Martin Newland tells us plaintively that ‘these days people find it hard to accept that religion and rationality can co-exist.’ Well, maybe; some people; other people clearly find it very easy. And as for ‘these days’, I would say the social pressure is running more in the other direction ‘these days’ than it did, say, twenty years ago. But maybe by ‘these days’ Newland means ‘these past three hundred years’.

At any rate, he shows us how well religion and rationality can co-exist.

I am a Roman Catholic. As such, I believe that God took the decision to be born into a poor family in Roman-occupied Palestine. I believe that His short life on earth was spent setting down the rules by which He expected us to live, and I believe that as a sign of His love for us He humbled himself on a cross, died and rose again. I believe that He left behind a church which is infused with His Spirit but also subject to sin. I further believe, if pressed, that the fullest incarnation of God’s plan for his church resides in the Roman Catholic Church, with the successor of St Peter at its head and the Apostolic Succession as its historical guarantor.

Okay [Interlude. My eyes happened to move up from the screen to the window while I thought for a second, and they caught the most lurid rainbow – I had to get up and go stare at it for awhile. You should see it. It happens to end right in the bit of Puget Sound I can see from that window – grey water, grey clouds, and this luridly glowing arc of colour transecting them, hovering above the water. It’s moved closer now and is over the marina and ends on the shipping pier. Now it’s fading. Going…going…whew, that was pretty.] Okay do I think it’s rational to believe those things? No. I can see wanting to believe them, and so deciding to believe them; I can agree that I have plenty of irrational beliefs myself; but I can’t say that I think those beliefs are rational; so in that sense he’s right: I don’t think religion and rationality can co-exist. I think rational people can have irrational beliefs, but I don’t think the irrational beliefs become rational merely because rational people have them; I think they remain irrational. So if Newland’s point is that we should think those beliefs are religious and also rational, it’s a fair cop: I don’t.

He says other things along the way, some of them rather unpleasant.

Reactions in everyday secular society to manifestations of religiosity, such as the veil, range from a patronising accept-ance to the downright insulting…Yasmin Alibhai-Brown claims that the veil is not mandated by the Qur’an. But what is mandated is that women cover themselves. What is also mandated is that men dress plainly. And the original texts have been followed, as in all the mainstream faiths, by teachings and interpretation which are also considered by the faithful to be linked to the will of God.

What does that mean, ‘linked to the will of God’? Linked how? In what sense? In what way? By whom? But more to the point – does he not realize what a repulsive phrase that is, ‘what is mandated is that women cover themselves’? Especially when followed by the asymmetrical mandate that men dress plainly? Does he not know how that sounds? Does he not get that it sounds like sheer revulsion and hatred? That it sounds like a visceral reaction to women as both seductive and disgusting? That it frames us as purulent heaving steaming piles of sex organs? He probably doesn’t, but he damn well ought to. He ought to imagine for one second walking down the street in ordinary clothes and having someone shout at him in a voice of rage ‘Cover yourself!’

But I feel a kinship with those Muslim women because the world is full of Jack Straws, who imply by their actions that religiosity entails something vaguely misguided or sinister, something that is ill at ease with public life. By involving the nation in an intensely critical, secularised debate on their personal religious observances, Straw has insulted these women in the same way that I feel insulted and hurt by Madonna aping Christ crucified, by part of the Act of Settlement, by the burning of papal effigies in southern England and by the use of a compulsory BBC licence fee to broadcast the offensive Jerry Springer: The Opera.

But the ‘personal religious observances’ in question are also public, and what we do in public has the potential to be the subject of debate. That’s how it is. (That’s why I never go out. Everybody’s a critic.) At least until theocracy becomes universal (at which time it might not be Newland’s religion that is the favoured one, and he will get all nostalgic for secularism).

Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury. He goes on trial on Thursday. He could get the death penalty. For what? ‘His crime is to have tried to attend a writers’ conference in Tel Aviv on how the media can foster world peace.’ Ah yes – that’s a good reason to kill someone.

But few stories better illustrate the Islamist tinderbox that Bangladesh has become than Mr. Choudhury’s. “When I began my newspaper [the Weekly Blitz] in 2003 I decided to make an end to the well-orchestrated propaganda campaign against Jews and Christians and especially against Israel,” he says in the first of several telephone interviews in recent days. “In Bangladesh and especially during Friday prayers, the clerics propagate jihad and encourage the killing of Jews and Christians. When I was a child my father told me not to believe those words but to look at the world’s realities.”

So he was beaten up for ten days, then spent 16 months in solitary confinement, until he was released on bail.

In July, the offices of the Weekly Blitz were bombed by Islamic militants. In September, a judge with Islamist ties ordered the case continued, despite the government’s reluctance to prosecute, on the grounds that Mr. Choudhury had hurt the sentiments of Muslims by praising Christians and Jews and spoiling the image of Bangladesh world-wide. Last week, the police detail that had been posted to the Blitz’s offices since the July bombing mysteriously vanished. The next day the offices were ransacked and Mr. Choudhury was badly beaten by a mob of 40 or so people. Over the weekend he lodged a formal complaint with the police, who responded by issuing an arrest warrant for him. Now he’s on the run, fearing torture or worse if he’s taken into custody.

