The City of London Police tried to prosecute a protester for calling Scientology a ‘cult.’
Author: Ophelia Benson
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Prisoner Boasts of Plan to Prison Officer
‘I am planning to bomb Bluewater shopping centre in Exeter.’ ‘It’s in Kent.’ ‘The plan is not finalised yet.’
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Please Not the Old ‘Community Leaders’ Drivel
Top cop had to ‘build links’ with the ‘diverse’ community he policed; that meant meeting community leaders, e.g. Scientologists.
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Bill Sneaks Religion Into Science Class
Louisiana Senate Bill 733 lets public school teachers use supplementary materials when teaching about evolution.
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A common objective?
Tom Clark argues with the theologian John Haught. He starts out with some common ground – or perhaps not.
As much as their worldviews differ, both naturalists and anti-naturalists share a common objective: getting the nature of reality right according to their best lights.
I don’t really think that’s true – at least not of anti-naturalists of the type discussed in the article. I thought that as soon as I read it, then as I read the rest of the article I found places where Clark makes points that are (at least) in tension with it. It seemed to me as soon as I read it, and then thought about it, that anti-naturalists are motivated in their anti-naturalism by something other than getting the nature of reality right. I think what they want to do is get the nature of reality into alignment with their wishes, and that getting it right is subservient to that goal.
And what comes after that passage simply bears that out.
From Haugh:
Do our new atheists seriously believe …that if a personal God of infinite beauty and unbounded love actually exists, the ‘evidence’ for this God’s existence could be gathered as cheaply as the evidence for a scientific hypothesis?
But why should anyone think that, even if there is a ‘God,’ it is one of infinite beauty and unbounded love? If your goal is to get the nature of reality right, you start by taking an impartial look (to the best of your ability) at reality, at the world as it is; if you do that, do you think that beauty and love describe the world? Not if you really take a look. Not if you know anything about it. If you really look, you know very well that there is a lot of ugliness and misery too, and that a god of beauty and love seems at the very least incomplete as a god of this world and this reality.
Haught further says that to decide the question of God’s existence it is necessary to open oneself ‘to the personal transformation essential to faith’s sense of being grasped by an unbounded love.’ Clark comments:
[W]e see that detecting the object of knowledge – infinite Love, should it exist – requires receptivity to the possibility of its existence on the part of the knower. But of course being receptive is patently to be psychologically biased in favor of the possibility, to be susceptible to a certain interpretation of one’s experience, namely that one is being embraced by god. So right away we encounter a stark contrast between Haught’s theological mode of knowing and ordinary empirical inquiry, in which subjective biases in favor of certain hypotheses are seen as threats to objectivity. For those concerned about whether their preconceptions and desires might be distorting their grasp of reality, that is, anyone interested in truth as opposed to wishful thinking, the theological requirement of receptivity raises a bright red flag.
Exactly. Which is why I’m not sure naturalists and anti-naturalists do share the common objective of getting the nature of reality right.
It’s an excellent article; read the whole thing.
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The Compleat Sceptic: Of Fathers and Dissident Daughters
As mesmerized television viewers know, America is beset with vapid discussions of the faith of their future president masquerading as “compassion forums.” In the April 12 CNN version of what may become a permanent feature of American political showmanship, candidates were challenged to describe whether they have ever felt the Holy Spirit move within them and whether, in their best judgment, God wanted him, or her, to be president.
No, this was not a BBC satire. It is American Realpolitik. The questions were deadly earnest, exceeded in absurdity only by the feigned seriousness with which the combatants stumbled through their rehearsed platitudes. Neither contender was asked the unfashionable empirical question that used to dominate discussion: Would you push a red button or invade a country if you were menstruous, or testosteronous, or had simply had a bad day? Plausible reasons for doing irrational things, in 2008, are not discussible. The real, persistent, and biologically-based causes that explain why human beings sometimes behave dangerously are sequestered through a diabolical system of rhetorical taboos. But imaginary things, like “the Holy Spirit moving” in us, still matter. In America, anyway, this is where the Postmodern Feminism that supplanted (even if it was nascent within) the Political Feminism of the 1960’s has brought us.
