So it turns out that Sacranie isn’t all that gleeful after all. Or perhaps he is but thinks it politic to pretend not to be. Or perhaps he is but wants to throw his weight around some more anyway – yes that could be it, that seems to fit.

The Muslim Council of Britain told the BBC News website: “We have not received any complaints about this piece of artwork. We would have preferred to have been consulted by Tate Britain before the decision was taken to remove John Latham’s piece. Sometimes presumptions are incorrectly made about what is unacceptable to Muslims and this can be counter-productive.”

Ah – is that what you would have preferred. Is it really. Yes … Read the rest

Brilliant. Perfect. Let’s let worries about ‘offending’ religious sensitivities determine what art we’re not allowed to see. What a good idea! Why didn’t someone think of it sooner? It would save such a huge amount of trouble, for one thing – we would all have to spend so much less time in museums and at the theatre and reading blasfeeemous books. Think how much more efficient we would be. We would be able to put new colours on the stripes in toothpaste. We would make the world a more beautiful (and of course less blasfeemous) place.

One of Britain’s leading conceptual artists has accused the Tate gallery of ‘cowardice’ after it banned one of his major works for fear of

Dogmatism, we were talking about the other day. Via this remark by Simon Blackburn in Truth.

Today’s relativists, persuading themselves that all opinions enjoy the same standing in the light of reason, take it as a green light to believe what they like with as much conviction and force as they like. So while ancient scepticism was the sworn opponent of dogmatism, today dogmatisms feed and flourish on the desecrated corpse of reason.

A day or two after posting that I read a related comment by Hume.

You propose then, Philo, said Cleanthes, to erect religious faith on philosophical skepticism; and you think that if certainty or evidence be expelled from every other subject of inquiry, it will all