Four legs good two legs bad

Nov 18th, 2010 12:30 pm | By

Karima Bennoune thinks human rights groups shouldn’t portray Anwar al-Awlaki as a nice liberal guy.

Bennoune pointed out that Awlaki published an article in al-Qaida’s English language magazine, Inspire, in July openly calling for assassinations of several people, including a young woman cartoonist in Seattle and Salman Rushdie. This was at around the time the CCR was offering to represent Awlaki’s father, she said.

Bennoune, who is of Algerian descent, also expressed fears that the CCR and the ACLU were in danger of “sanitising” Awlaki to western audiences.

“Since the inception of the case,” she said, “there has been increased mystification of who Anwar al-Awlaki is in liberal and human rights circles in the United States. This may in part have resulted from the fact that a highly reputable organisation like CCR was willing to represent his interests, and described him only as ‘a Muslim cleric’ or ‘an American citizen’, and repeatedly suggested that the government did not possess evidence against Awlaki.”

Gita Sahgal also thinks this is a problem.

Karima Bennoune’s public criticism of the Center for Constitutional Rights and the ACLU’s case in defence of Anwar al-Awlaki is a welcome stand for a universal vision of human rights that has largely gone missing from western human rights organisations.

Many Asian, African and Middle Eastern groups and organisations who are struggling against both state and non-state violence feel utterly betrayed by the deliberately ignorant and partial stands taken by organisations in the US and Britain which are supposed to represent human rights. Their outrage was ignored or attacked by the left in Britain. The three founders of Amnesty International in Algeria were allegedly expelled from the organisation for raising an internal complaint about Amnesty’s failure, in their view, to criticise atrocities committed by Islamist rebels, as opposed to government repression, as Algerian feminist Marieme Helie Lucas made public for the first time earlier this year.

A familiar and depressing pattern.



Reading journal

Nov 17th, 2010 12:00 pm | By

The library coughed up a copy of Jonathan Franzen’s new novel a lot faster than I expected, so I’m reading it. Is anybody else reading it, or finished reading it? I saw one or two rave reviews at first, then some revisionist commentary saying actually it’s a tad boring. I’m pretty much with the revisionists. It is interesting enough to keep reading, so far (I’m at p 224, less than halfway), but it’s also pretty boring, and at the moment it’s getting boringer.

It’s too much writing about too few people. There are really only three people so far, and 224 pages is a lot of pages for only three people unless the three people are very damn interesting, and these three people are not. Now, Joyce could do that – but he made the people interesting. That can be done, but you have to do it. Franzen hasn’t done it – not enough. It is as mentioned interesting enough from page to page (as so many many many contemporary novels are not), but when you’re not reading it and you look back over what you have read – it seems like a lot of reading for the not very exciting lives of three not very exciting people. It seems a bit of a waste.



The petri dish refuses to give me a hug

Nov 17th, 2010 11:36 am | By

It’s a Sisyphean task keeping track of the…surprising arguments of Karl Giberson, BioLogos’s ubiquitous “science-and-religion scholar” (as they always call him). I’m barely recovered from his explanation of the profundity of the middle ground at Huffington Post and now here he is again, back at BioLogos, setting himself up as demolishing “strawmen,” complete with mocking picture of same. His demolition is not entirely convincing.

The final straw man I want to torch in this series is the claim that science uses evidence and religion uses faith…

Well that seems like a tall order. How will he manage that, one wonders.

He notes that evidence is more abundant in some fields than in others. True. But then he says that the kinds of inferences made in for instance evolutionary biology “look very much like little leaps of faith.” But inferences are provisional; real leaps of faith are not. Giberson is stacking the deck already.

He notes that economics is fuzzy, then he says “Religious reflection is more like economics than it is like chemistry.” Ah it’s reflection we’re talking about, is it? No actual firm faith-based claims at all? Now he’s moving the goalposts.

But no, it turns out he’s not. Or he was, but then he immediately takes it back.

There is evidence for the claims of the economist and for the chemist and there is evidence for religious truth claims. This is a simple fact. The New Testament contains several documents written about Jesus by smart people in the first century. These documents are evidence.One can disagree with the documents and reject the evidence as weak or inadequate in some way. Or one can accept the evidence and be a Christian. But what one cannot do is claim that there is no evidence or dismiss the evidence because it fails to meet the standards of the chemist.

