Author: IRQO

Good old Texas. It has an exciting new law, HB 3678 or the ‘Religious Viewpoint Anti-Discrimination Act.’

Students may express their beliefs about religion in homework, artwork, and other written and oral assignments free from discrimination based on the religious content of their submissions. Homework and classroom assignments must be judged by ordinary academic standards of substance and relevance and against other legitimate pedagogical concerns identified by the school district. Students may not be penalized or rewarded on account of the religious content of their work.

May not be ‘penalized’ – as in given a bad grade or told they are wrong? Well, not necessarily – perhaps. I asked Brian Leiter about this alarming portent, and he pointed out that school officials will be able to fall back on that second sentence – at least in functional schools. But there are those other legitimate pedagogical concerns identified by the school district, and there is the little matter of what can happen to school districts. Think ‘Dover.’ There is also the odd wording – ‘standards of substance and relevance.’ Standards of what? What standards are those, and what good are they? They might as well be called standards of niceness and okayness. They’re not much of a guide, and therefore not very reassuring. It is very difficult not to picture biology classes and history classes (not that history is taught in public schools any more) in which the answer ‘God did it’ is acceptable. It is difficult not to picture Texas jam-packed full of schools in which all the students can freely prattle about Jesus and his good friend God and know nothing at all about anything else.

Wisdom from an expert on holistic medicine.

Dawkins seems to be stuck in the last century.

Stuck in the last century – that’s a good one. Experts on holistic medicine are so hip and cutting edge and up to date while stodgy boring unfashionable people like scientists are stuck (like flies in amber, like gnats in ice cream, like a large person in a small doorway) in the last century, way the hell back seven years ago before the internet or CAT scans or the internal combustion engine.

He’s a very entertaining guy, but he suffers from existential insecurity: everything has to be proven before he’ll believe it.

That’s stupid, in more than one way. I’ll enumerate them. 1) ‘Existential insecurity’ is a silly tendentious self-flattering label to apply to rational skepticism of miraculous claims. It is not ‘existential insecurity’ to think and say that claims of medicinal effects that defy the laws of physics are not automatically credible. 2) It’s an elementary mistake to confuse evidence with proof, which shows what kind of ‘expert’ Stephen Russell is. Everything does not have to be proven before Dawkins will believe it; for claims about the natural world he wants evidence before he will consider the claims plausible.

His basic, rather alarmist, premise was that western medicine is in danger of being overshadowed by alternative medicine. Apart from being simply not true, it’s a very old-fashioned way of looking at the field.

There it is again – the peculiar obsession with fashion, and the clumsy lurch into irrelevance. It doesn’t matter whether it’s ‘old-fashioned’ or not; the issue is merit, not fashion.

It’s ridiculously nihilistic to think that if you can’t prove something right now, it isn’t valid. It’s so self-limiting: Dawkins must be very unhappy in himself. We’ve progressed beyond that.

We fashionable up to date types, that is – the ones who keep making the same stupid mistake about proof over and over again, while calling ourselves ‘experts’ in a ‘field’ that thinks water remembers a vanished molecule and can therefore have curative power. Russell must be very happy in himself; but what’s that got to do with anything? He’s still a chump.

Good old Nigeria, arresting 18 men for going to a party while (perhaps) being gay. That’s dangerous stuff; much more dangerous than, say, telling people that polio vaccines are part of a western plot to render Muslim women infertile.

There are vociferous local demands for the men to be stoned to death. At last week’s court hearing, an angry mob of Muslim homophobes assembled outside the court. They shouted anti-gay epithets and demanded that all 18 men be sentenced to death. Furious at the judge’s decision to opt for non-death penalty charges, they pelted the defendants with rocks as they left the court, attacked the police, and attempted to lynch the judge and to set the court building ablaze…

Sounds like a fun afternoon, doesn’t it?

Peter Tatchell points out some tensions:

Nigeria’s anti-sodomy laws contravene the anti-discrimination provisions of various African and UN human rights conventions that Nigeria has signed and pledged to uphold. These include the African charter on human and peoples’ rights, which came into force in 1986. It affirms the equality of all people, without discrimination. Similar provisions are included in the UN international covenant on civil and political rights to which Nigeria acceded in 1993…The persecution of gay Nigerians is symptomatic of a wider tyranny, which tramples on individual freedom and civil liberties, as documented by Human Rights Watch.

Whatever editor wrote the subhead for Tatchell’s article missed his point, and in fact subverted it. Whatever editor did that got things completely wrong, thus showing a depressing lack of understanding of the real problem.

This African country claims to be a democracy but its persecution of gay people is pure tyranny.

That’s stupid. Tatchell doesn’t mention democracy in the article, and that ‘but’ is no ‘but’ – it’s nonsense. Persecution of gay people is not somehow inherently the opposite of democracy; on the contrary, it’s a very tidy illustration of the danger of democracy, precisely because gay people are always a minority, and a pretty small one at that. It is perfectly possible to be both a democracy and a country that persecutes gay people. The tyranny in question is the tyranny of the majority.