Wow.

Before that January day in Bradford, the Left-liberal consensus was notionally on the side of the Muslim community, which in Britain is predominantly Asian. Since that day there has been a creeping racialist antipathy towards Muslims, by the Left. The grounds of their growing hatred are entirely spurious and are represented as religious. The very part of Muslim belief that trespasses on the territory of the secular liberal creed is identified, for that reason alone, as intolerable. That is to say, Muslims are denied the right to take offence when their most holy emblems are deliberately pilloried.

No they’re not – they’re denied the ‘right’ to do things like kill people or torch embassies or threaten people or plot to kill people. Those things are crimes, actually, not ‘rights.’ Of course all the rest of the passage is absurd nonsense too – but life is short, and I have places to go and things to see.

This line of artistic endeavour finds its ultimate expression in Theo van Gogh’s film Submission (a word translating “Islam”). Islam holds the text of the Koran holy, and insists on public modesty in the depiction of women. So why not, the film-maker thought, project the holy words of the Koran on to the exposed body of women? Tee-hee, he chortled in his Dutch way. So van Gogh was killed.

And…the religious columnist Christopher Howse apparently approves? At least, it’s difficult to spot any sign of disapproval in anything he says.

The secularist haters of Islam pretend that that they have a sacred principle of their own, which is freedom of speech, freedom to publish.

Yes, that’s right. We’re funny that way. Of course we wouldn’t (the sensible among us at least) call it a sacred principle, and we would agree that freedom to publish is not completely without limits, but we do have ‘a principle’ that we should be able to publish stories and polemics and disputes about religion and religions, in general and in particular, without being threatened or set on fire or blown up or shot or carved up. Does Christopher Howse not agree?

Susan Haack in Defending Science – Within Reason (p. 286) quotes (in order to dispute) Richard Swinburne:

If God’s existence, justice and intentions became common knowledge, then man’s freedom to choose [to believe or disbelieve] would in effect be vastly curtailed. (Swinburne, The Existence of God p. 244)

What I immediately wondered (not for the first time) on reading that is: why is that important? Why is it even meaningful? Why is belief an issue? And why, being an issue, does it become an issue of freedom? Why is it treated as a test?

We have all kinds of common knowledge – and that’s not seen as a problem. We don’t worry about our freedom to choose to believe or disbelieve various items of common knowledge; why is it different with God? That is, independent of the fact that God is hidden and is not common knowledge?

Given the fact that God is hidden – and that billions of people claim to believe in it anyway – it becomes very difficult to see how to separate the claim about freedom (and other similar claims) from the need to explain the brute inconvenient fact that God is hidden. In my case anyway, it is impossible.

In other words – God is hidden – and this obvious fact is slightly inconvenient (though not as inconvenient as it ought to be) for people who believe in it and want others to believe in it, and espcially for people who want to rebuff and reprove and correct non-believers. That means there is a need for some kind of explanation. What would such an explanation look like? Well, like what Swinburne says. Therefore…it seems likely that that is why Swinburne says it.

1) God is hidden. 2) Non-theists consider this a reason not to believe God exists. 3) Theists need a counter-reason. 4) Therefore theistic explanations of God’s hiddenness are rendered suspect by this motivation.

An explanation can be suspect and still be correct, of course – but to a non-theist all these excuses for God’s non-appearance do tend to sound awfully…carefully crafted to fit the disconcerting and undeniable facts. (We keep inviting God to dinner and it keeps not showing up.)

An argument like this would show its fragility quite readily in real life. ‘You skipped work today, you’re fired.’ ‘No, I was there.’ ‘No you weren’t!’ ‘Yes I was, it’s just that we kept missing each other.’ ‘Uh huh – that’s a little too convenient – you’re fired.’

An explanation that is too convenient in that way is suspect.

The European Federation of Catholic Medical Associations issued a statement

at the conclusion of its 11th annual congress expressing its firm commitment to the defense of life in response to the threats of abortion, euthanasia, genetic manipulation, the creation of human embryos, and others…[T]hey stressed that ethical norms and principles precede civil laws, which should be influenced by natural law and the teaching of the Church. They went on to state that decisions about “the medical treatment for patients who put their trust in us should be guided above all by our conscience. Moral evaluation of medical practice should not be based on superficial opinions or the latest tendencies, but rather on the sensibleness of a conscience formed according to the objective ethical norms common to all people and constantly defended by the Church.”