Oh no no no no no no. The “evidence” fails to meet any standards at all. The “documents” are not primary, and they are fiction in any case. They are no more “evidence” for religious truth claims than an edition of Hamlet is evidence of events in medieval Denmark. They are evidence for the mythography of Jesus, evidence which requires a lot of interpretation and inference, but that’s not what Giberson is claiming; he said they are evidence of religious truth claims. Not religious values, not moral claims, but religious truth claims. They’re not. If he doesn’t know that, he must be remarkably sheltered. If he does – well he’s just making a loopy argument.

The far more significant difference, of course, relates to the dynamic character of religious investigation. When Isaac Newton “leaped to the conclusion” that gravity ruled the universe, gravity did not respond by embracing Newton and healing his brokenness. When believers make their leap of faith to embrace God, God responds by entering into relationship with believers, often with transformative consequences. There is no counterpart to this response in scientific or historical investigation.

No indeed – because scientific and historical investigation are not about healing brokenness or embracing or any similar kind of self-deluding emotive trance. “Dynamic” here is just a dressy word for wishful thinking. There’s a good deal of impertinence in pretending that that is strawman-demolition.



Even Galileo was free to believe what he wanted

Nov 15th, 2010 12:21 pm | By

Myth 7 in Galileo Goes to Jail is that Giordano Bruno was a martyr for science; the author, Jole Shackelford, corrects this by pointing out that Bruno was burned alive for heresy, not science. Oh; that’s all right then.

He sets the stage by quoting from…guess…The Warfare of Science (1876), by Andrew Dickson White. The White-Draper thesis is the great bugbear of the revisionists on this subject, and after awhile one starts to wonder why it is so urgent to correct the mistakes of a history (however influential) dated 1876.

Whatever. White made the mistake of implying that Bruno was killed for being a Copernican when in fact he was killed for being a heretic. All right – he was killed for being a heretic. And?

And he had some nerve, that’s what.

How did this defrocked monk and unrepentant heretic who denied the doctrine of the Holy Trinity – the key to Catholic teaching of redemption and eternal life – come to be “the world’s first martyr to science”? [p 63]

Does that read like straight secular history to you? It doesn’t to me. It reads like indignant Catholic history. It reads as if Shackelford takes heresy for granted and thinks Bruno should have repented for it, and as if he thinks Bruno was very wrong to “deny” the “doctrine” of the “Holy Trinity” and also as if he thinks redemption and eternal life are meaningful concepts and things it is possible to have. The article doesn’t read like that throughout, but it often comes close. There’s a strange deafness to the possibility that “heresy” is not a crime and that killing people for it could have a chilling effect on free inquiry.

The Catholic church did not impose thought control on astronomers, and even Galileo was free to believe what he wanted about the position and mobility of the earth, so long as he did not teach the Copernican hypothesis as a truth on which Holy Scripture had no bearing.

Oh I see – liberality itself then. He could think what he liked, provided he shut up about it, but as for saying it aloud – well really. How dare he.

More later.



Talking to Hitchens

Nov 14th, 2010 5:46 pm | By

Some great stuff in Andrew Anthony’s long interview with Hitchens.

In America it’s been suggested by some religious types that his condition could prompt a revision of his atheism. It’s not a hypothesis to which he grants much respect.

“So now I know that there’s another life in my body that can’t outlive me but can kill me, it’s the perfect moment to gratefully acknowledge that I’m a product of a cosmic design? Who thinks up these arguments? Actually it’s an insulting question: ‘I hear you’re dying. Well wouldn’t it be a good time to get rid of your beliefs?’ Try it on them and see how they would like it. ‘Christian, right? Cancer of the tits?’ ‘Well, yes, since you ask.’ ‘Well, can I suggest you now drop all that tripe?'”

Well yes that’s insulting, but the rules are different when talking to atheists.

