And speaking of tensions between religious freedom and other rights – Helen Ukpabio is another who is attempting to use the law to make her “religious rights” trump other rights.

Since “Saving Africa’s Witch Children” was first shown in Britain, in 2008, Mr. Itauma’s home state has adopted a law against accusing children of witchcraft. But Ms. Ukpabio went on the offensive by suing the state government, Mr. Foxcroft, Mr. Itauma and Leo Igwe, a Nigerian antisuperstition activist.

In the lawsuit, Ms. Ukpabio alleges that the state law infringes on her freedom of religion. She seeks 2 billion naira (about $13 million) in damages, as well as “an order of perpetual injunction restraining the respondents” from interfering with or otherwise denouncing her church’s “right to practice their religion and the Christian religious belief in the existence of God, Jesus Christ, Satan, sin, witchcraft, heaven and hellfire.”

In other words, in the name of religious freedom, Ms. Ukpabio seeks a gag order on anyone who disagrees with her.

Anyone who disagrees with her and who wants to protect children from accusations of “witchcraft” and the resulting abandonment and/or torture and possibly death. She wants the “freedom” to tell people that some children are witches and that she can detect them.

Ukpabio’s critics say her teachings have contributed to the torture or abandonment of thousands of Nigerian children — including infants and toddlers — suspected of being witches and warlocks. Her culpability is a central contention of “Saving Africa’s Witch Children,” a documentary that will make its American debut Wednesday on HBO2.

Those disturbed by the needless immiseration of innocent children should beware. “Saving Africa’s Witch Children” follows Gary Foxcroft, founder of the charity Stepping Stones Nigeria, as he travels the rural state of Akwa Ibom, rescuing children abused during horrific “exorcisms” — splashed with acid, buried alive, dipped in fire — or abandoned roadside, cast out of their villages because some itinerant preacher called them possessed.

A freedom too far.

Okay this is one of the funniest things I’ve seen in awhile. On Facebook at least. Salman Rushdie learned from a Facebook friend how to find various “interesting characters” to “add to one’s ✍ writing.” So now he gets to spark up his famously dull prose with little pointing hands ☛, umbrellas ☂, telephones, and other tiny symbols. One wag remarked

oooh! can’t wait for
☀☃✗✈✖☺☆by Salman Rushdie – Published by Random House

Hahahahahahaha.

And then there is this fella Andrew Pessin, who says you can be certain and also uncertain and that way all shall win, all shall have prizes. You do it using the Paradox of the Preface.

Imagine an author writing something like this as a preface to her work:

I am certain, of each and every sentence in this work, that it is true, on the basis of various considerations including the careful arguments and use of evidence which led me to it. And yet I recognize that I am a fallible human being, likely to have made some error(s) in the course of this long work. Thus I am also quite certain that I have made some such error somewhere, even if I cannot say where.

I could buy that if he had made it “I am sure, of each and every sentence” and so on. I could buy it if he had made it I am convinced, or I strongly believe, or I really really think. But by making it “I am certain” he turns the whole thing into gibberish. If you are already quite certain that you have made a mistake somewhere, then you can’t also be certain that you haven’t – you can’t be certain that every sentence is true.

Maybe he meant a kind of colloquial version of ‘certain’ which is like the colloquial version of ‘literal’ in that it doesn’t mean what the word means. I have noticed that a lot of people use the word to refer to claims that they can’t possibly be certain of, and wondered if they actually think it is an exact synonym of ‘sure’ or ‘convinced.’ But if he did…that’s kind of stupid, frankly, since the whole piece depends on that word, and he used it sloppily. You can’t be certain that you have made no mistakes and at the same time certain that you have made a mistake.
Anyway, I avoid this kind of tangle by simply never being certain or even sure that I have made no mistakes.

Decca Aitkenhead’s article on Hitchens is very snide, but one suspects there is a good deal of truth in it. In particular I can’t help being amused by her portrayal of his sense of humor.

The march of time certainly hasn’t altered one thing about Hitchens, which is, alas, his unaccountable pleasure in word games of the most puerile variety. Page after page is devoted to the infinite hilarity derived by Amis, Rushdie, McEwan and Hitchens from substituting in the titles of well-known books, films and songs the word “dick” for “heart”, or “fuck” for “love”, or “cunt” for “man”.

