Category: Notes and Comment Blog

Taken from the comments, slightly modified to make it general rather than a reply.

The literal meaning of the term “indoctrination” indicates the matter at issue quite clearly. Here’s a very standard definition from Dictionary.com: “to instruct in a doctrine, principle, ideology, etc.” Children are not merely instructed in doctrine, of course, they are also inducted into the ranks of religious organizations in various ways: not just educationally, but socially, ritually, and so on. Moreover, inducting children into the ranks of their chosen religion is the explicit primary purpose of most parents who emphasize their children’s religious education, which is what makes it indoctrination rather than mere education: The word “education,” when unmodified, is generally used to indicate instruction in knowledge and skills, not instruction in doctrine or ideology. Using a term like “religious education” – which I also used – doesn’t change a thing about either the purpose or results of the process.

Which leads me back to my main argument: Children’s membership in religious organizations is by definition not voluntary because children (at least young children) cannot legally, morally, or psychologically be judged capable of informed consent. The assertion that parents have the right to pass their religious beliefs on to their children is entirely irrelevant, because I have granted that exact same right. But acknowledging parents’ right to raise their children in their religious tradition does have the inevitable consequence that membership in religious organizations has a very large, elephant-in-the-room-sized non-voluntary component. I’ll grant that many of the things parents make children do are not voluntary by this standard, including ordinary education – but involuntarily imposing membership in religious organizations on children has different consequences from involuntarily imposing vaccinations or school attendance or violin lessons or whatever. Why? Because religious organizations frequently violate basic principles of justice and equality.

I also granted that religious liberty deserves special protection, and that this protection could even extend to letting religious organizations violate basic principles of justice and equality within their ranks. But for any religious organization’s freedom to discriminate within its ranks to be consistent with a free society’s protection of all rights for all citizens – this is, for it not to unduly privilege religious freedom above other basic rights, nor to unduly privilege some citizens above others simply because they were fortunate that their parents happened to have raised them outside of any discriminatory religious organization – no one can ever be coerced to join a discriminatory religious organization, and every member must be genuinely free to leave those ranks as they will. I will state it even more clearly: Permitting religious organizations to engage in discrimination is morally wrong if membership in religious organizations is not genuinely, fully voluntary. I deliberately chose not to emphasize or dwell on the matter of coercing adults to stay within the ranks of religious organizations because it is genuinely trickier, for many reasons – but how free one really is to leave the ranks doesn’t matter one bit if entering those ranks in the first place is not voluntary, and for the most part it is not.

Religious organizations and institutions do in fact discriminate, and they do in fact involuntarily induct many members into their ranks who cannot conceivably give informed consent – not just many, but the overwhelming majority. These facts create a fundamental conflict between the free exercise of religion and other fundamental rights – including the basic rights of self-determination and equal treatment, which are de facto denied to those unfortunate enough to be born to parents who raise them within the confines of discriminatory religious organizations. Since the basic rights of self-determination and equal treatment are the ultimate rationale for guaranteeing every citizen’s freedom of religion in the first place, this conflict is particularly acute.

I am not denying the right of parents to raise their children as they see fit (within reasonable limits), nor am I denying that religious organizations and institutions have the right to conduct their own religious business as they see fit (within reasonable limits), and that the latter right can reasonably be extended even to practices that discriminate on the basis of religion, gender, behavior, etc. What I am asserting is that these rights in combination generate a genuine logical and moral conflict with basic rights to self-determination: The right of religious organizations to engage in discriminatory practices can only avoid conflict with basic rights to equal treatment and self-determination if and when membership in religious organizations is genuinely voluntary – i.e. you aren’t being discriminated against if you entered the discriminatory group of your own free will and can leave at any time – and parents’ rights to impose religion on their children means that an overwhelming majority of members in religious organizations do not become members voluntarily by any reasonable definition.

Of the fundamental rights at stake, I think equality should trump the special protections offered to religion based on the principle of religious liberty: Religious beliefs include bigoted beliefs; I am loathe to extend special protection to the institutionalized practice and enforcement of bigotry simply because it falls under the heading of religion. The presumption that protecting religous freedom always and automatically does require the state to grant unfettered free reign to religiously-grounded sexism (and heterosexism, and so on) simply because it’s religious is exactly the presumption that Ophelia rightly calls into question in her post.

But how best to deal with this in practice is not at all clear. One thing that might help the situation comes from the other line of argument I made: Free democratic states need to fully disentangle themselves from religions, making them the truly private membership organizations they should be.

A good start would be doing more to keep indoctrination out of public schools, and in its place to ensure that children in public education are exposed to neutral, historical and sociological religious education that paints a realistic, non-judgmental picture of religious diversity. That would greatly reduce the coercive character of parental indoctrination: Even if children are taught “the One True Way” at home and church, they will be in a better position to make their own decisions as adults if they have at least been positively exposed to the idea that there are lots of other ways.