Hitchens dislikes the “New Atheist” title. “It isn’t really new,” he says, “except it coincides with huge advances made in the natural sciences. And there’s been an unusually violent challenge to pluralist values by the supporters of at least one monotheism apologised for quite often by the sympathisers of others. Then they say we’re fundamentalists. A stupid idea like that is hard to kill because any moron can learn it in 10 seconds and repeat it as if for the first time. But since there isn’t a single position that any of us holds on anything that depends upon an assertion that can’t be challenged, I guess that will die out or they’ll get bored of it.”

Oh no. Not any time soon anyway – not while the Huffington Post and the Guardian are still paying them to say it.



Hearing from Tiresias

Nov 14th, 2010 1:17 pm | By

The old Tiresias trick comes in handy sometimes. The neurobiologist Ben Barres started out as Barbara, and he reports on what it’s like to be an intelligent woman.

The top science and math student in her New Jersey high school, she was advised by her guidance counselor to go to a local college rather than apply to MIT. She applied anyway and was admitted.As an MIT undergraduate, Barbara was one of the only women in a large math class, and the only student to solve a particularly tough problem. The professor “told me my boyfriend must have solved it for me,” recalls Prof. Barres…

Although Barbara Barres was a top student at MIT, “nearly every lab head I asked refused to let me do my thesis research” with him, Prof. Barres says. “Most of my male friends had their first choice of labs. And I am still disappointed about the prestigious fellowship I lost to a male student when I was a Ph.D. student,” even though the rival had published one prominent paper and she had six.

Well…women should just all do the transgender thing; problem solved. Right? Or would that be slightly inconvenient.

Some supporters of the Summers Hypothesis suggest that temperament, not ability, holds women back in science: They are innately less competitive. Prof. Barres’s experience suggests that if women are less competitive, it is not because of anything innate but because that trait has been beaten out of them.

“Female scientists who are competitive or assertive are generally ostracized by their male colleagues,” he says.

And called shrill strident bitches for good measure.



Ten paces in each direction

Nov 13th, 2010 6:55 pm | By

What’s Karl Giberson talking about?

He’s saying gnu atheists are wrong to say that religious believers are stuck in the past and unable to change. Then he says there are some religious believers like that, but there are some clueless non-religious people, too. Then he says that some of the religious believers who refuse to accept scientific findings that they don’t like are educated but just don’t want to accept scientific findings for religious reasons.

Oh. So…how is that not what gnu atheists say? How does what Giberson says show that gnu atheists are wrong to say that? Here’s how he explains believers’ reasons for saying no thanks to parts of science:

Mohler is educated and does not hold this belief because of simple ignorance. He is well-read and informed on such things. But he’s inclined, for widely accepted theological reasons, to get his science from the Bible.

Yes…that’s the point. That’s the kind of thing that makes religion not compatible with science – it’s this business of being inclined, for theological reasons, to get your science from the bible, or the koran or the guru or the tv show about a medium. So how are we wrong?

Well because there are other believers, who don’t do what Mohler does – at least not all of it. We’re wrong not to agree that that means they have more in common with us than they have with Mohler. It could be otherwise, Giberson says. Mohler could think they have a lot in common, but he doesn’t; and Coyne could think they have a lot in common, but he doesn’t. Both of them reject the middle ground, and Giberson thinks this is naughty.

Why is it that people on middle ground always seem to be on the “other” team, when this seems far from obvious? In the recent election, by analogy, why were moderate Republicans vilified for being too much like Democrats? Has everyone in the country decided that there is only “us” and “them,” so that “not us” equals “them”? Whether we agree with people in the middle or not, is there not value in acknowledging those who can make connections between disparate points of view?

But who says Giberson is the one who is in the middle? Who says the middle is midway between Albert Mohler and Jerry Coyne? Not I. There are lots of places one can locate the middle, and lots of ways one can locate oneself there and everyone else out on the two Poles of Error. In any case I think most gnu atheists aren’t really very interested in all this political mapmaking. I don’t care whether Mohler is more “extreme” than Giberson or Coyne is more “extreme” than Scott or Rosenau. I don’t have to vote for any of them, nor do I have to campaign for any of them, so I can just judge them all on the merits, not where they fit on some Map of Difference-splitting.



