I just accidentally learned, via a post of Eric’s, that George Pitcher last autumn got a job as public relations flack for the archbishop of Canterbury. I’m amazed. I’m shaken to my core. My Weltanschauung is all anyhow. I have to rethink everything I thought I knew.

One thing I thought I knew was that Rowan Williams is a scholarly, gentlemanly sort of fella, however mistaken about everything. But he can’t be, since he hired or consented to the hiring of a vulgar abusive hack like George Pitcher.

Remember him? Remember him in May of last year, when Evan Harris lost his seat?

A stranger to principle, Harris has coat-tailed some of the most vulnerable and weak people available to him to further his dogged, secularist campaign to have people of faith – any faith – swept from the public sphere…For a doctor, he supported the strange idea that terminally ill people should be helped to kill themselves…

Now he’s gone to spend more time with his NSS pamphlets and the House of Commons is better for his passing. His political demise will be mourned only by those with a strange fascination for death, those euthanasia enthusiasts whose idea of care for the elderly and infirm is a one-way ticket to Switzerland. But now Dr Death cannot bring a malign influence to bear on the legislature any longer. Bye bye, Evan.

That is the kind of writer and thinker that the archbishop is pleased to have handling public relations for him.

Anthony Grayling explains some things about the New College of the Humanities.

The cast of professors is stunning but will they actually spend much time on the new campus? “They won’t give tutorials, but they will be partners, bringing advice and expertise. I want to recreate the experience I had at Oxford. I was very intensively tutored in my college but could also go and hear some amazing and extraordinary lectures.”

That’s what I thought it was about. I thought that because it was one of the many things we talked about over tea a few weeks ago. We talked about the one-on-one tutorial – I from the point of view of one who had never experienced such a thing but only envied it, he from the point of view of one who had. I thought of that as soon as I read about the NCH on Sunday…unlike Terry Eagleton.

The master of the college will be public sage and identikit Islington Man, AC Grayling. …Anyway, why should anyone be surprised at the prospect of academics signing on for a cushy job at 25% more than the average university salary, with shares in the enterprise to boot?

What would prevent most of us from doing so is the nausea which wells to the throat at the thought of this disgustingly elitist outfit. British universities, plundered of resources by the bankers and financiers they educated, are not best served by a bunch of prima donnas jumping ship and creaming off the bright and loaded. It is as though a group of medics in a hard-pressed public hospital were to down scalpels and slink off to start a lucrative private clinic. Grayling and his friends are taking advantage of a crumbling university system to rake off money from the rich. As such, they are betraying all those academics who have been fighting the cuts for the sake of their students.

Oh are they; are they really. Simon Jenkins raises an eyebrow.

[Eagleton] omits to mention his own Grayling-ite credentials, as “excellence in English distinguished visitor” to America’s private Notre Dame Catholic university. There he gives three weeks’ teaching per semester for an undisclosed sum.

Downing scalpels and going off to a private (and Catholic, at that) university (that charges £27,000 a year) instead of staying home to fight the cuts. What a steaming self-righteous hypocrite Terry Eagleton is, and a bullying toady of the church into the bargain. He sneers at NCH for being unlikely to have a theology department. Yes really!

On a far more intelligent note, there’s Katha Pollitt’s conversation with Wajeha al-Huwaider. 

Katha asked

Some Muslim feminists are trying to reinterpret—they would say, correctly interpret—the Koran in a gender-egalitarian way. For instance, they point out the Koran says only that women should dress modestly, not that they need to be swathed from head to toe, or even cover their hair. Do you think there can be a feminist Islam?

The answer is definite:

There is a feminist Islam, mainly led by Muslim women in the West. But they tend to forget that none of the monotheistic religions treat men and women equally, and there’s a limit to what scholarship can do to change that. For example, daughters inherit half what sons inherit. Men are allowed to marry up to four wives. Two female witnesses equal one male. Secular society is a better bet for women—and men too.

There you have it.

Read the whole thing.

Oh lordy, it’s Cathy Lynn Grossman again. Again? Yes, there was once before. She’s a Templeton “Fellow,” too, class of 2005. Her schtick is to point in horror at some gnu atheist or other and say how shocking and evil it all is. This time it’s PZ. She’s hoping there’s going to be a Great Cracking of the Whip.

