Must stop must stop must stop. Must stop arguing with ridiculous guy on Facebook who calls Ibn Warraq, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Wafa Sultan “racists” because he dislikes them. He’s lily white himself of course. Must stop must stop must stop.

He’s a “humanist,” according to him. He’s yet another anti-gnu. He’s a chump. Must stop must stop must stop.

I did a podcast interview earlier this afternoon with Johan Signert of the Swedish Humanists.

I’m invited to the Let the Light Howthelightgetsin thingy at Hay on Wye. I just might do it.

Anthony Grayling is not an enemy of new or gnu atheism, though I suspect some people would like to shoulder him into that category. He won’t be shouldered though. He’s very polite about it, but he won’t be shouldered.

The little jokes and kindly bearing can make Grayling sound quite benignly jovial about religion at times, as he chuckles away about “men in dresses” and “believing in fairies at the bottom of the garden”, and throws out playfully mocking asides such as, “You can see we no longer really believe in God, because of all the CCTV cameras keeping watch on us.” But when I suggest that he sounds less enraged than amused by religion, he says quickly: “Well, it does make me angry, because it causes a great deal of harm and unhappiness.”

He spotted the attempt at shouldering, you see, so he replied quickly.

…we have to try to persuade society as a whole to recognise that religious groups are self-constituted interest groups; they exist to promote their point of view. Now, in a liberal democracy they have every right to do so. But they have no greater right than anybody else, any political party or Women’s Institute or trade union. But for historical reasons they have massively overinflated influence – faith-based schools, religious broadcasting, bishops in the House of Lords, the presence of religion at every public event. We’ve got to push it back to its right size.

Not very anti-gnu, that. On the contrary.

it wasn’t the atheists, according to Grayling, who provoked the confrontation. “The reason why it’s become a big issue is that religions have turned the volume up, because they’re on the back foot. The hold of religion is weakening, definitely, and diminishing in numbers. The reason why there’s such a furore about it is that the cornered animal, the loser, starts making a big noise.”Even if this is true, however, the atheist movement has been accused of shooting itself in the foot by adopting a tone so militant as to alienate potential supporters, and fortify the religious lobby. I ask Grayling if he thinks there is any truth in the charge, and he listens patiently and politely to the question, but then dismisses it with a shake of the head.

“Well, firstly, I think the charges of militancy and fundamentalism of course come from our opponents, the theists. My rejoinder is to say when the boot was on their foot they burned us at the stake. All we’re doing is speaking very frankly and bluntly and they don’t like it,” he laughs. “So we speak frankly and bluntly, and the respect agenda is now gone, they can no longer float behind the diaphanous veil – ‘Ooh, I have faith so you mustn’t offend me’. So they don’t like the blunt talking. But we’re not burning them at the stake. They’ve got to remember that when it was the other way around it was a much more serious matter.

“And besides, really,” he adds with a withering little laugh, “how can you be a militant atheist? How can you be militant non-stamp collector? This is really what it comes down to. You just don’t collect stamps. So how can you be a fundamentalist non-stamp collector? It’s like sleeping furiously. It’s just wrong.”

Now the odd thing is that yesterday on Facebook (one does find out some interesting things via Facebook, there’s no denying it) the Institute for Science and Human Values flagged up a cruise next October with guest speaker…Anthony Grayling. The ISHV is very very very hostile to “militant” atheists. Several of its founding members spend a remarkable amount of time saying how hostile they are to “militant” atheists. I’m wondering if that’s going to turn out to be a rather tense cruise.

Just for completeness, or pedantry.

You are simply hosting the Gnu atheist admirathon. No wonder B&W has been disowned by more rational voices.

Which more rational voices? Wally Smith? Chris Mooney? Tom Johnson? Josh R? Steph the Pixie?

Do you really think it’s the Feast of Reason?

Of course not. Did I ever say I did? No.

There is nothing any longer on B&W worth reading that isn’t cut from the same cloth.

Really? Not Leo Igwe? Not Allen Esterson? Not Phil Molé? Not Franco Henwood?

Sorry; I just don’t buy it. Even if you hate the blog part of B&W, there is plenty that’s worth reading.

It’s a hornet’s nest to any disagreement.