I have just come from a lecture by Daphne Patai. Her father, the much-neglected Rafael Patai, was a Hungarian Jew who collaborated with the mythographer-poet Robert Graves in producing one of the most sophisticated exposés of Hebrew myth ever compiled. Her lecture was on the intellectual limitations of feminism. Thirty one people attended. It was one of the best lectures I have heard on the “anti-science” of the feminist movement. It was not recorded. That is a shame because it was a refreshing breath of heresy directed against the political orthodoxy of “women’s studies programs.” It opened a wound that has scarcely been noticed: the tension between political liberalism and secular humanism, between skepticism as a programmatic cast of mind that can be turned even against fashionable positions, and a programmatic liberalism that advocates a selective form of skepticism—namely, the sort applied to conservative orthodoxy.
Patai inherited from her father the compleat sceptical gene that very few people, in my experience, possess. Voltaire may have been one of them. He is alleged to have said “Only my skepticism keeps me from being an atheist.” The same rule applies to Patai’s feminism. She is a feminist, self-proclaimed and proud to be one. She was a pioneer in the founding of women’s studies programs at the University of Massachusetts, where she still teaches (but not women’s studies). She believes that the souls, bodies, and intellects of men and women are created equal. I am sure she hates the mindlessness, violence, brutishness and unreflective self-congratulation that defines sexism; but she finds sexism in both sexes.
She is problematical because she (brazenly) challenges her sisters to justify the excesses of their trade, without saying their trade is insignificant. A curriculum that studies and celebrates the achievements of women is as justifiable, surely, as one that glorifies the achievements of dead Greeks and medieval monks and reformers.
If women’s studies means that, then recherchez la femme. She is aware of the peculiar history of the field, which, without being limited to Jewish theorists, boasts an array of them. She worries that the history of personal violence and masculine idiocy should become, in its own right, a field of academic inquiry.
A fable: A young Jewish Bennington graduate betakes herself to the freewheeling culture of Amsterdam to research the Provo Anarchy movement. She marries one of her “subjects,” and in turn is abused by him. Mercilessly—beaten, hunted, and harassed. She is befriended by a fellow American-in-search of meaning, also Jewish, Ricki Abrams. Abrams introduces Andrea Dworkin to radical feminist writing from the United States–Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics, Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex. She and Abrams begin to work together on “early pieces and fragments… of a radical feminist text on the hatred of women in culture and history.” The result of all this is the theory that (a) all men are sexist and naturally violent; (b) all acts of heterosexual sex are rape, by implication if not in law and (c) all women are victims. From this, to Third Wave, to Catherine MacKinnon’s reverse legal-Aristotelianism, to Riot Grrrl punk feminism is a dizzying journey. But it is more than a journey. It is a curriculum leading to a degree in America’s best liberal arts colleges and universities.
Daphne decided to jump ship when, in a planning session with other women’s studies specialists, she wondered out loud why the sciences were “sexist,” and asked specifically about the Periodic Table—something, surely, both men and women would agree is beyond the dimorphism that characterizes most modern discussions of sex and gender. After all, the world is the world, chemical, physical, biological. But with that contempt for intellect which characterizes both Bubba in Georgia and too many women’s studies professors, she was told that “Only men would put numbers in boxes.” She retired happily into the Romance Linguistics department, whence she had come.
Abraham Joshua Heschel, the brilliant biblical and Talmudic scholar, is best known for his pioneering work on the nature of Hebrew prophecy, less known for his daughter Susannah who now teaches at Dartmouth. Heschel, like many Jews of his generation, had doubts about the “legitimacy” of women being ordained to the rabbinate in the culture that is alleged to have given us patriarchy. But he had a history of his own. His sister Esther was killed in a German bombing. His mother was murdered by the Nazis, and two other sisters, Gittel and Devorah, died in Nazi concentration camps. He never returned to Germany, Austria or Poland. He wrote, “If I should go to Poland or Germany, every stone, every tree would remind me of contempt, hatred, murder, of children killed, of mothers burned alive, of human beings asphyxiated.”
Heschel concluded that if the message of the prophets is social liberation, then the prophets were pointing forward to the religious enfranchisement of his children, irrespective of their sex. Susannah would be a rabbi, because so many women had been killed by the cruelty of men without conscience and scruples.
Not every father is Abraham Heschel, or Rafael Patai. And those men were not uncomplicated, perhaps not typical.