Now that online provocateur PZ Myers, the biologist whose popular Pharyngula blog features profane attacks on religion, is part of the ScienceBlogs lineup coming under National Geographic’s editorial control, will Myers have to evolve to new standards?

Ah the voice of censorious respectability and majority opinion – will someone at last be able to make PZ Myers stop saying things that Cathy Lynn Grossman doesn’t like? No. Grossman doesn’t get a veto, and she’ll just have to put up with that.

Just in case you’re wondering about whether Myers, who once outraged Catholics by calling the Eucharist just another cracker, frets over being offensive, here’s what he said in 2008 at Skepticon One, an event organized by the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster:

“There’s no constitutional right that says you may not be offended.”

That’s right – there’s not. Grossman seems to think there is, or there should be. That’s silly.

Hemant Mehta interviewed Damon and Jerrett Fowler a few days ago. Jerrett wants people not to forget about it and move on to the next thing.

My biggest fear is that, since this is the Internet, people will find other places to focus their attention. This is going to be a long and drawn out battle and there is little we can do to make it go faster.

The support so far is amazing, more than I could have ever imagined, however, I hope that the support doesn’t go away. We need the community behind us so that we have the strength to follow this through. This isn’t just for us, this is for everyone out there as well. Anyone who’s hurting, marginalized, ignored because of their lack of religion or religious preference. My dream is to see this through and to have full support all the way.

That’s probably a lot of people.

Well here is something I would love to know more about – the early history of the Home of the Good Shepherd in Wallingford, in Seattle. I’ve been familiar with the building that housed it for years, indeed decades. It belongs to the city now, and houses various organizations; the grounds around it are a city park. I think I always vaguely knew it had been some kind of “homeforunmarriedmothers”…but I’ve been learning to treat that archaic term with more suspicion, plus “Good Shepherd” is one of the four orders that ran those houses of horror the Magdalene laundries, so…

So I finally got around to looking it up, and sure enough.

The Home of the Good Shepherd, located at 4649 Sunnyside Avenue in Seattle’s Wallingford neighborhood, opened in 1907 to provide shelter, education, and guidance to young girls. The Home generated revenue by operating a commercial laundry, as did many other Good Shepherd institutions. Girls were referred by the courts or brought in by their families from throughout Washington and sometimes Alaska.

Check. Check. Check.

The Sisters of the Good Shepherd believed that by providing the benefits of a stable and loving home, the girls could become responsible, moral, and caring women.

Bad syntax there, but you can tell what it’s trying to say. You can also read on and see that the sisters’ idea of a stable and loving home is rather…Catholic.

The south wing of the building housed the “penitent” girls, those whom society considered “wayward” and rooms for those nuns who worked with them…

The nuns frequently led the girls in religious song as they walked to and from meals and Mass. Spiritual quotations were posted on classroom walls and devotional statues of saints were found throughout the Home’s stairways, hallways, and grounds. The Sisters of the Good Shepherd demonstrated to the girls a pious and moral lifestyle.

Not altogether homey…plus it was a prison.

For the first half of the institution’s history, residents rarely were allowed to leave the grounds or hear news of the outside world. Thus, the residents’ most coveted privilege was “parlor” — receiving approved visitors every other Sunday…The girls could not be trusted and neither could the outside world. To prevent residents from seeing the outside world and leaving the Home, locked doors and opaque glass were used in the earlier years. A little later, barred windows, barbed wire fences, then window alarms were installed. Though these measures appeared harsh for some; for others, it offered protection and safety and enabled to them concentrate on rehabilitating and healing.

You bet.

If the account is accurate (and that’s a big if), it was overall less harsh than the Irish versions, but it was still a theocratic prison. The big difference seems to be that the sentence wasn’t for life. Other than that, it’s a nasty business.

