And speaking of “dissent” and “disagreement” and “people who do not share your opinion” – speaking of calling sustained frothing hatemongering “dissent” and “disagreement” and “people who do not share your opinion” – that’s all over a thread of PZ’s on the Montreal Massacre.

PZ made the point that the Montreal Massacre was a very overt example of misogyny. He made the related point that misogyny has consequences. Misogynists came along at a dead run to protest the outrage of saying that misogyny has consequences. There was a lot of bullshit about “dissent” and “disagreement” and “people who do not share your opinion” as cozy ways of describing sustained frothing misogyny. From Al Stefanelli for instance…

Al Stefanelli

Are you fucking kidding me? Really, this is the best you can come up with, comparing a horrendous act of violence with people who do not share your opinion on various social justice issues?

Wow, Godwin would be impressed…

No, see, that’s not it. Not sharing one’s opinion on various social justice issues is not it. That’s not the right thing to call it. That’s very much the wrong thing to call it. It’s inaccurate, and self-flattering.

The train wreck inspired Chris Clarke to a metaobservation on misogyny.

1) PZ posts a remembrance of the 14 women killed and 10 injured by the misogynistic murderer responsible for the École Polytechnique massacre that took place 23 years ago today, and points out that the hatred that motivated the murderer is still all too common.

2) 12 comments in, the thread becomes about whether the particular rhetorical trope PZ used to point out the continued existence of misogyny was fair to misogynists, and is no longer about remembering the massacre victims.

Naturally. It’s a violation of the Universal Declaration of Misogynist Rights! PZ unfair to misogynists!

Yeah, you’re right: hate speech against individual women based on their gender isn’t the same as being a mass murderer. But it feeds those who commit the murders. And when you post online, or shoot the misogynistic shit in a bar, or complain “all in fun” among friends, they are listening to you, and deciding that you’ve got their backs.

And when you essentially march into a memorial service to complain about that fact, you’re saying the victims aren’t as important as your right to deny the consequences of your actions.

Chris Clarke unfair to misogynists!

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

The Family Research Council thinks Uganda’s commitment to hatred of gays is just the best thing ever.

Speaker of Parliament Rebecca Kadaga has taken up the challenge of national repentance by promising passage of the “Kill the Gays” legislation as a “Christmas gift”to the people of Uganda.

Naturally, Christian conservative leaders in the U.S. are thrilled with what FRC has called an “inspirational moment for the [Ugandan] nation.” As Alvin McEwen pointed out, FRC President Tony Perkins tweeted a big, warm hug to President Museveni for “leading his nation in repentance” and thus helping to create a “nation prospered by God.” But Perkins’ tweet was an hors d’oeuvre for the main course, a November 26 email alert sent out to FRC subscribers entitled, “During Revival, Media Still Atone Deaf.” As the title suggests, one target of the longer commendation of Museveni is the mainstream media in the U.S. which, having drawn attention to violations of LGBT peoples’ human rights in Uganda, is accused of being “so threatened by religion that it refuses to leave another country alone to pursue its own views on sexuality and faith.”

Ah yes “views.” Views. That’s all it is – just views. Just opinions. Just dissent, disagreement, seeing things differently. Who could possibly object? Why do those horrible liberal people in the liberal media object to Uganda having “its own views on sexuality and faith”? Because they’re horrible-liberal.

Other Christian Right leaders and pastors have seen fertile ground for their own religious agendas and enterprises in African nations — notable among them the organization known as “the Fellowship” or “the Family,” which operates the famed “C Street house” in Washington, D.C., a residence for right-wing senators and congressmen — and they’ve often lauded the human rights violators who carry out those designs.

For its part, the Family Research Council, which has been designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center for its “demonizing lies about the LGBT community,” continues to heap praise on President Museveni’s theocratic aspirations. In its email alert, FRC quotes liberally from Museveni’s speech and notes that Uganda “has stood — often alone — for traditional values, abstinence, and families despite tremendous pressure from the West.”

They’re doing intertheocratic work.

