Author: Ophelia Benson

  • Roger Scruton: Democracy or Theocracy?

    Secular government is the sine qua non of democracy, and theocracy is its natural opponent.

  • The Prospect List is a Stupid List

    It’s not about the best or the most important public intellectuals, but the most famous ones.

  • Delusions Come in Waves

    Mumbo-Jumbo confronts hydra-headed threat to intellectual and scientific foundations.

  • A Scientific Theory is Not a Guess

    A scientific theory is a machine that produces sensible explanations.

  • Adam Smith Students Change Name

    Newly named Jennie Lee College Students’ Association refuses to use Smith’s name in correspondence.

  • Students Drop Bad Role Model Smith

    ‘This isn’t an attack upon Adam Smith as a person.’ Whew!

  • Mixed Reviews of Pinter Nobel

    Stoppard, Frayn, Hitchens, Redgrave C.

  • Medievalism Rampant

    Polly Toynbee says it.

    The bishops have no right to restrict our right to die…This week’s debate on Lord Joffe’s bill on assisted dying for the terminally ill turned into a remarkable battle between the forces of the enlightenment and a barely disguised medievalism. Who rules here? God or man? How loud the voice of religion sounded in this, the world’s most secular nation. So much religious thinking still permeates every aspect of public life as, somehow or other, the religious occupy disproportionate positions of power wherever you look – from prime minister and half the cabinet to the head of the BBC.

    That’s one reason pious cant about ‘ceremonial theism’ won’t fly. It’s never safe to assume that ceremonial theism actually is ceremonial – it can always go from ceremonial to deadly earnest in the blink of an eye when somebody wants to force other people to stay alive when they don’t want to or to bear children when they don’t want to. Ceremonial theism, ceremonial fascism – not safe toys.

    The tone of the Lords debate was set in a joint letter from leaders of the nine major faiths, beginning: “We the undersigned, hold all human life to be sacred.” It was thunderingly reiterated alongside the Bishop of Oxford’s refrain – we are not autonomous beings. Extraordinary how many religious speakers repeated this odd mantra.

    Extraordinary, except that that’s the whole point, isn’t it. We are not autonomous beings; we are subject to the will of bishops. Because all human life is ‘sacred’.

    Atheists did mention God. What was the creator’s view of the sanctity of human life in the tsunami and the ruins of Kashmir or New Orleans? Lord Gilmore mocked the Archbishop of Canterbury’s saccharine view that everyone was wanted and that every life was valued to the very end; he (Lord Gilmore, that is) would hit anyone who said that while leaving him suffering in agony on his deathbed.

    Same here. I certainly hope I have a cosh handy for the purpose, and the strength to swing it good and hard. [makes mental note to self: keep cosh handy for deathbed] Why do people think it’s fine for their putative God to wipe out people in wholesale lots but it’s not all right for us to make a quick exit? Where is the sense in that? Why are we supposed (and expected) to have such reverence for the cruel sadistic bastard that we have to stick around for purposeless pain on his account? Why don’t they make themselves sick, saying things like that? I would really like to know.

    The religious view distorts all reality to squeeze into its own dogma. It was shocking to hear a number of (religious) doctors claiming every death could be eased and painless these days…The Bishop of Oxford harrumphed in the Lords at this week’s Guardian leader that said the bishops “should be listened to with respect – and then ignored”. But he didn’t explain why we are obliged to listen to them at all within parliament. It is, says the National Secular Society, the only legislature in the west with ex officio religious lawmakers…

    Ironic, isn’t it.

  • Battle Between Enlightenment and Medievalism

    Religious thinking still permeates public life as the religious occupy positions of power.

  • Bouyeri, Hofstad Network, Burqa Ban

    Acting out of ‘religious conviction’ is not necessarily problem-free.

  • Liberals Must Return to Their Paleo-liberal Roots

    There’s a faction on the left whose sympathies lie with nostalgic fascists.

  • Gray on Grayling on Descartes

    Shows Descartes to be more interesting than the closeted introvert in standard histories of philosophy.

  • Afghanistan: Women’s rights editor Mohaqiq Nasar arrested for blasphemy

    Mohaqiq Nasar (50), editor-in-chief of the magazine Hoqooq-i-Zan (Women’s Rights), has been arrested on 29 September 2005 on charges of blasphemy. He was detained on instructions from the religious adviser to President Hamid Karzai, a government official said. President Karzai’s religious adviser – though not explicitly named in this connection – is Mohaibuddin Baloch. The editor’s arrest is violating the press law of Afghanistan, which clearly demands that a journalist can only be arrested after the government appointed media-commission has studied the case, questioned him personally and recommended his arrest. This has obviously not happened. In a letter to President Karzai, Rationalist International strongly condemned the illegal arrest of Mohaqiq Nasar and the act of violation of press freedom and demanded the immediate release of the editor and the withdrawal of all blasphemy charges against him.

    Nasar has been publishing his women’s rights magazine since the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001 and contributed much to the change of women’s lives in his country that could be achieved since then. His magazine has always been a thorn in the flesh of the fundamentalist clergy and he was facing pressure from them. Before the parliamentary elections on 18 September, Nasar published an article, criticizing the draconian punishments for blasphemy, adultery and theft in Afghanistan’s penal law today. This article was used as a reason for the editor’s illegal arrest a few days after the election. Nasar’s article has been referred as potentially blasphemous to the Supreme Court.

    Quite as it had been under the Taliban, blasphemy is still punishable with death, adultery with public stoning to death and theft with cutting off hands. In fact, the new Constitution, adopted in January 2004, demands confirmity of all laws with the beliefs and provisions of Islam, that is with the laws of Sharia. The Supreme Court in Afghanistan can straightly take open blasphemy trials against alleged offenders proposed by the government and decide their punishment. Head of the Supreme Court is the country’s Chief Justice, the hardline cleric Fazl Hadi Shinwadi, who is notorious for his ruthless action against critics of Sharia. In 2003, he forced a sitting minister to resign, after she questioned the role of Sharia in the new Afghanistan. Before the presidential elections in 2004, he “disqualified” a running presidential candidate for blasphemy. As the head of the Fatwa department of the Supreme Court, which is even under the new Consitution the final authority to determine the confirmity of legislation to Islam, he ordered in August 2003 death penalty for Sayed Mir Hussein Mahdavi, Chief Editor of the weekly Aftab, and his Iranian assistant Ali Reza Payam Sistany [Bulletin # 111]. The fate of the two journalists is not known, but it is believed that they escaped to Pakistan.

    Recipients of Rationalist International Bulletins are permitted to reproduce, publish, post or forward articles and reports from the Bulletin. Please acknowledge
    Rationalist International Bulletin # 148. Copyright © 2005 Rationalist International.

  • Incompetent Writers Make History Too

    Hitler offers a vision of revitalization and rebirth following the perceived decay of the liberal era.

  • EU Official Has Lunch With Orhan Pamuk

    Pamuk was charged under law forbidding calling Armenian genocide ‘genocide’.

  • Afghan Editor on Trial for ‘Blasphemy’

    Editor of women’s rights magazine charged after after complaints from religious figures.

  • ‘Religious Leaders’ Demand Long Sentence

    Nasab questioned the use of harsh punishments such as amputation and stoning.

  • Committee to Protect Journalists is Worried

    Articles in the magazine Women’s Rights deemed “un-Islamic” and “insulting to Islam” by local clerics.

  • Bad Poet Wins Nobel Prize for Literature

    Good playwright though.

  • Pinter’s Dramatic Impact

    ‘Pinter remains…a questioner of accepted truths.’ Some of them.