Also, state intervention in religion need not be overt or directly coercive. Perhaps the stance of a well-structured, genuinely free democracy ought to be something like the following: “Of course religious organizations have every right to set codes of conduct for their members, determine who they hire and promote to leadership positions, and so on. But we are only willing to grant tax exempt status to non-profit organizations – religious or otherwise – which are willing to make such decisions within the bounds of secular equal rights legislation that apply equally to all citizens and citizen organizations. If the Catholic Church wishes to be a ‘boys only’ club, then they can pay taxes like any other private club or association.”

The approach outlined above seems very defensible to me. There may be reasons to grant religious organizations some special protections and presumptive legal latitude simply because they are religious, in defense of freedom of religion for all citizens: But insofar as freedom of religion entails freedom from religion for those who abjure such affiliations, there should be a principled assumption *against* extending protection or latitude to such a degree that religious organizations and institutions are afforded positive benefits not available to similarly constituted but non-religious organizations and institutions. If a private membership club is not permitted to discriminate, a religious organization should not be: Or, if the state does allow religious organizations to discriminate (on the basis of sex, race, or some other protected category aside from religion itself) in order to maximize freedom of religion, at the very least the state has a legitimate compelling interest (upholding equal rights for all citizens) in and an objective justification for treating a religious organization that discriminates differently from one that does not discriminate. In the U.S., churches that engage in overtly partisan politics theoretically risk losing their tax-exempt status – although in practice this is true more in the breach than the observance. Why not impose the same sort of limitation on churches that engage in hiring discrimination?

The Telegraph speaks up for inequality.

Toleration is one of the most fundamental values of a liberal society. It is also appears to be the one that some Labour ministers find hardest to understand. It requires accepting that other people are entitled to arrange their lives and institutions around their religious beliefs – even when those beliefs appear, to those who do not adhere to the religion in question, to be wrong-headed, or even discriminatory.

Really? Does it? ‘Toleration’ requires accepting that other people are entitled to arrange their institutions around their religious beliefs, no matter how oppressive and powerful and influential those institutions are? Really? So toleration requires accepting that a few other people are entitled to arrange institutions that control and oppress millions or billions of other people who are carefully and explicitly and permanently excluded from any power within those institutions? Really? No exceptions? So if a gang of clerics ‘arranges’ an institution that divides people into slave and free, toleration requires everyone to accept that?

Oh no no no – that’s not what we meant at all, The Telegraph would perhaps reply. No no, of course not. We meant the institutions that already exist, and have always excluded women from any power and any role in shaping the very rules that exclude them. That’s all. That’s quite a different thing, obviously; not like slavery at all. Obviously slavery is horrendous and no people can be allowed to ‘arrange their institutions’ in such a way as to allow slavery. God no. But it’s fine to exclude women – obviously – because women are…you know…well they’re not quite complete people, that’s all; they’re represented by the men they’re related to; so nothing is lost if they are excluded. Surely that’s obvious enough?

No, it’s not, actually, but it is obvious enough that that’s what unthinking smug comfortable people think on the subject. It’s also obvious that they’re careful to word things in such a way that that doesn’t jump off the page. It’s very sly to talk of ‘other people’ arranging ‘their lives and institutions around their religious beliefs’ as if it were a matter of all the people in question agreeing on how to arrange the institution when the exclusion of half those people from any possibility of participating in that process is precisely the issue. It’s not that ‘people’ arrange the institutions in such a way that women have no say, it’s that clerical men do. It can’t be called ‘toleration’ to accept the arrangement of institutions that officially permanently disenfranchise half their members at the outset. Yet The Telegraph feels entitled to do just that. Three cheers for the status quo.

I have this obstinate cold that is being very slow about going away. While it’s packing its things and checking its passport, it sometimes wakes me up in the night by making me cough so hard that it murders sleep. It did that last night at 2 a.m., so I got up and had some lemon zinger tea and listened to the World Service for an hour and then went back to sleep. This means I had the thrill of hearing a program called ‘Heart and Soul’ which on this occasion was about God and football. It was mind-bogglingly stupid.

There was some vicar doing most of the talking, and he sounded like an adult and everything, but he talked the most ridiculous childish nonsense as if it were perfectly normal and reasonable. He simply assumed that believing in something called ‘God’ is unremarkable and entirely sensible. He and everyone else had the most inane ideas about what this ‘God’ adds to football.

Apparently they find it thrilling and exciting to think that when a player does something remarkable, it is God making the player do it. Why? Why would that make it more thrilling rather than much less thrilling? There was a passage on a goal-keeper who did something called a scorpion kick, and they were all excited about saying that was God. But when a human does something extraordinarily agile or graceful or beautiful or difficult or all those – why isn’t it exciting that the human did it? Why would it be more exciting to say a hidden magician caused the human to do it? Why do they think ‘God’ adds something? It’s beyond me.