So it’s time to turn the glare of public attention on Choudhury and his fate. Jeff Weintraub alerted me (and a slew of other people) to the matter, and particularly urged Juan Cole to make a statement about it on Informed Comment. Norm already has a post (Jeff noted that Norm beat him to the punch). Pass it on.

The Wall Street Journal is not letting the Bush admin off the hook on this one.

The U.S. Embassy in Dhaka has kept track of Mr. Choudhury and plans to send an observer to his trial. But mainly America’s diplomats seem to have treated him as a nuisance. “Their thinking,” says a source familiar with the case, “is that this is the story of one man, and why should the U.S. base its entire relationship with Bangladesh on this one man?”…The Bush administration, which every year spends some $64 million on Bangladesh, has made a priority of identifying moderate Muslims and giving them the space and cover they need to spread their ideas. Mr. Choudhury has identified himself, at huge personal risk, as one such Muslim. Now that he is on the run, somewhere in the darkness of Dhaka, will someone in the administration pick up the phone and explain to the Bangladeshis just what America expects of its “moderate and tolerant” friends?

Good luck, Mr. Choudhury. Be well. Solidarity.

More on that Eagleton review. I have my doubts about other parts of it.

For mainstream Christianity, reason, argument and honest doubt have always played an integral role in belief.

Well, for one thing, that depends how you define mainstream Christianity (and I’m not too sure about that ‘always,’ either, in fact I think it’s wrong – for most of mainstream Christianity’s history, honest doubt has damn well not played an integral role, but led straight to the nice hot bonfire). For another thing, it could be seen as a contradiction to say that doubt plays an integral role in belief. For another thing, Eagleton doesn’t do a great job of modelling honest doubt himself.

He is what sustains all things in being by his love; and this would still be the case even if the universe had no beginning…The Creation is the original acte gratuit. God is an artist who did it for the sheer love or hell of it, not a scientist at work on a magnificently rational design that will impress his research grant body no end. Because the universe is God’s, it shares in his life, which is the life of freedom.

How does he know? Where is the honest doubt in all this?

And what does he mean? There’s a lot of it that I can’t make head or tail of. It scans, it makes grammatical sense, but I cannot figure out what it’s saying. Maybe I’m thick. Or maybe there’s no head or tail to be made.

Dawkins holds that the existence or non-existence of God is a scientific hypothesis which is open to rational demonstration. Christianity teaches that to claim that there is a God must be reasonable, but that this is not at all the same thing as faith. Believing in God, whatever Dawkins might think, is not like concluding that aliens or the tooth fairy exist. God is not a celestial super-object or divine UFO, about whose existence we must remain agnostic until all the evidence is in. Theologians do not believe that he is either inside or outside the universe, as Dawkins thinks they do. His transcendence and invisibility are part of what he is, which is not the case with the Loch Ness monster.

What does all that mean? Why is believing in God not like concluding that aliens or the tooth fairy exist? Why is God not a celestial super-object? And what on earth does it mean to say that theologians do not believe that he is either inside or outside the universe? And the bit about transcendence and invisibility? I’m lost. It all seems like pure blather – grand words that fail to refer to anything.

He asks how this chap [meaning God] can speak to billions of people simultaneously, which is rather like wondering why, if Tony Blair is an octopus, he has only two arms.

Eh?

For Judeo-Christianity, God is not a person in the sense that Al Gore arguably is. Nor is he a principle, an entity, or ‘existent’: in one sense of that word it would be perfectly coherent for religious types to claim that God does not in fact exist. He is, rather, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever, including ourselves. He is the answer to why there is something rather than nothing.

Except that ‘he’ (who is not a person, remember – yet ‘he’ does have a gender) is not the answer, because that’s not an answer. It’s just a lot of declaration, most of it incomprehensible.

After that he gets onto Jesus, and that part is much better. Jesus is compelling, and Eagleton puts the rhetoric to better use there. There’s one thing though –

On the horrors that science and technology have wreaked on humanity, he is predictably silent. Yet the Apocalypse is far more likely to be the product of them than the work of religion. Swap you the Inquisition for chemical warfare.

No, what’s really far more likely is that it will be both. It will be Islamists offing Musharref and taking over Pakistan – and bye bye misbelievers.

Still…

Dawkins, as one the best of liberals as well as one of the worst, has done a magnificent job over the years of speaking out against that particular strain of psychopathology known as fundamentalism, whether Texan or Taliban. He is right to repudiate the brand of mealy-mouthed liberalism which believes that one has to respect other people’s silly or obnoxious ideas just because they are other people’s. In its admirably angry way, The God Delusion argues that the status of atheists in the US is nowadays about the same as that of gays fifty years ago.

But he overplayed his hand, Eagleton ends up. He’s clear enough once he leaves God behind.

I was stopped cold by a paragraph in Terry Eagleton’s review of Dawkins’s book in the LRB (it’s subscription, so I can’t link to it; a kind reader sent me a copy). I’ll show you why.

Dawkins on God is rather like those right-wing Cambridge dons who filed eagerly into the Senate House some years ago to non-placet Jacques Derrida for an honorary degree. Very few of them, one suspects, had read more than a few pages of his work, and even that judgment might be excessively charitable. Yet they would doubtless have been horrified to receive an essay on Hume from a student who had not read his Treatise of Human Nature.

