Author: Ophelia Benson

I hesitate to link to the Daily Mail, but this is interesting.

Islamic extremists are fuelling the spread of “honour” based violence against women in Britain, the country’s most senior Muslim prosecutor has warned…”When you talk to women who are victims of this type of behaviour you often find that they will say that their husbands or fathers have been radicalised in the way that they think about women,” he said. “They will use Islam as a justification for telling women how to behave and for punishing them. There is no religious justification for forcing your children to marry or harming them because they behave in a particular way, but there are people out there who are using their faith as a reason to do this. In the past, they might have said ‘do this because I’m your dad’, but when they are radicalised it is making them feel more confident about the way they behave towards the women in their family. It is allowing the man to say ‘my religion says you must behave this way’ and it puts a lot of extra pressure on the women in their families and can make them feel that they should toe the line because it is about faith and their culture.”

The bit about feeling more confident is especially interesting. Plausible, and interesting, and depressing. It’s not good if people feel more confident about bullying and oppressing other people. We don’t want people to feel more confident about that, we want them to feel timid and hesitant and doubtful and uneasy; we want them to feel so hesitant and uneasy that they end up not doing it. Confidence is usually framed as a good thing, but of course it isn’t necessarily; it depends. ‘Confidence’ is another of those words and concepts, like loyalty and courage and tolerance and even freedom, that are not unqualified goods but tend to be deployed as if they are.

Nazir Afzal is saying something quite significant there, I think, which would repay a lot of thought and investigation. Religion and probably some kinds of politics and certainly ideology do work to make people ‘feel more confident about the way they behave towards’ various others – and that can be a very good thing, or it can be a horrible nightmare. There’s a lot of the nightmare around right now.

A note on How many senses. A correspondent reminds me that I said what I said too broadly. ‘But experiments are supposed to be repeatable by any appropriately trained person not actually disabled.’ True – that is too broad. Mind you, I clarified somewhat in the next sentence – ‘You could claim that the people who can’t do it are disabled – lack a sense’ – but I should have clarified in the first sentence. I didn’t mean disabled in general, I meant lacking a specific sense needed to repeat a specific experiment.

I added the qualification merely in the effort to be precise – as one does when arguing, you know. I was making a fairly sweeping generalization there, so I felt that need to be careful, to anticipate likely objections or exceptions and include them. The point of the disagreement turns on the difference between Stannard’s claim about experimental repeatability which applies only to a particular group, compared to experimental repeatability which applies in principle to everyone – with the necessary stipulations: appropriate training, and the appropriate senses (appropriate, in both cases, in the sense of ‘what’s needed for the particular experiment’). That’s all I meant.

This is so heartbreaking . It’s just so, so sad. I’m bedewing my keyboard with splashy tears. What happened? What’s her story? What went wrong? When did it begin? Why oh why can no one help her? Has she tried homeopathy? Has she tried going back to school to get a BSc in homeopathy and treating others in her tragic plight as well as herself? Has she tried forgetting all about it and doing something else? A hiking trip along the Cornish coast, working for Human Rights Watch, cooking?

I suppose what’s so terribly sad and heart-rending and especially poignant about it is that she looks so sexy in herself, if you know what I mean. She looks like the kind of woman that you look at her and think sex, or something closely related to that. So the fact that she is apparently in deep despair at her lack of sex drive is just – almost undendurably pitiful. That platinum hair, those made-up eyes, those pouty lips, those plucked brows, that pearly skin – all, all wasted because the poor lovely creature just doesn’t want to.

Or maybe that’s not it, maybe it’s that her malfunction is so intractable – that it’s been going on for at least four years. Four years!! Can you imagine? If not more. Four years this delicious pinkish glowing creature has not felt like shtupping. The agony! And all because she’s so busy. (I must say, she doesn’t look very busy, does she. Rather the opposite. She looks rather immobile – I suppose it’s the fact that she hasn’t changed her position or expression in four years that conveys that impression – along with the head leaning on the hand in good Romantic fashion, the downcast eyes, the sad lips. She doesn’t really look like a busy thrusting rushing harried multitasking woman who just doesn’t have time to lie down, does she. In fact she looks as if she’s lying down while sitting up.) The tragedy of modern life, you know? So much to do, so little time – humping just gets shoved to the bottom of the list, and the result is that women fall into despair and have to start popping Enhanced Sex Drive pills. I blame globalization.

Today’s women have less sex than their 1950s counterparts, say researchers. Experts in the United States believe the demands of modern life are to blame – leaving women with little time or energy. Fifty years ago, most women were stay-at-home mums with more free time. Few had jobs and television sets were rare.

Oh I know. I know, I know. Fifty years ago most lucky women stayed at home and had nothing to do, so they had sex all the time out of sheer boredom and lack of occupation. Does that sound great or what! How I wish I could live like that. Nothing to do, so plenty of time to eat, and drink, and sleep, and fuck. Almost as good as being a cow! The demands of modern life are indeed to blame if they’ve deprived us of all that.