There was also lots of patronizing stuff about how believers can see that football has multiple facets and secular people can’t, and about how in the absence of ‘God’ there is only consumerism. Stupid, untrue, shallow, calumnious shit like that. It made me cross.

I still went back to sleep though. Can’t complain.

Hooray! More mayhem and violence and carrying-on over ridiculously trivial items. It’s three in one, no, it’s just three. It’s transubstantiation, no it’s taking the biscuit. This is the birthplace of Ram, no it’s the birthplace of Ram’s piano teacher. It’s green, no it’s red, no it’s green. You break an egg at the little end, no you break it at the big end.

There were angry protests at mosques in Malaysia after four arson attacks on Christian churches, apparently provoked by a controversy over the use by Christians of the word Allah. Police were increasing their patrols of areas around churches and Christian communities were hiring security guards, after petrol bombs were thrown at four churches in and around the capital Kuala Lumpur, partially destroying one of them.

Good! Good good good; splendid work; keep it up. Obviously if there is an Allah then it can’t possibly tolerate having its name used to identify a god that is officially supposed to be the same god by another name, because that would – erm – well it would be unfitting. Obviously if there is an Allah then it has nothing better to do than to get upset about what Christians in Malaysia call their version (which is supposed to be the same, remember) of the deity. Obviously if there is an Allah then it can’t do something about all this itself, say by delivering a new revelation, but has to rely on stupid bad-tempered humans throwing petrol bombs at each other. Obviously if there is an Allah then it wants nothing more than to see human beings tearing each other to shreds over ownership of its name.

“We will not allow the word Allah to be inscribed in your churches,” said one speaker at the Kampung Bahru mosque in central Kuala Lumpur. Protesters carried posters reading “Heresy arises from words wrongly used” and “Allah is only for us”.

Great! Impressive. A refined sense of ownership and exclusivity and pettiness beyond the wildest dreams of a bilious nap-deprived toddler. Well done protesters! Don’t let other people use your words; those words are yours, dude, and nobody else can have them.

I’ve been engaging in yet another round of trying to challenge the dopy sexism that is so common in internet discussion, as if someone had declared the internet a boys-only domain. This time the dopy sexism was in comments at Richard Dawkins’s site, in a thread on that dreadful article by Nancy Graham Holm. Someone called her a stupid bitch and I said I hate her article as much as anyone but can’t we say how bad it is without resorting to sexist epithets? Stupidly, I always expect elbow-jogs of that kind to be 1) self-evident and 2) sufficient, so I’m always surprised when instead I get a big indignant idiotic argument. I got one this time, which derailed the thread, which was bad of me. I spent too much time yesterday trying to explain that epithets are fraught and that it’s stupid to try to defend them.

I said, and I still think, that one learns this at about age 6. You don’t call people names, with various obvious exceptions – trusted friends can do that in jest, etc etc (and even then things can go awry). You don’t call people names, and if you do call people names and someone objects, you don’t waste your breath and everyone’s time by explaining why it’s okay to call people names. As a general rule, it really isn’t all that okay to call people names. The presumption is with the badness of calling people names, not with the okayness of it. About two thirds of the humour of The Office has to do with this fact – with Michael (I’m talking US version here) constantly using epithets in a would-be hipster way, because he’s so down with the homies, while everyone for miles around looks at him in horror.

I also always think it’s enough to point out that the people doing the bitching and cunting would never say ‘that stupid nigger’ – but in fact yesterday it wasn’t enough at all; I got at least one guy insisting that it’s completely different. If there’s anything that makes my blood boil more than all this cunting and bitching, it’s that – it’s telling women essentially that they are not treated as inferiors.

So I spent too much time yesterday, and got absolutely nowhere, and ended up feeling frustrated at getting nowhere and regretful at wasting the time (someone is wrong on the internet!) and stupid for having derailed the thread. After I went away and did other, blameless things, the creeps I’d been arguing with filled another page with even nastier things – which stopped with comic abruptness after Richard commented at some length to say he wished threads wouldn’t derail into irrelevant flame wars but also that no as a matter of fact he’s not a fan of casual sexism, thanks, and he would much rather not have it on his site.

So there you go. I think those pathetic dweebs really did think that Richard was just fine with hipster sexism, and now they know better. Richard would like RDF to be a shining beacon to others in not being ‘one of those sites’ that treat epithets as rebellious ‘n’ cool.

Leo Igwe and his father were arrested this morning.

The police team was led by Dr Edward Uwa the university leacturer who raped a ten year old student Miss Daberechi Anongam…About three years ago, Dr Uwa invited Ms Daberechi Anongam to do some house chores for him and forced her to bed, covering her mouth and raped her. She sustained several injuries in her private part. Leo Igwe and his family members led an intensive campaign for justice for Ms Daberechi. After a lot of intrigues,the police now started a prosecution on the matter at Ahiazu magistrate court Imo State. Since then, Leo Igwe and his family have known no peace as several pettitions have been written against them to intimidate them to submission and to abandon the struggle for justice.