I’m reading Sikivu Hutchinson’s wonderful new book Moral Combat. There’s an apposite passage about Jim Wallis in the first chapter:

Wallis argues that America is suffering from a crisis of values. Progressive religious belief is the antidote to this crisis because “history is most changed by social movements with a spiritual foundation.” [Wallis, God’s Politics, p 24] This view fails to consider the extent to which American social movements – from the white supremacist imperialist spiritual foundations of the Revolutionary War to the patriarchal and heterosexist spiritual foundations of the modern civil rights movement – have been hindered by their “spiritual” foundations. By romanticizing the spiritual foundations of social movements, Wallis demonstrates that he is unwilling to interrogate how Judeo-Christian dogma undermines women’s rights and gay rights. Hence Wallis’ prophetic politics is based on cherry picking scripture to articulate a social justice agenda fundamentally incompatible with the patriarchal, imperialist, sexist, homophobic, inhumane thrust of the Bible. [pp 15-6]

Italics mine. And just so: as we saw just a couple of weeks ago when Sojourners rejected that mild “let’s welcome everyone” ad because um er ah well it was about welcoming a lesbian couple and their little boy omigod.

Entirely familiar, nothing new, but heartbreaking all the same. Multiply by X million every year.

“I wanted to get an education but my parents were determined to marry me off,” says Himanot Yehewala, an Ethiopian girl who was married five years ago at the age of 13.

“I tried to run away but my mother said she would kill herself if I did not marry him.”

That’s all – just that. She wanted to get an education, but she couldn’t; she had to stop getting an education and be a premature adult, instead. Her chance of a more interesting and useful life was over, at age 13. Multiply by X million every year.

Someone posted a shoe-fetish shoe (picture of) at Facebook, which naturally triggered a lively discussion of the semiotics of catch me-fuck me shoes. I pondered the agony to the calf muscles that would be caused by attempting to stand on the damn things – the heels look taller than the foot is long, so how is that even possible?

Anyway, some fella came along to straighten it all out with an aphoristic insight into the nature of women.

Great shoes, fancy clothing, cosmetic surgery, lipstick, waxings, hairdos, jewelry, makeup, and perfume are all unnecessary. However, if they were eliminated, I think the gay male population would increase rapidly and the women of the world would all look like the babushka ladies in Russia …uggggh!!!

Such a sweet compliment, isn’t it?

A puppy of my acquaintance.

Eric got to Ross Douthat ahead of me, but I’ll duplicate his effort anyway just because Douthat’s piece irritated me so intensely.

He says

the moral case for assisted suicide depends much more on our respect for people’s own desire to die than on our sympathy for their devastating medical conditions.

I don’t think he demonstrates that, and I don’t think it does – I think it depends on both. For one thing, if people don’t have devastating medical conditions, then they don’t need assistance with suicide. Part of what people fear is losing the physical ability to exit; that’s where the “assisted” comes in.

Fortunately, the revolution Kevorkian envisioned hasn’t yet succeeded. Despite decades of agitation, only three states allow some form of physician-assisted suicide. The Supreme Court, in a unanimous 1997 decision, declined to invent a constitutional right to die. There is no American equivalent of the kind of suicide clinics that have sprung up in Switzerland, providing painless poisons to a steady flow of people from around the globe.

That’s the bit that makes me so angry. That smug gloating pleasure in the knowledge that people who are suffering and desperate to die cannot do so. That smug certainty that he knows best and that what he thinks he knows gets to trump what other people want for themselves.

Douthat is, of course, a theist.

Texas governor Rick Perry called a court ruling that banned school prayers at a public high school graduation

“reprehensible.”

“The First Amendment prohibits governments from interfering with Americans’ rights to freely express their religious beliefs, and accordingly the U.S. Supreme Court has maintained that Congress may convene every day with a prayer,” Perry said in a statement.

Oh yeah? But then governments are interfering with Americans’ rights to freely express their beliefs that there is no god, aren’t they. My religious belief is that god is a non-existent imaginary agent. I don’t get to say that at public school graduation ceremonies or Congress’s morning prayer. Since other people do get to say that god is a real, non-imaginary agent, the state is interfering with my rights to express my religious beliefs.

It is also, of course, interfering with the religious beliefs of Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Wiccans, Scientologists, Crefto Dollarians, and so on.

I look forward to your letter, Governor Perry.

