Tag: FTB

  • No really, it’s all yours

    From David Futrelle at Man Boobz – some guy says feminism causes male violence. (Well sure it does – makes perfect sense if you think about it – if we just do what we’re told what’s there to get violent about?) Guy points out it’s a bad idea, because after all who can hit harder?

    In other words, the fact that there are violent men out there is why women shouldn’t complain about violent men. Presumably the only marches women should be organizing would be “No, Go Ahead, You Keep the Night” marches.

    Good one.

     

  • Archbishop Smith of Southwark

    Archbishops say the funniest things.

    Archbishop Smith said that although Sikhs and Muslims had successfully used the law to uphold a right to manifest their beliefs in such areas as religious attire and jewelry, Christians were denied the same right because the courts had decided that it was not essential to the practice of their faith.

    “Why can’t Christians wear the symbol of the cross?” he asked in an interview with the American Catholic News Service.

    “It is absolutely part of the Gospel,” he said. “Without the cross there is no salvation. It is at the heart of our faith because it is the symbol and sign of God’s unconditional love.”

    That really did make me laugh aloud. A torture device is the symbol and sign of God’s unconditional love. Without the symbol and sign of being tortured to death, there is no salvation. Oooooooooooookay.

  • Watch your back

    Religion makes people better department.

    Let’s say you lived in Giles County, Va., a rural enclave of about 17,000 people in the southwestern portion of the state. Let’s say you were a high school student and you were opposed to the school board’s decision to post the Ten Commandments in your school.

    Would you be eager to be public about it?

    Nope. I’ve learned too much about how a great many people feel about perceived attacks on their religion.

    At AU, we know from experience that plaintiffs in church-state lawsuits can and do experience harassment. When we sued Judge Roy Moore, Alabama’s infamous “Ten Commandments judge,” the plaintiffs were named. That means people could track them down – and some did.

    During the litigation, plaintiff Melinda Maddox , who was newly married, returned from her honeymoon to find that the windows of her house had been shot out.

    As I noted in a February blog post about plaintiffs in church-state cases, it can take real courage to stand up for church-state separation in court. Consider the case of Joann Bell, a mother in Little Axe, Okla., who protested religious activity in her children’s public schools in 1981. Her home was burned down by an arsonist.

    But don’t forget: religion makes people better.

  • When it’s a problem

    Libby Anne gets responses from people saying “yes but we home-school and we follow Jesus but we don’t fit your description.” She gently points out that if they don’t fit the description then she’s not writing about them…and goes on to provide a list of the genuine problems with “the various teachings of Christian Patriarchy and Quiverfull” [italics hers], not having a large family or homeschooling. Among them –

    • When parents teach their daughters to dream of nothing but homemaking and seek to kill any other desire or dream, that is a problem.
    • When parents teach their daughters that boys are to go out into the world and take dominion while girls are to take dominion by doing laundry, that is a problem.
    • When parents teach their daughters that women are created to serve men, that is a problem.
    • When adult daughters are expected to obey their fathers and remain under their fathers’ authority, that is a problem.
    • When parents insist that they control their adult daughters’ romantic relationships and can’t trust them to be adults and make their own decisions, that is a problem.

    She knows this from the inside.

  • Prizes

    Never let it be said that Islamists don’t have a soft spot for children. Hell no – they’re as sentimental about the kiddies as Charles Dickens or the pope. They like nothing better than to give the wee ones a special treat during Ramadan.

    A radio station run by Somalia’s al-Shabab Islamist group has awarded weapons to children who won a Koran-reciting and general knowledge contest.

    Andulus radio, based near Mogadishu, gave the group which won first prize in
    the Ramadan competition an AK-47 rifle and the equivalent of $700 (£450).

    The second prize-winners received an AK-47 and $500, while the third prize
    was two hand grenades and $400.

    Ahhhh – isn’t that sweet. Can’t you just see it? The dear little eyes going round with excitement, the tiny hands fumbling with the triggers, the whores and infidels screaming and writhing on the ground.

    You didn’t know I was such a softy, did you.

