Decline of religious belief means we need more exorcists, say Catholics

The new Free Inquiry is out, and my column in it is online.

The takeaway:

The more we buy into the meme that abortion is always a tragic lesser-of-two-evils situation, the more we lose sight of the reality, which is that for a woman or girl who does not want to be pregnant, abortion is a glorious human invention, a life-salvaging bit of technology.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Jafafa Hots said:

(keep searching and searching for justifications for continuing to do what you were always doing for totally unrelated reasons once people start demanding you justify your actions… lemme see. Leaving genitals intact destroys the sanctity of traditionally-altered genitals? Have we tried that one yet?)

So good I just wanted to repeat it.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

glosswitch on Snow White vs The Evil Queen: Some thoughts on feminism’s “generation gap”. It starts with a movie, Snow White and the Huntsman.

It’s everything that’s terrible about how mainstream feminism is marketed and it’s a bloody fairy tale. Just what is wrong with the world?

Charleze Theron’s Ravenna, the villain of the piece, is a cross between Tampax Pearl’s Mother Nature and Valerie Solanas. She is pitched against Kristen Stewart’s Snow White, who is young, beautiful and feisty, all set to overthrow a patriarchal regime that demands all women be young, beautiful but not particularly feisty. Snow White rebels by remaining young and beautiful while also having agency™ and being empowered™ – go her! Meanwhile Ravenna, the Evil Queen, can only maintain her youth and beauty by being evil. Deep down she’s an ageing minger and therefore not worthy of exerting any power or influence. So Snow White kills her. Yay feminism! Kill that stupid, youth-addicted, power-hungry, post-menopausal waste of space!

It’s interesting how familiar that sounds.

It’s obvious that Ravenna ought to just get old and lump it rather than try to beat the system. The camera lingers over ancient (late thirties) Theron’s face, comparing it unfavourably with Stewart’s pure, unlined visage. It’s not clear whether “the system” here is fairyland or Hollywood – perhaps there’s no real difference. Anyhow, the message is this: if you’re going to be a rebellious woman, be a very young, pretty one who only rebels against other women, preferably the older, less pretty ones. That way you can put on a sexy show of beating the system while the system remains firmly intact.

I can’t help thinking this is the perfect metaphor for the so-called generational model of feminism, one that sees women proceeding in successive waves, each one trashing the one that came before it plus the one that follows. Ravenna is to Snow White what second wavers are to younger feminists today, and what first wavers were to second wavers. She’s demonic, extreme, deluded. She doesn’t “get it” in the way Snow White does. She’s a misogynist caricature whereas Snow White, once you strip away the agency bullshit, is a patriarchal fantasy woman, a cool girl feminist par excellence. And that’s the story of feminism. Either you’re an evil witch – a racist-transphobe-frigid harpy who doesn’t know her time is up – or you’re an ineffectual sexy faux-rebel, storming the castle and swishing your hair with no clue that actually, you’ll get old too. One day you’ll be the past-it minger to whom no one wants to listen. Queer gender all you like but one day you’ll be placed on the same old scrapheap of womanhood as the rest of us.

No. That won’t happen. There’s a new system in place now – for the first time in history, all the women who are young and pretty now will stay that way forever. They will also continue to “get it” forever; no one will come along in five years rolling her eyes and getting it better.

Misogyny is clever these days. Women are so empowered we’re allowed to project manage our own women-hating via the medium of feminist discourse. I’ve noticed this recently in response to the New Statesman’s series of essays on second-wave feminism. The belief that older women’s work is of no value – that they are indeed evil witches – is very much to the fore in the knee-jerk responses from people who (I’ll hazard a guess) have not read the work of the thinkers they deride:

Plus also sexy and not ugly.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

An excellent piece by Massimo Pigliucci saying why Neil deGrasse Tyson is wrong to say philosophy is timewasting bullshit that gets you hit by cars because you’re too busy asking yourself whether cars are real or not.