Now they’ve been accused of murdering someone – someone who died of AIDS some time ago.

Fortunately, Leo and his father have now been released on bail, but they’re obviously still vulnerable to being framed. Attention must be paid.

A commentator at Comment is Free explains about the axe-attack on Kurt Westergaard the other day.

It was the latest in a string of attempted attacks that can be traced directly to the offence caused by Westergaard’s cartoons for Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in 2005.

Unbelievable, isn’t it? A guy with an axe broke into Westergaard’s house and made an earnest effort to chop him up with it, and Nancy Graham Holm is pointing the finger of blame at Westergaard. For drawing a cartoon.

Why did the editors of Jyllands-Posten want to mock Islam in this way? Some of us believed it was in bad taste and also cruel. Intentional humiliation is an aggressive act. As a journalist now living in the same town as Westergaard, I thought some at Jyllands-Posten had acted like petulant adolescents. Danes fail to perceive the fact that they have developed a society deeply suspicious of religion. This is the real issue between Denmark and Muslim extremists, not freedom of speech. The free society precept is merely an attempt to give the perpetrators the moral high ground when actually it is a smokescreen for a deeply rooted prejudice, not against Muslims, but against religion per se. Muslims are in love with their faith. And many Danes are suspicious of anyone who loves religion.

So the real villains here are the cruel heartless Danes who are not charmed by religion. The guy with the axe is just an understandably upset victim of the horrible secular Danes, who don’t share his tender erotic love for Islam.

Now the Danes won’t back down and the few but fatally insane radical extremists will continue the fight…This time, Westergaard’s attacker was caught – but someone else is out there waiting for an opportunity to strike again.

Because the Danes won’t back down, which they ought to do, because these people with the axes are so reasonable and fair and modest in their demands. All the Danes have to do is apologize for something one newspaper did and promise never to do it again. A mere nothing! It’s so simple – there are these maniacs saying ‘we want to kill you and we’re going to do it’ and if only everyone apologizes to them, everything will be all right. Can’t you see that? Of course you can. Just lie down – there you go – close your eyes – hands together, like that, that’s right – is that too loose?

But really. What a disgusting piece.

Chris Mooney is still at it, telling ‘scientists’ what they must do. They must learn to ‘communicate’ better. They must also learn to reassure trembling theists better. They keep not doing that, and Chris Mooney is getting pretty tired of the way they don’t listen to him.

…at its core, the objection to evolution isn’t about science at all, but about perceived threats to faith and moral values. The only way to defuse the conflict is to assuage these fundamental fears. Yet this drags many scientists out of their comfort zone: They’re not priests or theologians and don’t know how to sound like them. Many refuse to try; others go to the opposite extreme of advocating vociferous and confrontational atheism.

Isn’t that irritating? Mooney keeps telling them, yet they go right on being atheist and saying why they are atheist. It’s so perverse and obstinate and naughty. After all Mooney has infallible knowledge of what is the right thing to do and what actions will cause what results, so it’s just unconscionable that ‘scientists’ won’t obey him.

Ironically, to increase support for the teaching of evolution, scientists must join forces with — and show more understanding of — religion. Scientists who are believers also need to be more vocal about how they reconcile science and faith.

They must, you see – not they could, or they should, or it might help if they; no, they must. According to Chris Mooney. That’s how we know he has infallible knowledge of what will cause what to happen – it’s because he’s so bossy.

In other words, what’s needed is less “pure science” on its own — although of course scientists must continue to speak in scientifically accurate terms — and more engagement with the concerns of nonscientific audiences. In response to that argument, many researchers will say: “Why target us? We’re the good guys. And if we become more media savvy, we’ll risk our credibility.” There is only one answer to this objection: “Look all around you — at Climategate, at the unending evolution wars — and ask, are your efforts working?” The answer, surely, is no.

The answer is ‘no’ if and only if your definition of ‘working’ is one peculiar to Chris Mooney. What he means is not ‘are your efforts working?’ but ‘are particular things going the way I would like them to go?’ and it simply is not written into the structure of the universe that scientists as such are obliged to do whatever will make things go the way Chris Mooney would like them to; not even if Mooney’s wishes are on the whole sensible wishes. Mooney does have sensible wishes, but they’re not the only possible wishes, and his version of ‘working’ is not the only possible version of ‘working.’ Scientists spending their time being scientists rather than being ‘media savvy’ suck ups and soothers and appeasers makes a lot of things ‘work’ and it may just not be on the cards for them to add political maneuvering to the menu. It’s also just not as obvious as Mooney thinks it is that if scientists did do that, the things Mooney wants to work would work. He has great and unexplained certainty that it is obvious, but pretty much no one else does.

On other topics, including evolution, scientists must recognize that more than scientific matters are at stake, and either address the moral and ethical issues themselves, or pair with those who can (in the case of evolution, religious leaders and scientists such as Giberson and National Institutes of Health chief Francis Collins).

