Women – they’re old news, right? That battle was won long ago, right? No..

Bride burnings, honor killings, female infanticide, sex trafficking, mass rape as a weapon of war and many other hideous forms of violence against women are documented in a report released last month by the United Nations. The report, a compilation of many studies from around the world, should have been seen as the latest dispatch from that permanent world war — the war against women all over the planet. Instead, the news media greeted its shocking contents with a collective yawn.

Because…? The news media have other things to do? The subject isn’t important? Women don’t matter? Women deserve what they get? Those places are … Read the rest

Oh good, more calls for mandatory religion and against public atheism.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, and the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, are introducing a new think-tank report that challenges the secular dream of taking Christ out of Christmas or anything else…In a joint foreword, they welcome the conclusion of the report that faith is not just important for human flourishing, but that society can only flourish if faith is “given space” to contribute and challenge.

Really? Is that true? ‘Flourish’ in what sense? According to whom, by what lights, according to which criteria? And what kind of ‘space’ has to be given, and how much of it, and to whom? Can society … Read the rest

Tony’s been teasing Chuck. Excellent.

Tony Blair attacked the “anti-science brigade” yesterday for threatening Britain’s path to the future. He condemned the “outrageous distortion” of campaigners against pioneering technologies, insisting that they had to be defeated. His remarks at the King’s Centre, Oxford, will be taken as a thinly-veiled swipe at the Prince of Wales. Prince Charles has dismissed GM-food trials as unethical…Scientists would have a role in all the “big questions of our time – climate change, the spread of infectious diseases, water supply, biodiversity, terrorism,” said Mr Blair who confessed that he was a science “refusenik” at school. But he stressed the need to win the “irrational public debate” often surrounding scientific research. Without referring to Prince

Charming.

In a startling warning to the Government, senior church and political figures have backed a report advocating force to protest against policies that are “unbiblical” and “inimical to the Christian faith”.

The Telegraph cites the ‘menacing language’ of the report and says ‘Lord Mawhinney, the Tory peer, Andy Reed, the Labour MP, and the Rt Rev Peter Forster, the Bishop of Chester, helped to produce’ it.

The report from the Evangelical Alliance says “violent revolution” should be regarded as a viable response if government legislation encroaches further on basic religious rights. The church is urged to come to a consensus that “at some point there is not only the right but the duty to disobey the state”…Proposals to

More pondering on this question of what is good and for whom. Compassion is an important human virtue, but would it be an important virtue, or a virtue at all, if humans were different kinds of entities? If we were conscious but immortal and perfect, if we never suffered, if we had no vulnerability of any kind (and didn’t know of any entities that did), would compassion be a virtue? Would we see it as a good thing? I tend to doubt it.

I had similar doubts and questions about some things Keith Ward said in a discussion with Anthony Grayling in Prospect last year.

The scientific perception of the cosmos is that it is an intelligible, law-like, mathematically