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

Oh so that’s what interfaith is for – fighting secularization! There I was half-convinced it was for dialogue and bridge-building and working together to do things. Ok no I wasn’t, I wasn’t even quarter-convinced, but I was at least aware that that was the advertising slogan. But it appears that not everyone got the memo.

Well of course not. Lots of faith people don’t want secularism, after all – they want their particular dogma imposed on everyone else. And if there’s anybody who not only wants that but has the power to make it happen, it’s the US Conference of Catholic Bishops. The National Catholic Register was there.

WASHINGTON — Participants at a recent interfaith conference in the nation’s  capital discussed how interreligious dialogue can play an important role in  establishing peace and fighting secularization in America.

Dialogue between faiths “can serve our nation and the world in ways that  professional diplomats cannot,” said auxiliary Bishop Barry Knestout of  Washington, who delivered the keynote address at the event.

He explained that a shared “commitment to an authentic and robust dialogue  will foster understanding and peaceful coexistence.”

Held Nov. 10 at St. Paul’s College in Washington, the “Generations  of Faith” conference was the second of its kind sponsored by the U.S.  Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Hey, Bishop Barry, you and the rest of your gang want to fight secularization (and secularism) because you want to be able to force Catholic hospitals to refuse to provide abortions even to save the woman’s life. You want to be able to make it harder and more expensive for women to use contraception. You want to bully and punish and exclude nuns whom you consider (or pretend to consider) “radical feminists.” You want to fuck everything up in the name of a nonexistent but nasty god.

And what you mean by “dialogue” isn’t actually dialogue. Don’t you remember what the bishop of Phoenix told St Joseph’s Hospital? I’ll just refresh your memory.

In effect, you would have me believe that we will merely have to agree to disagree. But this resolution is unacceptable because it disregards my authority and responsibility to interpret the moral law and to teach the Catholic faith as a Successor of the Apostles…Thus far, you have insisted that you are not doing anything wrong, but that your interpretation (of the USCCB’s directives on Catholic health care) simply differs from my own. According to Catholic teaching, though, there cannot be a “tie” so to speak in this debate.

Until this time, you have not acknowledged my authority to settle this question, but have only provided the opinions of ethicists that agree with your opinion and disagree with mine.

If actions speak louder than words, your actions communicate to me that you do not respect my authority to authentically teach and interpret the moral law in this diocese.

It’s not about dialogue. It’s about obedience. Bishops have authority, and when they tell you to obey, the dialogue is over; they get to settle the questions. They’re not the right kind of people, in the right kind of institution, to blather about dialogue. Blathering about it as a way to combat secularization is just insultingly dishonest. Secularism (whose goal is secularization) is a precondition for dialogue. Secularism takes us out of the realm of magic invisible beings who bestow absolute authority on certain human beings, and into the realm of fallible uncertain all-on-the-same-footing people. To fight it is to fight dialogue and free inquiry and free thought.

The secular response to religious diversity is to push all religious beliefs  out of public life, Bishop Knestout warned. But while this approach has become  prominent in the modern era, it is dangerous to all religious beliefs and fails  to respect “the reality of the spiritual dimension of life.”

Interreligious dialogue that builds and maintains relationships among  different faith traditions is therefore even more important in protecting the  role of religion from the secularism that threatens it, he explained.

Authoritarians of all stripes unite against secularism, and then when that fight is won, the bishops can fight religious diversity. Baby steps.

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

I mentioned meeting Mark Fournier at Eschaton. (There are surprisingly many B&W readers-and-commenters in Ottawa.) Step in the time machine and go back to 2006, and Richard Swinburne…

Remember this of Swinburne’s? The interjection is mine.

Theodicy provides good explanations of why God sometimes — for some or all of the short period of our earthly lives — allows us to suffer pain and disability.

Good? Good explanations? Good in what sense?

Although intrinsically bad states, these difficult times often serve good purposes for the sufferers and for others. My suffering provides me with the opportunity to show courage and patience. It provides you with the opportunity to show sympathy and to help alleviate my suffering. And it provides society with the opportunity to choose whether or not to invest a lot of money in trying to find a cure for this or that particular kind of suffering.