Bossy. Bossy bossy bossy. He really should do something about that – being an expert in communication and all. It’s way off-putting to have a young fella like him telling you what you must do, especially when what you must do is something as rebarbative as either trying to talk ‘moral and ethical’ sludge to theists or pair with Karl Giberson or Francis Collins for the purpose.

Maybe what ought to happen is that scientists ought to start writing articles for the Washington Post telling communication experts what they must do to make things work. That would be entertaining.

The BBC is disgusting at times. It had to report on this al-Shabab guy trying to kill Kurt Westergaard so therefore it had to make sure you didn’t get the wrong idea and think it, the BBC, didn’t think Kurt Westergaard deserved it, at least a little bit. That would never do. So it includes a sidebar of ‘analysis’ which ends with this even-handed bit of slime:

Moderate Muslims in Denmark have condemned the attack on Kurt Westergaard, but they still believe his drawing was sacrilegious.

Muslim nations are attempting to outlaw what they call the defamation of their religion.

Mr Westergaard came out of hiding last Spring, saying he wanted to defend freedom of expression.

Some independent religious scholars argue the cartoonists were wrong to offend Muslims and say the drawings made dialogue impossible.

Notice the failure to point out that some ‘independent religious scholars’ (whatever that is supposed to mean) and some other kinds of people argue that on the contrary the cartoonists were not wrong to draw cartoons about Mohammed; notice the ‘wrong to offend Muslims’ as if what the cartoonists did had been to ‘offend Muslims’ as opposed to drawing cartoons; notice that any satirical or political or otherwise substantive cartoon can always ‘offend’ someone; notice giving the stupid evasive anonymous smeary ‘the cartoonists were wrong to offend Muslims’ claim the last word; notice doing that in an article about the attempted ax-murder of a 75-year-old cartoonist in his own house. Notice, and be disgusted.

Oooh look, I get to be on a list. Usually when there’s a list, I don’t get to be on it, which is probably perfectly sensible because there are better people to be on it, except when one looks closely at the list one notices that everyone on it is of just one gender, and it happens to be not the one that I am of which, and at that point one begins to wonder, is there a secret invisible subliminal hidden sub rosa unconscious criterion for being on the list that the maker of the list would probably not admit to but that nevertheless somehow just made it be that only people of one gender were good enough to be on the list.

Or to put it more bluntly, which I feel like doing because this kind of thing is getting increasingly on my nerves, is it really that difficult to draw up lists that are not 100% totally all male? Is it really? Is it really that hard for people to remember that there are female atheists too and some of them are well worth listening to or reading?

Because the trouble is (and this is hardly a news flash), the more people go on remembering just the men all the time when lists of atheists are drawn up, the more the women will be ignored and forgotten and the lists will go on being all male and the women will be even more ignored and forgotten and the process just goes on like that forever. I mean, fucking hell! Does this have to be spelled out at this late date? This is well known and has been well known for my entire adult life, and I’m 153. People choose people like them, so everybody else gets overlooked, so people already in a position to draw up lists and invite people to conferences choose people like them and all the other kinds of people just go on being locked out forever. You have to make the effort to seek out people not like you in order to correct for your own bias in favor of people like you so that other kinds of people will get a god damn chance. Is that so hard to understand?!

I beg your pardon. I mustn’t be so vehement. (Or wait, maybe I must – maybe there will be a contest for ‘Most Vehement Atheist’ some day and maybe if I am really really vehement I will get on the list even if the list does not specify ‘Most Vehement Female Atheist’ and then we would know Progress was Being Made.) It just did seem pathetic that a guy drew up a list of most vocal atheists of 2009 and every single one of them was a guy and he apparently hadn’t even noticed until commenters pointed it out. Come on.

Never mind, commenters did point it out, and they were sweet and astute enough to mention me among other people when they did it. But still it seems pathetic that it has to be pointed out. Yo, dude, could you really not think of even one woman worth including? Seriously?

Mark Vernon is playing the same old hurdy-gurdy.

The Oxford church historian tells of a ‘wise old Dominican friar’ who informed him that God is not the answer. Rather, God is the question…First you’ve got to ask what you mean by the word ‘God’. And there is a quick answer: we don’t know what we mean by the word ‘God’. God is a mystery. ‘The word “God” is a label for something we do not know’…

A mystery is different from a problem; a problem can be solved, science does that, science does it well, but a mystery is different. And God is one of those. Aquinas said God can’t even be said to exist. Talk about mysterious!

That’s how much of a mystery God is. Inherent in any decent conception of divinity is the notion that the divine is not a thing in the world, like everything else, because God is the reason there are things at all. God as the cause of existence, not something that exists.

It’s a mystery, but that doesn’t mean we can’t talk about it; oh nooooooo. We can talk about it a lot! Why would we want to?

