Austin Dacey, in The Secular Conscience.

“In the United States, secular and liberal have become dirty words…Best sellers allege that liberalism is a dogmatic faith, a critique popularized by evangelical leaders in the 1980s…When a rare few secularists push back against religious belief in print, they are branded – often by fellow seculars and liberal religionists – ‘dogmatic,’ ‘evangelical,’ ‘militant’ and ‘fundamentalist’ atheists. [examples in an endnote] Their scandalous premise is that religion is an urgent topic of conversation and therefore subject to the intellectual and moral standards of all serious conversation.” [p 11]

One thing that’s interesting about this is that Austin Dacey was one participant in something called ScienceDebate2008. Lawrence Krauss was another. Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum were two others, and the experience was, they say, ‘the central inspiration’ for their book [UA p x]. It’s interesting that Austin Dacey says things – many things – that are just the kind of thing that Mooney and Kirshenbaum consider The Enemy and attack in every mass media outlet that will have them, which is most of them. He could be describing M&K themselves in that passage above.

Or there’s this, in which Dacey quotes Nicholas Kristof talking about the ‘dismal consequences’ of religious influence and then rebuking ‘a sneering tone about religious Christianity itself.’ Dacey says

“Secular liberals are being asked to perform an act of cognitive contortionism, to object to the ‘consequences’ of conservative religion without objecting to the moral precepts that cause them.” [p 13]

Or this:

“Secular liberals must lift the gag order on ethics, values, and religion in public debate. We can no longer insist on precluding controversial moral and religious claims from public conversation…This means understanding and avoiding the Liberty Fallacy. Susceptibility to public criticism is the price of admission to public debate. Religious conscience does not get in free. Many secular liberals have convinced themselves that freedom of belief entails respect for all religions, and that respect means refraining from criticism. But that is not respect; it’s just blanket acceptance, even disregard.” [p 18]

Mooney and Kirshenbaum please note.

Thought for the day, from Owen Flanagan’s The Problem of the Soul (no, he doesn’t think there is such a thing as the soul).

“As for my ironist friends who think that science is no more objective than any other way of thinking, I have observed in most of them a fairly deep ignorance about science. Being around intellectuals who know almost nothing about science does not particularly bother me, except when they pronounce on the nature of science. My view is that if you are going to claim that all forms of discourse are equally subjective, you better have real familiarity with all the forms of discourse you aim to level.” p. 54

Now sometimes a cunning plan turns out to be not so cunning after all. Mooney’s cunning plan of banning me from commenting on his blog so that my unkind questions and objections would no longer appear there is going to turn out to be a mistake, because it means I will post them here instead. This is penny wise and pound foolish. A comment on his blog would just get lost in the clutter of kwokkery and other nonsense there, and would not be on the main page in any case. A post here is on the main page for a month. So you see…he should have just settled for letting me ask questions there. The morally bankrupt path Does Not Pay.

They have yet another article, this time a long feature in The Nation. The first part of it is actually good – but at the end, oblivious to the many warnings and shouts of ‘Watch out! Danger!’, they return to their petty childish feud with PZ Myers yet again. They make fools of themselves yet again.

Accurate science and the most stunning misinformation thrive side by side–anti-vaccine advocates, anti-evolutionists and global warming deniers all have highly popular websites and blogs, and there is no reason to think good scientific information is somehow beating them back.

This problem was on full display in the 2008 Weblog Awards, a popularity contest that featured a tight race for Best Science Blog. The two leading contestants: PZ Myers’s Pharyngula, the online clearinghouse for confrontational atheism, and Watts Up With That, written by former TV meteorologist Anthony Watts, a skeptic of the scientific conclusion that human activities have caused global warming. Both sites are polemical: one assaults religious faith; the other constantly attacks mainstream understanding of climate change.

In the end, Watts Up With That defeated Pharyngula, 14,150 votes to 12,238. The “science” contest came down to the religion-basher versus the misinformation-machine, and the misinformation-machine won. That speaks volumes about the form science commentary takes on the Internet.

No it doesn’t. It says almost nothing about the form science commentary takes on the Internet. Furthermore, PZ is not just a ‘religion-basher’; as not-yet-banned commenters pointed out, he does science too. Furthermore again, M&K omitted to mention that he told readers not to vote for Pharyngula because of the inclusion of pseudo-science in the contest. This is all too typical of their incomplete malicious distorted ‘reporting’ on people they don’t like.

Now that’s going to sit here festering for all of August. Such a pity.

I wasn’t going to inflict any more Mooney-Kirshenbaum nonsense on you, but now Mooney (at least) has taken a couple more steps further into the moral slime, and I feel it My Duty to record the fact. I think it’s time to declare Chris Mooney officially morally bankrupt. He’s not just wrong – he’s doing bad things.

On that post I criticized on Monday, a commenter announced that I was lying.

