would actually be realized.

Yeah. It’s also an open invitation to all to notice places where that is not happening, and to make ethical demands about them.

What is ‘God’? Nicholas Beale offers one answer:

On the loving bit, philosophically I’m inclined to offer “Loving Ultimate Creator” as a defintion of God. That is clearly fundamental to Christianity and I think broadly consonant with Islam & Judaism. It offers a philosophical explanations for Anthropic Fine-tuning the intelligibility of the universe, the existence of objective morality and beauty, and our strong intuition that love is the most important and fundamental aspect of the universe.

Whose strong intuition that love is the most important and fundamental aspect of the universe? Who is the we in that ‘our’? Beale and Polkinghorne? Theists? Human beings in general?

I don’t know, but I know I have no such intuition. My intuition would be more that love is not an aspect of the universe at all, but rather an aspect of animal mental life. Yeah in a trivial sense that makes it an aspect of the universe, because that’s where it’s located, but the most important and fundamental aspect? No. Maybe Beale just means that as a grandiose way of saying important and fundamental to human beings…but that’s not clear.