The devil is the latest thing

Nov 13th, 2010 12:12 pm | By

The US Catholic church is giving the gnu atheists support for their claim that science and religion are not epistemically compatible. Very obliging and civil of them, I must say.

There are only a handful of priests in the country trained as exorcists, but they say they are overwhelmed with requests from people who fear they are possessed by the Devil.

Now, American bishops are holding a conference on Friday and Saturday to prepare more priests and bishops to respond to the demand. The purpose is not necessarily to revive the practice, the organizers say, but to help Catholic clergy members learn how to distinguish who really needs an exorcism from who really needs a psychiatrist, or perhaps some pastoral care.

So they are operating on the assumption that some people really do need an exorcism, and that there are reliable repeatable teachable ways to distinguish between those people and lunatics. Right. Well this is our point, isn’t it – there is no evidence that anyone “really needs” an exorcism, but the Catholic church thinks that some people do, all the same.

“Not everyone who thinks they need an exorcism actually does need one,” said Bishop Thomas J. Paprocki of Springfield, Ill., who organized the conference. “It’s only used in those cases where the Devil is involved in an extraordinary sort of way in terms of actually being in possession of the person.

“But it’s rare, it’s extraordinary, so the use of exorcism is also rare and extraordinary,” he said. “But we have to be prepared.”

Thank you Bishop Paprocki for spelling it out some more. The bishop is telling us that (according to his religious belief) there is an entity called “the Devil” and the Devil (however rarely and extraordinarily) can be “in possession” of a person, by which is meant can magically inhabit a person and make the person do things. This is a pre-scientific belief. There is no evidence of the existence of an entity that fits the description of “the Devil,” or of anyone inhabiting another person and making the person do things. It’s a magical story, yet here is the modern church taking it seriously and holding conferences on how to spot it.

“What they’re trying to do in restoring exorcisms,” said Dr. Appleby, a longtime observer of the bishops, “is to strengthen and enhance what seems to be lost in the church, which is the sense that the church is not like any other institution. It is supernatural, and the key players in that are the hierarchy and the priests who can be given the faculties of exorcism.

“It’s a strategy for saying: ‘We are not the Federal Reserve, and we are not the World Council of Churches. We deal with angels and demons.’ ”

Bingo! That’s just what we say. No, the church isn’t just one more institution, the church thinks it deals with angels and demons.

“People are talking about, are we taking two steps back?” Father Vega said. “My first reaction when I heard about the exorcism conference was, this is another of those trappings we’ve pulled out of the past.”

But he said that there could eventually be a rising demand for exorcism because of the influx of Hispanic and African Catholics to the United States. People from those cultures, he said, are more attuned to the experience of the supernatural.

“More attuned to the experience of the supernatural” being a euphemism for less educated and more credulous, which of course the priest doesn’t want to come right out and say is the best path to belief in Catholic nonsense.



Gentlemen: declare your agenda

Nov 12th, 2010 1:41 pm | By

There are a couple of indignant people replying to my and others’ comments on Charles Freeman’s reply to James Hannam at the New Humanist. They are indignant about my claims about the Templeton connections and possible agenda of some of the historians who write about Science ‘n’ Religion. One uses the pseudonym “Thiudareiks,” which is Theodoric in Saxon or Old German or something, so I don’t know anything about that one. But the other is one Humphrey Clarke, who…

has a long admiring review of the very book at issue at a blog called Quodlibeta, or Bede’s Journal. Who else blogs there? Why…

James Hannam, that’s who. So far Humphrey Clarke hasn’t bothered mentioning that fact. Ho hum.



Offensive to or deviations from

Nov 12th, 2010 1:24 pm | By

Is Indonesia a beacon of free speech and open discussion? Not exactly.

…just seven months ago, Indonesia’s highest court issued a landmark ruling widely considered to be a major setback to speech and religious rights. The Constitutional Court upheld the constitutionality of Indonesia’s Blasphemy Act, which criminalizes speech or acts considered offensive to government-approved religions as well as “deviations from teachings of religion considered fundamental by scholars of the relevant religion.”

So if someone should say that Mohammed was actually a very liberal feminist kind of guy who never said that women should be beaten for disobedience…that would be a crime in Indonesia? Interesting.