Staggering, isn’t it? One suspects – one suspects – that very few of ‘those’ ‘right-wing’ dons had read much Derrida; one suspects, but one doesn’t know, and one certainly doesn’t offer the reader a shred of reason to share one’s suspicion, or evidence that would back it up, but, nothing perturbed, one immediately proceeds to spring off from one’s own unexplained and unargued suspicion to point out that the ‘right-wing’ dons would doubtless be cross with students who hadn’t done the reading. But one has forgotten – how very quickly, in the space of one sentence – that one doesn’t know (or one would have said so) that the ‘right-wing’ dons hadn’t read much Derrida, one merely suspects it. One has forgotten that one doesn’t know, and one blithely proceeds to use the suspicion to bludgeon someone else, as if a suspicion were the same thing as an established fact.

Then he has the brass to call Dawkins bumptious. One suspects that it is not altogether unfair to think Eagleton is a little bumptious himself, and one directs a bumptious and suspicious raspberry in his direction.

Catherine Bennett notes that the Rational Dress Society protested against dress fashion that ‘impedes the movements of the body’ with the result that after three or four decades, women were able to ride bicycles. Well, yes. Clothes and dress codes seem like a comparatively trivial matter, but they’re not. They’re immensely important. I’ve felt that literally all my life – from earliest earliest childhood. I always wore jeans when I could, I always fought wearing a skirt whether for school or for social occasions, I always fought binding or uncomfortable clothes. I remember fussing (okay probably whining) about a dress that was too tight or pinchy somewhere when I was a child; my mother said something to the effect that a little discomfort was the price of looking elegant; I rejected the principle absolutely. And it’s gone on that way ever since. I loathe the dress code for women, and that includes the secular dress code as well as religious ones – I loathe all the things women are expected to wear that impede the movements of the body. Did you know the streets of lower Manhattan were littered with high heeled shoes on September 11? Women are expected (and expect themselves) to dress for work in such a way that they can’t even run. They even, ‘Wonkette’ tells us, amputate ‘their little toes the better to fit their Jimmy Choos’ – and it’s been little more than a century that we’ve been able – and allowed – to ride bicycles, run, play sports, swim freely. Imagine not having that option. Imagine always having to wear a long dress, a corset, little flimsy shoes; imagine never ever being able to run, breathe freely, lounge, jump around – never being able to use your own body in an unconfined untrammeled way. Imagine life imprisonment.

Over a century on, this is just one of the many freedoms that young, enthusiastic female proponents of the jilbab and veil are content, apparently, to deny themselves. Yes, they freely choose not to be able to see properly nor to be able to communicate directly, nor move freely, nor play sports, swim in a public place and willingly embrace all the attendant limitations on their professional and social lives. Meanwhile, they are happy to watch their menfolk caper about, bareheaded, in western trainers and jeans.

Imprisonment for me, freedom for you – ‘freely’ chosen.

All this free choosing, according to Straw’s critics, we should accept, uncritically, at face value, because – here’s their trumping argument – what does freedom mean, if it doesn’t mean being free to oppress yourself? What does freedom mean if you can’t feel comfy in a niqab? Or happy to shave off your hair and wear a wig instead? Or comfortable – if you so choose – with footbinding? Or keen – if that’s what you want – to have a clitoridectomy?

The irony is beautifully stark in this item on a teacher suspended for wearing the niqab in class (the students, not surprisingly, couldn’t understand what she said).

She said: “The veil is really important to all Muslim women who choose to wear it. Our religion compels us to wear it because it’s in the Koran.”

As Edmund Standing pointed out when he sent me the link, note the juxtaposition of the liberal language of choice with the anti-liberal language of religious compulsion. She chooses to be compelled to wear it – and presumably not to fret too much about the women in Iran and Saudi Arabia and Iraq and many other places who are unable to choose not to be compelled to wear it.

Sorry – a couple of people have reproached me for linking to Nagel on Dawkins when it’s subscription. Sorry. I got access via bugmenot (which will probably now be taken away) a long time ago, so I forget that it’s subscription. I thought it might be on the Dawkins site but it isn’t, at least not yet. Try bugmenot – it doesn’t always work, but it sometimes does. It’s cheating, but then again, one can read magazines at libraries, and that’s not cheating.

It’s worth the effort (no surprise there).

One of Dawkins’s aims is to overturn the convention of respect toward religion that belongs to the etiquette of modern civilization. He does this by persistently violating the convention, and being as offensive as possible, and pointing with gleeful outrage at absurd or destructive religious beliefs and practices. This kind of thing was done more entertainingly by H.L. Mencken (whom Dawkins quotes with admiration), but the taboo against open atheistic scorn seems to have become even more powerful since Mencken’s day.

Just so, perhaps especially in the US (although it seems to me to be pretty powerful [in public discourse] in the UK too). I was saying just that to Jeremy the other day – that yes Dawkins and Dennett are rude about religion, but that I think they do that not because they are smug or arrogant but because the default assumption has become that it is taboo to be scornful of religion, with the result that unbelievers can feel very isolated and peculiar, especially young ones; I think what both are doing is at least partly performing the fact that it is and ought to be permissable to be scornful of religion. They’re performing for that high school student that Dennett talked about in his NY Times Op Ed – the one who felt so isolated and peculiar until Dennett spoke at his school and was quite matter-of-factly atheist. At least I think they are, I think that’s one possible and even likely explanation, though they may also just be being irritated.

