I don’t like Doudou Diene. I’ve said it before here – probably during the cartoons fuss. He’s scary, because he works for the UN.

“Islamophobia today is the most serious form of religious defamation,” Doudou Diene told the U.N. Human Rights Council…Diene, a Senegalese lawyer who was appointed as an independent U.N. expert on racism in 2002, was presenting a report on defamation of religions to the 47-member council. The report also includes sections on anti-Semitism and other forms of religious or racial persecution around the world. African and Islamic countries welcomed the assessment and called for moves to draft an international treaty that would compel states to act against any form of defamation of religion.

A report on … Read the rest

How to pretend an incompatibility is just a difference in taste. How to airbrush a genuine stalemate.

[R]eligious convictions limit many Americans’ willingness to accept controversial scientific theories…Science and religion have traditionally, and often incorrectly, been viewed as enemies. This perception has been fueled in part by a number of famous episodes in history that have pitted scientists, like Galileo and Darwin, against the prevailing religious establishments of their time. But more often than not, scientists and people of faith have operated not at cross purposes but simply at different purposes…How can Americans say that they respect science and even know what scientists believe and yet still disagree with the scientific community on some fundamental questions? The answer is

Go, Wajeha Al-Huwaider.

A group called the League of Demanders of Women’s Right to Drive Cars in Saudi Arabia will present a petition to King Abdullah this week, asking him to “return that which has been stolen from women: the right to free movement through the use of cars, which are the means of transportation today.”…Heading the new group pressing to overturn the ban is Wajeha Al-Huwaider, an American-schooled education analyst…Last month, she held a one-woman demonstration with a placard demanding, “Give Women Their Rights!” She was arrested, detained for seven hours and freed only after a male “guardian” signed for her. Banned by the Saudi Interior Ministry from writing in the Saudi press, she writes online. The authorities

A bishop says something worth saying for a change:

‘It is very common in the world today, including in this country, for people who have changed their faith, particularly from being Muslim to being Christian, to be ostracised, to lose their job, for their marriages to be dissolved, for children to be taken away,’ [Bishop of Rochester Michael Nazir-]Ali said. ‘And this is why some leadership is necessary from Muslim leaders themselves to say that this is not what Islam teaches.’

Who are these Muslim leaders though? As we know, that phrase gets bandied around a lot, but seriously, who are they? There was a time when that translated pretty straightforwardly (and unfortunately) to people at the top of … Read the rest

A week or two ago I was reading another book about emotions and thinking, The Political Brain by Drew Westen (I read it after reading this article in the NY Review of Books). I was struck by this observation on page 15:

Republicans understand what…David Hume recognized three centuries ago: that reason is a slave to emotion, not the other way around…Democratic strategists for the last three decades have instead clung tenaciously to the dispassionate view of the mind…They do so, I believe, because of an irrational emotional commitment to rationality – one that renders them, ironically, impervious to…scientific evidence on how the political mind and brain work. [italics his]

Hmmmm, I thought – do I have that? So … Read the rest

Anthony Grayling finds John Gray not altogether persuasive.

In a nutshell the book consists in the repeated assertion that modern secularist thinking is utopian in aspiration, has inherited this aspiration from Christianity, has failed because its belief in progress is false and has in fact been violently regressive…[H]e is against the progressivist ambitions of the secular Enlightenment, and he hopes to annoy its proponents by giving it Christianity for a father and – that weary old canard – Nazism and Stalinism for offspring…In order to establish that secular Whiggish Enlightenment-derived aspirations are the child of Christianity, Gray begins by calling any view or outlook a “religion”. Everything is a religion: Torquemada’s Catholicism, the pluralism and empiricism of 18th-century philosophers,