Oh my – this is funny – tragic but funny. Aspiring author self-destructs in public. Is urged to stop self-destructing. Continues self-destruction process. Tragic…I can’t wait to read the rest.

Nir Rosen was hired by the London School of Economics. Rosen is “the free-lance journalist who gained infamy and lost an NYU fellowship after celebrating via Twitter the sexual assault on Lara Logan and wishing the same on Anderson Cooper.”

The Evening Standard reports

Mr Rosen was forced to resign in disgrace from New York University last month after making fun of CBS correspondent Lara Logan, who was stripped, beaten up and molested by a baying mob while covering the Egyptian revolution. He admitted his career was ruined after writing a series of comments on Twitter about Ms Logan, saying she was “probably just groped like thousands of other women”.

But this weekend he announced he will start work at the LSE, and is expected to be paid around £50,000.

One LSE source said: “It’s an unbelievable appointment. You’d think these people would have learned their lesson by now, but all they seem to want to do is rehabilitate highly offensive individuals.”

Nick Cohen phoned the LSE press office. He reported their conversation on Facebook:

“Does he have any academic credentials?”

“No but his war reporting experience is condsidered useful.”

“You mean his experience of justifying the rape of women correspondents?”

“I am not going to answer that.” Hangs up.

Rosen has now resigned. You might think Nick did his bit to help; I couldn’t possibly comment.

After some further conversation yesterday, I actually ended up better understanding what the latest spate of anti-gnu atheism was getting at. After yet another look, I still think Berlinerblau’s piece is terrible. It annoys me five paragraphs in, and that’s with having skipped the first two paragraphs. I’m not saying I think the piece is not so bad, but I am saying I can see why he might be riled. I always thought Hoffmann’s piece was a much better read, and now that I also see why he might be riled, well there you go.

They’re both academics, you see; they teach; they teach undergraduates. Need I say more? You know how young people are. (For any readers who are young: you know how you are.) Young people in the US, at any rate, which is the relevant category here.

Once you isolate that variable, it all becomes clear. They teach undergraduates, so they get smart-ass ducklings who think they know everything already and refuse to read anything denser than a Facebook update.

They get “new atheist” undergraduates like that. They get “new atheist” undergraduates like that who grew up on self-esteem classes. Ohhhhhhhh – now I get it.

Is that the fault of “new” atheism? Hmmm. I would say mostly no, but I wouldn’t say that none of it is. In fact I would agree that some of it probably is. On the other hand, I would add, if it weren’t gnu atheism it would be something else.

Yes but if you teach history of religion, for instance, callow lazy undergraduate gnu atheism interferes directly with what you teach. The same is probably true if you’re the Director of the Program for Jewish Civilization.

You can see it, right? You can see how it might go? Gnu atheist students age 20 or so, who think they already know whatever they need to know on the subject and express lofty contempt for things they can’t even spell. Why do they think this? They picked it up from PZ Myers, or Richard Dawkins – that’s the thinking. Actually it’s a lot more likely that they picked it up from commenters at Pharyngula or the RDF site, but still – that’s “new” atheism in some sense (though it’s always better to make it clear which sense is in play).

I can sort of see how gnu atheism could seem like just another version of anti-intellectualism, and I can pretty easily see that it’s at least compatible with anti-intellectualism for followers. I say “for followers” because it’s absurd to think of any of the Name “new” atheists as anti-intellectual, much less incurious, which was Berlinerblau’s wild charge.

I said on Facebook yesterday that I was tempted to work up a little statement to append to every post I write –

Nothing here is to be construed as permission to refuse to read any history or philosophy of religion. There is no merit to ignorance.

There’s a churchy thing called a Couples Retreat. It’s at the First Baptist Church in Hammond, Indiana, where the pastor is Jack Schaap, who is apparently what professionals call a Real Doozy. The church offers a list of What We Believe, in case any confused people try to join in, thinking they’re Wiccans or something. The list of What They Believe would cause a wondering frown to appear on the face of Karen Armstrong, and as for Terry Eagleton, he would probably decide to become a line order cook.

We take instruction from the Bible literally; we believe what it is actually saying, not that it is an allegory or a fable. We take instruction from the Bible in the areas of life and faith and go to it for the answers to life.

Like not cooking a football in its mother’s milk, and all that kind of thing. What all the liberal believers and friends of liberal believers tell us hardly anyone believes – and yet the First Baptist Church of Hammond Indiana is a big church. Very big. It seats 7,500.

Check out the video of the couples’ retreat. It has couples saying how much they loved the retreat. Well not exactly. It has couples standing there, one couple at a time, but with each couple, only the man is miked, and only the man talks. Sometimes the woman nods, in a shocking display of insubordination, but mostly each woman just stands there smiling into the camera like a stick of wood while the man clutches the back of her shirt and does all the talking.

That’s their idea of being churchy, and “Christian,” and good, and the right way to be, and supportive of The Family. Their idea is that the man gets to be a human being and the woman gets to be a stunted idea-less empty object that is attached to the man and would shrivel and die if she accidentally got unattached. She’s a parasite, an appendage, a part of his body. Their idea of virtue, at First Baptist of Hammond, is to live a bifurcated life in which men are people and women are something much less.