“Oh, I know,” he chortles, when I bring this up. “Shameful.” He surely can’t still find these jokes funny, can he? “Oh yeah, I do. I sometimes wake up laughing at them. Yup. Never get bored of it.” And this from a man who once wrote that women weren’t funny.

Now, I can imagine a few of those being funny (except for the cunt part, but we’ve already found out that the word has a somewhat modified meaning in British English), but an infinite stream of them? Not so much. Endless repetition really isn’t all that funny, yet I do know some people who really think it is, and tirelessly engage in it. They’re all men. And they are all peculiarly (indeed, conceitedly) blind to humor in women. One shouldn’t generalize from one’s own narrow experience, but all the same, I find Aikenhead’s weary incredulity quite funny. I too have spotted what looks like a correlation between unfunny jokes in the self and inability to recognize funny jokes in the other – something that is more than just ‘I am funny and you are not’; it’s a peculiar kind of humor coupled with a peculiar kind of tin ear.

Still. To be fair, it’s hard to believe that that really applies to any of the males Aikenhead mentions, since they can be genuinely funny as well as boringly pseudofunny.

Still again…there is that pub joke of Hitchens’s…

Why does he say to the barmaid, “Put a Xerox in that” when he wants another drink? He’s meant to be an international sophisticate, not a home counties golf club bore.

“I think it’s rather ingenious.” He beams. “You don’t want to say, ‘Same again’, like everyone else. It works like a sonnet. It gets them every time.”

Hmmmm…

I quite understand, except for one thing – why did they hire a psychic in Bangalore? Are there no psychics in Lincolnshire? That seems most unikely. It’s a mystical sort of place, Lincs – it must be crawling with psychics.

Now I know what you’re going to say – they’re psychics – they don’t have to be on the spot – der. It’s spiritual. It’s not all grubbily of the earth earthy; it’s immaterial, it’s floaty, it’s non-geographical. The psychic could be on Pluto; it wouldn’t matter. Thought travels through space and time, it does not need bodies or proximity. I know. I get all that. But what about the convenience of the people who are stuck in Lincolnshire? Surely it would be easier for them to chat with a psychic who was right there than with one who was in a completely different time zone.

On the other hand, I suppose the thinking is that if you’re going to use a psychic you might as well use the best, and obviously the best psychics are all in India. Fair enough. Forget I said anything.

Karl Giberson is a honcho at BioLogos. BioLogos is about “Science and Faith in Dialogue,” about Science & the Sacred. Francis Collins is a scientist, Karl Giberson is a scientist. Karl Giberson explains why he has reservations about Intelligent Design.

BioLogos enthusiastically endorses the idea that the universe is intelligently designed and we certainly believe that the creator of the universe is intelligent. We consider the evidence regarding the fine-tuning of the universe to be provocative and compelling. Our reservations about ID certainly do not derive from any rejection of the rationality of the universe.

The rationality of the universe? What’s rational about the universe? It’s too big, for one thing. It’s too cold for another, too full of surprises for another, too hard to breathe in for one more. What’s so rational? And…rational according to what criteria? Ours? Obviously not. God’s? But that just begs the question.

Anyway. What I really wonder is what he means by saying “we certainly believe that the creator of the universe is intelligent.” What can any human mean by that? What do we mean by “intelligent”?

We mean “intelligent according to us,” of course. We’re human beings, saying human things, seeing things from a human perspective. “Intelligence” is something we attribute to ourselves and perhaps in small amounts to some other animals. It’s something we name as existing in some of the evolved animals in the organic top layer of this one planet. Does it seem at all likely that the same quality could exist in an entity that “designed” and “created” the universe? Not to me it doesn’t. We recognize something we call “intelligence” in entities of a certain size with a certain amount of brain tissue. The universe doesn’t seem to be the kind of thing that could be “designed” and “created” by a similar entity magnified enough times to be bigger than the universe (you have to be bigger to be outside it, because you have to be outside it before you can design and create it). It’s not enough to be bigger than Texas, or bigger than the earth, or bigger than Jupiter – bigger than the universe is a whole different order of bigger. Does it make sense to think we can make educated guesses about what kind of personal qualities – intelligence, courage, politeness – an entity of that size might have?

I don’t think it does. I think it’s just a packet of words that people mouth, without really thinking about them properly. If they actually thought about them, the oddities would slow them down. It’s very easy to say we certainly believe that the creator of the universe is intelligent, but making sense of it is another matter.