When Ophelia Benson claims through her “questions” that Chris and Sheril have no evidence she is not telling the truth. It’s one thing for people who haven’t read the book to assert this – she has the book.
So let me say that again and more emphatically: She is lying.

Here is the question from her own site: “How do you know overt atheism causes people to be hostile to science? How does that work? What is your evidence?”
From page 173 to page 185 there are detailed endnotes with citations to back up the assertions in Chapter 8. [details of citations] It’s one thing to disagree with the premises the authors put forward. That’s fine – you’ve provided links to reasonable reviews that do disagree with parts of your book.

Benson doesn’t just disagree. She lies and asserts that they have nothing to back up their assertions.

You know (if you’re regular readers, at least) how loaded that language is. You know we don’t allow people to use that language here because it could get us (or, worse, just Jeremy) sued. That fact hints at a certain moral weight to the language. That’s not news – duels have been fought and brawls have been brawled over such language. I take very strong exception to the accusation. The notorious flamer John Kwok repeatedly accused me of lying (on the same kinds of grounds, i.e. ridiculously flimsy) last week, and I emailed SK to say please delete (it was her thread), and she did. This time things went differently. One, I did a couple of posts denying the charge and explaining what was wrong with the claim. Two, I emailed both bloggers to say please delete.

The comments were blocked; the email was ignored.

I emailed again later, after other comments were let out of moderation and posted (one can tell because new comments appear interleaved with old ones); I also tried again to post the comments. Still nothing.

I tried to comment in reply to people addressing me, this morning, and was unable even to do that – so I tried to post a comment saying ‘Good morning. Have a nice day’ and was unable to do that. So this is the state of play: a libelous comment announcing that I am lying sits there, and my denials are blocked, and I am now apparently banned entirely.

That’s morally disgusting. And there’s no way to get it on the record other than by saying it here, so I’m saying it here. Chris Mooney is morally bankrupt.

Here are the comments I made, that Mooney won’t let me post:

It’s libelous to say that people are lying when they’re not. I’m not lying. It’s not lying to ask questions. I’ve read the endnotes (obviously), and I’ve never said that M & K don’t have references; I’ve said they don’t offer evidence or argument. So have other people. So far, M&K haven’t offered any, they’ve just repeated their assertions.

Notice I’ve never said M & K are lying. I’ve flatly contradicted them at times, for instance when they claimed that Chris “tried to engage in a civil debate with Dr. Coyne” – but I’ve never said they are lying. That’s because I don’t know that they are – for all I know they believe every word they say.

Then

“From page 173 to page 185 there are detailed endnotes with citations to back up the assertions in Chapter 8.”

I’ve just gone through them again. There are citations and some attempts at argument, but they don’t back up all the assertions in chapter 8. In particular they don’t back up the one I asked about in the question you quote. I didn’t ask ‘how do you know science and religion are compatible?’ As you point out, I asked ‘How do you know overt atheism causes people to be hostile to science? How does that work? What is your evidence?’ The citations and attempts at argument in the endnotes don’t back up that assertion. It looks to me as if M and K think that assertion is so self-evidently true that they didn’t need to back it up – in other words that it never occurred to them to back it up because it never occurred to them that it was an assertion. They appear to think it’s just an obvious fact.

That’s it. As you can see – there’s nothing salacious or blasphemous or libelous, or even rude or repetitive or conspicuously tedious, at least not compared to comments by several regulars there. Yet I’m not allowed to say it – even though it is in response to a baseless charge that I am lying.

To repeat – this is morally disgusting.

Barbara Drescher tells another story of Mooney’s Short Way With Dissenters.

(I’m not including SK in this because she did delete the accusations of lying last week.)

Eric MacDonald made a comment that needs to be on the main page:

In their little piece on civility, where Barbara Forrest is quoted as saying “Be nice”, Mooney and Kirshenbaum say this:

Religion is a very private matter, and given that liberal religionists support church-state separation, we really have no business questioning their personal way of making meaning of the world.

This is false. Religion is not a very private matter. It is a very public matter, and it is increasingly more and more public. How people make sense of the world, religiously, almost always seeks to impose itself on others.

Religion does not respect boundaries. For a long time it was thought that religion had retreated to the private sphere, but it had not. Religious priorities were still reflected in law and social custom, but as soon as these came to be questioned, and in many cases overturned, religions began, once again, to strive to re-establish the religious ‘foundations’ of the culture. The introduction of an unreconstructed Islam into jurisdictions traditionally dominated by Christianity has led to renewed attempts to reassert Christian dominance.

The same thing is happening with respect to science. It is astonishing and disturbing to see someone with the apparent stature (in the scientific community) of Francis Collins making childish arguments for the consistency of science and (what turns out to be a gasp-makingly conservative form of) Christianity. This should be seen as a very deep cultural crisis. By all means tell religious yarns if you are afraid of the dark, but don’t bring them into scientific contexts, as though they had anything of value to offer. They don’t. In fact, what they offer, as Jerry Coyne points out, is only a blurring of boundaries.