The Blasphemy Act provides for both civil and criminal penalties for those who insult approved religions and those who attempt to persuade others to adhere to unofficial religions. This translates into a de facto ban on proselytizing that lends itself to overly broad and arbitrary interpretations by local governments. For example, in September 2005, three Christian women were sentenced to three years imprisonment for conducting a Christian youth program, even though the Muslim children in the program had parental permission to attend, and none of the children had converted to Christianity.

I wonder what happened to the parents who signed those permission slips.

 



A “truth” was now defined and enforced by law

Nov 11th, 2010 5:58 pm | By

Charles Freeman on a crucial moment in history (from The Closing of the Western Mind):

In January 381 Theodosius issued an imperial decree declaring the doctrine of the Trinity orthodox and expelling Homoeans and Arians from their churches…

This council, together with the imperial edicts which accompanied it, was the moment when the Nicene formula became part of the official state religion (if only for the moment in the Eastern empire). All those Christians who differed from it – Homoeans, Homoiousians, Arians and a host of other minor groups – were declared to be heretics facing not only the vengeance of God but also that of the state. The decision of Constantine to privilege one Christian community over another was consolidated in that a “truth” was now defined and enforced by law, with those declared heretical to be punished on earth as well as by God. It was unclear on what basis this “truth” rested, certainly not one of exclusively rational argument, so it either had to be presented as “the revelation of God,” as it was by Thomas Aquinas, or accepted that “truth” was as defined by the emperor. [pp 193, 194]

Not what you would call a science-friendly world, then.



Let it shine

Nov 10th, 2010 4:27 pm | By

A couple of pastors have realized that they don’t believe the stuff they preach any more, and they’re stuck.

The two, who asked that their real identities be protected, are pastors who have lost their faith. And these two men, who have built their careers and lives around faith, say they now feel trapped, living a lie.

That must be a horrible situation. (It’s interesting that they don’t go on to say – that we’re told, at least – that nevertheless they still feel they are providing something their parishioners need. They feel trapped and crappy and dishonest; they don’t feel helpful or benevolent.)

Jack said that 10 years ago, he started to feel his faith slipping away. He grew bothered by inconsistencies regarding the last days of Jesus’ life, what he described as the improbability of stories like “Noah’s Ark” and by attitudes expressed in the Bible regarding women and their place in the world.

“Reading the Bible is what led me not to believe in God,” he said.

He said it was difficult to continue to work in ministry. “I just look at it as a job and do what I’m supposed to do,” he said. “I’ve done it for years.”

See? That’s not a guy who thinks religion is a wonderful thing. It’s a guy who thinks it’s a job, and one that he doesn’t like any more.

Adam said his initial doubts about God came as he read the work of the so-called New Atheists — popular authors like the prominent scientist Richard Dawkins. He said the research was intended to help him defend his faith.

“My thinking was that God is big enough to handle any questions that I can come up with,” he said but that did not happen.

“I realized that everything I’d been taught to believe was sort of sheltered,” Adam said, “and never really looked at secular teaching or other philosophies. … I thought, ‘Oh my gosh. Am I believing the wrong things? Have I spent my entire life and my career promoting something that is not true?'”

Really? Oh my goodness – here was I thinking that gnu atheists can’t possibly convince anyone except near-atheists, because we’re always being told that, and yet here is an actual pastor being convinced by gnu atheists. Fancy that, eh? But then that’s what I keep saying (despite what I just said about what I thought, which was not entirely sincere): that nobody knows who will or won’t be convinced, and some people even among firm believers may be turned around by reading a book. So here’s one. And there are others; they write to gnus and tell us so.



An inviolable religious obligation

Nov 10th, 2010 4:08 pm | By

I wonder how that cop feels.

Elizabeth Smart’s ordeal as a kidnapped polygamist child bride could have ended weeks after her abduction when a policeman challenged her captor to lift her veil.

But he backed off when Brian Mitchell insisted that it was an inviolable religious obligation, condemning the 14-year-old to another eight months as a sex slave.

When a police detective approached an oddly dressed teenager in a Salt Lake City library and asked her to lift her veil, Mr Mitchell refused, saying their religion only permitted her husband to see her face.

