Author: Ophelia Benson

I’m here. (Where? Here. Where I said I’d be. At the Center for Inquiry, in Amherst, outside Buffalo, New York.) Jeremy’s here, Julian’s here, Joe Hoffman is here, Paul Kurtz (of course) is here, Tom Flynn, Nathan Bupp, and others. It’s good fun. I’ll tell you more later.

B&W is going to fall silent or near-silent for awhile – until July 23d to be precise. I’m off to this Beyond Belief thing. I’d love to maintain B&W in the meantime but spyware ate my laptop two years ago, so I can’t, although Jeremy has kindly offered to let me use his when he’s not, so maybe I will be able to do a little.

So long!

So I flick to the World Service at 7 and hear that Alan Johnston was released an hour ago . Various people around here cheered rather noisily. I may have been one of them.

Barely had they told us that than he was on the line to tell us about it. It was horrible, ‘as you may imagine’ – in solitary confinement all that time with people who at intervals talked of killing him. He said at the very end they beat him – as they took him to the car to free him, apparently, they had to pound on him. It wasn’t nice.

And as he points out, he’s not the only one.

But anyway – he’s out. Yay.

Funny god these bishops believe in. Arbitrary, whimsical, cryptic, absent-minded, brutal, sloppy, and stupidly vicious. We’d better hope it doesn’t exist. Oblivion is vastly preferable to being bossed around by a petty shit like that for eternity. Funny that the bishops seem to find it attractive. (But not really funny at all of course, since it’s merely a projection of their own petty shitness.)

One diocesan bishop has even claimed that laws that have undermined marriage, including the introduction of pro-gay legislation, have provoked God to act by sending the storms that have left thousands of people homeless…[Graham Dow, Bishop of Carlisle] expressed his sympathy for those who have been hit by the weather, but said that the problem with “environmental judgment is that it is indiscriminate”.

Why yes, it is; clever of the bish to spot that, but therefore perhaps not all that clever to attribute it to a deity he probably wants people to love as well as fear. Typical enough, of the incoherence of church ‘teaching,’ but not all that clever all the same. Also a tad scientifically illiterate – he doesn’t mean ‘environmental judgment’ of course; the technical term is meteorological judgment.