Religion does not respect boundaries. Like any other form of monolithism religion is quite prepared to mix private and public, empiricism with superstition, law with personal choice. If M&K don’t understand this, then they do not understand religion and its dangers. It is a danger to anything that requires critical thinking. There is no place for humility or even etiquette here, whether or not science can or cannot prove a negative. What science can and should say is that it has no need of this hypothesis. In fact, I would hazard the guess that if there is a problem about scientific literacy, this is related to the fact that, for many, religion provides the illusion of knowing already. Making it clear that religion is something private – as private as poetry and considerably less helpful – and that the only reliable ways of knowing involve critical rationality and empirical evidence, might help to separate things that, in public discourse, are too often conflated.

Gould was wrong about NOMA, but he had the right idea. Religion needs to be put in its place. It has no relation to science whatsoever, and, despite its claims to the contrary, no special moral authority. Once this is clearly understood, the religious are free to tell each other stories, if it helps them get through the night. They may even imagine, in private, that they are talking about real things, but there is no reason for others to believe this, and lots of reasons why others should insist, and insist again, that religions must know their limits, and that they should not be taken seriously when they try to speak with a public voice.

Mooney and Kirshenbaum have struck again. They’ve written a piece on their blog telling some entity unattractively called ‘the New Atheist blogosphere’ why TNAB is wrong and M&K are right. It’s a repulsive read, because (as usual but more so) it’s so willfully blind, so obstinately determined not to heed reasonable objections but instead to ‘frame’ them as irrational outbursts from Declared Enemies.

They’ve created this bind for themselves, of course. They spent a large chunk of their very short book blaming ‘New Atheists’ for American ignorance of science, and then labeled all criticism as coming from ‘New Atheists’ and therefore (in ways not always specified) tainted and wrong and thus safe to ignore. The problem there is that they’re getting criticism from some very clever and knowledgeable people, so they’re ignoring criticism that they really (for the sake of their cognitive health, though perhaps not for the reputation of their book) should pay attention to.

But they’re not, and in the process of not, they are misrepresenting both themselves and their critics – which causes their critics to think even less of them. This is not because of some ‘New Atheist’ cognitive distortion.

For several months, Chris tried to engage in a civil debate with Dr. Coyne about the merits of “accommodationism.”

Chris did no such thing. ‘Engage in a civil debate with Dr. Coyne’ is exactly what Chris did not do. Chris made arbitrary random assertions about the need for greater ‘civility’ and cited Coyne as someone who needed to be more civil.

Forrest eloquently defended this view in the first half of her talk; but in the second, she also challenged the latest secularist to start a ruckus–Jerry Coyne, who I’ve criticized before. In a recent New Republic book review, Coyne took on Kenneth Miller and Karl Giberson, two scientists who reconcile science and religion in their own lives. Basically, Forrest’s point was that while Coyne may be right that there’s no good reason to believe in the supernatural, he’s very misguided about strategy. Especially when we have the religious right to worry about, why is he criticizing people like Miller and Giberson for their attempts to reconcile modern science and religion?

Many people asked what exactly he meant, and he never replied. That is not ‘trying to engage in a civil debate’ – it’s accusing someone of something and then refusing to elaborate or justify the accusation.

He became concerned a few weeks back, though, after posting (along with a few supporting words) a video of Eugenie Scott talking about science-religion compatibility. Merely for posting this video, Coyne accused Chris of “dissembling” and “using authority arguments.” Scott was also accused of dissembling—simply for making an argument she believes in.

Coyne did no such thing. Coyne wrote a long and considered post pointing out that Mooney was simply repeating the old accusation without having taken in the intervening objections. That does not remotely translate to ‘merely for posting this video.’

And so on. Needless to say, things don’t improve as they go on. This is why a lot of people disagree with M&K – it’s not because we all live in a box with ‘New Atheists’ painted over the door.

Doesn’t Scientology sound attractive. All you have to do if you want to be a scientologist is sign away all your rights, including the right to earn the minimum wage. Then if you leave or they kick you out – you have to give them some money.

7. BREACH OF COVENANT. If a staff member . . . breaks his agreement either by leaving staff before completing his commitment [either 2 1/2 or 5 years] or by violating his good standing as a Scientology staff member so that he is dismissed in accordance with policy, he or she shall remit forthwith to the Church a penance for violation of this covenant in accordance with the ecclesiastical policy of the Church…

Heads they win tails you lose. They don’t have to pay you the legal minimum, but you have to pay them if you want to leave (like for instance in order to get a job that pays the legal minimum). Take take take on their side, give give give on yours.

I can’t see what could possibly go wrong, can you?

The Economist has more sense than some people I could mention

It’s hardly a new charge against atheists, but it has come up again several times recently in the blogosphere: that today’s secularists, atheists, anti-theists and whatnot, including the publicly active ones, are “just as fundamentalist as the fundamentalists”…This trope needs to be laughed out of existence, immediately.

I’ve been working on it. Backup is welcome.