“He said he was looking for Elizabeth Smart,” Ms Smart told an engrossed courtroom…

Smart said that the policeman “asked if he could be a part of our religion for a day, just so he could see my face, just so he could go back and say, ‘No, it wasn’t Elizabeth Smart’.” When Mr Mitchell refused, the detective gave in.That moment she felt “like hope was walking out the door”, Ms Smart told the jury.

He was looking for her. He saw a girl of the right sort of size, with a veil over her face. He tried to check her identity. The kidnapper said no, citing an inviolable religious obligation. The cop gave it up. Smart got eight more months of misery as a result.

Maybe people should start to learn that a woman or girl with a bag over her head is a sign of something seriously wrong. That particular “inviolable religious obligation,” where it exists, is a symptom of a systematic social abduction of women. It hides powerlessness and helplessness.



Science and absolute theological truths

Nov 9th, 2010 6:01 pm | By

Charles Freeman replies to James Hannam’s reply to Freeman’s criticism of Hannam’s book God’s Philosophers.

My most important point, and one that Hannam does not even address in his response, is that, in comparison to the Greeks the natural philosophers operated within the context of a much more authoritarian society. Christianity brought the concept of absolute theological truths, many ring-fenced as “articles of faith” which, as Hannam notes, apparently with approval, were unchallengeable.

That has to have been a considerable stumbling block, surely.

As intellectual life evolved in the Middle Ages, no one quite knew where the boundaries lay, the threat of heresy was used all too widely in personal power struggles between opposing factions and individuals and the ultimate punishment was burning on earth as a preliminary to eternal burning in hell. If Hannam cannot see how this affected free discussion in the Middle Ages, there is little hope for him. Yet, as I show in my critique, he even seems to be sympathetic to the process.

Well that would slow me right down, I can tell you. Burning? Oh well I guess I’ll just stick with making shoes.



Finding the right gap

Nov 9th, 2010 4:23 pm | By

There’s been a discussion of agnosticism in comments at Pharyngula, with Stephen Novella offering some attempted clarifications. I think agnostics or “agnostics” of the Mark Vernon type have muddied the waters. Not knowing doesn’t have to be some mushy compromise between theism and atheism; not knowing really does matter.

That’s central to all these “what would it take to convince you of god/the supernatural” questions – often the examples offered are of things it would be very hard or impossible for people to actually know. If a 900 foot Jesus appeared – well, appeared where? And how would anyone know it was Jesus? And what about all the people who didn’t see it, because they were ill in bed, or in prison, or stuck in a collapsed mine? For them it would be hearsay. But there would be videos. Yes but videos aren’t the same thing. And so on. It’s really hard to think of something that everybody could know about first-hand. Magic tricks with a particular word in every book and magazine in the world, for instance, wouldn’t work, because how would anyone know that?

What we can and can’t know really does matter.

The question should therefore be more limited. “What would it take to convince you that there are good reasons to believe in god/the supernatural?” That would be a lower standard, because the reasons wouldn’t have to convince you, but you could agree that they could reasonably convince other people. That question is more like asking, “What would be a better gap than the ones people point to now?”

All you would have to come up with would be something hard or impossible to explain given our current knowledge, without having to agree that you yourself would be forced to agree that it convinced you that god/the supernatural exists.

This is helpful because it’s hard to think of anything that really forces that conclusion. It’s always possible to think “but I could just think I might be hallucinating, so I would never be really convinced.”

Unless you simply make that part of the thought experiment, in which case it becomes true by definition. Let’s stipulate that, then. Yes: if there were something that forced me to believe despite thoughts of hallucination, then yes, I would believe.

We could say that the experience would be such that it made the hallucination possibility unreal – that I could mouth the words, but not actually believe them. But saying that is itself  mouthing words. We can’t know that there is such a thing, or that there could be. Maybe there could, but we don’t know.

Tricky, isn’t it.



Kumbaya

Nov 9th, 2010 12:53 pm | By

Chris Stedman is excited about inter-faith thingies again – interfaith cooperation, interfaith training, interfaith leadership, interfaith youth, interfaith activism, the interfaith movement, the interfaith table, interfaith work, interfaith events, interfaith understanding, interfaith coffee, interfaith ice cream, interfaith bicycles…the list goes on.