I agree with Dawkins that the issue of design versus purely physical causation is a scientific question. He is correct to dismiss Stephen Jay Gould’s position that science and religion are “non-overlapping magisteria.” The conflict is real. But although I am as much of an outsider to religion as he is, I believe it is much more difficult to settle the question than he thinks. I also suspect there are other possibilities besides these two that have not even been thought of yet.

That’s just it, in a way – other possibilities. That’s interesting, where saying ‘God’ is the opposite of interesting. It’s about as interesting (and plausible) as saying Joe.

A religious worldview is only one response to the conviction that the physical description of the world is incomplete. Dawkins says with some justice that the will of God provides a too easy explanation of anything we cannot otherwise understand, and therefore brings inquiry to a stop. Religion need not have this effect, but it can. It would be more reasonable, in my estimation, to admit that we do not now have the understanding or the knowledge on which to base a comprehensive theory of reality.

You bet. I’m happy to admit that. I resent the ‘God’ answer partly because it claims we do have the knowledge – because it’s content with an answer that’s not an answer, and uses the non-answer to close off the question. It’s doubly annoying.

One the other hand – to be fair – Lakoff disputes Pinker’s review and says it says he says the opposite of what he says.

Steven Pinker gets off some good zingers at George Lakoff.

If Lakoff is right, his theory can do everything from overturning millennia of misguided thinking in the Western intellectual tradition to putting a Democrat in the White House…Conceptual metaphor, according to Lakoff, shows that all thought is based on unconscious physical metaphors, with beliefs determined by the metaphors in which ideas are framed. Cognitive science has also shown that thinking depends on emotion, and that a person’s rationality is bounded by limitations of attention and memory. Together these discoveries undermine, in Lakoff’s view, the Western ideal of conscious, universal, and dispassionate reason based on logic, facts, and a fit to reality. Philosophy, then, is not an extended debate about knowledge and ethics, it is a succession of metaphors…Citizens are not rational and pay no attention to facts, except as they fit into frames that are “fixed in the neural structures of their brains” by sheer repetition.

Hmph. I don’t believe it. (Nor does Pinker.) Thinking can depend on emotion without completely ruling out reason based on logic, facts, and a fit to reality – can, and has to, and does.

Finally, even if the intelligence of a single person can be buffeted by framing and other bounds on rationality, this does not mean that we cannot hope for something better from the fruits of many people thinking together–that is, from the collective intelligence in institutions such as history, journalism, and science, which have been explicitly designed to overcome those limitations through open debate and the testing of hypotheses with data. All this belies Lakoff’s cognitive relativism, in which mathematics, science, and philosophy are beauty contests between rival frames rather than attempts to characterize the nature of reality.

That captures what I’ve always disliked about Lakoff’s ‘framing’ stuff – its anti-thought, anti-cognitive, anti-intellectual, pavlovian advertising approach. Never mind substance, never mind rational thought about substance, never mind actually thinking about what political candidates say, just offer slogans to counter Their slogans, reflexes to trump Their reflexes, and let it go at that. Meet baby stuff with baby stuff. No thanks, I’d rather do better than that.

Lakoff tells progressives not to engage conservatives on their own terms, not to present facts or appeal to the truth, and not to pay attention to polls. Instead they should try to pound new frames and metaphors into voters’ brains. Don’t worry that this is just spin or propaganda, he writes: it is part of the “higher rationality” that cognitive science is substituting for the old-fashioned kind based on universal disembodied reason.

Ick.

Lakoff’s faith in the power of euphemism to make these positions palatable to American voters is not justified by current cognitive science or brain science. I would not advise any politician to abandon traditional reason and logic for Lakoff’s “higher rationality.”

Yeah. Lakoff’s euphemisms are a tad on the obvious, self-undermining side, also (as Pinker notes) the self-congratulatory side (they almost boil down to ‘just call us The Nice People and all will be well’). His popularity with the Democratic party is 1) suprising and 2) a bad sign.

But David Edgar sees things differently. He sees them strangely, too.

For most of the past 30 years, being in favour of free speech meant being in favour of good things (notably honesty about sexuality) and against denial and repression…Now we are having to defend things we disapprove of, such as the glorification of terrorism or, indeed, calls for censorship. The conundrum that one of the things liberals have to tolerate is intolerance hasn’t needed to be at the forefront of debates on free expression before. It is now, and it should be.

‘One of the things liberals have to tolerate is intolerance.’ No it isn’t. I don’t subscribe to any principle that requires me to tolerate intolerance or to defend things I disapprove of; one of the principles I subscribe to is that things should always be judged on their merits. I think free speech is a good but I don’t think it’s the only good and I don’t think it should always trump other principles; I think it depends. I think free action is a good too, for that matter, but that doesn’t commit me to defending all actions; it depends.

Yes, it is bad for wives to have to obey husbands, or for parents to renounce gay children, but such attitudes were common among this continent’s indigenous peoples until relatively recently – and people coming to live in Europe should not be asked to disavow them as a condition of entry, any more than they should be forced to express opinions on any other matter.