What is the difference? What is the difference between ‘superficial opinions’ and ‘the latest tendencies’ on the one hand and objective ethical norms on the other? And how do the Catholic doctors know what the difference is? And how do they tell? How, exactly, do they distinguish between the two? What exactly is that silly line-up of bollocks supposed to mean?

What it appears to mean, to an outsider at least, is simply ‘norms that we don’t like’ on the one hand and ‘norms that we do like’ on the other hand, dressed up as something detectable with fine Catholic instruments.

After emphasizing the spotless moral character that a doctor should have, they noted that “the source and foundation of ethical norms is the inalienable dignity of the human person throughout his or her life, from conception to natural death.”

Natural death? So they’re putting their imprimatur on natural death now? So we are to take it that Catholic doctors from now on will refuse to treat any illness that could, if left untreated, cause natural death? That’s a little off-putting.

Kenan Malik reminds us of the wise and reasonable words of Khomeini when he put out the hit on Rushdie and his accomplices.

[O]n February 14, 1989, the Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa. “I inform all zealous Muslims of the world,” he proclaimed, “that the author of the book entitled The Satanic Verses and all those involved in its publication who were aware of its contents are sentenced to death.”

Note that – not just Rushdie, but also all those involved in its publication who were aware of its contents should be murdered by religious zealots. What a nice guy. It’s a shame he never had a chance to meet Torquemada; they would have gotten along so well.

And of course it’s so sensible and fair – that all human beings in the world should be required to say nothing about Islam that fails to meet with Khomeini’s approval, on pain of death. Islam is not incidentally but centrally a set of laws and restrictions and limitations that control the lives of people who are subject to them (people who ‘submit’ to them), but people are not allowed to discuss those laws in a way Khomeini (and his successors) might not approve (and to be safe of course we should understand that as in any way at all, since we don’t know for sure what they do or don’t approve). So an intrusive controlling demanding religion full of sexist laws and arbitrary restrictions must be immune from criticism and discussion, because if we discuss it the wrong way we might be murdered.

[T]he argument at the heart of the anti-Rushdie case – that it is morally unacceptable to cause offence to other cultures – is now widely accepted. In the 20 years between the publication of The Satanic Verses and the withdrawal of The Jewel of Medina, the fatwa has in effect become internalised. “Self-censorship”, Shabir Akhtar, a British Muslim philosopher, suggested at the height of the Rushdie affair, “is a meaningful demand in a world of varied and passionately held convictions. What Rushdie publishes about Islam is not just his business. It is everyone’s – not least every Muslim’s – business.”

What’s wrong with that idea? Anything?

Yes. What’s wrong with it is the implicit assumption that passionately held convictions deserve – perhaps even have a ‘right’ to? – forebearance and polite silence. But convictions aren’t things that need or ought to have forebearance and polite silence. Convictions that can’t survive the encounter with other convictions probably aren’t worth passionate tenacity; at any rate it isn’t possible to protect them without paralyzing mental life, and a universally paralyzed mental life is not a good thing.

Norm has more.

The liberal principle that we may interfere with the actions of another (only) to prevent harm to others does have its difficulties since, like many other conceptual boundaries, the boundaries of the concept of harm are fuzzy. But the principle, if it is one, that freedom of speech must be curbed to avoid offending people, is manifestly a qualification of the right of free speech that all but destroys the usefulness of the right. For there are no boundaries on what people can be offended by.

Quite. And if you broaden the meaning of ‘harm’ to include ‘offense’ then you make speech and its cognates unable to do what they are centrally for. A thought or an argument or an idea that can’t possibly offend anyone is a very bland mild tame idea, that makes nothing much happen. Ideas like that aren’t worth bothering with. We can’t have ideas that matter without the risk of offending someone.

Update: an attentive reader noticed what I didn’t: this story is dated 2003. This of course doesn’t make it an atom less revolting, it just makes it not Breaking News. (I must say, I didn’t know NWFP was that bad five years ago…)

What was that I was saying about what worthless malevolent thuggish bastards the Taliban are?

Male doctors and technicians have been banned from carrying out ultrasound examinations and using electrocardiographs (ECG) on female patients by the Islamist government of Pakistan’s North West Frontier province in its latest step towards “Talibanisation”. The ban effectively excludes all women from undergoing such crucial medical examinations as the province has only one female ECG technician and none trained in ultrasound. “We think that men could derive sexual pleasure from women’s bodies while conducting ECG or ultrasound,” explained Maulana Gul Naseeb Khan, the provincial general secretary of the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), the six-party religious alliance which now governs the North West Frontier. “Similarly some women could lure men under the pretext of ECG or ultrasound. Therefore to uphold the supreme values of Islam, the MMA has decided to impose the ban in line with the May 8 resolution of the province’s assembly that nothing repugnant to Islam will be allowed.”