Uh huh. Because everything, if you look at it like that, can be warped into something that is actually good. We should all go out and cause suffering then, right?

Mark a few months earlier was considering Swinburne’s take on causality and why God.

And now we come to another of Swinburne’s arguments: that assuming an intelligent creator is a simpler premise than the naturalistic alternatives. Given that it took all of this infrastructure just to get a few billion moderately intelligent and generally benign humans to appear on one planet, how is it simpler to assume the existence of an infinitely intelligent and good entity? Where did God come from? The answer is usually that God has always existed, but since Swinburne finds it highly suspicious that particles all follow the same rules across most of space and time, how likely is it that an entity as complex as God would never change? It’s no good to say that God is above time, because apparently he intervenes occasionally, which situates Him as an actor in time. It is precisely this temporal existence of the divine that believers crave–a God above time is not interactive. Indeed, an entity above time and space would be so utterly alien as to be completely orthogonal to all human hopes and wishes, ruling the universe by an incomprehensible aesthetic more conducive to blind terror than comfort and hope.

I always think it’s odd that many people think they know not only that god exists but also what god is like and that god is good in a sense that is meaningful to humans. That’s a lot to know. It’s a lot to know and there’s no real source for any of it. How can they possibly be so sure that god is not “so utterly alien as to be completely orthogonal to all human hopes and wishes”? It always makes me wonder how they know god isn’t raising us for food. That’s why when we got to this point in the conversation on Friday evening, I said “it’s a cookbook” and everyone laughed. They all knew the reference.

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

Neil deGrasse Tyson did a couple of alarming and disheartening tweets just now -

Neil deGrasse Tyson‏@neiltyson

Done with Jury Duty. I said I could not convict a person solely on eyewitness testimony. They sent me home. I’m now 0 for 4.

After hearing my skepticism of eyewitness testimony, six other jury candidates promptly agreed. And they got sent home too.

Oyyyyyyyyyy.

Eyewitness testimony is so crappy – so very unreliable and yet so trusted.

TV trains everyone to think it’s infallible, as if there were a video camera in our brains and all we have to do is roll the tape. We’re bad at noticing stuff even when it’s right in front of us, and then we’re bad all over again at remembering. Put the two together and you get a big “Huh? I dunno. I wasn’t watching.” But noooooo, cop shows always present it as Hidden Photography Inside The Head. The cops ask for detailed descriptions of the suspect, they get impatient when people don’t know, they take the lineup very seriously – as if all this were totally reliable.

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

Jesus and Mo and Moses are on the story.

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

Hank Fox took a bunch of nice photos at Eschaton. There’s Genie Scott, PZ, Larry Moran – and there’s Eric.

Eric and I had the opportunity for several long talks. He’s a compadre.

There is Dorothy Grasett. Dorothy gave me a beautiful wooden box her brother made, as a present. It’s here on the desk beside me.

That’s Saturday evening, before or after PZ’s talk.

And there’s one of me squirming.

Hank calls it relaxing, but it’s squirming. I always squirm. That’s Heina up in the right corner.

Thanks to Hank for letting me re-post a few. Go over there to see them all.

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

It’s a literary trope, the father who disowns or betrays a daughter. I don’t say that to make light of it, but on the contrary, to point out the way it has haunted the human imagination, which underlines how horrible it is. (This applies to all combinations of parents and children, but fathers and daughters gets noticed less than fathers and sons.)

Agamemnon, you know. He sacrificed Iphigenia – which is to say, he killed her on an “altar” – to get a wind when the attack on Troy was becalmed. Not very fatherly, as one of the Mitfords might have put it. Lucretius used it as the occasion for his famous comment, tantum religio potuit suadere malorum – religion can persuade [people to perform] such evils.