Rand Paul, Kentucky’s “Tea Party” nominee for the Senate, is opposed to the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo says why that’s not just a principled libertarian view:

To a degree the argument Paul is making is something like saying that I don’t like rape or murder, I just don’t believe in a police force to prevent it or a judiciary to punish the offenders. The reason we, albeit imperfectly, have equality before the law and in the society at large (in terms of public accommodations and so forth) on racial grounds in the whole of the United States is because of federal legislation that forced that to be the case. The reason we don’t have white and colored drinking fountains or pools for whites only

is because of federal legislation that forced that to be the case.

And we know all that because that’s how it played out during the 1950s and 60s. There was activism, there were protests and marches and freedom rides, and they got things going, but they weren’t enough. They faced overwhelming state force, and they would have lost if the federal government hadn’t – slowly and reluctantly under Eisenhower and Kennedy, with more commitment under Johnson – joined in. Libertarianism wouldn’t have worked, at least not nearly as fast.

Sean Brady says no no no no no he won’t go. He doesn’t want to. It’s not fair. All the others. He was only. They didn’t use to. Back then it was all. You just don’t. We all thought that.

The cardinal, the head of the Catholic Church in Ireland, is under pressure to stand down after it emerged that he took part in a secret canonical tribunal in 1975 at which two minors were made to swear oaths of silence about their allegations against the paedophile priest Father Brendan Smyth.

Smyth went on to rape hundreds more children across Ireland, the UK and the United States before he died in prison in 1997.

Well, yes, but that’s nothing out of the ordinary. Look here – suppose you’re an executive of BP, or General Motors, or Enron, or Lehman Brothers, or any other fine upstanding capitalist institution. Suppose a couple of children credibly report being raped by one of your subordinates. What do you do? You force them to swear secrecy, of course! And you transfer that subordinate from London to Salford, or Galveston to New York, or whatever it may be; you move the subordinate to a city different from the city where the two raped children live, thus insuring that that subordinate will not be raping those two children again. Simple! Problem solved! The children have been made to shut up, and the rapist has been moved, so it’s a win-win. Everybody is protected, everybody is safe, everybody is happy.

So what possible reason could there be for Sean Brady to quit his excellent high-status job?

Marie Collins, a campaigner who was abused by a priest as a child, said that she was not surprised. “I met with him six weeks ago and he gave no indicaton whatsoever that he felt any remorse or regret or even grasped that he’d done anything wrong in the Brendan Smyth case, that he’d left an abuser free for 18 years to continue abusing.”…

“He [Cardinal Brady] was well aware for the following 18 years that Brendan Smyth was free to continue abusing and he did nothing about it,” she said.

“In his statement he has not even referred to the past, so I think it’s an indication that nothing is changing in the Church, the attitudes are still the same for all the words that we are getting.”

Forgive and forget, Marie Collins. Cast not the first stone. That was then, this is now. Move on. Spilt milk. Get over it. Get a life.

In his own words, which he put down in a comment [Apr 19th, 2010 at 11:16 am] on Cristina Odone’s vicious Telegraph blog post about him just before the election.

On the issues, it is true that, in common with 80% of the country and a majority of Christians, Lib Dems support – on a free vote for MPs and peers – the legalisation of assisted dying for the suffering terminally ill of sound mind. This is very different from “euthanasia” which would include involuntary and non-voluntary euthanasia (non-consenting or where no capacity to consent) which we of course oppose.

And yet both Odone and Pitcher flatly stated that he supports euthanasia. The election result was very close; Odone’s falsehood may have been decisive. She said something false and hateful just before the election, and he just barely lost. I do not like Cristina Odone.

On abortion, there is no party policy. I support – as does 80% of the population and the Church of England – the right of women not to be forced to go through pregnancy and give birth against their will. Abortion, when it happens, should take place as early as possible and our current laws should be amended to make access to early abortion easier to prevent delays.

Always good to have falsehoods corrected, don’t you think?

I just heard Peter Tatchell speaking very sharply to a Ugandan government minister (whose name I didn’t get, having turned the radio on in mid-segment) on the World Service. “You do not speak for all Ugandans,” he said fiercely. The minister said, “We’re not going to be bullied.” No indeed; instead you’re going to bully.