Again, the “why” is simply answered: because existence is so extraordinary. You see, if you believe the question of God is worth asking then it’s because you’ve sensed that life might have meaning, that the cosmos is for something, that there might be an explanation beyond chance as to why there is something rather than nothing. To ask of God is to raise these questions.

No doubt, but to raise these questions is not necessarily to talk about (or ‘ask of’) God. It is entirely possible to talk and speculate about life, and meaning, and the cosmos, and purpose, and why there is something rather than nothing, without talking about ‘God.’ You may not want to; you may think those vague suggestions are too generalized and shapeless and in an odd way parochial to be worth talking about; you may suspect that those aren’t real ‘questions’ but rather pretend questions shaped by the need to find reasons for thinking ‘God’ is real; but all the same you can. It’s the weird imperialism of goddy types that makes them think all questions of that kind are inextricable from God-talk. Being hammers, they think everything is a nail. But it isn’t.

So, second, how can God be talked of? It’s called the negative way, or the apophatic – saying what God is not. Whatever God might be, God is not visible: God’s invisible. Whatever God might be, God cannot be defined: God’s ineffable. Nothing positive is said. But nonetheless something is said of God. Similarly, the often forgotten motivation for the formulation of doctrine is the aim of not dissolving the mystery of God. When Christians say God is three in one, they assert what they take as a meaningful contradiction. And that’s the point. If you accept it, you accept a mystery.

God’s ineffable, but we get to go on and on and on effing anyway, and people say God is one and God is three and you just have to lump it and that’s because they don’t want to dissolve the mystery of God so the thing to do is to talk complete bullshit because by gum that preserves the mystery of God, and it lets you go on talking, too. In other words anything and everything, anything goes, it doesn’t matter, it’s a mystery and ineffable so nobody can say ‘Eh that’s nonsense’ and we can just go on blathering forever without ever having to check our data. As Mark Vernon does for another three paragraphs.

There’s something terribly childish about being satisfied with that kind of thing. Why bother? Yes, sure, you can do that, and go ahead, but why go proudly public with it in the Guardian’s blog? Why say it aloud as if we were supposed to be impressed? I’m impressed by people who really find out things, not by people who just spin words about ineffable trinities.

Oh look, I’m back. That is to say, the database is fixed, thanks to its owner, who fixed it, but prefers to remain anonymous, which makes thanking rather abstract, but you get the idea.

Apologies for the dry spell. Never mind. What with folding up the turkey to re-use next year and making wrapping paper hash, you’ve been too busy to read B&W anyway.

But those days are over – it’s shoulders to the wheel now, and no slacking. New Year’s Eve nothing – that kind of thing is for shallow worldly frivolous flower-sniffers, and I don’t hold with it. I expect a ten-page report on my desk by the end of the day.

A bit more on indoctrination. What is wrong with indoctrination?

Guardian readers were upset, David Shariatmadari says, by ‘the idea that a religious group should set about “indoctrinating” children who were intellectually defenceless.’ But just how damaging is this, he asks.

There are a few arguments I can think of, but I’m not completely convinced by them (as always, I’m open to persuasion). The main one is that children do not yet have the capacity to evaluate the worth of religious ideas.

No not quite – that puts it too mildly. Children do not yet have the capacity to evaluate the worth of any ideas, and that’s why adults should be very economical about imposing ideas on them. Children believe what they are told, especially when parents or authority figures are the ones doing the telling. That’s just a brute fact, as brute as the fact that children are shorter and lighter than adults. Adults should be economical in their use of superior size and strength on children, and they should be economical in their use of superior cognitive abilities on children. Adults shouldn’t exploit either advantage unless there’s a very good reason which is at least compatible with the child’s well-being.

Religious parents of course think religious ideas are crucial for the child’s well-being, so that’s a complicated issue. But churches and other religious institutions – they have other motivations for imposing their pet ideas on children, motivations which include their own continued employment and status. They are interested parties, and that means they should be very cautious indeed about ‘indoctrinating’ children who are intellectually defenseless. It’s only fair.

Still pretty clear and bright today, so I did the next item on the ‘don’t waste the ideal weather’ list and walked the golf course at Pebble Beach. It must be a closely-guarded secret that one can do this, because walkers are there in the single digits rather than the thousands. (But then there weren’t all that many people at Point Lobos, either. Carmel is always packed to the rafters while Point Lobos is blissfully underpopulated. Funny.) I encountered a guy on my dawn walk this morning, who stopped to greet the dog who was with me; the guy asked if where we were was the Pebble Beach course and I said no, it’s at the far end of 17 Mile Drive. We chatted dog for a bit and then parted, and as an afterthought I called after him, ‘You should walk the Pebble Beach course if you have time, it’s spectacular.’ He was all astonishment. ‘They let you do that?’ he said. They do. They don’t put out big signs saying YOU CAN WALK HERE but they definitely let you. ‘If I had my dog could I take him there?’ he asked. Yes. It’s funny, you’d think it would be all exclusive and get offy, but it isn’t. It costs the earth to play the course, but nothing to walk it. I’d much rather walk it!