And then there’s Shakespeare, who repeatedly portrayed fathers disowning daughters. In other Elizabethan plays, fathers who do that are defending “honor” (does it sound familiar? Of course it does, because it’s the same) and the daughters either deserve it or are betrayed by fate or bad luck or some such thing, not by their fathers. In Shakespeare’s many plays on the subject, the father is always dead wrong.

Juliet’s father tried to force her into a marriage and when she refused he disowned her. Hero’s father believed lying tricksters who said she’d been letting men in her bedroom window so they could fuck like weasels. Desdemona’s father disowned her because she married a Moor – a man of Another Race. Cordelia’s father not only disowned her, but cursed her – meaning not he swore at her but he called down curses on her, curses that were meant to be efficacious – for declining to flatter him in the way he expected. Imogen’s father was another who accepted a trickster’s claim that she was a Secret Slut. Perdita’s father disowned his wife because he got it in his head (for no reason) that she was humping his best friend, and he tried to have the infant Perdita killed.

Juliet dies disowned, as does Desdemona. Cordelia and Lear, and Perdita and Leontes, however, get the chance for reconciliation at the end. It’s interesting how thoroughly Shakespeare puts the fathers in the wrong.

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

And speaking of horribly unenlightened views, there is also Ashley Miller’s father, who has decided to stop talking to her, to disown her, to cut her off, to make her an undaughter, because her boyfriend is unwhite.

I can’t get my head around it. Imagine caring more about your racism than you care about your daughter! Imagine giving up a daughter for the sake of racism. What an incredibly bad bargain. What a pathetic, wrong-way-around exchange.

I suppose I am thankful that he waited until the day after Thanksgiving to do it.  Not that he told me, he made my stepmother his proxy as he was too angry to speak to me directly.  I have been disowned for loving someone my father does not approve of.

“Too angry” – as if there were an important principle involved.

I don’t know how one goes about coping with these things.  I have a very supportive family, friends, and boyfriend.  And Dad and I were never super close.  And, perhaps there were things I could have done better, but none of them change the fact that my dad is the kind of person who would disown their only child for dating “out of race”.

Just what I’m trying to get my head around. That kind of person. What kind of person would do that?

It’s heartbreaking.

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

I’m back. I didn’t get sucked into the engines even once.

Yesterday morning CFI demonstrated in front of the Ugandan High Commission in Ottawa to protest the Kill the Gays bill. Vyckie and I went too. Kevin Smith, the director of CFI Canada, used Twitter to summon media attention, and took pictures. He gave me permission to post them.

That’s Seanna in the purple coat. She’s the Director of CFI Ottawa, which is an unpaid position – a volunteer position, but that word suggests to me a not quite real job, and that certainly doesn’t fit. The guy tweeting on her right is Michael Payton, and I’m hiding behind him.

Kill the bill, kill the bill, kill the bill.

Kevin told me that one of the cops at the demo is on the LGBT panel of the RCMP. Yesss!

Support CFI Canada. They’re doing good work.

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

Ahh that was fun. Went out for a nice refreshing walk – to Parliament Hill then east on Laurier and along the canal and then back here. Pitch dark but all the nicer for that.

Last night we went to the Museum of Nature for nibbles and PZ’s talk on chance in evolution and then we got to wander around in the bird and dinosaur galleries. After hours! Cool or what?

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

Eschaton is over. I just had a long conversation with Eric in the doorway of the larger of the two rooms where it was held, until he had to leave for the airport. It’s been wonderful to meet him and talk to him.

Udo Schuklenk gave a great talk on secular ethics this morning. I kept wishing some of the sciencey types who think philosophy is useless could have been present. He based it on three of the myths in his forthcoming book with Russell Blackford on 50 myths about atheism. He used three Jesus and Mo toons to illustrate his analysis of three of the myths – no morality without god; no-god robs life of purpose and meaning; denial of the sanctity of human life.

One of the observations I liked – the validity of laws ultimately depends on their acceptability to a given population. The same applies to god. Goddy types think you have to choose between nihilism or goddy absolutes, but really god too depends on acceptability.