Anyway, the thing that’s so particularly exciting this time is that even atheists can do it. You would think that wouldn’t make any sense, since if there’s one thing atheists can be counted on not to be interested in, it’s faith – but it turns out that you would be wrong to think that. Atheists are all over it.

Speaking before a group of policy and philanthropic professionals, I explained that there are many atheists, agnostics, humanists and other nonreligious individuals like Anderson, Chituc, Link, Garner, Liddell and others at the institutes who wish to seek understanding, respect and collaboration with their religious neighbors.

Why does that statement give me the creeps? Why does it make me want to duck my head and slam the door and run quickly in the opposite direction?

I suppose because it sounds so damn intrusive and pious and missionary-like. I don’t want to seek anything with my neighbors, nor do I want them to seek anything with me. I don’t want to pester people that way. I don’t want to be always meddling with people, and I’m suspicious of people who do. I’m suspicious of Chris Stedman. I’m suspicious of all this teaming up and leadershipping and faith-based initiativing.

And I suspect that faithiness has something – perhaps a lot – to do with that habit of mind, and atheism has a lot to do with its absence. I think faithy people tend to think they have The Answer, and to want to force it (in the nicest possible way, of course) on everyone else. I think atheists tend not to think that. Yes we tend to think atheism is liberating, but we’re not so sure of it in every case that we feel like knocking on people’s doors to tell them so.

I don’t know – I just think all this reaching out can’t help being patronizing, and it creeps me out for that reason. There they all are, the fresh-faced youngsters, planning how things are going to be for the rest of us. I don’t want them planning things for me. I want to do my own planning. I want to be grumpy if I feel like it. Maybe I’ll start wearing a big red G for Grumpy.



Life as furniture

Nov 8th, 2010 5:26 pm | By

An item from last August, which I hadn’t seen before. For about £5,000 a taxi driver in Bradford would track down women and girls who had run away from home to escape a forced marriage.

Zakir’s job was never to harm his targets, but to return them home to face their “destiny” of being made to marry someone their parents had chosen. Despite the fact that runaways can be beaten for having escaped, he sides with the families on the issue. The softly spoken driver, speaking to G2 on the condition his real name was not used, insisted: “I did it as a favour to the families, as I knew most of them. It wasn’t about the money. It was about izzat [honour]. I saw the effect it had on them when their daughter ran away. The worry and the shame from the community talking about them. I was part of the ‘taxi driver network’, so we shared information about who we picked up and where they got dropped off.

Of course, returning them home to be forced into marriage is harming them, to put it mildly. Returning them home to be beaten is also harming them. And notice how the concern is all for “the families” and not for all the individuals who make it up, which would have to include the escaped women and girls. Notice how the families are assumed to have every right to treat women and girls as inanimate objects to be forced to do whatever the families ordain.

One woman who knows what it feels like to be hunted down is Jaspreet. She ran away from her home in Sheffield after discovering that her father was arranging her marriage. The 21-year-old said: “I overheard my dad talking to his brother in Pakistan about getting me married to my cousin over there. He’d never discussed marriage with me.

“I didn’t want to get married yet. I wanted to finish my law degree. I would have been happy to have an arranged marriage in my mid-20s. But when I protested, my dad threatened me physically and said I would be letting the family down if I refused. I couldn’t take any more of the rows, so I ran away.”

Like that. It’s her life, but she doesn’t get to decide what she does with it, “the family” does, as if she were the dining room table.



An amuse-bouche

Nov 8th, 2010 5:18 pm | By

Something Allen Esterson pointed out to me a couple of weeks ago and which I had to share. From Brandt, K. J. (2005). Intelligent bodies: Women’s embodiment and subjectivity in the human-horse communication process.