Listen, you stupid evil pile of dung – anybody could do anything. You could get a hard-on every time you open your foul malodorous mouth to explain why you and your horrible friends want to see women forbidden to use medical technology – and I bet you do. Men could derive sexual pleasure from rubbing themselves against the nearest goat, and some women could ‘lure’ men by being alive within 50 kilometers of one – but that’s not a reason to impose yet another idiotic prurient goggle-eyed jerk-off restriction on women and their ability to get health care.

‘The supreme values of Islam’ – the ones that are more important than health, education, development, prosperity, decent relations between people, sanity, pleasure, happiness, fun, laughter, jokes, music, dancing, kites – have we left anything out? ‘Nothing repugnant to Islam will be allowed’ – and since everything is repugnant to stupid medieval brutalist backward life-hating woman-hating Islam, at least in your version of it, then nothing will be allowed, and everybody will just dry up and blow away like an old piece of dust. That’s the plan, is it?

The clerics have already banned public dancing and music, kite flying and satellite television. They have closed cinemas, photographic shops and beauty parlours, and have torn down billboards displaying female images.

That’s what I said – they’ve banned pretty much everything. Let’s see, what else is there – flowers, birds, colour, spices, scents, sport, games, bicycles, roller skates, pictures, fruit, wind, rain, stars, planets, sunrise, sunset – have you banned all those yet? Better get on it.

Human rights activists are concerned that the ban will result in more stillborn babies and deaths in pregnancy. Pakistan already has one of the world’s highest rates of deaths in pregnancy, with an estimated 30,000 women dying in childbirth each year.

Oh who cares about that – at least all those dead women won’t be luring men, or working as police officers, or otherwise violating the ‘supreme values of Islam.’

Read more about Malalai Kakar, murdered by the brave pious merciful compassionate caring decent Taliban. (Thanks to mirax for the link.)

Most mornings, before her children wake, she peeks out her front door to look for a “night letter”-a death threat from the Taliban pinned to her home that she doesn’t want her children to see. “The notes say things like ‘Quit the force, or else,'” she says, with a thin smile. “Of course, I won’t.”…Malalai points out that women’s participation in law enforcement is not just about them. It is about the thousands of women in Kandahar who have been denied police assistance time and again, because the Muslim community does not allow men to interact closely with women they aren’t related to.

One down; how many more to go?

Perhaps the biggest reason the force needs women is the escalating rate of domestic violence in Afghanistan. There were 47 documented domestic murders in the country in 2005 and 20 in the first half of 2006, according to the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission. Moreover, they estimate that up to 80 percent of marriages are forced. Almost 60 percent of girls are married before the age of 16, some as young as 6. Incidents of self-immolation (in which a woman who has been physically or emotionally abused sets herself on fire as a means of protest) have risen dramatically since 2003, according to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women.

Like so:

Malalai…searched the house and found a woman and her son chained by their hands and feet. They’d survived for 10 months on crusts of bread and cups of water. The woman, a widow, was handed over by her in-laws to her brother-in-law after her husband passed away. The brother married her and divorced her, a major taboo that guaranteed she would be a social outcast for the rest of her life. When she went to pick up her belongings, the brother-in-law forced her and her son into a cage and held them captive. “The Taliban may threaten me,” Malalai says. “But because of stories like rescuing this woman, the women and children love me.”

But now she’s gone, and the bastards have won.

This upsets me so much I can hardly see straight – the head of Kandahar’s department of crimes against women murdered on her way to work. Bastards, bastards, bastards.

Taleban rebels, who banned women from joining the police when they were in power, said they had carried out the shooting. “We killed Malalai Kakar,” a Taleban spokesman told AFP news agency. “She was our target, and we successfully eliminated our target.”

Well aren’t you clever. That’s a real accomplishment, isn’t it – you had guns, and so you were able to shoot someone to death. Guess what – anybody can do that. It’s easy, it’s cheap, it’s cowardly; anybody can do it. But it’s only low-life thuggish bullying chickenshit scum who want to do it. People like you. People who want to make crimes against women into sacred rites. People who want to turn all of life into blank meaningless obedient hell on earth. People who want to destroy everything any good and replace it with their horrible murderous oppressive mindless death-loving gun-toting masculinist selves. Scum. I hope Allah appears to you in your dreams and tells you what loathsome shits you are and you wake up just long enough to cut your own heads off.