Neil made his latest disparaging remarks about philosophy as a guest on the Nerdist podcast [4], following a statement by one of the hosts, who said that he majored in philosophy. Neil’s comeback was: “That can really mess you up.” The host then added: “I always felt like maybe there was a little too much question asking in philosophy [of science]?” And here is the rest of the pertinent dialogue:

dGT: I agree.

interviewer: At a certain point it’s just futile.

dGT: Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. My concern here is that the philosophers believe they are actually asking deep questions about nature. And to the scientist it’s, what are you doing? Why are you concerning yourself with the meaning of meaning?

(another) interviewer: I think a healthy balance of both is good.

dGT: Well, I’m still worried even about a healthy balance. Yeah, if you are distracted by your questions so that you can’t move forward, you are not being a productive contributor to our understanding of the natural world. And so the scientist knows when the question “what is the sound of one hand clapping?” is a pointless delay in our progress.

[insert predictable joke by one interviewer, imitating the clapping of one hand]

dGT: How do you define clapping? All of a sudden it devolves into a discussion of the definition of words. And I’d rather keep the conversation about ideas. And when you do that don’t derail yourself on questions that you think are important because philosophy class tells you this.

Sigh. That really is…ungood. Childish.

Well, Neil, consider this your follow-up call, just as you requested. Not that you didn’t get several of those before. For instance, even fellow scientist and often philosophy-skeptic Jerry Coyne pointed out that you “blew it big time” [8] when you disinvited philosopher David Albert from an event you had organized at the American Museum of Natural History, and that originally included a discussion between Albert and physicist Lawrence Krauss (yet another frequent philosophy naysayer [9]). Moreover, when you so graciously came to the book launch for my Answers for Aristotle a couple of years ago, you spent most of the evening chatting with a number of graduate students from CUNY’s philosophy program, and they tried really hard to explain to you how philosophy works and why you had a number of misconceptions about it. To no avail, apparently.

So here we are again, time to set you straight once more. This, of course, is not just because I like you and because I think it is in general the right thing to do. It is mostly, frankly, because someone who regularly appears on The Daily Show and the Colbert Report, and has had the privilege of remaking Carl Sagan’s iconic Cosmos series — in short someone who is a public intellectual and advocate for science — really ought to do better than to take what amounts to anti-intellectual (and illiterate) positions about another field of scholarship. And I say this in all friendship, truly.

Quite so, about the positions. He has a big microphone; he should not use it to say ignorant and disparaging things about philosophy. We do not need less philosophy and philosophically-informed thinking in this country. No, that is not what we need.

Massimo then gives some bullet points by way of trying to clear things up for NdGT. A sample from one -

I suggest you actually look up some technical papers in philosophy of science [12] to see how a number of philosophers, scientists and mathematicians actually do collaborate to elucidate the conceptual and theoretical aspects of research on everything from evolutionary theory and species concepts to interpretations of quantum mechanics and the structure of superstring theory. Those papers, I maintain, do constitute a positive contribution of philosophy to the progress of science — at least if by science you mean an enterprise deeply rooted in the articulation of theory and its relationship with empirical evidence.

And then there’s the chair issue.

A common refrain I’ve heard from you (see direct quotes above) and others, is that scientific progress cannot be achieved by “mere armchair speculation.” And yet we give a whole category of Nobels to theoretical physicists, who use the deductive power of mathematics (yes, of course, informed by previously available empirical evidence) to do just that. Or — even better — take mathematics itself, a splendid example of how having one’s butt firmly planted on a chair (and nowhere near any laboratory) produces both interesting intellectual artifacts in their own right and an immense amount of very practical aid to science. No, I’m not saying that philosophy is just like mathematics or theoretical physics. I’m saying that one needs to do better than dismiss a field of inquiry on the grounds that it is not wedded to a laboratory setting, or that its practitioners like comfortable chairs.

Massimo showed the piece to NdGT, they had an email conversation about it, but no result. I find that disappointing.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

The philosopher Becca Reilly-Cooper on Twitter (@ boodleoops – yes it’s true, not all philosophers take themselves terribly seriously:

I’m pretty sure my grandfather *didn’t* fight for your right to threaten women with rape, torture and mutilation actually, free speech bros.