So I did, and spectacular it was. It’s laid out on bluffs that overlook the ocean and Carmel Bay and the hills behind it. It’s an excellent walk on a very clear day in December.

David Shariatmadari is asking what is indoctrination and is it such a bad thing?

Of course, for many, the idea that anyone should spend their whole lives believing something wrong is bad. Those who are convinced of the truth of Christianity, whether they suffer or not, have been convinced of a lie, so the argument goes. But why single out religion? Lots of people believe lots of things that are probably wrong: they cleave to political and social hypotheses whose benefits are hotly contested, and sometimes impossible to test. Most of our working models of the world are based on a very fallible combination of imagination and experience, not scientific truth.

It’s not so much the spending one’s whole life believing something wrong, that I think is bad – it’s the being told things that there is no reason to believe, that I think is bad. That’s especially the case when the things are large and consequential and fundamentally arbitrary. It’s the lack of reasons more than the wrongness that I think is suspect.

Why? Why does it matter? Why do I think it matters? Because we need our ability to sort through beliefs, and detect which ones are likely to be false. We need to be able to reject unfounded truth claims. We need that for all sorts of reasons, both practical and intellectual. That means that early training in accepting reason-less truth claims delivered by authority is not useful. To the extent that indoctrination matches that description, it is not a good thing.

Well I had good luck with the travel: a big wind blew into California the night before I came down so it was crystal clear – the flyover of San Francisco was absolutely spectacular, and even the shuttle bus trip from San Jose to Monterey was beautiful. And the stars – !

The wind had died down but it was still very clear yesterday so I went to Point Lobos to take advantage of the weather while it lasted. I went to Sea Lion Point and Cypress Grove trail and then I went back on the North Shore trail, where I haven’t been before. It’s very up and down, so you keep arriving at places where you look down sheer rock faces to a cove far below with the surf thundering in. It’s very beautiful.

Hello. I haven’t disappeared – I spent most of today traveling and then a big chunk of it walking along a bit of the California coast in a strong wind and then another big chunk of it writing a piece for Comment is Free. Normal broadcasting will resume shortly.

Sad sad sad. Sunny at Liberal Conspiracy – see comment 12:

I buy Jonathan Dimbleby’s arguments:

First, even the editor agreed that printing the images were not central to the story anyway since the Yale Press was central to the story. So it’s not censorship. Printing them would be gratuitous.

Really. The images were not ‘central’ to the story because Yale Press was central to the story. Well what about Yale Press was central to the story? Its pretty blue eyes? Its taste in music? No; its withdrawal of illustrations from a book about a controversy about those illustrations. So in what sense were the illustrations not central to the story? Who decides what’s central? Since when is reporting supposed to stick to what is (by some very narrow definition) ‘central’ while stripping out everything that is (by some insanely broad definition) peripheral? Since when is the subject matter of a controversy not central to reporting on that controversy? How can it be ‘gratuitous’ to print something that is informative about the subject of the story? Would Sunny Hundal take that view of the matter if the subject were a strike or a debate in Parliament or a war? I doubt it, so why does he take it here? I don’t know.

Clive Davis:

The ultimate ethical tangle, or a simple case of selling out to intimidation? I never ran the images on my old blog because I always thought it was a case of stirring up controversy for its own sake. I also had major doubts about the motives of bloggers and activists who did use them. All in all, Dimbleby has made the right decision, but I can’t help wondering if he made it for the wrong reasons.

That’s it. He doesn’t say what he thinks the motives of those bloggers and activists were – he just throws a little stinkbomb of suspicion and then runs away. Tacky. Tacky tacky tacky.

Jonathan Dimbleby said one particularly odd thing in his explanation of Index’s decision.

When John Kampfner alerted me to the prospective publication of an interview with Jytte Klausen and to our editor’s wish to illustrate it with the “offending” cartoons, it was plainly a matter for the board to determine. Any other course would have been irresponsible…A year earlier, in September 2008, four men had been arrested for allegedly fire-bombing the North London home of the publisher of Gibson Books who had proposed publishing The Jewel of Medina. Only the most cavalier attitude towards the safety and security of those directly and indirectly involved in the publication of the Index interview would have failed to note that outrage.

Wait…what? Why? What’s he talking about? The Jewel of Medina is a different book. Why is Dimbleby taking it for granted that what four guys did by way of reaction to one book, or rather to the entirely manufactured fuss about one book, is relevant to a different book, a different situation, a different issue?

Well…uh…because the cartoons fuss was about Angry Muslims, and because the manufactured fuss about The Jewel of Medina would have been about Angry Muslims if it had ever happened as opposed to being predicted and then conjured up by the coverage of the prediction, and because the putative, notional, predicted fuss about the publication of the cartoons in Klausen’s book would have been about Angry Muslims if it had ever happened, which it never has, and because the New Improved putative, notional, predicted fuss about the publication of the cartoons at Index on Censorship would be about Angry Muslims again.