Hitchens on death-bed evangelism.

 ‘It’s considered acceptable in our culture to approach perfect strangers, as often or not who may be in extremis, and evangelise. I don’t see why that’s considered a normal thing.’ His voice rises in indignation. ‘They’re allowed to roam the wards. They tried it on me.’I know people old and young who’ve been terrified by attentions of this kind.’

He has been thinking of making a short speech along precisely these lines, to the effect that he, Harris and Dawkins may set up a secular equivalent of hospital visitors. ‘We’d go round – “Hope you don’t mind, you said you were Catholic? Only three weeks to live? Well, listen, you don’t have to live them as a mental slave, you know; you could have three weeks of freedom from fear of the priest. Don’t be a mug all your life…” I don’t think it would be considered in very good taste.’

I don’t think it would be a kindness either, I say.

‘I think it would,’ Hitchens says. ‘Absolutely.’

On whether he thinks he’s been a good person.

‘No, not particularly. Not as the world counts these things, because the world expects, for that definition to apply, a good deal of selflessness. And while no one scores very high on that, I score lower than most. I don’t do much living for others, I really don’t.’

On what being good actually is.

Thinking of his damning critique of Mother Teresa in his 1995 book The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, I say, rather unkindly perhaps, that it would be unfortunate if he were to be remembered not as the person who had fed the poor and comforted the dying, but the person who had given a good kicking to the woman who did.

He looks at me. ‘I don’t think the contingency comes up. Those who do feed the poor and comfort the dying are safe from me. Mother Teresa did neither. She was a fraud.’

Quite so, and thus the question was not so much unkind as mindless. Hitchens didn’t give a good kicking to “the woman who did” – notice that “the” as if there were only one and that one were Ma T. How her reputation does persist, for no reason apart from sheer reputationicity.

Rabbi Adam Jacobs tells the Huffington Post and its readers that atheists can’t say it’s wrong to stone women to death because they are atheists.

In fact, the most sensible and logically consistent outgrowth of the atheist worldview should be permission to get for one’s self whatever one’s heart desires at any moment (assuming that you can get away with it). Why not have that affair? Why not take a few bucks from the Alzheimer victim’s purse — as it can not possibly have any meaning either way. Did not Richard Dawkins teach us that selfishness was built into our very genes?

I wonder if Jacques Berlinerblau will do a thoughtful erudite eloquent piece saying why that is ignorant and wrong. No, I don’t really. There is only so much time in a life, and with so many ignorant gnu atheists to beat up, ignorant theists just have to take care of themselves.

Furthermore, doesn’t Darwinism suggest that certain groups within a given population will develop beneficial mutations, essentially making them “better” than other groups? It would seem that racism would again be a natural conclusion of this worldview — quite unlike the theistic approach which would suggest that people have intrinsic value do to their creation in the “image of God.”

Much for you to do there, Professor Berlinerblau. Much ignorance and error. Still too busy?

At the end of the day, the reason that I can agree with many of the moral assertions that these atheists make is because they are not truly outgrowths of their purported philosophies, but rather of mine. I would suspect that the great majority of the atheistic understanding of morality comes directly or indirectly from what is commonly referred to as the Judeo-Christian ethic.

Directly or indirectly – well that makes it easy. Fine, have it your way, Rabbi: my  understanding of morality comes indirectly from what is commonly but mistakenly referred to as the Judeo-Christian ethic, an “ethic” which is very different now from what it was when it was young, thus showing that not even your understanding of morality comes directly from “the Judeo-Christian ethic.” Whatevs.

The It Gets Better project is a good thing.

The interview with Dan and Terry on Fresh Air was also good. Terry had an especially horrible time the first two years of high school. He said he couldn’t even walk down the hall in such a way that he didn’t attract bullying. Everything he did – the way he moved, the way he talked, everything – got him bullied. His mother went to the school and asked them to do something about the bullying.

Their response was, ‘There’s nothing that they could do. If he looks that way, if he talks that way, if he walks that way, there’s absolutely nothing they could do to protect me and it was probably just going to happen and that my family should probably just get used to it.’

That really brought me up short. I think I’d heard it before, when they first started It Gets Better, but if so it shocked me all over again. Jeezis – his school telling his mother if he looks that way, if he talks that way, if he walks that way, there’s absolutely nothing they could do…that’s so complicatedly horrible I can’t deal with it. Which is why It Gets Better is so necessary.

I find it too moving to watch. I hope the kids don’t! I hope for them it’s a lifeline, not something that makes them go all maudlin. But I found the one by White House staff very…powerful.

Big excitement: another religious state school is opening in Leicester, a Hindu one modeled on another in Harrow (London). Hooray hooray, even though there are people who think Not hooray hooray.

It, like other faith school proposals for “free” schools, has its opponents, those that think the plethora of religious schools being opened under the Gove initiative will destroy community cohesion and increase segregation on racial and religious grounds among pupils.