On one hand you have faith that makes people fly planes into buildings, genitally mutilate young girls, murder abortion doctors (in church), stone adultresses, outlaw certain forms of consensual sex or even just make it impossible to buy beer on Sunday in some states. On the other hand there is the atheist “faith” that makes people write smug op-eds, put ads on buses, file frivolous lawsuits against nativity scenes on public property, and the like. Show me what harm in the world a prominent atheist intellectual has done.

They make all the normal non-intellectual non-atheist people hate science! That’s what. Atheists make people hate science. It’s the new discovery of the year, which was revealed by…by…well I don’t know what it was revealed by, but revealed it was, so that answers that question. That’s what harm in the world a prominent atheist intellectual has done. Ask anyone.

Until god does prove the atheists wrong with an indisputable miracle and Messrs Harris, Dawkins and Dennett still cling to their atheism, fundamentalist religion and “fundamentalist” atheism cannot be put on the same footing. And until those al-Darwinia brigades arrive and start beheading people, “fundamentalist” is a slander against atheist journalists and academics whose sharpest weapon is a pen.

Thank you.

About this meta-discussion. H E Baber sees things differently.

But then there’s the meta-disussion–when self-appointed referees (particularly when they’re also players) complain that all that bashing is too, too nasty or that this rough play is hurtful to “despised minorities.” Of course I think it’s perfectly ok for atheists to proselytize, irritating as it is, just as I think it’s perfectly ok for Mormans to come knocking on my door, which I find equally irritating.

I don’t normally say things like “all that bashing is too, too nasty” or “this rough play is hurtful to ‘despised minorities’.” I didn’t say it this time, either. I said something a little different. I agreed with Russell Blackford that Dennett and Dawkins “have been demonised with some success” and added that “the myth-perpetuating and demonization are if anything getting louder and more pervasive.” I then named a whole slew of names by way of example. I then said there was a good deal of the witch hunt about this, because of the exaggeration and the scapegoating.

Now – notice that Baber says she thinks it’s perfectly ok for atheists to proselytize, and also that their doing so is just as irritating as Mormons’ knocking on her door. But of course atheists don’t knock on people’s door – and we don’t do what is normally considered proselytizing, either. So already we’re in double standard country – already we’re being told we’re allowed to do what we’re doing, but it’s just as irritating as knocking on people’s doors in order to tell them what to believe.

Well this is exactly the hyperbole I was talking about – it’s also exactly the charge that Chris Mooney and the other Atheist-haters like to fling around: that we want to pry into what people believe, we want to force people to think correctly. This is the double standard. We do much less in the way of intrusion and attempted forcing and proselytizing than throngs and hordes of theists do – yet we get told we are equally irritating.

The rest of the comment is equally careful and well-informed.

As far as accuracy goes, it’s at best an exaggeration to suggest that people who criticize the New Atheists and their followers hold that religion deserves some special respect–I don’t think it does–or that religious claims shouldn’t be criticized in public or that atheists should be deferential or remain closeted.

But Chris Mooney has been saying all of that for weeks, on his blog, in Newsweek, in other news outlets, in the wake of having said it in his book. Many other people say it too – I listed several in my post. How does Baber know it’s an exaggeration to say that they say that? Beats me! Frankly, I think she just made it up. It apparently doesn’t sound plausible to her, so she just announces it isn’t true. Well – that’s not good enough.

It’s also inaccurate to suggest that the New Atheists’ critics want to impose a double standard s.t. religious folk are allowed to trumpet their views publicly and evangelize but atheists aren’t. Some I suppose would hold that both atheists and religious people should be more polite and should avoid proselytizing and inflammatory rhetoric.

But again – it’s not a matter of supposing – it’s a matter of the public record. The “New Atheists'” critics shout the place down about the irritating noisiness of the “New Atheists” while not saying a word about thousands of years of noisiness from Old Theists. That is a double standard. It’s not that they spell it out, obviously, but then double standards never are – that’s why they’re called that! The word indicates an unacknowledged inequality. That’s the point.

I wouldn’t say all this – but there is a rude dismissiveness in the Comment is Free piece, in the comments here, and in ‘The New Atheists’ at The Enlightenment Project that, frankly, I have had enough of. I think H E is dead wrong on a whole bunch of facts, and that she’s either unaware of or ignoring a whole bunch of realities; given that, I think she should be less quick to scold other people.

Here’s one such blind spot:

I suppose I can understand some of the hostility to religion. There are still a few people around who were raised as fundamentalists and got beat up by it or who live in backwaters where conservative evangelical Christianity is the religion du jour, religious participation is de facto mandatory and non-participants get flak.

A few people who live in backwaters where conservative evangelical Christianity is the religion du jour etcetera. Er – no. It’s more than a few.

Have a pleasant evening.