Lots of girls calling for help.

Hundreds of children fearing for their lives have called a new national helpline set up to assist victims of forced marriages since its launch four months ago…Many are seeking ways to escape parents and family members who are trying to force them into unwanted marriages. Others have said they fear becoming victims of so-called “honour killings”, because of social and sexual behaviour that their community disapproves of.

A small but nevertheless significant point – if a ‘community’ disapproves of various forms of innocuous social and sexual behaviour enough to motivate killing the people who engage in it, then that ‘community’ is not ‘their community,’ and it’s misleading to call it that. It sounds cozy and loving and protective and, you know, communal, in a good way. But it isn’t any of that, is it – not if it’s so controlling and so puritanical that it prompts some people to murder female relatives. So newspapers should stop calling it that. They should say something blunter and more neutral – their neighbours disapprove of, their co-religionists disapprove of, their parents’ friends disapprove of; something like that.

Run by the refuge charity Karma Nirvana and initially funded by the Government’s Forced Marriage Unit, the network is staffed by survivors of forced marriages who help find refuges for women who predominantly hail from Britain’s south Asian and Middle Eastern communities. According to Jasvinder Sanghera, who was disowned by her family for refusing a forced marriage and went on to set up Karma Nirvana, the youngest caller to the new helpline was 13. “We have to move away from thinking that forced marriages and honour-based violence only affect a few people,” she said. “These numbers will be just the tip of the iceberg.”…When asked to name who was responsible for violence against them, just 13 per cent of victims mentioned husbands, while 71 per cent blamed immediate family. “For me this is one of the most shocking, but insightful statistics,” said Ms Sanghera. “It shows how violence is being perpetrated by the entire community, not just abusive husbands. That’s why it is so hard to tackle and so difficult for people to escape.”

It’s the entire community, and not ‘their’ community; more like their jailer. If it were really ‘their’ community they wouldn’t need to escape.

Hey it’s late September – yet again I’ve forgotten to say Happy Birthday B&W until weeks after the date. Well happy birthday B&W – it’s six years old. More than that, since I’m late. Staggering, isn’t it? Still here after all this time.

Go CFI, go IHEU.

Mr President, integrating the human rights of women throughout the United Nations system must start here in the Human Rights Council. No State should be permitted to hide behind tradition, culture or religion in order to justify any abuse of women’s human rights. This Council is the World’s primary institution charged with the promotion and protection of human rights, and has a sacred duty to fulfil. It must be possible here to freely exercise the right to freedom of expression in order to defend the human rights of all, including women, and to expose abuse, whatever the attempted justification.

Including women indeed; women most of all, since we’re the ones whose rights get snatched away and trampled in the dust by the religious bullies.

But of course Roy Brown wasn’t allowed to get away with it completely unopposed.

Later, a Pakistani delegate stopped Brown on the way to lunch to complain that he had “told only half of the truth” because honour killings were outlawed in Pakistan and that the police had arrested several people in connection with the two barbaric killings we had mentioned. Furthermore, the marriage of young girls was not on the increase in Saudi Arabia as we had claimed.

Too bad the Pakistani delegate is more worried about Roy Brown than about murders of women and child marriage in Pakistan.

Steven Weinberg on living without God.

Around 1100, the Sufi philosopher Abu Hamid al-Ghazzali argued against the very idea of laws of nature, on the grounds that any such law would put God’s hands in chains. According to al-Ghazzali, a piece of cotton placed in a flame does not darken and smolder because of the heat of the flame, but because God wants it to darken and smolder.

Not a very curiosity-inspiring way to think about things. Whatever happens happens because God wants it to. Ho hum. What’s for dinner?

I do not think we have to worry that giving up religion will lead to a moral decline. There are plenty of people without religious faith who live exemplary moral lives (as for example, me), and though religion has sometimes inspired admirable ethical standards, it has also often fostered the most hideous crimes. Anyway, belief in an omnipotent omniscient creator of the world does not in itself have any moral implications—it’s still up to you to decide whether it is right to obey His commands.

Quite. This is what all the futile squabbles about what is or isn’t in the Koran or the Bible miss: it doesn’t matter what is or isn’t in the Koran or the Bible, all that matters is whether the rule in question is good or (as is all too often the case) jaw-droppingly horrible. If it’s the latter, then don’t obey it; that’s all.