Ah, but that’s not the issue – you’ve given yourself too easy a case there. What about ‘people – men, perhaps? – coming to live in Europe’ who beat their wives or daughters, who take their daughters out of school, who coerce them into marrying someone they don’t want to marry? Or who beat up their gay children rather than merely renouncing them? That’s the issue – not disavowals in airports, but actions.

The title of that bit of wisdom is ‘Sorry, but we can’t just pick and choose what to tolerate’ – which is quite laughable, in a depressing way. Yes we can. That’s exactly what we can do, and have to do, and do in fact do, all the time. We tolerate some things and not others, some actions and not others. Think again, David Edgar.

Houzan Mahmoud says it clearly enough.

The veil is not merely a piece of “cloth”, but a sign of the oppression of women, control over their sexuality, submissiveness to the will of God or a man. The veil is a banner of political Islam used to segregate women born by historical accident in the so-called “Islamic World” from other women in the rest of the world.

She’s surprised to find herself agreeing with Jack Straw, but also thinks he’s a bit late.

Jack Straw’s government has always been proud of its “multicultural society”, in which all kinds of backward and anti-human cultures are respected and given space by the state. Women from an Islamic background will be among the most oppressed…More than ever I hear many women claiming that wearing the veil, burqa or niqab is their own choice. I totally reject this view. Not wearing the veil can create harsh problems for women – if it doesn’t cost them their life, as in Iraq, it can cost them long-term isolation from their community…The policies of cultural relativism have claimed the lives of many women in the UK, with their killers not properly brought to justice because “culture” and “religion” are taken into account by the courts. Women’s rights are universal…Imagine if a girl has been told to wear the veil from as early as four or five years old, where is the choice in this?…I understand why girls would veil, but I cannot see it as anything other than a solitary confinement prison.

It’s not just a piece of cloth, she says, it’s a political statement, ‘the banner of a political movement, political Islam, in the Middle East, Europe and worldwide. We must take a firm stand against this by demanding secular laws, secular education and equality for all.’ Count me in.

Salman Rushdie on the ‘Today’ programme on Tuesday. The subject is a collaborative exhibition with Anish Kapoor, based on Scheherezade. Rushdie points out that people forget or don’t realize how murderous the sultan is – he doesn’t point out, but could have, that the reason the sultan murders all those very young women after he’s had sex with them is so that no one else will have sex with them. He gets a new virgin every night, and she is killed in the morning. The subject has echoes of recent discussions, and the reporter asks them about Jack Straw. Kapoor says it’s a matter of respect, and Rushdie asks to disagree. Then he proceeds to do so as thoroughly as possible. So I transcribed it.

“But speaking as somebody with three sisters and a very largely female Muslim family, there’s not a single woman I know in my family or in their friends who would have accepted the wearing of the veil, and I think the battle against the wearing of the veil has been a long and continuing battle against the limitation of women, so in that sense I’m completely on his side. He wasn’t doing anything compulsory, he was expressing an important opinion, which is that veils suck, which they do. You see one of the things that’s interesting about the story around which this work is based is that it is precisely about a woman taking into her hands the matter of her life and taking power back from an extremely powerful and bloody ruler, and I think the veil is a way of taking power away from women.”

Damn right. You rock, Salman. And veils suck.

Yasmin Alibhai Brown gets it.

I now find myself in the unusual position of agreeing with Straw’s every word. Feminists have denounced Straw’s approach as unacceptably proscriptive, and reactionary Muslims say it is Islamaphobic.

Not this feminist. (See? This is why the word ‘some’ comes in handy. It’s similar when people over there get going on the subject of Americans. ‘Americans love sentimental movies, Americans are religious fundamentalists, Americans are fat, Americans mispronounce “Victoriar and Albert”.’ Not all of us, except for the last one: we all do make that mistake.) This feminist has not denounced Straw’s approach as unacceptably proscriptive; instead I’ve wished he hadn’t skated over the feminist issues.

But it is time to speak out against this objectionable garment and face down the obscurantists who endlessly bait and intimidate the state by making demands that violate its fundamental principles. That they have brainwashed young women, born free, to seek self-subjugation breaks my heart.

Yeah. And it’s also depressing that that brainwashed self-subjugation results in some liberals (and some feminists – some, mind you) indeed saying Straw’s approach is too proscriptive.

Britain has been both more relaxed about cultural differences and over-anxious about challenging unacceptable practices. Few Britons have realized that the hijab — now more widespread than ever — is, for Islamicist puritans, the first step on a path leading to the burqa, where even the eyes are gauzed over…I refuse to submit to the hijab or to an opaque, black shroud. On Sept. 10, 2001, I wrote a column in the Independent newspaper condemning the Taliban for using violence to force Afghan women into the burqa. It is happening again. In Iran, educated women who fail some sort of veil test are being imprisoned by their oppressors. Saudi women under their body sheets long to show themselves and share the world equally with men. Exiles who fled such practices to seek refuge in Europe now find the evil is following them…Millions of progressive Muslims want to halt this Islamicist project to take us back to the Dark Ages. Straw is right to start a debate about what we wear.

Don’t read the comments on this unless you want to feel sick. The Independent article has gone subscription, so I used this one, but the comments are…nasty.