  • One of these items doesn’t belong

    Via Metamagician, a piece by Brian Thompson of JREF on “diversity” at JREF.

    we at the JREF do take diversity  seriously, and it’s something we strive to achieve at our events.  If  the skeptics community is going to thrive and grow, it’s essential that no one feel unwelcome or excluded due to race, gender, religion, or  sexual orientation.

    I don’t understand that – it looks like a typo, or a thought-typo. It looks like grabbing an established category without taking the time to think about it and thus notice that it needs tweaking for the purpose.

    There’s no sensible or substantive reason to cause people to feel unwelcome due to race, gender, or sexual orientation, but there can be such a reason due to religion (or atheism), for the same sort of reason there can be sensible or substantive reasons to cause, say, socialists to feel unwelcome at a gathering of libertarians or vice versa. That is, people can be caused to feel unwelcome simply by being exposed to ideas they disagree with, and that could easily happen to religious people at a skeptics’ event.

    It seems like a futile idea for a skeptics’ organization to commit itself to not causing religious people to feel unwelcome in that way. Race gender and sexual orientation are a different category, but ideas can’t be prevented from possibly causing people to feel unwelcome, without being emptied of all their content and so ceasing to be ideas.

  • He had to wash his hair that day

    So, did things get a little too hot for Bush? Did he suddenly remember some brush that needed cutting? Did he have that bad dream about the cops knocking on the door the way they did to Kissinger that time?

    Next week’s appearance by former U.S. president George W. Bush at an event hosted by a local evangelical Christian university has been cancelled.

    The decision came Wednesday, the same day three former students launched a petition urging the university to cancel the speech. On Tuesday, a class valedictorian and professor publicly spoke out against the appearance following the resignation of another staff member.

    Bush was scheduled to speak Sept. 20 to about 150 people at an invitation-only breakfast hosted by Tyndale University College and Seminary, home to about 1,400 students at two campuses in Toronto’s north end.

    Toronto, you see. To-ron-to. It’s in Ca-na-da. That’s a-no-ther coun-try. It’s outside the US. Bush has compelling reasons not to go to places that are outside the US.

  • One hand is enough

    It doesn’t matter what you believe. The important thing is how you live.

    An Islamic sharia court in Nigeria has sentenced two men to amputation at their right wrists for stealing a bull, with the amputation to be carried out in
    public if it is given final approval.

    The sharia court in the village of Nassarawan Mailayi in the northern state
    of Zamfara on Thursday ordered that Auwalu Abubaka, 23, and Lawalli Musa, 22,
    have their right hands chopped off for stealing a bull worth 130,000 naira
    ($867, 628 euros).

    A man shows his amputated hand (archive shot)

  • Don’t think, just live

    Via PZ, I find the latest iteration of John Gray’s world-weary anti-liberal schtick.

    Most of it is the familiar Armstrongesque “religion is not belief it’s practice.” Silly atheists are barking up the wrong hydrant trying to say the beliefs are all eyewash because the beliefs don’t matter so ha. Art and poetry aren’t about establishing facts and religion is like that so ha. Myths aren’t silly and wrong, they’re great stories, except the one about science being a good thing, which is silly and wrong because humanity isn’t marching anywhere because it forgot to bring its boots so ha. You know the kind of thing.

    Human beings don’t live by argumentation, and it’s only religious
    fundamentalists and ignorant rationalists who think the myths we live by are
    literal truths.

    Evangelical atheists who want to convert the world to unbelief are copying
    religion at its dogmatic worst. They think human life would be vastly improved
    if only everyone believed as they do, when a little history shows that trying to
    get everyone to believe the same thing is a recipe for unending conflict.

    We’d all be better off if we stopped believing in belief. Not everyone needs
    a religion. But if you do, you shouldn’t be bothered about finding arguments for
    joining or practising one. Just go into the church, synagogue, mosque or temple and take it from there.

    What we believe doesn’t in the end matter very much. What matters is how we
    live.

    I bothered with this just because I wanted to point out the howling absurdity of that final paragraph. As if how we live could float free of what we believe! What we believe damn well does matter very much because it influences how we live.