And that that’s not something the state should be fostering and funding. What’s the other view, exactly? I can never quite figure it out. That it will do those things but those are good things to do? Or that it won’t do those things? Either one seems…feeble.

The programme is intended to overcome the situation whereby there are a million Hindus in the UK but only 30 Hindu primary school places a year for them.

But there you are, you see, that’s just it: what does that mean, “for them”? Nothing, basically. You might think (if you were a naïve observer) it meant the children of Hindus are barred from all UK schools apart from a selected 30. But of course that’s not the case: the children of Hindu parents like the children of any other parents can attend state schools. The “for them” implies that children of Hindu parents perhaps “need” to attend specifically Hindu schools, even though parts of the article put that very idea into question. It’s a goofy, retrograde, sloppy idea that’s been coming into vogue in recent years, and people should toughen up and get rid of it. Children don’t “need” to go to any kind of denominational school, and assuming they do does indeed push them into religious and sometimes ethnic segregation. Get over it.

I wanted to say a bit more about that passage from Obama’s Audacity of Hope that Rieux quoted yesterday.

And yet for all her professed secularism, my mother was in many ways the most spiritually awakened person that I’ve ever known. She had an unswerving instinct for kindness, charity, and love, and spent much of her life acting on that instinct, sometimes to her detriment. Without the help of religious texts or outside authorities, she worked mightily to instill in me the values that many Americans learn in Sunday school: honesty, empathy, discipline, delayed gratification, and hard work. She raged at poverty and injustice.

I wish he had managed to say that without presenting it as somehow at odds with secularism, and for that matter without calling it “professed” secularism as if his mother had been either fake or wrong. I wish he had in fact said emphatically that his mother’s attributes were and are entirely compatible with secularism. He could even have said that religion is often at odds with for instance kindness or honesty, not in a random way but as part of its nature. Religion can be punitive, and it can be deceptive or evasive.

Most of all, she possessed an abiding sense of wonder, a reverence for life and its precious, transitory nature that could properly be described as devotional. Sometimes, as I was growing up, she would wake me up in the middle of the night to have me gaze at a particularly spectacular moon, or she would have me close my eyes as we walked together at twilight to listen to the rustle of leaves.

Again – entirely unsurprising. I spent a large chunk of pre-dawn time just this morning staring at a particularly spectacular moon – it’s full, so it was low in the west at 5:30 a.m., and the clouds had parted, so it was reflected in Puget Sound. I listen to leaves; I stare at eagles perched in trees over my head; I stop dead when I hear the chatter of a hummingbird, to look for it and then watch it when I’ve found it. That has nothing to do with religion. It is compatible with religion (though not the contemptus mundi kind) but it is in no way dependent on it.

I really, really wish Obama could have discussed the issue without patronizing his mother’s non-theism.

In the mood for some spiritual discipline? Have some Giles Fraser. He’s very kinky.

It’s good to do without stuff. It’s a discipline. Food, sex, hot showers, reality tv, flowers, poetry, music – whatever you like, you should give it up, so as to exercise your giving it up muscle. For those of you who like to ask questions: you should give that up. It’s good for you and it’s a pretty compliment to god.

…one of the things that we learn from earthquakes and tsunamis is precisely that such mastery is an illusion. To use Lacanian language: it is an eruption of the Real against the neat meaningfulness with which we structure our lives. Are religious believers especially bad at wanting to buy any old explanation for tragic events so long as they return their familiar symbolic order to its former integrity? Probably, yes. For too often, religion can regard the admission that one does not understand as some sort of lack of faith. And furthermore, it can regard the refusal of poor explanations as a lack of loyalty to the tribe.

Fraser seems to have given up making sense for Lent. He doesn’t mean “are religious believers especially bad at wanting to buy any old explanation” – he means are they bad about doing that. They’re all too good at it. And that “poor explanations” is just confusing – he means bad explanations.

Anyway – what he’s doing is going all around the houses in order to say “don’t ask why god did this because I have no clue.” We already knew that, and we think Fraser and other clerics should realize that that means their god is either useless or a sadist or not there. In Lacanian language that would be: dude, get over it.

I accidentally encountered a new (new to me) atheist-hater yesterday. Very unpleasant guy. I was curious so I followed the link to his blog, and found this winsome little essay.

Let me make a loud and clear statement that a James Lee or Jared Loughner type would or should understand. A secular humanist seeks to improve human welfare upon our planet while atheism is amoral and only claims to be a lack of belief. Isn’t it clear that these two men lack respect for human life? So they can rightfully call themselves atheists but should be denied entrance into a humanist organization. Yet the above humanist organizations welcome and recruit atheists who may or may not respect human life.

The Counsel for Secular Humanism and the American Humanists Association should immediately delineate their terms and deny atheists into their ranks. There is a difference between the terms atheist and humanist! Until the above Humanist organizations delineate their terms, they must defend the actions taken by the type of “nut jobs” that they would allow into their ranks! These “Humanist Organizations” have some explaining to do!

He’s saying atheists are likely murderers. And yet they laugh when we say atheists are a despised group! Funny, innit. (I don’t advise commenting there. The guy’s got a nasty mouth, and he’s not what you’d call scrupulous.)