Mirror. Look in it.

Your readers aren’t the least bit interested in civil discourse: when challenged they revert to the same tropes, and when that fails, invoke the myth that atheists have been persecuted historically. It is pure crap, it is untrue, and it really deserves to be outed.

I think the reality is that many of the people who read B&W aren’t very interested in lectures on civil discourse from you at present, because you have been throwing around insults as if you had to use up your stock before midnight. And if you think atheists are not stigmatized, you’re not even listening to yourself, let alone the rest of the commentariat.

 And why so brave–did they talk to you to talk back to Hoffmann and show some spine? Just asking?

No. Just answering.

No, Ophelia: B^W is just a sounding board for like-minded hard atheist opinion.

See above.

There are no butterflies there anymore just gasbags like the seminally under-qualified Eric McDonald and clowns like PZ Myers, who could benefit from a reading comprehension course with an emphasis on analogies. As I recall, Myers was lambasted as such at last year’s CFI 30th, so why don’t we say we are dealing with an atheist fringe that threatens always squandering its capital on its worst instincts?

This is civil discourse is it?

The headline on this article originally read

Bishops agree sex abuse rules

Just what we’ve always said!

Salman Rushdie thinks it’s funny, Russell Banks thinks it’s funny; I think it’s funny too. (So that means I’m as cool as Salman Rushdie and Russell Banks, right? Sure.)

Anyway. I thought this particular bit would speak to us today.

And he asks, “Kelly, have you ever studied any world history?,” and I’m, like, “Excuse me, but I happen to be wearing an imported Italian cashmere sweater.”

I was going to ignore it, but no one else is, so I’ll just say…I too dissent. I disagree with most of Bloody Fools.

Especially items like

As to Myers, despite the development of a blasphemy fan club and admiration for the cowardly use of free expression rights in the safe haven of Morris, Minnesota, the only serious “threat” came from Catholic League president Bill Donahue.

The cowardly use of free expression rights? I can’t even begin to make sense of that. I must do the same thing myself every day, nearly every hour. I’m not likely to be murdered for saying what I think here in Seattle, so I’m cowardly for saying it?

No; I don’t understand, and what I do understand I don’t like. I don’t like the theme of atheist-bashing.

PZ comments.

Jerry comments.

Eric comments.

All cowards are they? No, I don’t think so. I don’t think we have to be under a death threat to earn the right to say what we think without being called cowards.

Staffan de Mistura is nuts. He’s barking.

…the head of the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (Unama), Staffan de Mistura, said during a visit to Mazar-e Sharif that the only person who could be blamed for the violence was the American pastor.

“I don’t think we should be blaming any Afghan. We should be blaming the person who produced the news – the one who burned the Koran. Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from offending culture, religion, traditions.”

The only person who could be blamed. Not the people who did the actual killing, with guns; only the guy who made a point of pissing them off.

Please.

Isn’t there a literary character, or family, called Tantamount? Did I imagine that?

I’m thinking it’s from someone like Aldous Huxley or Evelyn Waugh. Anthony Powell? Mervyn Peake?

It started when Paula Kirby said on Facebook yesterday that some BBC presenter had said something was of “tantamount importance.” Groans all around. But then I started getting this itch inside the head…Margot Tantamount? Charles Tantamount? Tantamount Hall?

Google has been no help, so maybe I did imagine it. Anyone?

These guys certainly think so.

A student at an Islamic school in Bangladesh has been shot dead and at least 30 others injured during a demonstration against women’s rights.

The protesters were marching through the south-western town of Jessore against moves by the government to ensure equal property rights for women…

Under Bangladeshi law, a woman normally inherits half as much as her brother.

Because god wants it that way, which we know, because god said so in this book we are holding aloft while screaming in rage.

Oh good grief.

[David] Willetts blamed the entry of women into the workplace and universities for the lack of progress for men.

“Feminism trumped egalitarianism,” he said, adding that women who would otherwise have been housewives had taken university places and well-paid jobs that could have gone to ambitious working-class men.

Yes, and working-class men who would otherwise have been miners had taken university places and well-paid jobs that could have gone to ambitious women. What about it?