Oh good – there are some women in Malaysia who have figured out how to make the world all better. How, you ask, all aflame. By telling wives to be more obedient.

“We just want to ask all the wives to be obedient wives so that there will be fewer problems in our society,” such as infidelity, divorce and domestic violence, she told AFP.

“Obedient wife means they are trying to entertain their husbands, not only taking care of their food and clothes,” Maznah said. “They have to obey their husbands. That’s the way Islam also asks.”

Right. We know. That’s why we hates it, precious.

Maznah is already involved in another controversial venture — the Ikhwan Polygamy Club, which was launched in 2009 to promote polygamy. Muslim men in Malaysia can take up to four wives.

She is herself in a polygamous marriage, as the second of her husband’s two wives.

In 2010, a study by a Muslim activist group found men in polygamous relationships find it difficult to meet the needs of all their wives and children, and that the result is often unhappy and cash-strapped families.

Golly, what can one say? She sounds like a real tool. In every sense.

I’m getting a hilarious new type of spam which consists of a single sentence complimenting me for all-cognitive reasons – basically “oooh you’re so clever.” One said “sbutle [sic] must be your middle name.” Hahahahahahahahahaha.

Seriously, what do they do, have bots that scan websites and figure out what kind of flattery will go down best?

Let’s take a look at who is really being bullied and shouted into silence. Let’s take a look at a case where in real life

the mob arrives; insults are flung around; the character flaws, motivations, psychological makeup, etc., of the original [dissident] are dissected at length

and a high school kid is disowned and thrown out of the house by his parents for attempting to stop his public high school from having an unconstitutional official prayer at graduation.

A student’s public prayer at a pre-graduation “Class Night” event was turned into an opportunity for the school and community to gang up on Fowler and publicly close ranks against him — teachers as well as students. (Here’s video).

Check out that video. This isn’t a blog post; this isn’t a set of comments on a blog post; this is an auditorium full of people baying their majoritarian triumph at a lone student who in fact has the law on his side. This is a real example of “we can mobilise large numbers of people and use scorn in order to communicate our “community’s” disapproval of a particular kind of “harmful” behaviour.”

Why are there so many secular liberals so eager to pretend that the worst bullies and majoritarian silencers around are atheists when in the real flesh and blood world (and the online world too, in fact) this kind of thing has us beat by orders of magnitude?

Just a few points about “Brave Rieux tells it like it is…“

I don’t have time for the new atheist idiots right now. But I wanted to flag up this remark by some bloke on the internet called Rieux.

There’s something a little skeevy about saying “on the internet” when the link goes here. Jeremy could have said “some bloke at Butterflies and Wheels.” It seems evasive to pretend this is all just random.

The context is the usual thing: some person writes something critical about the new atheists; new atheists go berserk; the mob arrives; insults are flung around;

“New atheists go berserk” is an exaggeration. One, the people who commented here and on McLaren’s post are only a small fraction of new atheists, not new atheists as such. Two, we didn’t really go berserk, we disputed various claims, and became more irritable when they were ignored or brushed off as beneath the notice of someone so important or treated as literally violent – or rather all those, in succession. Ok maybe getting more irritable is close enough to going berserk, but then why isn’t calling irritability “going berserk” itself “going berserk”? In other words the issue is heat and intensity of language (because that’s all there is here), so why are ours berserker while McLaren’s and Jeremy’s are entirely reasonable? Either both are berserker or both are reasonable.

“The mob arrives” is another exaggeration. We’re talking about a few people here. Fewer people than it would take to fill a bus or a Starbucks. Now, a lot of comments in succession that all agree in disagreeing with Person X can feel like a mob; I realize that; but that doesn’t mean they are a mob.

the character flaws, motivations, psychological makeup, etc., of the original poster are dissected at length; original poster cannot possibly respond to all the criticism (and knows perfectly well it would be futile anyway); new atheists jump up and down with self-righteous glee, and tell themselves they are the protectors of truth, rationality and honour (yeah right).

Original poster could respond to some of the criticism though, and doing so in a reasonable way might result in less criticism later. (In a reasonable way according to whom? Eye of the beholder. Yes but – some ways are clearly not reasonable.) More to the point, OP does not know it would be futile anyway. Neither does Jeremy. “The new atheist idiots” notwithstanding, it’s not the case that everyone who commented here and/or there is incapable of reasonable discussion.