Well I’ve been thinking (and murmuring, much of the time) that this all seemed rather hasty and unconsidered and likely to end in tears. It’s all very well, but writing someone a check for $700 billion to do as he likes with is really a little bit extravagant, when you think about it. I understand that he says the situation is urgent, but all the same, this business of shouting ‘hurry up, right now, there’s no time to lose, don’t stand there talking about it and thinking about the consequences and asking foolish questions and wondering if it will work, we’re in a crisis here, give me the 700 billion dollars right now!’ looks unpleasantly like…a rather bumptious way of bouncing legislators into throwing away a very very very large sum of money. Paul Krugman thinks much the same.

Some are saying that we should simply trust Mr. Paulson, because he’s a smart guy who knows what he’s doing. But that’s only half true: he is a smart guy, but what, exactly, in the experience of the past year and a half — a period during which Mr. Paulson repeatedly declared the financial crisis “contained,” and then offered a series of unsuccessful fixes — justifies the belief that he knows what he’s doing?

Hmmmmmm. It’s right on the tip of my tongue. No, on second thought, it isn’t.

[T]he financial system will still be crippled by inadequate capital…unless the federal government hugely overpays for the assets it buys, giving financial firms — and their stockholders and executives — a giant windfall at taxpayer expense.

And one of the tweaks that some legislators want to make is to provide help for people who can’t pay their mortgages – by for instance arranging ‘work-outs’ so that they get lower mortgage rates – say 5%. But the trouble with that is – what about all the people who can pay their mortgages (though not easily)? They would like to pay 5% too, presumably; why is it only people who took on too much debt who get to have cheap mortgages? What about people who don’t have mortgages at all, but rent their living space? What do they get? Bupkis. This seems perverse to me. I believe in subsidized housing, but I don’t believe in subsidized mortgages, and I don’t quite see why anyone does. Why stop there? Why not give tax money to people who can’t make their car payments? In a little over your head with that new SUV? Well here, we’ll just slash the interest rate, courtesy of the taxpayer. Feel better?

We can’t have national health insurance, because we just can’t, that’s all, but we can have national mortgage insurance, along with tax benefits for mortgages. Why?

if the government is going to provide capital to financial firms, it should get what people who provide capital are entitled to — a share in ownership, so that all the gains if the rescue plan works don’t go to the people who made the mess in the first place…But Mr. Paulson insists that he wants a “clean” plan. “Clean,” in this context, means a taxpayer-financed bailout with no strings attached — no quid pro quo on the part of those being bailed out. Why is that a good thing? Add to this the fact that Mr. Paulson is also demanding dictatorial authority, plus immunity from review “by any court of law or any administrative agency,” and this adds up to an unacceptable proposal.

Why indeed?

Good, the word is getting out. That was the idea. It needs to get out, and it also needs to be not a monopoly of right-wing blogs. This is not an inherently right-wing concern, to put it mildly – and the more it is left as such the more it strikes people as perhaps possibly vaguely racist – but it isn’t – so it’s good that it’s getting out.

PZ gets the word out. The Freethinker does too. Norm also does. Mick Hartley is another. Dale is another.

Austin Dacey has been in Geneva all this month on assignment from the Center for Inquiry to defend human rights against attacks from people who prefer religious rights. Hillel Neuer of UN Watch got down to work the next day.

For several years, states from the Organization of the Islamic Conference have advanced resolutions to combat “the defamation of religion,” which have passed handily. In March, the OIC, aided by Russia, China, Cuba, and the so-called non-aligned states, succeeded in altering the mandate of the Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression to include monitoring and reporting on “abuses” of expression on matters of religion. In late August, an Abuja, Nigeria regional meeting (in preparation for the Durban II conference on racism) issued a Declaration that calls on states to “avoid clinging inflexibly to free speech…with absolute disregard to religious feeling.”

No, not going to do that; going to go on clinging inflexibly to free speech with absolute disregard to religious feeling. Religious feeling going to have to take care of itself. (I know, I’m not a state, but once states avoid clinging inflexibly, they will expect their citizens to do likewise, won’t they.)

One would have thought that the UN would be a citadel for freedom expression, but it has now become home to blasphemy prohibitions. As I mentioned during the panel discussion today, this taboo is now in effect in the chambers of the HRC itself. Late in the eighth session of the HRC, an NGO representative attempted to raise questions about OIC-backed statements of “Islamic human rights,” and he was interrupted by the Pakistani delegation, which claimed that even to discuss such matters was an insult to his faith.