Great.

Like many girls, Nabila has a boyfriend. However, as the daughter of a conservative Muslim family, this puts her at risk…[H]er two elder brothers have subjected her to repeated beatings, one of which was so serious it resulted in a trip to hospital. Nabila’s schoolwork has suffered, partly as a result of the emotional trauma and partly because of the raging migraines she now gets through being repeatedly beaten about the head…Nabila is one of many victims of “honour-based” violence, which, at its most extreme, can see young women of south Asian and Kurdish origin being murdered by their families. This kind of abuse has its roots in the cultural concept of women’s chastity being in the control of the men in her family; any suggestion of independence is seen as defiling the family’s reputation or “honour”. It can occur in strict Muslim and also Sikh families.

So the girls disappear.

…a statistical analysis done several years ago by Bradford city council. It tracked 1,000 boys and 1,000 girls with Muslim names as they moved through school; at primary, for 1,000 boys on roll, there were 989 girls; by secondary, the 1,000 boys were still around, but the number of girls had dwindled to 860. Across the report the analyst had written: “Where have all the girls gone?” Balmforth, who gives talks to teachers and social workers, says the answer is that the girls have been taken to Bangladesh or Pakistan. In such cases, by the time teachers notice girls have disappeared, it is frequently too late to do anything. The pattern that leads to forced marriage tends to run as follows: emotional blackmail, threats, beatings, imprisonment and kidnap.

Read the whole dang thing.

The BBC also discussed the limbo question.

But limbo has long been a problem for the Church. Unease has remained over reconciling a Loving God with one who sent babies to limbo and the Church has faced much criticism.

So – there’s unease about a loving god who sends babies to limbo, but what about a loving god who gives babies diseases, or one who lets babies get scalded, or raped (it happens), or beaten, or crushed (slowly) after earthquakes? What about a loving god who hands babies and children over to parents who neglect them or tell them they’re ugly and stupid or sell them into slavery or yank them out of school and force them to marry strangers? What about a loving god who allows all the suffering that sentient beings undergo on this particular planet? I’m curious about that. I’m permanently curious about it. Curious and also worried: because I think the resolution or repression of the problem has some unpleasant consequences – a justification or minimization of suffering that is not morally healthy. I don’t think we ought to reconcile a loving god with the way things are for sentient beings; I don’t think it can be done, and I think the attempt is corrupting.

But, that’s a separate issue, so never mind that for now.

But there are those who argue that it is not simply a “hypothesis” that can just be swept aside; that the notion that unbaptised children do not go to heaven has been a fundamental part of Church teaching for hundreds of years. Then, of course, there is the argument that if this can be abolished, what else is disposable?

My point exactly. If it’s been a fundamental part of Church teaching for hundreds of years then members of the church were expected to take it seriously; they were expected to believe it and take it as true, not just think it was an interesting notion of the church hierarchy that they could take or leave. And given that, it is surely bound to give believers pause to have the hierarchy suddenly say ‘Oh, wait, we’ve changed our minds.’ It just is. They’re bound to wonder why, if the idea has turned out to be as revisable as all that, they were told it was true for so long. And as the BBC shrewdly points out, if they wonder that, they’ll also wonder what else is disposable. Why would they not?

You know the US is in the grip of a war on religion, right? Sure. That’s why there are all these religious exemptions cluttering up the place.

Alabama exempts church day care programs from state licensing requirements, which were tightened after almost a dozen children died in licensed and unlicensed day care centers in the state in two years.

Well that’s good thinking. State licensing requirements were tightened presumably to improve the safety of day care centers – but church day care programs are exempt. On what grounds? Because if children in those programs crack their skulls on the concrete under the swing set, they’ll go to heaven so it’s okay? Because the church needs the money? What?

In recent years, many politicians and commentators have cited what they consider a nationwide “war on religion” that exposes religious organizations to hostility and discrimination. But such organizations — from mainline Presbyterian and Methodist churches to mosques to synagogues to Hindu temples — enjoy an abundance of exemptions from regulations and taxes. And the number is multiplying rapidly. Some of the exceptions have existed for much of the nation’s history, originally devised for Christian churches but expanded to other faiths as the nation has become more religiously diverse. But many have been granted in just the last 15 years — sometimes added to legislation, anonymously and with little attention, much as are the widely criticized “earmarks” benefiting other special interests.

Some legal scholars and judges see the special breaks for religious groups as a way to prevent government from infringing on those religious freedoms.“Never forget that the exercise of religion is a constitutionally protected activity,” said Douglas Laycock, a law professor at the University of Michigan who has written and testified in support of greater legislative protection for religious liberty. “Regulation imposes burdens on the free exercise of religion. Exemptions lift those burdens.”

The free exercise clause has some unfortunate effects, in my view – such as zealots suing for the right to post bible verses in their offices saying homosexuality is a sin. Run-amok exemption would be another. Regulation imposes burdens on everything, which is precisely why it should be universal.

Read it all. It’s intensely irritating.

I usually disagree with Cristina Odone, but she makes a reasonable point here.