And I’ve read On Liberty several times, but I missed the part where Mill defends harassment, or threats to invade and cut women’s genitals.

Same here!

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

So I was on a panel on multiculturalism should we worry about it on Saturday, moderated by Rebecca Goldstein, with Taslima and Katha and Sarah Jones. At one point Rebecca said we were agreeing too much so it occurred to me to try to fix that by bringing up not female genital mutilation but the male kind. (Instead of cries of outrage, though, there was some applause. Yet more agreement! What can you do.)

You already know what I think, unless you’re a new reader. I don’t think it’s parents’ “right” to cut off healthy bits of their infants for non-medical reasons. I don’t. I think the only reason we don’t recoil in horror at the very idea of cutting off a bit of the penis for no real reason is because we’re so damned used to it. Well isn’t that always the way violations of human rights go unnoticed for year after decade after century.

On the other hand to (some) religious people it’s a foundational part of their “community” and not doing it would deprive the child of the right to be included in that community. If you take that as a right, you have competing rights here. I don’t take that as a right, but some parents do.

Seen on Twitter just now:

The Circ Decision @TheCircDecision 19 h

[with a logo saying PARENTS KNOW BEST]

Circumcision is a choice for parents of a baby boy to make. Read & make an informed decision http://babies411.com/babies411/articles/circumcision-whats-your-decision-xnew.html …#wiscfi#wis3

No. It isn’t. It isn’t “a choice for parents of a baby to make” whether or not to cut off a head or a nose or an arm, and the same applies to a bit of the penis. Parents don’t have carte blanche to mutilate their children.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

I’m at the airport. Way too early. I can see the top of the Capitol from this desk-plug-in spot.

There are sparrows in here. They fly along the windows as if they want to get out but maybe they’re used to being here. Maybe they’re like children raised wearing a burqa.

Taslima talked yesterday about being a child who said No, a child who was curious, a child who always asked questions.

Taslima is so amazing.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

What an amazing evening. I was sitting talking to Stacy and others at the reception and someone came up behind me and gave me a standing mini-hug, I turned and there was Taslima.

And after her came a bunch of other exes. It was exciting. Things are happening.

Taslima told a funny story about Mohammed bargaining with Allah to cut down the prayers from 50 a day – 50!! a day!! – to something more tolerable. 40? No no. 30? No no. 20?

Mohammed was a merchant.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Sorry about weird disappearing posts and comments and whatever else is weird. I’ll straighten it out late tomorrow when I get home, or Monday. They were only tiny posts anyway.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Hahahahaha me on a panel discussing multiculturalism with Taslima Nasreen and Katha Pollitt and Rebecca Goldstein – what a great wish-fulfillment dream. Perfect.

Wait…

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

What an amazing evening. I was sitting talking to Stacy and others at the reception and someone came up behind me and gave me a standing mini-hug, I turned and there was Taslima.

And after her came a bunch of other exes. It was exciting. Things are happening.

Taslima told a funny story about Mohammed bargaining with Allah to cut down the prayers from 50 a day – 50!! a day!! – to something more tolerable. 40? No no. 30? No no. 20?

Mohammed was a merchant.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

I’m here. Rumpled, plane-battered, hungry and foodless, grumpy, but here.

There’s a party of Young Communists staying. Alas they’re all on my floor. They’ve been shouting in the halls.

Did I mention I’m hungry?

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Oh hey, I forgot to mention I’m leaving. taking airplanes, busy, so things will be quiet for a few days. I’m off to Women in Secularism 3.

Now’s the time for you to talk about anything you’ve been wanting to get off your chest; nothing is off topic. And your time starts

NOW

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

The Times-Picayune reports:

Legislation that will further limit access to abortion in Louisiana and would likely close three of the state’s five abortion clinics overwhelmingly passed the state Senate with a vote of 34-3 Wednesday.