That was our friend David Littman. Austin teams up with David Littman later in the month. Read all of September, he tells about it.

And those of you who have blogs or websites or newspaper columns or radio chat shows – I don’t usually hit you up this way, but I’m going to now – please spread the word about CFI’s report on all this, written by Austin and by Colin Koproske. Lure people in with a teaser if you like, but anyway spread the word. This stuff is way too little reported. Let’s swiftboat it, only without the lying.

And then there is increasingly-Haredi Jerusalem.

Yoel Kreus…describes himself as a ‘shmira’, a Hebrew word that translates as ‘watcher of Israel’. ‘I make sure the rabbis’ decisions happen … I help you to be a moral person,’ he said…Signs warning women not to enter if they are wearing trousers, short sleeves or a skirt above the knees, hang in the neighbourhood. One is affixed outside Kreus’s two-room house…Extraordinarily, he admitted to slashing the tyres of women who have driven into the neighbourhood who, he said, were indecently dressed…’Now I’m trying new creative methods, not using violence. Now I make a small hole in their tyres and the air deflates slowly. I’m not destroying their car.’

He’s not destroying their car, he’s helping them to be a more moral person. Wearing trousers, of course, is self-evidently immoral.

He maintained that separation was necessary beyond the boundaries of the neighbourhood. ‘Having secular people on the buses is a problem. They go like animals, without clothes. Non-religious girls don’t dress properly. They encourage me to sin,’ he said…The transport ministry, which regulates and funds bus transport through private companies, has allowed operators to provide ‘kosher’ or ‘pure’ routes, where women are required to sit at the back and cannot board unless appropriately dressed. More than a dozen women have filed complaints after being verbally or physically attacked on the buses.

Just the other day we were arguing about how secular Israel is. More secular than Iran or Saudi Arabia, certainly, but not as secular as it could be. Not secular enough to prevent women being physically attacked on city buses because religious zealots don’t like the way they’re dressed. Not secular enough.

And speaking of ignorance and silliness, there’s always Theo Hobson.

[A] creationist is not someone who subscribes to the idea of divine creation; it is a believer who refuses to admit the difficulty entailed in Christian faith, who wants it to be as easy as science…[W]hen I say that I believe that God created me, and the whole world, I am making a difficult statement of faith. It is the most difficult statement of faith that can be made: it is saying that I trust God will right all wrongs, cure all pain. For Christians do not just believe that God created the world, but that he created it good, and that this fundamental goodness will ultimately triumph.

A couple of points. One, it’s not just difficult (and for most people it’s not even difficult, it’s dead easy), it’s wicked. Possibly that’s what Hobson means by ‘difficult,’ but if it is it must be cowardice that prevents him from saying so (because why else wouldn’t he say so?). It’s wicked to say all that because it means that all the suffering the world is so full of is ‘good’ and intended by a conscious agent; that’s a bad thing to say. At that rate one could just take Hitler and Stalin and Pol Pot to be incarnations of God; at that rate we are trained to embrace cruelty instead of rejecting and reviling it.

The second point is that it’s typical of Hobson’s particular kind of conceit, to say that ‘faith’ is difficult while science is easy. Bullshit. It’s faith that is easy, because it’s an act of will, with no skill or knowledge required; science is difficult because you have to know lots of stuff to do it. It’s just conceited self-flattering rhetoric to reverse the terms that way.

Sam Harris is not entirely impressed by Sarah Palin, or by the fact of her candidacy.

However badly she may stumble during the remaining weeks of this campaign, her supporters will focus their outrage upon the journalist who caused her to break stride…and, above all, upon the “liberal elites” with their highfalutin assumption that, in the 21st century, only a reasonably well-educated person should be given command of our nuclear arsenal.

This is what always infuriates me. Whence comes this conviction that ignorance is a terrific quality for a president to have? Nobody wants a plumber who can’t find the sink, or a pilot who never learned to fly, or a doctor with a fake diploma, or an amateur engineer. Why is the presidency considered a job for ignorant and dim-witted people? I get that ‘likability’ is a huge factor, but I don’t get why people don’t insist that it at least be paired with above-average brains and education.