Russell Blackford said in More on H.E. Baber’s piece in The Guardian that yes there are such people as knee-jerk atheists, who are far less nuanced and thoughtful than Dennett and Dawkins and so on, but –

But that is inevitable. What movement doesn’t attract a lot of people who adopt a relatively crude version of its ideas? It’s very unfair to write in a way that perpetuates the myth that Dennett, Dawkins, etc., themselves are unnuanced and dogmatic. Any fair reading of their work shows the opposite. If anything, there is now some urgency in dispelling that myth, which is not only unfair but also making it more difficult for the individuals concerned to get a decent hearing, i.e. they have been demonised with some success.

Quite, and the myth-perpetuating and demonization are if anything getting louder and more pervasive. The Great Anti-atheist Noise Machine is leaving The Atheist Noise Machine in the dust, at least in terms of sheer volume. (In terms of quality, I would say no, but then I would, wouldn’t I.) Andrew Brown has made a specialty of it at Comment is Free belief, Terry Eagleton and Stanley Fish and John Gray have joined the chorus, Madeleine Bunting and Mark Vernon and Theo Hobson and Giles Fraser and Chris Hedges and many many more grind away at the subject week in and week out, and of course Chris Mooney is at it almost full-time.

It’s noticeable that a lot of those people would probably call themselves liberals or leftists of one kind or another – yet they seem to be curiously blind to the commonalities between their pet hobby and a good old-fashioned witch hunt. They seem to be surprisingly obtuse about the risks of the hyperbolic scapegoating they are indulging themselves in. They seem, in fact, like people who have never even heard of pogroms or Joe McCarthy or God Hates Fags. They seem weirdly easy in their minds about heaping frenzied opprobrium on people whose ideas they dislike. They seem to think they are like Stephen Jay Gould when in fact they more closely resemble Anita Bryant. Strange, isn’t it.

I haven’t said enough yet about Sholto Byrnes. I’ve said a little, but that little was a mere note – a mere listing of the things he said about Does God Hate Women? that were not true. I’m not sure that was quite adequate. I’m not going to say all that I could say about Sholto Byrnes, but I am going to add a little something.

For instance I’m going to point out that his vituperative and inaccurate review was apparently not enough for him; he had to take another swipe, just in passing, while talking about a different book.

Armstrong’s god is beyond our little explanations etc etc; ‘any suggestion of literalism is to fall into a gross and idolatrous anthropomorphism.’

Although this may come as a surprise to the millions of Christians who entertain thoughts of God as a jovial beardie – a celestial Frank Dobson, if you will – it is familiar territory for any student of theology or philosophy of religion. Which is why Armstrong is right to describe the analysis of the Dawkinsites, who have made the god they wish to dismiss into just such a being, as “disappointingly shallow” and “based on such poor theology”. It is also why the poisoned darts of Armstrong’s critics (see Johann Hari’s review of Does God Hate Women? in the NS of 6 July) fail to pierce her arguments. They are aimed at territory she does not wish to defend.

No they’re not. Our putative ‘poisoned darts’ are not aimed at her woolly idea of god, they are aimed at her bad and unfootnoted pseudo-scholarship on Mohammed and his marriage to a child. They are aimed at territory she has defended in more than one book. But Byrnes is not a precise or careful writer. Byrnes just throws things – not poisoned darts so much as whatever is nearest – an old boot, a sandwich, the dog, a stale muffin that looks exactly like the Blessed Virgin if you look at it the right way. Byrnes reads a book and has reactions to it and then takes his reactions to be things resembling facts. He felt hatred for our book, therefore it became true that our book was largely “torrents of invective” – when in fact that description fits at most one page of the book.

Sadly, and rather contemptibly, the Independent and its lawyer pretended to believe this explanation. Here’s what the lawyer had to say in response to our dispute of that assertion:

This is a comment and is in keeping with the rest of what is a strongly expressed review based on the writer’s honest belief. For the proper meaning of the expression it has to be read in the context of the preceding passage, including the word “excoriating”. No reader would expect this tag to be literally true or anything more than a figure of speech, to be understood in the light of the reviewer’s transparent and openly articulated dislike of the book. Reviewers, as you know, are entitled to be opinionated and to express their opinions forcefully and colourfully. Of course, Madeleine Bunting expresses similar views in her recent article on your book.

Yes, of course, we know, and we stipulated, that reviewers are entitled to be opinionated and to express their opinions forcefully and colourfully. We do not accept that that means they are entitled to make express their ‘opinions’ so forcefully and colourfully that they grossly misrepresent the book. We think it’s absurd to complain about bad reviews, and we fully expected bad reviews for this book. Reviews that say things that are untrue are another matter. We think there is a difference.

I’m an editor. I’m an editor in more than one place. If I got a review like that – I would reject it. It’s too stupid, too crass, too vulgar, too…bad to publish. The literary editor of the Indy accepted it, and then defended it. There’s something peculiar about that.

There’s also something very odd about the goddy turn at lefty newspapers and magazines in the UK – but more on that later.

A pretty story – more data to back up Karen Armstrong’s claim that religion is centrally about compassion.