The last clause: see above. Even if we are as described, are we really more so than McLaren in those two posts? Not that I can see.

Yes, we can mobilise large numbers of people and use scorn in order to communicate our “community’s” disapproval of a particular kind of “harmful” behaviour. Hurrah! Yes, scorn delivered by a mob has value when it’s directed at behaviour that really does cross “legitimate ethical lines” (those damned women wanting to drive their cars – pah!)!

No kidding – but that applies to so many things. It’s only as good as it is. Community disapproval of women’s rights or gay rights is a bad thing; community disapproval of racism or sexism is a good thing. We know. But in the wider world, atheists are the ones subject to community disapproval, and that is exactly what McLaren was playing into, and that was exactly what exasperated us about her posts. For some reason the faith-hugging community didn’t show up in force to defend McLaren, but that’s not because there is no such community.

Anyway, if mobs commenting on blogs are so reprehensible, consider Tom Johnson/YNH/Hammill/Wally. He created mobs all by himself as TJ/YNH, and used them for all he was worth. He used them to accuse people of lying – for instance Rieux, and me. It’s odd that all the venom is reserved for us.

…it’s a mistake to engage with these morons. Write your criticisms, but don’t give them a platform to respond. They’re not interested in a rational exchange of views, and you can’t come out on top against a mob…

Therefore the thing to do is post a string of insults and then close comments so that no one can respond. That’s being interested in a rational exchange of views. Hmm.

Manal al-Sharif, age 32, drives a car. Manal al-Sharif goes to jail. Manal al-Sharif is released from jail upon signing an undertaking never to do such an outrageous thing again.

“Concerning the topic of women’s driving, I will leave it up to our leader in whose discretion I entirely trust, to weigh the pros and cons and reach a decision that will take into consideration the best interests of the people, while also being pleasing to Allah, and in line with divine law,” she said, according to a translation of her statement.

“On this happy occasion, I would also like to affirm that never in my life had I been anything beside a Muslim, Saudi woman who aspires to remain in God’s good graces and to safeguard the reputation of our beloved country.”

Well there you go. If their leader decides, in his infinite wisdom, that women not driving cars is pleasing to Allah, then it is only right for them to obey. If their leader decides that Allah is a petty bullying shit who can’t stand to see women have the most ordinary kind of freedom, then that’s what Allah is, and all that’s left for Manal al-Sharif to do is to promise to try to remain in the shit’s good graces.

Sorry, things will go dead for awhile. I somehow got a spyware invader (despite antivirus and spysweeper) and it prevents me from getting online so I can’t download the tools to fix it so…I don’t know when I’ll be back.

Sorry!

Magdalenes? What Magdalenes?

…it was Ireland’s hidden scandal: an estimated 30,000 women were sent to church-run laundries, where they were abused and worked for years with no pay. Their offense, in the eyes of society, was to break the strict sexual rules of Catholic Ireland, having children outside wedlock.

Their “offense” – but it wasn’t a mere offense, was it, it was a crime. We know this because of what the passage says: the women were imprisoned for years. They got the kind of sentence a convicted murderer gets. They were locked up, for years, and abused and worked for no pay. That’s an extremely harsh prison sentence – for having children outside marriage.

Until recently, the Catholic Church was the ultimate moral authority in Ireland, and it promoted strict rules on sex. In this climate, the shame of giving birth to an illegitimate child was so great that many unmarried mothers were rejected by their families. They were taken out of “decent society” and put into Magdalene laundries by members of the clergy, government institutions and their own families.

In Ireland it was a crime to have a child outside marriage – a crime for a woman, that is; naturally no man was ever locked up and worked for years for that crime – but it wasn’t a crime to imprison women without trial and treat them like shit for many years. That’s Catholic morality – sex is the worst crime there is, as long as it’s not a priest doing it, and imprisoning, abusing and exploiting girls and women is no crime at all. That’s Catholic priorities. That’s what life is like when the church gets to run everything.

I’d like Karen Armstrong to explain that.