Ian Cromwell also gave a great talk. Zombies. Racism. Then we had a panel discussion on godless ethics. Eric and Udo and I had lunch together last thing before Udo left.

Heina Dadabhoy told me she tweeted the last line of my talk yesterday, that along with separation of church and state we need separation of church and health care, and it got 42 (or was it 46?) RTs. All right! We can do this, people. And we need to.

CFI is protesting at the Ugandan embassy (or consulate?) tomorrow, and I get to go.

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

So I’ve met Eric MacDonald at last. Also Mark Fournier. Conversation about Job, and Steiner schools and anthroposophy, and people who think they know things, and the quiet revolution in Quebec.

My talk is this afternoon; Vyckie is after me; Eric is after Vyckie.

Note to hotels: don’t have tv on in the breakfast room. Ugh.

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

All riiiiight – I got to see inside the Parliament library. That makes up a little for the crushing fact that I didn’t get to see the second floor of Manchester Town Hall (with the murals by Ford Madox Ford) because it was off-limits that afternoon.

I had to take the tour, because you can’t go as many places if you just wander around on your own, such as the library for one. The tour it is then, I exclaimed, and accepted my orange pass with 2:50 stamped on it. It was 2:30, so I nipped up to the Peace Tower to look at the view. It was very like the time I nipped up to the Old Post Office tower in DC – same line to wait for the small elevator, same easier time getting down, same general kind of architecture – and both in national capitals. How about that.

The library is gorgeous.

I like gorgeous. I don’t like coldly minimal. I know someone who spent two million dollars on a reno – yes really – and it’s coldly minimal, just the same very boring tan wood everywhere. The hell with that. I want gorgeous.

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

Second trip, to walk by the canal.

First I went around the corner from the hotel to get a look at that park I can see from my window, where I saw dogs being walked in the frozen sunrise. I found that it’s not a park at all, it’s the grounds of the Science Museum (where PZ is doing a talk tomorrow evening) – so now I see that I can see the museum from here! It’s right over my left shoulder as I speak. It’s one of those massive castle type museums – the bit I can see looks like Caernarvon Castle or something. There’s also a new glass part, which I can also see from here.

Also, Ottawa (at least this downtown part of it) is packed with very appealing 19th century brick houses, that are like the brick semis you see all over London and yet also not like them, and not like anything else I know either. They’re familiar yet oddly distinctive.

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

Hey if you’re a magician, be careful about what tv talk shows you grace with your presence. Go on the wrong one and you might be set on fire.

Wayne Houchin, a Las Vegas-based magician, was.

Shocking footage has emerged on YouTube of a magician being attacked and badly injured by the host of a TV show on which he was a guest.  In an apparently spontaneous gesture, the man (who has been named as Franklin Barazarte) who is both host and producer of a talk-show in the Dominican Republic, doused 29-year old Wayne Houchin with a flammable liquid and set it on fire.

Well at least Bill O’Reilly doesn’t do that.

We shouldn’t jump to any conclusions about this one incident, although it if *was* an attempted exorcism, it would not be unique in involving violent and dangerous practices.  To take two examples from different parts of the world, in 2007 a Romanian priest was jailed for 14 years for conducting an exorcism that led to the death of a nun,  while in Japan last year a 13-year-old girl suffocated after being strapped down and doused with water by her father and a Buddhist monk who were trying to expel an “evil spirit”.

And there are all the children in places like Akwa Ibom state in Nigeria, and London, and all the women in places like India and Kenya, who get tortured to death for being “witches.”

Bullshit is not always harmless.

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

Yow – it really is cold. I got out there though. Walked around Parliament Hill and admired the stunning views of the river and Gatineau and the Gatineau hills and the distance. Saw three of the Cats of Parliament Hill sunning themselves on their front porches. I also admired the ugly-beautiful crazily grandiose architecture, just as I admired that of Manchester Town Hall. Saw the mouth of the Rideau canal. Also the Women are Persons! monument. Yes, Virginia, it really had to be argued that women are persons, and there really were people (men, that is) who said no they aren’t.

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