In our romantic vision, these bearded men and apron-clad women offer the possibility of etching out a distinct path, removed from the ugly materialist world of big business and commercialism. The families’ tragedies is unbearably moving, yet the way this community is dealing with a gunman killing five young schoolgirls (and then himself) is disturbing…It’s not just TV and iPods they reject: it is schooling beyond 14, the emancipation of women and scholarship that questions a single interpretation of the sacred texts…Given their uncompromising ways, the Amish live in an apartheid of their own choosing. This can be dangerous, as we have seen with Catholic paedophile priests: when community leaders become the custodians of their own morals and are not subject to scrutiny, all kinds of wrongs can take place and all manner of fundamentalist tendencies thrive.

It’s interesting to note that pretty much all the comments on this piece indignantly reject her criticism – which is unfortunate, because she’s right. Amish isolation does protect for instance domestic abuse. There was a long article about just that in Legal Affairs in January 2005. I commented on it at the time. Odone for once absolutely nails it: when community leaders become the custodians of their own morals and are not subject to scrutiny, all kinds of wrongs can take place. Indeed they can, which is why isolated patriarchal groups should not be given an automatic free pass and exemption from scrutiny. Not Jonestown, not David Koresh’s setup, and not the Amish.

We’ve been hearing something lately about the expertise and, how shall I say, the best-mindedness (in the sense of being among the greatest minds of the past thousand years) of theologians. I’m not convinced. Actually I could put it more strongly than that, but I’ll just say I’m not convinced. No one has ever accused me of not being tactful. Okay lots of people have accused me of exactly that, but it was always a misunderstanding.

There are several reasons I’m not convinced; this article in the Times illustrates one or two.

The Pope will cast aside centuries of Catholic belief later this week by abolishing formally the concept of limbo…This week a 30-strong Vatican international commission of theologians, which has been examining limbo, began its final deliberations. Vatican sources said it had concluded that all children who die do so in the expectation of “the universal salvation of God” and the “mediation of Christ”, whether baptised or not. The theologians’ finding is that God wishes all souls to be saved, and that the souls of unbaptised children are entrusted to a “merciful God” whose ways of ensuring salvation cannot be known. “In effect, this means that all children who die go to Heaven,” one source said.

Okay – you’ve got your Vatican commission of theologians, thirty of them, and they have been ‘examining’ limbo. They’ve been what? What does that mean? How have they been examining limbo? They’ve been looking at it through a telescope? Through a microscope? Both at once? Both in alternation? Fifteen theologians on the tele and fifteen on the micro, and they combine their findings? Or they X-ray it? Run it through an MRI scan? Shave off bits of it for radio-carbon dating? Or is it that they sit limbo down and ask it a lot of questions? Or do they give it a written exam, with two hours to complete it and proctors walking up and down to prevent cheating? Or what?

Well, apparently none of those, since the pope is going to abolish the concept itself, which would seem to hint that there’s nothing physical or material to examine. But then what? What does it mean for theologians to examine limbo? To talk about it, apparently, and decide whether they feel like believing in it or not.

In propelling limbo out of its own uncertain state, the Pope is merely acknowledging the distress its half-existence causes to millions…One of the reasons Baptists and some other Protestant denominations resist infant baptism is because they believe the souls of babies are innocent and that it is for adults to choose a life in Christ or otherwise.

In other words, all this stuff is about what people want or don’t want to believe. That’s understandable. But it’s not some sort of body of specialist knowledge that only panels of theologians are qualified to pronounce on, because real knowledge isn’t in play here. What is in play here is how people want things to be arranged. The ‘Vatican international commission of theologians’ looks remarkably like a bit of hocus-pocus designed to disguise the fact that the pope is just making a political move, giving people what they want. It’s another one of those ‘ignore that man behind the curtain’ scenarios. Maybe the theologians just got together to eat cannoli and chat, and after enough time had passed for dignity, emerged to announce what they’d been going to announce all along. Or maybe they talked seriously about ‘limbo’, but the effect is the same. It’s all cannoli and chat, if you ask me.

Note, especially, the somewhat riotous non sequitur: ‘The theologians’ finding is that God wishes all souls to be saved, and that the souls of unbaptised children are entrusted to a “merciful God” whose ways of ensuring salvation cannot be known. “In effect, this means that all children who die go to Heaven.”‘ That ‘finding’ is rich. But the non sequitur is even better: God’s ways of ensuring salvation cannot be known, therefore all children who die go to Heaven. But if God’s ways of ensuring salvation cannot be known, how can it be known that all children who die go to Heaven? If one thing cannot be known, how can another, related thing be known? Isn’t it all or nothing in this department? To put it another way, why can’t God’s ways of ensuring salvation be known? Because…well, because there’s no one to ask, and nothing to examine, and no publication to peer review, and no experiment to replicate, and no claim to falsify. But if the Vatters admits that about one aspect of god, why do they get to make flat assertions about other aspects? What magical powers do theologians have to make all this kind of thing authoritative? Especially when they don’t even have the papal perk of infallibility.

A reader wondered in comments why B&W hasn’t done more to protest Bush’s torture bill. There are items on it in News, I pointed out. It’s also true that if you type ‘torture’ into B&W’s ‘Search’ you’ll get a lot of items, some of which are about FGM or ‘witchcraft’-related torture in Africa or India, but many of which are about Bush & co. Then there’s the fact that I only have two hands, as the saying goes, and I’m a bit pressed for time right now, and there are a lot of subjects to cover. But having said all that, I have been wanting to mutter something (but have also felt inadequate to the task), or rather squawk something or bark something or howl something or yell in a cracked but deafening voice something. What can I say? That it’s a shameful spectacle, Bush going to Congress to lobby for a torture bill. But who doesn’t already know that?