Commenting on the controversial case of a 9-year-old Brazilian rape victim who underwent an abortion, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith said the concern the church needs to show the girl does not change the fact that abortion is wrong. In declaring that the doctors and others who were involved in helping the girl [including her mother – OB] procure an abortion automatically incurred excommunication, the church does not intend to deny the girl mercy and understanding, said the statement published in the July 11 edition of the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano.

No – all it intends is to deny her rescue from bearing twins at the age of 9 after being repeatedly raped by her stepfather. That’s all.

Time gives some background.

The brief document from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the orthodoxy office that Benedict personally led before becoming Pope, defends Sobrinho’s “pastoral delicacy” and leaves no wiggle room on the standing of the family and doctors who carried out the abortion…”The Church does not thereby intend to restrict the scope of mercy. Rather, she makes clear the gravity of the crime committed, the irreparable harm done to the innocent who is put to death, as well as to the parents and the whole of society.”

As usual: strain at a gnat and swallow a camel. Worry more about a currently notional ‘innocent’ than about a non-notional living feeling child.

But beyond the constant tug-of-war between Rome and local dioceses, there is a more important principle at stake. “We have laws, we have a discipline, we have a doctrine of the faith,” the official says. “This is not just theory. And you can’t start backpedaling just because the real-life situation carries a certain human weight.” Benedict makes it ever more clear that his strict approach to doctrine will remain a central pillar to his papacy, bad publicity be damned.

Ah yes, that principle! That important principle! The principle of ‘fuck humans and their weight and their needs, we have a doctrine of the faith’!

Evil bastards. Evil mindless unthinking callous bastards.

Well that clears that up.

A Saudi Arabian princess who had an illegitimate child with a British man has secretly been granted asylum in this country after she claimed she would face the death penalty if she were forced to return home…Her case is one of a small number of claims for asylum brought by citizens of Saudi Arabia which are not openly acknowledged by either government. British diplomats believe that to do so would in effect be to highlight the persecution of women in Saudi Arabia, which would be viewed as open criticism of the House of Saud and lead to embarrassing publicity for both governments.

Indeed – to do so would in effect be to highlight the persecution of women in Saudi Arabia. So…maybe the UK government shouldn’t be quite so affectionate toward Saudi Arabia? Yes I know that’s not a realistic question. But there it is.

She persuaded the court that if she returned to the Gulf state she and her child would be subject to capital punishment under Sharia law – specifically flogging and stoning to death. She was also worried about the possibility of an honour killing.

Hey! You can’t say that! This is The Independent! You can’t say harsh things about Sharia in The Independent – it’s forbidden. Just ask Sholto Byrnes.

Another entry (they’re coming in thick and fast these days) in the “Random hostile assertions about ‘New’ atheists” file. This one, I’m sorry to say, is from HE Baber, with whom I have had friendly exchanges, and whose blog I like, and who has a way of seeing things from an unexpected angle. But ‘New’ atheists are not among the things she sees from an unexpected angle.

Most people I know are atheists. But they’re atheists of the old kind who have no particular interest in proselytising because they do not believe that anything of importance hangs on whether or not people believe in God and because they recognise that theological claims are controversial. Unlike the New Atheists they don’t think they have discovered, or invented, something new and interesting.

But ‘the New Atheists’ don’t think they have discovered, or invented, something new and interesting. I challenge anyone to find ‘a New Atheist’ (by which I do not mean just some random anonymous commenter from Dawkins’s site five months ago) claiming to have discovered, or invented, something new and interesting. All the ‘New’ atheists I know are perfectly well aware that atheism has been around for a long time. As a matter of fact it’s often the Old Theists who claim that atheism is new-fangled – they’re the ones who are always telling us that all our ideas – equality, the value of the individual, rationality, secularism, democracy – are the product of Christianity. We’re the ones who say ‘oh come on, do you really think it’s only the believers who have ever been able to think of anything? Do you really think there were no secret atheists in the good old days when atheism was a capital crime?’

I just think it’s obviously false to say that ‘New’ atheists think they have discovered, or invented, something new and interesting. False and rather unpleasant – unpleasant because false. There’s an awful lot of this kind of thing around, as we know, and it really is quite annoying. It’s not good to single out groups for opprobrium; it’s not good to do that by saying things about such groups that are false. I think people ought to stop doing that. I think Comment is free: belief ought to stop encouraging them to do that.

Sometimes the jaw simply drops, the incredulous oath simply forces its way out past the teeth. This is one of those times – Terry Eagleton explaining the merits of a Catholic schooling to Laurie Taylor.

“I valued the way it taught me to think analytically, to not be afraid of analytic thought, however nonsensical some of the content surely was. There was an opportunity to argue.”

But how could he square that relatively sanguine memory with the requirement at Catholic schools to memorise and recite the absurd one-line strictures contained in the standard catechism?