In other words, Dimbleby is extrapolating from the fact that four random guys attempted to set a fire in response to a worked-up fuss about one book and concluding that therefore it is dangerous to do something quite unrelated to that book (unless the word ‘Muslim’ is enough to make the two related) and that therefore it is worth self-censoring an organization that claims to monitor censorship. That is, if you think about it, a fairly ridiculous conclusion to draw. It borders on not thinking.

It also involves a kind of block thinking that in almost any other context would be called racist, or something similar. ‘Muslim’ is not a race, as I and others keep pointing out, but on the other hand, to take crazily thuggish behavior of a very few members of a perceived group as likely behavior of members of that group on all possible occasions, is to treat that group with a level of suspicion and generalized fear that is not usually consistent with equal treatment. It’s reasonable to think of groups such as murderers or terrorists that way, but with broader, non-criminal groups, a certain amount of benefit of the doubt is necessary for equality and fairness. The US internment of Japanese citizens during WW II is a classic illustration of that. Dimbleby’s unexplained jump from The Jewel of Medina to a completely different book carries an unpleasant whiff of universal suspicion.

The fact is, there has been no fuss about Klausen’s book, except for the one that Yale itself created. No fuss. No angry emails, no nothing. The anticipatory fuss is the only one there has been.

This is what happened with Random House and Denise Spellberg, and it is what happened with Does God Hate Women? – a reporter predicted a violent reaction to that book and the publisher got temporarily nervous. Fortunately and admirably that publisher – Continuum, Oliver Gadsby, Sarah Douglas – did much better than Random House and Yale. But the point is, in all three cases, there were no Angry Muslims, there were only people predicting Angry Muslims and then treating their predictions as if they were reality.

This is not just bad for free expression – it’s also unfair to Muslims! It’s the soft tyranny of low expectations. It’s not the way to go.

So Index on Censorship runs an interview in which Jo Glanville talks to Jytte Klausen about Yale University Press’s refusal to publish the Motoons in Klausen’s book on…the Motoons.

Not only were the cartoons removed from the book, but historic illustrations of Mohammed that Klausen had wanted to include to illustrate her thesis were also omitted. When the story leaked to the American press last summer, Yale was widely criticised for undermining academic freedom. Christopher Hitchens described it as “the latest and perhaps the worst episode in the steady surrender to religious extremism”.

Klausen points out that the cartoons were necessary for what she was attempting to do in the book.

In the book, and it was written with this purpose, I ask the reader to put on different glasses and look at the images and analyse them from the vantage point of the different arguments that were made against and for the cartoons at the time. What would a Danish reader see? What did the cartoonist intend to show? Why would a secular Muslim say they were Islamaphobic? Why would a religious Muslim say they were blasphemous? These are all different readings of the meaning of the cartoons and I wanted my readers to look at how no illustrations, and no caricature, is read in the absence of context.

Yet her publisher knocked the slats out from under that project by making it impossible for the reader to find the cartoons in the text.

Klausen tells Glanville how the academic panel who reviewed her book all recommended publication of the cartoons, and the much later meeting with John Donatich, the director of the press, who got her to agree, under protest, that they would be removed after all.

It was Orwellian because they were citing my own statistics and my own book against me. Linda Lorimer turned to the back of the book where there is a chronology of events and she said: “Here you write everything that has happened and look, here is your table that shows that the cartoons caused over 200 deaths,” and later they cited my own statistics in their justification for why they removed the illustrations. However, in my book I write very clearly these deaths were not caused by the cartoons, but were part of conflicts in pre-existing hot spots…The whole point of the book is that the cartoon conflict has been misreported as an instance of where Muslims are confronted with bad pictures and spontaneous riots explode in anger. That is absolutely not the case. These images have been exploited by political groups in the pre-existing conflict over Islam…So that’s the point of the book.

And yet the very press that is publishing the book gets it completely wrong – ignores the book itself to claim that ‘the cartoons caused deaths’ – which is such a stupid claim on its face that you would think people who run Yale and Yale University Press would be able to see through it. But apparently not.

And all this because of purely notional conditional subjunctive concerns – as Klausen notes.

You know there has not been a single security threat. There has not been a single angry email, fax, phone call from anybody Muslim. Yale University has not produced any threatening letters, I have not received any threatening letters, the press has not received any.

That’s the way it was with Does God Hate Women?, too – but Continuum did the right thing instead of the wrong one. Well done Continuum. Yale could learn a thing or two from you.

But that’s not the end of this story – that’s only the setting. The story here is that, unbelievably, Index on Censorship itself has decided to censor the cartoons. Yes you read that correctly – Index on Censorship itself has decided to censor the cartoons.

So at the top of the page is Index’s confession of its own pathetic dereliction, and then under that is the interview about Yale’s identical dereliction.

Words fail me. They didn’t fail Kenan Malik.

It’s an outrage.