Today, many women hold down jobs while also raising children. Any spare time is often spent shopping, working out in the gym or watching their favourite television programmes.

Well – duh. What else is there? Nothing! Obviously. Shopping, the gym, tv; that’s what life is about, isn’t it? You ‘hold down’ jobs and raise children so that they can grow up to ‘hold down’ jobs and in their spare time revel in the joys of shopping, the gym, and tv. So what’s the problem? (It’s that it’s supposed to go shopping, the gym, tv, sex, that’s what. Oh right, I forgot.)

“Couples are often weighted down by double careers and childcare, and by the time people have been to the shopping mall and watched all the television they want, there is not much time for sex. We live in an age where there is little unfilled leisure time. Sex used to fill that gap.”

Well – so what is the problem then? If couples find, after they have watched all the television they want, that it’s four in the morning and they’d rather sleep than hump, why is that something for researchers or the BBC or the hauntingly melancholy woman to fret about? Why isn’t that simply their choice as consumers and enjoyers of the illusion of free will? Why is platinum-hair sulking just because she watched ten hours of ‘Big Brother’ on DVD when she could have been having sex instead? Jeez, hon, just have the sex instead of watching tv next time, that’s all; lighten up! Dang – four years of pouting just because she can’t find the ‘Off’ button? That’s what I call a sulk.

Internal experience revisited. Disregard if bored with subject.

It seems perfectly rational to believe you had an internal experience, and somewhat rational to say you can’t doubt you had it. What’s not rational is to interpret it as external – and be unable to doubt that.

It’s not the same as doubting you went running this morning – because that is external. It’s a bit of behavior. It’s true that your memory of it is internal – but it is at least in principle checkable, as Chris Whiley noted. Your inner meeting with God isn’t, which makes it vastly less checkable. Stannard’s physics analogy* is bad because he doesn’t just ‘trust’ the other physicists – he also knows that their work is in principle and fact checkable – he could check it himself. That is not true of all these reports of meeting God in prayer (and of finding ‘yes, that someone does have the characteristics of love and forgiveness and all the rest of it’).

Also – Stannard says in that passage that the experience is repeatable. But it’s not. It’s repeatable (if at all) only by people who have that kind of experience. But experiments are supposed to be repeatable by any appropriately trained person not actually disabled. You could claim that the people who can’t do it are disabled – lack a sense – but that seems far-fetched, especially since the putative ‘sense’ corresponds to no physical organ, as the Big Five do – so it’s dubious even to call it a sense, sixth or otherwise.

The parallel with Wiccans and pagans is more relevant than I made out when I first mentioned it, I think. Because they’re all – apparently – doing the same thing. They all want to meet god or goddess, and believe they will, and set out to hypnotize themselves – and it works. In fact it’s not obvious why Stannard’s claim is anything other than auto-hypnosis. Of course, he can still say ‘Yes it’s auto-hypnosis and that’s how God appears to humans.’ That could be true – but is it rational to think so? Not particularly!

*’I believe a lot of things about physics, not having personally done the experiments. And it is because I trust the people who have done the experiments. It seems to me that if you’re dealing with religious people, who all engage in this prayer activity, and time and again, they keep on coming up with the idea that they are in contact with someone, and yes, that someone does have the characteristics of love and forgiveness and all the rest of it – now that is repeatable…

Joan Smith in amusing vein.

[O]ne of the jobs I most fancy is poster-girl for a strictly rational approach to human affairs.

Hey I want that job! Me, me, me. I dibs it. It’s mine.

[R]ecent events show that it isn’t just sceptics who are worried by the inroads which other people’s imaginary friends have been making in secular states…[I]n a blow to the Islamophobia industry which has tried to silence critics of Islam through strident accusations of racism, the Education Secretary Alan Johnson issued guidelines which will allow schools to ban paranoid forms of religious dress.

The Islamophobia industry hasn’t just tried to silence critics of Islam via accusations of racism, to a considerable extent it’s succeeded. Lots of people do indeed refuse to criticise Islam precisely on the grounds that doing so amounts to persecuting minorities. That’s certainly not a universal view, but it’s not a vanishingly small one, either.

“What do we want? Discrimination! When do we want it? Now!” has never seemed to me a persuasive platform for any religion to fight on…[T]he Archbishop of York and two Anglican bishops found themselves criticised by peers who wanted to know what had happened to the notion of Christian love…The Anglican hierarchy needs to do some soul-searching about why they joined this doomed cause, placing themselves on the same side as monstrously prejudiced bishops from Latin America and Africa.

Well, it’s partly precisely because those bishops are from Latin America and Africa. See item about what amounts to persecuting minorities, above. The Anglican hierarchy apparently feels uncomfortable and unhappy about simply contradicting or ignoring bishops from Latin America and Africa; it feels too much like white skin privilege or colonialism or both. They’ve pretty much said as much, I think – in slightly more roundabout terms, but that is the gist. They feel caught between two oughts, is what it boils down to. Unfortunately, they’ve chosen the wrong ought. It’s a powerful ought, and a lot of people choose it, with rather dreadful consequences.