Due to the addition of technical amendments, the bill will head back the state House of Representatives for another vote before going to the governor’s desk. The lower chamber voted overwhelmingly to pass the legislation — which is more or less the same now — the last time they saw it. So the bill is expected to face little to no opposition as it crosses the finish line in the Legislature.

Back to forced pregnancy and unsafe abortions! Back to women having no way out of the trap. Back to women being unable to plan their own lives.

Gov. Bobby Jindal has backed the proposed abortion restrictions since the beginning of this year’s legislative session in Louisiana. It is expected that he will sign the measure quickly into law.

But…Roe v Wade?

Tough shit, suckers!

Sponsored by Rep. Katrina Jackson, D-Monroe, the legislation would require physicians who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of the facility where the procedures take place. It also imposes the same restrictions — such as a requirement for a 24-hour waiting period — on abortion-inducing medication as  apply to surgical abortions.

Bit by bit, faster and faster, they’re reimposing a total ban on abortion.

Jackson largely based her proposal on a Texas law that has been upheld by a federal court.  The Texas provision has led to widespread closure of abortion clinics in the Lone Star state.

Which was the plan.

Fuck them all.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

The Russian Orthodox Church is annoyed that a guy in a dress won the Eurovision song contest. This strikes Russians as hilarious, because The Russian Orthodox Church features guys in dresses.

The drag queen’s performance and its enthusiastic reception was a sign of the world’s moral decline and part the aggressive assertion of Western cultural norms, according to Vladimir Legoyda.

The chairman of the church’s information department told Interfax news agency: ““The process of the legalisation of that to which the Bible refers to as nothing less than an abomination is already long not news in the contemporary world.”

Yup. It’s a hot mess. People going in for abomination everywhere you look, and nobody but priests in dresses to tell them no.

Can they dance in those things?

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Sinister.

Imagine that a little-known but increasingly powerful group of ideologues had hatched a plan to transform the United States into a Christian theocracy harkening back to the Dark Ages of Europe, a time when society was governed by the laws and officials of the Catholic Church.

Suppose further that this plan had a scary simple strategy: Recruit bright, young law students; put them through an intensive indoctrination program; place them in plum internships across the country; and watch as they swim upstream until they reach the top of the legal system, where they can create, enforce, and interpret laws according to a legal philosophy infused with fundamentalist Christian theology.

Got it?

Now learn that it’s already here. Sofia Resnick and Sharona Coutts at RH Reality Check report:

Welcome to the world of the Blackstone Legal Fellowship, an annual program established in 2000 by the Alliance Defending Freedom, an Arizona-based nonprofit that is swiftly emerging as a major behind-the-scenes player in many of the nation’s most controversial legal cases involving reproductive rights, sexual justice, and a vast range of other moral and social disputes.

“[T]he Blackstone Fellowship inspires a distinctly Christian worldview in every area of law, and particularly in the areas of public policy and religious liberty,” states the Alliance’s public tax filing. “With this ongoing program, it’s [the Alliance’s] goal to train a new generation of lawyers who will rise to positions of influence and leadership as legal scholars, litigators, judges—perhaps even Supreme Court Justices—who will work to ensure that justice is carried out in America’s courtrooms.”

Um…help.

In Missouri, a former Blackstone Fellow, Kevin Corlew, is running for the state’s 14th congressional district in this year’s elections. Another, Bradley Cowan, is the chief of the administrative law division at the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Kentucky,according to his profile on LinkedIn. And based on our review of public records, the offices of attorneys and solicitors general in at least eight states—Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Indiana, Michigan, Oklahoma, Texas, and Virginia—have hosted Blackstones as interns, jobs in which fellows help draft memos and pleadings for the most powerful lawmakers in their states and, more importantly, forge the contacts that will propel them to their own positions of power.

Mind you, it’s a small number of people, however creepy. But it’s insinuated itself into some key places.