But Patai bears that sort of relationship to her father, who is her ghost and her mentor, but not her master. “He had,” she said to me over dinner, “seventeen languages; I’m a professor of Romance linguistics and I have four.” It is the kind of complex father-daughter relationship that throws Margaret Atwood’s “King Lear in Respite Care” into view, or Anne Sexton, on the death of her father:
Gone, I say and walk from church,
refusing the stiff procession to the grave,
letting the dead ride alone in the hearse.
It is June. I am tired of being brave.She does not begin with atheism, or secularism or any of the liberal secular agendas thought to arise from a purely personal and political point of view. Her father was bold, or foolish, enough to write books called The Arab Mind (1976) and The Jewish Mind (1996). He was martyr to an intellectual cause that flew in the face of liberal orthodoxies. So is she. Irreverent critics of The Arab Mind, infected with the spirit of Edward Said’s Orientalism, said it was “a compendium of racist stereotypes and Eurocentric generalizations.” The Jewish Mind fared worse. She lives his controversies amidst controversies of like proportion, against social orthodoxies of similar dimensions.
I must wonder where these discussions are headed, as the academy lapses into the self-preserving rhetoric that dilutes liberal ideals on the one hand and punishes scepticism with an iron glove on the other.
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Saudi Police Arrest Rights Activist at University
Matrook al-Faleh arrested after he criticized conditions in a prison where other rights activists are stuck.
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Nour Miyati Denied Justice for Torture
HRW reports all charges were dropped against Saudi employer who abused Indonesian servant.
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Some New Members of HRC are Rights Abusers
Human Rights Council has not found time to inquire into Burma’s unabashed denial of food to its own population.
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Baggini on Secular and Sacred Values
When it comes to specific matters of morality, the idea that religious convictions need respect, not interrogation and defence, is absurd.
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HRW on Crisis for Gay Rights in Turkey
Necessary to defend all people’s basic rights against the dictatorship of custom.
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Goodness, what’s the rush?
A Texas appeals court rules that the state CPS acted too hastily in removing all the children from the FLDS ranch.
In the decision, the 3rd Court ruled that CPS failed to provide any evidence that the children were in imminent danger. It said state acted hastily in removing them from their families. The agency had argued that the children on the ranch were either abused or at risk of abuse. The Texas Family Code allows a judge to consider whether the “household” to which a child would be returned includes a person who has sexually abused another child. Child welfare officials alleged that the polygamist sect’s practice of marrying underage girls to older men places all its children at risk of sexual abuse.
And there’s another thing – the fact that the children in question are not free to leave. To put it mildly. Make no mistake: they are locked in there, and the doors are not open. And, it goes without saying, they don’t go to school. If anything is wrong, there is no one they can tell.
The court wrote, “Even if one views the FLDS belief system as creating a danger of sexual abuse by grooming boys to be perpetrators of sexual abuse and raising girls to be victims of sexual abuse as the Department contends, there is no evidence that this danger is ‘immediate’ or ‘urgent’ … with respect to every child in the community.”
Even though they can’t leave? Even if there is no way for anyone from outside to make sure all the children are all right? Sorry; I don’t buy it. I’ve read and heard enough accounts from some of the few people who have escaped to have good reason not to buy it.
Scott Dixon, a CPS regional director, said some shelters and facilities were already getting calls from parents asking when they could pick up their kids…Carolyn Jessop, who fled the sect in 2003, was leading the training. She called the decision “a shock. I am just hoping that enough people will come out and protest it,” said Jessop. She is an ex-wife of Merril Jessop, the assumed leader at the Eldorado compound.
An ex-wife who as a teenager was married to Jessop at the command of her father. She was raised FLDS, she couldn’t say no, but she was shocked and horrified. No; sorry; men shouldn’t be allowed to marry off their daughters like so much livestock.
Scott McCown, a former judge and executive director of the Center for Public Policy Priorities, said…protective services could still remove the children after a full trial. McCown said there is a very real risk that if the children are returned to their parents they will be moved to another state, Canada or Mexico and be outside the jurisdiction of Texas’ protective custody. “One of the real dangers is flight, and the court doesn’t address that at all,” McCown said.