Everybody could always have been and done something else; so what? It’s no more inevitable or Right or How Things Ought to Be that women “are” housewives than it is that working-class men “are” miners. The university places and well-paid jobs don’t somehow belong to men, and women aren’t stealing them if they try to get them too.

Women who would otherwise have been housewives would have been housewives because things were rigged against them. That’s what that “otherwise” is pointing at. Willetts is thinking back to a time when it was just taken for granted that women would “be” housewives and that they would not “be” anything else, especially not anything demanding brains and hard work, and he’s thinking of it as if it were a natural or default state which we have now weirdly departed from, with the result that women are grabbing jobs that should have gone to men.

It looks to me as if David Willetts grabbed a job that should have gone to someone who doesn’t think that way.

Watch out for Fridays. Maybe stay home on Fridays, with the doors locked and barred and sheets of iron over the windows. At least, if you live somewhere like Pakistan or Afghanistan, do that.

Thousands of demonstrators angered over the burning of a Koran in Florida mobbed offices of the United Nations in northern Afghanistan on Friday, overrunning the compound and killing at least seven foreign staff workers, according to Afghan officials…The incident began when thousands of protesters poured out of the Blue Mosque in Mazar-i-Sharif after Friday prayers and attacked the nearby headquarters of the United Nations.

Correlation is not causation, but when thousands of angry men rush out of a mosque after Friday prayers and attack a nearby UN headquarters, causation seems a pretty safe bet.

The crowd, which he estimated at 20,000, overwhelmed police forces and the United Nations security guards, and the weapons they used in the attack may have been those they seized from the United Nations guards.

Funny kind of “prayers,” too, if the correlation is indeed causation. Funny kind of “prayers” that can prompt twenty thousand men (yes men – they don’t let women join in) to go on a violent rampage and kill some random innocent people.

Mr. Ahmadzai, the police spokesman, said the demonstrators were angry about the burning of the Koran at the church of Pastor Terry Jones on Mar. 20.

Except it’s not actually “the” Koran that was burnt. Jones didn’t cause the Koran to disappear from the face of the earth. It was one copy out of many millions. It was a calculated insult, and that is all. It was not a felony, much less a capital crime, and a mob in Afghanistan is not an appropriate substitute for a Florida cop in any case.

Shut up your doors on Fridays.

What a relief: it turns out that religious schools don’t exclude after all. Whew!

The Catholic school accommodates plenty of non-Catholic children whose parents are often African Christians who choose to send their kids to a school with a specifically religious ethos.

In other words, they find a denominational school, even if it is not of their own denomination, more congenial than a non-denominational or a multi-denominational school.

This is an absolutely key point. It blows out of the water the assumption that denominational schools somehow ‘exclude’ anyone not of their own denomination.

Ohhhhhh, I see. I was confused all this time. I thought “exclusion” could apply to students of other religions as well as other denominations, and to students of no religion at all at all. But it turns out that’s wrong and the only issue is that a school of one denomination might exclude students of a different denomination and David Quinn knows of one where it doesn’t work that way, he guesses, as far as he knows, so there’s no problem with churchy schools and everything is copacetic.

A cynic might say oh really? So a Catholic school doesn’t exclude children from Muslim backgrounds? Or Protestant ones? Or secular or atheist ones? But decent people don’t care what a cynic might say, so let’s rejoice to know that denominational schools are a wonderful brilliant great terrific perfect idea.

Howard Jacobson is cautious about revolutionary elation.

Let’s not get too carried away by the secular nature of the revolutionary zeal engulfing the Middle East right now: the Godly are always there in the wings, waiting for the hour in which they can claim the victory as theirs and restore tyranny, only in their image. Maybe it won’t happen this time – I doubt it, listening to protesters saying they don’t mind what comes next, so long as the process is democratic, as though a democratically elected theocracy is somehow better than any other kind.

Really. I do wish people would get that straight.

Much has been made over the last weeks of the youthful passion of the demonstrators, tweeting for liberty. Here, two of the most terrible illusions of our time are yoked together. To the fallacy that the opinions of the young are worth attending to because they are not the opinions of the old is joined the fallacy that the the internet, because it is ungovernable, is bound to be a positive instrument for good.

 Or to put it another way, theocrats also know how to tweet.