Author: Ophelia Benson

Yippee!

You know how I’m always asking why people like Azam Kamguian and Maryam Namazie don’t get the kind of attention the MCB gets? How I’m always saying the BBC and the Guardian and, you know, the government, ought to talk to them as well as or in fact damn well instead of a lot of fundamentalists? You know? Well – well you already know what I’m going to say, probably, since I just put it in News. But I want to yell and squeal and dance and hop for a minute anyway. Bear with me. The day didn’t begin well – it began with the horrid shock of going online and finding dear old B&W turned into a mocking advert of some kind. You think you were shocked! (I know you do, and were, because you emailed to tell me so, and I’m glad you did, because you wouldn’t if you didn’t like B&W.) Imagine how I felt! Imagine (this is Homeric vein) a doting mama going to the baby’s crib and finding there a large and very dirty warthog. Imagine a dedicated poet going to the desk and finding there, where the soaring dazzling sonnet was supposed to be, a smelly pile of rotting cabbages. Imagine a moneybags opening a safe deposit box and finding there, instead of the usual piles of stock certificates and diamonds, a heap of used bandages. So that’s how the day began. So it’s good that it’s ending (well the day isn’t ending, but I have to get off the computer, so the computerday is ending) with something better.

I didn’t even know. There I was reading the article – and was surprised and pleased to read this part –

Eight people have been nominated for the inaugural “Secularist of the Year” award, which will be presented at a central London hotel. They include a leading theatre director who has fought religious censorship in the arts, an illusionist who has used his TV shows to debunk spiritualism and several campaigners against Islamic governments in the Middle East.

I thought ‘That’s good,’ and read on.

They also include Somali-born Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who has highlighted violence against Muslim women.

That’s even better, I thought. The NSS has the right idea. Well done NSS.

Among those nominated for Saturday’s prize are Nicholas Hytner, director of Britain’s National Theatre, who came under fire for staging the musical “Jerry Springer — The Opera”, which many Christians regard as blasphemous. Other nominees include Azam Kamguian and Maryam Namazie, Iranian women who have campaigned for women’s rights in the Middle East and against Tehran’s clerical rule.

I have to admit – I kind of shrieked when I read that. In fact no kind of about it: I let out a very loud and vehement exclamation. Yessss! Go Azam, go Maryam, go Ayaan! B&W is bursting with pride for you. Hurrah!

And maybe the Major Media damn well will start phoning them up when they want an opinion now. It’s about stinking time.

But hurrah.

We’ve been hacked, so I’m going to have to take the server down for a while. I’ll get B&W up and running asap.

Bastard Spammers!

Here we go again. I still don’t get it. I don’t understand the basic point.

Unlike many pro-evolution types, however, he agrees with creationists and intelligent-design advocates that evolution often operates as not just a scientific theory about species, but also as a worldview that competes with religion.

One: and? If evolution does ‘operate as’ a worldview that competes with religion – what of it? Why should the worldview of religion not be competed with? Because fundamentalists don’t like it, yes, I get that, but why else? Two, if evolution does provide a better (more coherent, more warranted, less full of holes) explanation of how we got here, then it does. Why is that not part of the science, and why is it to be frowned on? Other than because the fundamentalists don’t like it. We were just talking about not placating fundamentalists – in a different context, but it applies here too, I think.

Huxley, Ruse argues, felt he needed to build a rival “church” to defeat archaic Anglican and Christian beliefs, and put man, not God, at the center of life.Evolution became his “cornerstone.” With the help of philosopher Herbert Spencer, who extended “survival of the fittest” thinking to social theory, Huxley promoted evolutionary thinking as a worldview hostile to sacred religious truths.

And? Why not? There are no sacred religious truths, because they’re not true. Calling them sacred is just a way of declaring them off-limits. Well they can’t be off-limits. I know I’ve said this fourteen thousand times now, but – I’ll just say it again. Religious people don’t get to demand that other people believe (or defer to, or respect, or godalmighty teach) their sacred myths. They can believe whatever they like themselves, but they don’t get to force their beliefs on other people. (On the subject of respect for religion, Stuart told me about this Simon Blackburn pdf article yesterday. SB refuses to respect religion. Does a good job of it, too.)

Both books, however, undermine the notion that the evolution/creation dispute is simply hard science versus mushy religion. Simplistically, it may be, but not simply. As Ruse shows, it’s often more like secular religion versus non-secular religion, even if most of the “professional” science remains on the evolution side.

But that’s just crap. It’s just rhetoric. Evolution isn’t ‘secular religion’ because it isn’t religion. It may be used as an ideology by some people, but that’s not the same thing, and it is not, not, not useful to pretend it is the same thing.

George Johnson asks the pertinent Millean question in the NY Times.

So suppose there is a Great Intender, who mapped out the circuitry of living cells with the care an Intel engineer would bring to a new microchip. Where then did the creator come from? Was he created by another creator? Or did he evolve?

That’s what I’d like to know! And since those pesky creationists never answer, they need to go away and be quiet until they’ve figured it out.