Oh well. So a few hundred kids have crappy lives, and raise their own children to have crappy lives, and so on forever; no big deal.
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Prosecution for Calling Scientology a ‘Cult’
Cop read protester section 5 of the Public Order Act, then gave him a court summons.
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The Psychology of Theological Justification
If we expand our epistemic horizons, John Haught says, we will find god.
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Court Decision in FLDS Case
Texas appeals court ruled CPS failed to prove there was any danger to the health and safety of the children.
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Texas Court of Appeals, Third District, Austin
The Relators’ Petition for Writ of Mandamus is conditionally granted.
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A Pervasive Pattern of Sexual Abuse
‘When we see evidence that children have been sexually abused and remain at risk of further abuse, we will act.’
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Khadim Hussain: the Fate of Swat [scroll down]
An overwhelming majority of people never supported the clergy in their quest for influence in the valley.
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You have the right to remain silent
A teenager is facing prosecution for using the word “cult” to describe the Church of Scientology. The unnamed 15-year-old was served the summons by City of London police…Officers confiscated a placard with the word “cult” on it from the youth, who is under 18, and a case file has been sent to the Crown Prosecution Service.
Uh – right. Because that’s obviously a crime. Saying Scientology is a cult is self-evidently a crime. Uh…what? In what universe?
Demonstrators from the anti-Scientology group, Anonymous, who were outside the church’s £23m headquarters near St Paul’s cathedral, were banned by police from describing Scientology as a cult by police because it was “abusive and insulting”…A policewoman later read him section five of the Public Order Act and “strongly advised” him to remove the sign. The section prohibits signs which have representations or words which are threatening, abusive or insulting.
Which covers, if the police so choose, pretty much all words. Except maybe ‘nice’ – maybe the sign would have been permitted if it had said ‘Scientology is nice.’ Or maybe not, in case it was sarcastic.
The teenager refused to back down, quoting a 1984 high court ruling from Mr Justice Latey, in which he described the Church of Scientology as a “cult” which was “corrupt, sinister and dangerous”. After the exchange, a policewoman handed him a court summons and removed his sign.
Justice me no justices, Teenager; public order requires that things not be said on signs no matter how many justices have said them beforehand. Public order is a very fragile thing. All of London could be reduced to screaming anarchy and bloody warfare in a heartbeat if a sign were allowed to call Scientology a cult – so hand it over, and here’s your summons.
Liberty director, Shami Chakrabarti, said: “This barmy prosecution makes a mockery of Britain’s free speech traditions. “After criminalising the use of the word ‘cult’, perhaps the next step is to ban the words ‘war’ and ‘tax’ from peaceful demonstrations?”
Might as well. Best not to risk it.
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Running women
Ali Al-Ahmed points out an anomaly.
The procession of the Olympic torch drew protests from Paris to San Francisco over China’s treatment of the Tibetan people, but no one has protested another tragedy that is afflicting millions of women in Saudi Arabia, Iran and other Muslim countries. Many Muslim women dare not even dream of the Olympics because their countries ban female sports altogether or severely restrict the athletic activities of the “weaker sex.”…[T]he slogan of the 29th Olympic Games is “One World, One Dream.” This dream, however, will not be realized by women in Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries that ban women from sports domestically and internationally. The International Olympic Committee charter states that “any form of discrimination with regard to a country or a person on grounds of race, religion, politics, sex or otherwise is incompatible with belonging to the Olympic Movement.” But the Olympic Committee is failing to adhere to its own standards. While the hypothetical example of participating countries barring black athletes from the Olympic Games would have rightly caused international outrage, the committee continues to allow the participation of countries that do not allow women on their Olympic teams.
Yes well you see…barring women is different from barring black people because…because…because nobody owns black people (it took a bit of a fuss, but we have that pretty much settled now), but women are owned. So countries are allowed to say that women can’t do sports because women all belong to someone, but countries aren’t allowed to say that black people can’t do sports because no one owns them (except the women, but don’t confuse me).
It must be something like that, you know. Otherwise it wouldn’t fly. It does fly, so the thinking must be something along those lines. Rules about women are Special because they cut close to the bone because women belong to other people, so nobody has the right to say they ought to be allowed to do things.
Or else it’s just the usual disgusting craven unwillingness to say ‘boo’ to Saudi Arabia.