The point to be lamented is not that Sarah Palin comes from outside Washington…The point is that she comes to us, seeking the second most important job in the world, without any intellectual training relevant to the challenges and responsibilities that await her. There is nothing to suggest that she even sees a role for careful analysis or a deep understanding of world events when it comes to deciding the fate of a nation…The problem, as far as our political process is concerned, is that half the electorate revels in Palin’s lack of intellectual qualifications. When it comes to politics, there is a mad love of mediocrity in this country. “They think they’re better than you!” is the refrain that (highly competent and cynical) Republican strategists have set loose among the crowd, and the crowd has grown drunk on it once again. “Sarah Palin is an ordinary person!” Yes, all too ordinary. We have all now witnessed apparently sentient human beings, once provoked by a reporter’s microphone, saying things like, “I’m voting for Sarah because she’s a mom. She knows what it’s like to be a mom.”

Several women in the US know what it’s like to be a ‘mom’; that by itself is not a reason to elect any one of them to the presidency. Yet apparently people think it is. Is it too late to return to aristocratic government?

Stanley Fish is a smug bastard. This is not news, but he’s smugger than usual in his New York Times blog post on Rushdie and Spellberg and Jones. The first sentence is a staggerer.

Salman Rushdie, self-appointed poster boy for the First Amendment, is at it again.

That just irritates the bejesus out of me. Self-appointed? Poster boy? At it again? Excuse me? He could hardly have been less self-appointed – it was the Ayatollah and his murderous illegal bloodthirsty ‘fatwa’ that appointed Rushdie a supporter of free speech, not Rushdie. And Rushdie defends free speech in general, not the First Amendment in particular; how parochial of smug sneery Fish to conflate the two. And ‘poster boy’; that’s just stupid as well as insultingly patronizing: Rushdie doesn’t swan around with a crutch, he makes arguments in support of free speech. And ‘at’ what again? ‘At’ saying that publishers shouldn’t give in to threats either from Islamists or from academics speaking for notional Islamists or ‘offended’ Muslims who in some distant subjunctive world might be ‘offended’ by a novel about Mohammed’s child ‘bride’? Now that’s ‘self-appointed’ – Denise Spellberg did a lot more self-appointing than Rushdie did.

Random House is free to publish or decline to publish whatever it likes, and its decision to do either has nothing whatsoever to do with the Western tradition of free speech or any other high-sounding abstraction.

Of course Random House is free to publish or not publish, but what happened is not quite that simple; Random House decided to publish and then at almost the last minute decided not to, for a very stupid and craven reason that then became public. That’s not illegal – Random House is ‘free’ to do that (depending on what it says in the contract, that is), but that doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t point out how stupid and craven Random House is.

Rushdie and the pious pundits think otherwise because they don’t quite understand what censorship is. Or, rather, they conflate the colloquial sense of the word with the sense it has in philosophical and legal contexts. In the colloquial sense, censorship occurs whenever we don’t say or write something because we fear adverse consequences, or because we feel that what we would like to say is inappropriate in the circumstances, or because we don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings. (This is often called self-censorship. I call it civilized behavior.)

Oh do you; do you really. Someone decides not to write something because (for instance) she fears being killed by enraged Islamists – and you call that ‘civilized behavior’?

I don’t believe a word of it; I don’t believe that even of Stanley Fish; I think he must have lost track of what he’d just said by the time he wrote the bit about civilized behavior. But that was stupid of him, and smug, and sloppy. If he does believe that, then he’s a moral imbecile.

But censorship is not the proper name; a better one would be judgment. We go through life adjusting our behavior to the protocols and imperatives of different situations, and often the adjustments involve deciding to refrain from saying something. It’s a calculation, a judgment call. It might be wise or unwise, prudent or overly cautious, but it has nothing to with freedom of expression.

Oh yes it does. When the ‘imperative’ of a particular ‘situation’ is that our judgment tells us not to write a novel or play or cartoon because of threats of violence then that has a great deal to do with freedom of expression. If we can’t safely write X Y or Z because furious religious zealots might kill us if we do, then we don’t have freedom of expression. It’s been taken away from us by criminal extortionists. Stanley Fish ought not to be so complacent about this.

Hitchens reads Bernard-Henri Lévy’s new book.

He can take a long time to show how agonized he is by leftist compromises with every disgraced regime and ideology from Slobodan Milosevic to Islamic jihadism, but the effort expended is worthwhile and shows some of the scars of political warfare from Bangladesh to Bosnia. He is much readier to defend Israel as a democratic cause than are most leftists and many Jews, but he was early in saying that a Palestinian state was a good idea, not because it would appease Arab and Muslim grievances but for its own sake. (This distinction strikes me as both morally and politically important.)