“I agree that the catechism was a way of short-circuiting thought. But it wasn’t all there was. I also remember a religious teacher in the sixth form, a rational enlightened man, quoting from an awful textbook called The Fundamentals of Religion that we had to learn like a garage mechanic boning up on parts. He came to a passage which dismissed Buddhism in two sentences, looked up, and said, ‘That’s shoddy scholarship’. That phrase resounded in my ears. It wasn’t typical. But it did happen. It was possible.”

Jeezis. He’s (apparently) serious. Years and years of the catechism and everything that goes with it, countered by one teacher on one occasion uttering three words that point out an obvious absurdity. It wasn’t typical, but it did happen, therefore his Catholic schooling taught him to think analytically.

Except of course it didn’t, and neither did anything else, or if it did, he forgot it all again later. Judging by his current performance he’s crap at thinking analytically. As witnessed by this artless confession to Taylor, and by the whole interview, and by his horrible book, and by his horrible LRB review of Dawkins’s book. It’s not that there’s no fault to find with Dawkins’s book, it’s that Eagleton does such a bad job of finding it or saying it.

But hadn’t he as an intelligent sixth-former sometimes wanted to kick against the awful certainty of Catholic doctrine, its sheer unreadiness to entertain the idea that there might be something in other religions or ways of thought?

“Well, there is a bad side to certainty but there’s also a good side. People with my background don’t automatically thrill to the idea that we don’t know what we think about anything. I was taught by people at Cambridge who got an almost erotic frisson from the idea that they didn’t know what they thought and could afford not to know. Whereas I came from a background where it was thought that there were certain things you really had to get sorted out. There’s a difference between reasonable certainty and dogmatism.”

Is there ‘a good side’ to the awful certainty of Catholic doctrine? Eagleton seems to be saying, in his typically evasive, deniable (so much for ‘reasonable certainty’) way, that there is. Well there isn’t. Amen.

Comment is Free’s ‘Belief’ asks whether we should believe in belief and makes a highly debatable assertion on the way.

[S]ocieties do need myths, as indeed do individuals. Take away their organising beliefs about their purpose in the world and both individuals and societies disintegrate: the belief that societies can function without myths, or rather that they should and will in the enlightened future, is itself a myth, and not a very helpful one.

Organizing beliefs are one thing, and myths are another. It is perfectly possible to have organizing beliefs about one’s purpose in the world without believing in myths. It gets rather exasperating sometimes noticing how sloppy and casual and offhanded people can be about mixing up their terminology. Yes organizing beliefs are generally useful (depending on what they are, of course), but that doesn’t just translate straight into ‘societies and individuals need myths.’

This is the stupidest thing I’ve read since…well since the last eruption from the twins. There’s so much stupid in it that it’s hard to single it all out.

Saying that science has made religion redundant is rather like saying that thanks to the electric toaster we can forget about Chekhov, says Terry Eagleton in this gloriously rumbustious counter-blast to Dawkinsite atheism…paradoxes sparkle throughout this coruscatingly brilliant polemic…

Brilliant my ass. It’s tricksy, it’s decorated, but it’s not brilliant.

Eagleton is not anti-science or reason. He merely points out that science has produced Hiroshima as well as penicillin.

Because nobody would know that if he hadn’t merely pointed it out, and besides it’s stupid to say that ‘science’ produced Hiroshima.

Eagleton is stronger on reason than Ditchkins, for he thinks carefully about what his opponents say whereas Dawkins & Co prefer knockabout rhetoric to serious engagement with mainstream religious thought.

How would somebody who mindlessly follows Eagleton’s mindless lead in using ‘Ditchkins’ know what being strong on reason even looks like? And how can he claim without irony that Eagleton ‘thinks carefully about what his opponents say’ two words after he’s echoed that very Eagleton in calling two of those very opponents by a stupid schoolyardy nonce-name? Don’t ask me; I can’t begin to figure it out.

This is, then, a demolition job which is both logically devastating and a magnificently whirling philippic. Ditchkins, he says, makes the error of conflating reason and rationality. Yet much of what seems reasonable in real life turns out not to be true. And much that is true, like quantum physics, seems rationally impossible.

My foot my tutor, as Prospero said. Contrary to what Paul Vallely clearly thinks, neither Dawkins nor Hitchens is actually stupider than Terry Eagleton. Neither of them needs Eagleton to explain quantum physics. Neither of them needs him to explain that much of what seems reasonable in real life turns out not to be true. Eagleton is a conceited teacher of English who got way too much undergraduate adulation early in life and let it go to his head. He is not a polymath or a universal genius or a towering intellect. Dawkins and Hitchens aren’t necessarily right about everything (I hope it’s needless to say) but that doesn’t mean Eagleton is the guy to set them straight. Paul Vallely isn’t even the guy to comment on anybody setting them straight.

There’s more, but it’s too sick-making. I’m outta here.

Daniel Dennett gives the believers just the tiniest of prods.