The Magdalene laundries were a network of profit-making workhouses run by four religious communities — the Sisters of Mercy, the Sisters of Charity, the Good Shepherd Sisters and the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity…

Magdalene women worked long hours, typically seven days a week, without pay. There have been accounts of the harsh conditions the women endured, including allegations of mental, physical and, in some cases, sexual abuse. Many lived and died behind convent walls until the last laundry closed in 1996.

Because they had sex. Life imprisonment at hard labor for having sex.

The Irish government acknowledged as far back as 2001 that the Magdalene women were victims of abuse but says that because the laundries were privately run, they are outside its remit. It has resisted numerous calls for a statutory inquiry, the latest from the Irish Human Rights Commission in November 2010. The government also rejected proposals for compensation, saying that the state “did not refer individuals, nor was it complicit in referring individuals to the laundries.”

However, there is evidence that the state was involved. The Irish courts routinely sent women who were handed down a suspended sentence for petty crimes to the laundries, which operated as a kind of parallel detention system.

Public records show the government also awarded lucrative contracts to the nuns for its army and hospital laundry without ever insisting on fair wages for the “workers,” nor did it inspect conditions inside.

Testimony from Magdalene women claim that state employees like the Irish police force and social workers brought women to the laundries and returned those who had escaped.

It’s foul.

More Stedman and McLaren. Sorry. Fair warning, so that you can stop reading now if you’re fed up to the back teeth with them.

Stedman is annoyed that gnu atheists don’t take his and McLaren’s advice on what “will benefit the atheist movement” but instead dare to offer “disagreements and accusations that McLaren, Luna, I (and many who affiliate with us) don’t have the best interests of the atheist movement in mind.”

That’s an odd complaint. It seems like a tangent. I don’t really know what they have in mind, I know only what they do, and what they do is talk a lot of nasty smack about gnu atheists, most of which is exaggerated at best.

Then Chris does a long complaint about people thinking he agrees with every word of every guest post. Well he said of McLaren’s guest post that it was a doozy, in a good way, and that it was “a hugely informative and clear-eyed assessment of the state of the atheist movement.” Yes, I thought he pretty much agreed with it. If he doesn’t want us to think that, he could always refrain from lavishly praising the guest posts in his introductions.

My ask? That commenters here strive to see posts for what they are; that they make every attempt to assume that the author has the best of intentions and go about raising their disagreements in a way that is civil and demonstrates a genuine desire to get at the heart of the truth.

But that’s too much to ask, giving the energetically insulting tone and substance of McLaren’s post. It’s also a double standard. It’s telling commenters to be more “civil” than McLaren is.

[Note: I’m not going to go down the path of defending the more personal criticisms directed at me — I have no interest in humoring the accusations that I might not actually be an atheist, or that I don’t have the best of intentions concerning the atheist movement, for which I’ve sacrificed an incalculable amount of time, money, and energy. There’s really no reasoning with such baseless criticism.]

Self-important and self-pitying both at once. Again: I don’t know what his intentions are, I know only what he does; what he does is throw mud at gnu atheists at frequent intervals. This is a crowd-pleasing thing to do, so the self-pity thing isn’t going to work.

Now McLaren.

But the anger that was returned in many of the comments (and in retort posts on other sites) was none of these things. A subset of the anger I witnessed contained no respect, no boundaries, and no rules. It was an anger that involved direct slander against me, personal attacks against Chris Stedman (for daring to give me a public forum), and repetitive attempts to silence me, dehumanize me, and control my intellectual output and my voice.

Those are very strong accusations. She gives no examples, no links, no names, no evidence. I don’t believe her. I think she made a lot of rude and inaccurate accusations about new atheists (and maybe some gnus), and got a lot of rude replies as a result. She uses her own anger to inflate the putative crimes of other people, while wrapping herself in the flag of Niceness. It didn’t work last time and it doesn’t work this time. It convinces people who already like that kind of thing, but it repulses people who already despise it.

That’s the trouble with setting yourself up as the Ambassador of Nice. It means you have to be able to perform Niceness yourself. McLaren is transparently bossy and hostile, so she made a mistake thinking she could do that. Another failed diplomatic mission.