Through legal actions and its various legal training programs, the nonprofit focuses on fighting for the criminalization of abortion; against the rights of LGBT people; for so-called religious liberty (which often comes in the form of defending clients who wish to discriminate against gay people based on their religious beliefs); and for organized Christian prayer in government or public-school settings, such as its most recent victory—last week’s Supreme Court ruling upholding legislative prayer in Town of Greece v. Galloway, in which the Alliance represented the plaintiffs.

Theocrats on the march. I don’t like it.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Another one from Anj.

Anjem Choudary @anjemchoudary

MCB Spokesman says he doesn’t believe in segregation between men & women but Allah (SWT) & the Prophet said they must be e.g. in gatherings

MCB Spokesman says that wife’s don’t need to obey their husbands but Allah (SWT) says that they must [Qur'an 4:34] i.e husbands have Qawama!

So I was curious about Qawama, so I looked it up. I found an article at Women Living Under Muslim Laws by Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im.

 The most important principle of Shari’a influencing the status and rights of women is the notion of qawama. Qawama has its origin in verse 4:34 of the Koran which states that:

“Men have qawama (guardianship and authority) over women because of the advantage they (men) have over them (women) and because they (men) spend their property in supporting them (women)”.

According to Shari’a interpretations of this verse, men as a group are the guardians of and are superior to women as a group, and the men of a particular family are the guardians of and are superior to the women of that family.

This notion of general and specific qawama has had far reaching consequences for the status and rights of women in both the private and public domains. For example, Shari’a provides that women are disqualified from holding general public office, which involves the exercise of authority over men, because, in keeping with verse 4:34 of the Qur’an men are entitled to exercise authority over women and not the reverse.

It’s in a book; it’s a sentence in a book; therefore millions of women for hundreds of years have had their lives stunted and confined.

I have a really easy solution to this problem of men spending their property in supporting women and thus having “guardianship” over them and being superior to them. Share the support duties, and share the power and the equality. See? See how easy that is? Men shouldn’t be required to do all the money-providing, and women shouldn’t be required to be inferior. Both should be free to arrange things the way both want to. Both should be free to ignore the sentence in the 1700-years-old book. It’s just a book. There are a lot of books. Nobody has to obey that book. It’s an illusion to think you have to.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

A terrific event in London on August 6 – so all you people who are gathering for the World Humanist Congress in Oxford August 8th could go to this:

“How to Make Enemies and Alienate People – the Philosophy of Offensive and Inappropriate Language”

It’s hosted by our friend Bernard Hurley.

The growth of social media has given an unprecedented opportunity for those who wish to gratuitously offend to actually do so but it has also given an opportunity for those who wish to take offence at mere criticism to express such offence. It’s clear that someone who uses offensive language is doing more than just conveying information, but what exactly are they doing? The job of the philosopher is to clarify, rather than to prescribe and it seems to me that there is urgent need for clarification today. However there has been very little discussion about how offensive language fits into the Philosophy of Language. Drawing on some ideas of Michael Dummett, I shall make some suggestion about how such language might work.

This lecture is part of the 2014 Kant’s Cave Lecture series. As is usual at these lectures there will be plenty of time for discussion afterwards.

http://pfalondon.org/kant.html

Wednesday August 6 at 7:30 p.m.

Exmouth Arms, 1 Starcross Street, NW1 2HR London

I would go to that like a shot if it weren’t 6000 miles away. For many of you it’s just around the corner or a few stops on the tube.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

More Choudary, because he’s just that good.

Anjem Choudary @anjemchoudary

Some images from the “Rally against Hindu Oppression of Muslims in India” http://www.demotix.com/news/4699759/anjem-choudray-protests-hindu-oppression-muslims#media-4699699 … Khilafah is the answer to India’s problems!

See what he did there? He presents a photo from a Rally against Hindu Oppression of Muslims in India and in the photo we see a poster that shouts ISLAM WILL DOMINATE THE WORLD! So the idea is that Hindu oppression of Muslims will end because it will be replaced by Muslim oppression of Hindus and everyone else.

What could possibly go wrong?

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)