Today one of the most insistent forces arrayed in opposition to us vocal atheists is the “I’m an atheist but” crowd, who publicly deplore our “hostility”, our “rudeness” (which is actually just candour), while privately admitting that we’re right. They don’t themselves believe in God, but they certainly do believe in belief in God.

Yes, but that is because belief in God is a very peculiar and special kind of belief that goes all spiky and painful if outsiders explain why they don’t share it. It doesn’t work the other way, of course – non-believers don’t double up in pain if believers explain why they don’t share the non-belief. They get bored, they roll their eyes, they wish they were somewhere else with a bowl of ice cream, but they don’t break or fall apart or need hospitalization. That’s why vocal atheists are called hard names even by other atheists, while believers are wrapped in three layers of cotton wool and kept at an even temperature.

Last week a journalist had a very disgusting encounter with a group of Haredi men in Jerusalem. They were protesting the local council’s decision to open a municipal carpark on Saturdays, and she was there to report on their protest. She dressed conservatively, but then she accidentally walked up the wrong street.

I suddenly found myself in the thick of the protest – in the midst of hundreds of ultra-Orthodox Jews in their long coats and sable-fur hats. They might be supremely religious, but their behaviour – to me – was far from charitable or benevolent. As the protest became noisier and the crowd began yelling, I took my recorder and microphone out of my bag to record the sound. Suddenly the crowd turned on me, screaming in my face. Dozens of angry men began spitting on me. I found myself herded against a brick wall as they kept on spitting – on my face, my hair, my clothes, my arms. It was like rain, coming at me from all directions – hitting my recorder, my bag, my shoes, even my glasses. Big gobs of spit landed on me like heavy raindrops. I could even smell it as it fell on my face. Somewhere behind me – I didn’t see him – a man on a stairway either kicked me in the head or knocked something heavy against me.

Why? Because ‘using a tape-recorder is itself a desecration of the Shabbat even though I’m not Jewish and don’t observe the Sabbath.’ That’s why.

In other words, a minor, formal, mechanical, petty rule is so important that it justifies dozens of men spitting all over a woman because she breaks it. In other words, something of no inherent importance whatsoever justifies revolting intimidation and bullying and humiliation of a human being.

Right. Just so, the action of a Florida college student in removing a cracker from a church justified death threats and a campaign to get him expelled from his university.

But the Toothpaste Twins don’t see it that way. They see it the other way. They think it’s the trivial infraction that is enormously important while the intimidation and attempted life-spoiling is trivial. They must, because if they didn’t, they wouldn’t keep publicly raving about PZ Myers and his destruction of a cracker without mentioning the bullying and death threats directed at the student.

[W]e will end by elaborating upon why, in the wake of the communion wafer desecration, we decided we had to speak out about Myers in a way that would really be heard…[W]e were appalled. We could not see what this act could possibly have to do with promoting science and reason. It contributed nothing to the public understanding or appreciation of science, and everything to a nasty, ugly culture war that hurts and divides us all.

There’s a lot more in that vein, and very emetic it is. It’s also very misleading, because it never mentions the college student, just as the Newsweek article doesn’t.

I tell you what. I would dearly love to see a crowd of some five hundred women or so – a crowd big enough to win – surround that mob of Haredi men and turn on a whole truckload of recording equipment. You bet I would. No violence, no spitting, no pushing up against a wall, no kicking – just a spot of payback combined with demonstration. Demonstration of what? The unimportance of rules of this kind, that’s what. If people want to make them important to themselves, fine, but when it comes to punishing other people for failing to observe them – that’s bad and wrong and intolerable.

Would the Toothpaste Twins be appalled if a bunch of women did that? Apparently, they would. Their thinking is fucked badly up.

I want to say a few brisk words about a new piece by Mooney and Kirshenbaum in Newsweek. First a few extracts.

As soon as Francis Collins, an evangelical Christian geneticist who headed up the pioneering Human Genome Project during the 1990s, was floated as the possible new director of the National Institutes of Health-he was officially named to the post on Wednesday-the criticisms began flying. Evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne of the University of Chicago, for one, said Collins is too public with his faith…The poster boy for the so-called New Atheist movement today is biologist Richard Dawkins…The New Atheist science blogger PZ Myers, for instance, has publicly desecrated a consecrated communion wafer, presumably taken from a Catholic mass, and put a picture of it, pierced by a rusty nail and thrown in the trash, on the Internet.

I’ve had it with these two. I’ve had it with their passive-aggressive whiny tattling nonsense, their mindless bulldog persistence, their refusal to pay attention to the abundant highly reasonable and cogent criticisms they’ve received, and above all with their petulant name-calling finger-pointing hatred of an invented group called “New Atheists” and real people such as Dawkins and Coyne and Myers. They’re not as clever or as learned or as interesting or as funny or as good at writing or even as polite or decent or civil as Dawkins and Coyne and Myers. They’re a nasty pair, bent on attacking their betters in hopes of flogging a wretchedly bad book. The hell with them.