Well yes – very important indeed. Grievances (as I have pointed out more than once) are only as good as they are, and no one should appease them if they stink. It is a grievance to many people that women should be able to go outside without permission; it is a grievance to many people that gays should no longer be ostracized or persecuted; it is a grievance to many people that the pope has limited powers; it is a grievance to many (other) people that sharia is not the law of the world. Grievances, like so many things, have to be judged on their merits.

One could actually have gone further and argued that the totalitarian temptation now extends to an endorsement of Islam­ism as the last, best hope of humanity against the American empire. I could without difficulty name some prominent leftists, from George Galloway to Michael Moore, who have used the same glowing terms to describe “resistance” in, say, Iraq as they would once have employed for the Red Army or the Vietcong. Trawling the intellectual history of Europe, as he is able to do with some skill, Lévy comes across an ancestor of this sinister convergence in a yearning remark confided to his journal by the fascist writer Paul Claudel on May 21, 1935: “Hitler’s speech; a kind of Islamism is being created at the center of Europe.”

That’s the totalitarian temptation all right – no part of life left to the discretion of the owner; everything supervised and controlled and specified (left foot first on entering the toilet); no idling, wandering, dreaming, inventing. Totalism in all directions, as far as the eye can see.

In conclusion, Lévy repudiates radical sympathy with theocracy, and indeed theology, by inverting Pascal and saying that “we have to make an antiwager that we can win not by betting on the existence but on the nonexistence of God. That’s the price of democracy. And the alternative, the only one, is the devil and his legions of murderous angels.”

The die is cast.

Anthony Grayling quotes Cardinal Bellarmine in 1615, in his reply to Steve Fuller’s reply to his review of Fuller’s Dissent Over Descent. Grayling quotes Bellarmine because ‘Fuller’s endeavour turns in important part on trying to show that science is the child of religion, that its styles of thought are religion’s styles, and that the very coherence of the scientific enterprise owes itself to the grand narrative of the religious world-view,’ and the Cardinal does quite a good job of showing why that is a ridiculous notion.

As you are aware, the Council of Trent forbids the interpretation of the Scriptures in a way contrary to the common opinion of the holy Fathers. Now if you will read, not merely the Fathers, but modern commentators on Genesis, the Psalms, Ecclesiastes, and Joshua, you will discover that all agree in interpreting them literally as teaching that the Sun is in the heavens and revolves round the Earth with immense speed, and that the Earth is very distant from the heavens, at the centre of the universe, and motionless. Consider then, in your prudence, whether the Church can tolerate that the Scriptures should be interpreted in a manner contrary to that of the holy Fathers and of all modern commentators, both Latin and Greek.

If science is the child of that, then a rhinoceros can be the child of a fruit fly, a hummingbird can be the child of a grey whale, a snow leopard can be the child of a star fish. A way of thinking that ‘forbids’ something, and in particular that forbids anything ‘contrary to the common opinion’ of some guys called ‘the holy Fathers’ is not a scientific way of thinking. A way of thinking that points out what commentators on certain chapters of a particular very old book ‘agree in interpreting them literally as teaching’ what the sun is and does (and gets it dead wrong) and then points out (in a threatening manner) that ‘the Church’ isn’t going to tolerate contradiction of agreed interpretation by commentators on parts of a very old book – is also not a scientific way of thinking; it is of course not only the opposite of a scientific way of thinking, it is its deadly, violent, murderous enemy.

Like some others, Fuller wants to see religion…as giving us our idea of the odyssey, the quest, for truth and understanding (“salvation” secularised), a plumbing of mysteries and a searching out of hidden meanings, our errors and stumblings on the way justified by the faith that we can get there in the end. Thus one sees the trick: the infection of the argument by religious terminology to sacralise what is essentially so different from the static metaphysics, the unchanging and marmoreal already-revealed Truth of the faith, which requires not investigation and questioning – for that you die at the stake – but submission, acceptance, obedience, worship.

Just so, and as we’ve seen, more than once, that’s also what Martha Nussbaum does in her book on freedom of ‘conscience’ and religion: she talks repeatedly about a ‘quest for meaning’ when in fact what most religion delivers is not a quest at all but a settled dogma which reqires, indeed, not investigation and questioning but submission, acceptance, obedience, worship. There’s something really annoying about fans of religion pretending that religion is the source of quests for truth and understanding when for the most part it is the opposite and enemy of any such thing.