See David Luban in Slate for adequate muttering.

The Nuremberg Principles, like the entire body of international humanitarian law, will now have no purchase in the war-crimes law of the United States. Who cares whether they were our idea in the first place? Principle VI of the Nuremberg seven defines war crimes as “violations of the laws or customs of war, which include, but are not limited to…ill-treatment of prisoners of war.” Forget “customs of war” – that sounds like customary international law, which has no place in our courts anymore. Forget “ill-treatment” – it’s too vague. Take this one: Principle II, “The fact that internal law does not impose a penalty for an act which constitutes a crime under international law does not relieve the person who committed the act from responsibility under international law.” Section 8(a)(2) sneers at responsibility under international law.

The Bush administration started sneering at international law almost as soon as it took office. I suppose that’s one reason its reported 90% approval rating right after September 11 has always surprised me. So it goes.

I liked this letter in the Independent. It said what I wanted to say but didn’t have time to say about that Vallely piece.

I found Paul Vallely[‘s] piece disturbing. He states that Theo Van Gogh “routinely described Muslims as ‘goatfuckers’, before one of them murdered him”. Whether or not Van Gogh described Muslims thus, the point is that he was murdered for expressing an opinion in the form of a work of art. Vallely, by emphasising Van Gogh’s “vile”‘ vocabulary, appears almost to be justifying his killing.

Yes. I did want to point that out – and it wasn’t just his emphasizing the vocabulary, it was also the peculiar, sly phrasing – that ‘before one of them murdered him’ sounds unpleasantly pleased, unpleasantly as if he needed to be murdered.

Vallely then gives examples of works of art being self-censored, because of a growing “sensitivity” towards Muslim feelings. These works of art were not self-censored out of sensitivity, but out of fear of a Muslim backlash.

Indeed. Vallely cites as his first illustrative example ‘that a new sensitivity is developing in many quarters’ is the cancellation of ‘Idomeneo’ – but that decision was made strictly on security grounds. Fear is not the same thing as sensitivity, any more than submission is the same thing as peace. There’s something truly repellent about calling a surrender to anticipated threats ‘a new sensitivity’.

There’s some nasty stuff around.

From Paul Vallely in the Independent for instance.

Cherished traditions, such as freedom of speech, the alarmists complain, are being surrendered out of political correctness and appeasement…Everywhere have sprung up champions of freedom of expression and crusaders against religious darkness in the name of Western values.

Everywhere? Not really – not in the places for instance where people who sneer about ‘cherished traditions’ have sprung up, for instance. And some of us don’t defend freedom of speech or resist religious darkness ‘in the name of Western values’ at all, we do it for quite non-geographical reasons.

This is not so much a clash of civilisations as one between religious and secular fundamentalists…Take the article in Le Figaro written by the French high-school philosophy teacher Robert Redeker…The problem was that, for good rhetorical measure, he also added that the Koran was “a book of extraordinary violence”. And that the Prophet Mohamed was “a pitiless warlord”, a “murderer of Jews” and “a master of hate”…The trouble with debate carried out in this adolescent fashion is that it obscures rather than enlightens…it is simply gratuitously offensive.

Is it? How does Vallely know it’s gratuitously offensive as opposed to being Redeker’s considered opinion? That’s not obvious to me, at least.

But in many places there is a growing realisation that freedom of expression is not absolute but needs to be governed by a sense of social responsibility.

In the sense of taking note of the potential for riots, arson and murder, and being silent in consequence. Hooray.

That was a refreshing contrast to the hyperbole about art and free speech being “the elixirs of an enlightened society”. Instead of a power struggle, or a test of wills, it opens the way to a more mature approach. Instead of an emotional debate which closes down rational discourse, it is the way to build common values – ones which recognise the inalienable right to freedom of expression but which, at the same time, demand it be exercised in a measured way.

A more mature approach and a more measured way, meaning, shut up about Islam. Creepy stuff.

And there’s Tariq Ramadan, too, as quoted in the Times:

Some Muslims have accused M Redeker of courting trouble for publicity. Tariq Ramadan, a leading university teacher, said: “The philosophy teacher is free to write what he likes in Le Figaro, but he must know what he wanted — he signed a stupidly provocative text.”

A stupidly provocative text. Saying some not obviously false things about the Koran and the prophet is stupidly provocative, and an open request for death threats. Creepy stuff.

And the Guardian’s article on the subject is very nasty: full of ‘it’s all his fault’ tattletale crap, from the headline ‘French philosophy teacher in hiding after attack on Islam’ to the accusatory subhead Writer calls Muhammad ‘mass-murderer of Jews’ to the body of the story:

But the case has divided opinion in France, with some human rights groups and academics condemning the death-threats but at the same time accusing Mr Redeker of deliberately writing a “stupid” and “nauseating” provocation.

It’s all blame the victim all the time. It’s nasty creepy submissive stuff. Some more secular fundamentalism would be welcome.