The cowboy’s stranglehold on the label of expert in human-horse relationships, as well as mythic construction of the woman-horse bond, have effectively silenced women’s voices and rendered their experiences with horses non-authentic. This dissertation takes women’s knowledge of horses seriously as data and draws from three years (2001-2004) of ethnographic research of in-depth interviews and participant observation. I explore the human-horse communication process and argue that the two species co-create what I call an embodied language system to construct a world of shared meaning. I problematize the centrality of verbal spoken language and the mind in theories of subjectivity, and maintain that the privileged status of verbal language has left untheorized all non-verbal language using beings, human and non-human alike. I bring questions of embodiment–in particular women’s embodiment–to the center and examine how lived and felt corporeality shapes human subjectivity. I call for an understanding of embodiment not as deterministic but as a lived process that has a meaningful impact on how individuals understand themselves and others. Further, the women’s experiences of embodiment when working with horses propose a way to subvert oppressive dominant constructions about female bodies as inherently flawed and allow for a re-imagining of women’s bodily comportment.

Pesky privileged status of verbal language…



Four rows of priests in white robes and pointed white hats

Nov 7th, 2010 4:34 pm | By

He’s not a very pleasant-looking character, is he – he looks pissed off, not to say violent. He looks as if he’s going to take a swing at you as soon as somebody fastens his arms on. He looks as if he thinks you’ve got a fucking nerve cluttering up his world the way you do, with all your talking and breathing and walking to and fro.

Makes sense. The pope thinks so too, after all. No more messing around; let’s get this straight: God is the boss, and the pope is God’s enforcer. We don’t want none of your poxy seculsrism around here; you’ll do what the pope says God says, and you’ll like it. Capeesh?

Pope Benedict XVI defended religion from critics Sunday as he dedicated the Sagrada Familia church, a still-unfinished emblem of the Spanish city of Barcelona.”This is the great task before us: to show everyone that God is a God of peace not of violence, of freedom not of coercion, of harmony not of discord,” he said.

Peace correctly understood, that is; freedom ditto, harmony ditto. Secularists of course have a completely wrong understanding of all those items.

And he pushed back against what he sees as increasing secularism in the world, saying, “I consider that the dedication of this church of the Sagrada Familia is an event of great importance, at a time in which man claims to be able to build his life without God, as if God had nothing to say to him.”

Quite right; how dare we claim to be able to build our lives without the hidden magical deity that only the pope gets to talk to. The pope will set us straight about that all right, thank you very much. And if the pope should happen to want one of your children, you are to curtsy and say “Yes your majesty” and hand that child over; do you hear me?

Spain’s King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia were in the full-to-overflowing church as the pope poured oil on the altar and rubbed it in with his hand, then swung incense over it.

He was surrounded by four rows of priests in white robes and pointed white hats, their mitres the same shape as the pope’s own headdress, as he honored the architect of the church.

Do you detect a hint of amusement in those lines? Do you think this devilish “wire staff” is having a little fun with the papal ceremony-type deal? I think I do. Secular bastards.



Would you?

Nov 7th, 2010 3:53 pm | By

So if a very very tall Jesus appears in a Polish cabbage field (by which I mean a cabbage field in Poland, not a field in which Polish cabbage grows, which I don’t know if there is such a thing), is that reason enough for you to believe in god? Or would you be hesitant to believe because of the news reports that the tall Jesus is the brainchild of a Polish priest and was built by some people?

I think I would, at least at first, until we knew more, find the report of the Polish priest deciding to build the statue out of material more convincing than the possibility that the statue actually only appears to be a statue and is really a Jesus 108 feet tall, or even more if you count the bump he is standing on. I know this is very dogmatic and stubborn and fundamentalist of me, but I can’t seem to ignore the news reports. I try to be open-minded, but there they are, talking of construction teams and Polish people who think the statue is tacky.

After many delays, a crane on Saturday morning lifted the arms and shoulders and slowly placed them onto the figure’s lower body. Hours later, workers hoisted on the head, which is crowned with a golden king’s crown — rather than the crown of thorns favored in Christian iconography.

See what I mean? It just sounds as if somebody built it. I can’t help it; it does.

Workers in safety helmets and neon vests gathered at the base of the statue for a group photo, and Rev. Sylwester Zawadzki, the 78-year-old priest who created the statue, waded into an adoring crowd.

Safety helmets and neon vests – that’s a realistic touch. No, sorry, I’m going to have to wait and see what happens. If it starts to wander around, then maybe we can start to talk supernatural.