    For instance – if we believe that what we believe doesn’t matter very much then we live without paying much attention to what we believe and whether it’s well-founded or not and whether it could motivate us to do damage or not – we live according to Dunning-Kruger – we don’t know, we don’t know that we don’t know, and we don’t care that we don’t know, because we believe it doesn’t matter.

    And by contrast, if we believe that what we believe does matter and we believe that female human beings are created inferior and subordinate by God, then how we live will be shaped by that belief. If we’re men we’ll fuck up the lives of any women we have power over, if we’re women we’ll let our lives be fucked up, in both cases because we’ll think it’s what God wants.

    John Gray needs to take a closer look at the world.

  • With X at the center

    A non sequitur.

    Led by the biologist Richard Dawkins, the author of “The God Delusion,” atheism has taken on a new life in popular religious debate. Dawkins’s brand of atheism is scientific in that it views the “God hypothesis” as obviously inadequate to the known facts. In particular, he employs the facts of evolution to challenge the need to postulate God as the designer of the universe. For atheists like Dawkins, belief in God is an intellectual mistake, and honest thinkers need simply to recognize this and move on from the silliness and abuses associated with religion.

    Most believers, however, do not come to religion through philosophical arguments. Rather, their belief arises from their personal experiences of a spiritual world of meaning and values, with God as its center.

    The first paragraph talks about “scientific” atheism and the known facts, but then the second paragraph criticizes that view by talking about philosophical arguments. Gary Gutting, the Notre Dame philosopher who wrote the post, makes a kind of transition from the first to the second with the remark about “an intellectual mistake,” but still, it seems like a muddying of the waters to imply that Dawkins is guilty of “scientism” and then once that’s taken care of, shift to philosophical arguments.

    Of course most atheism combines the two, and most non-philosophers don’t worry much about keeping them separate. At any rate, that second paragraph doesn’t make much sense to me, for the usual kind of reason. It seems circular. Most believers get their belief from personal experiences, with God at the center. But “God” is the very item that’s in question, so how can “God” be at the center before there is any reason to think “God” exists? Gutting slots “God” in there as if it were perfectly natural and inevitable, but “God” is what atheists don’t believe exists, so it’s question-begging to slot “God” in anywhere.

    A spiritual world of meaning and values is a very general category, and could mean anything or nothing. “God” is much more specific, despite its convenient flexibility for purposes of argument. It doesn’t work to claim or imply that belief in God is not an intellectual mistake by talking about personal experiences of a spiritual world of meaning and values, with God as its center. Gary Gutting is a philosopher so I’m confident that he knows that much better than I do…yet he said it anyway. (Maybe he just meant “with the idea of God at its center” – but he didn’t say that.)

  • New ex-Muslims tell their stories

    Read them.

    Lastly, I discovered the beauties of Science That really opened my mind to new possibilities. There was just so much wonder in the world that Islam seemed too petty and small.  Why would Allah who creates the Universe worry about little things us humans do? Surely he has better things to do, and don’t tell me he watches over us because he cares for us and loves us. Have you read the Quran? If anything, Allah hates us considering the only ability he has shown in the Quran is the ability to find any excuse to torture you and bring you pain.  Islam seemed to diminish the beauty of the Universe by teaching that you are born into a pointless test which is rigged to make you fail. Allah apparently created us, just to see if we’ll worship him and find out which of the hundreds of religions was the real one. That began to seem if not absolutely pointless, then to be honest, rather stupid. What kind of a test is it in which most people only pass just because they were born into the winning team? If life is a test, it seems the most unfair test imaginable. If that is the meaning of life, to pass a pointless quiz, I would rather live a meaningless life.

    My view exactly. Why would a god create humans with some cognitive abilities and “test” us on our willingness to refuse to use them for the sake of “faith”? A god like that is a cheat; it’s an outrage to worship it.

    Noshina Fawad, Leeds

    I grew up in a household where my father was an atheist and my mother, a liberal Muslim. We were taught ethics and morality and were raised as Muslims. The more I learnt about Islam, the more I became aware of its many restrictions and how I was totally against them. Islam preaches peace and serenity and yet encourages the murder of ‘kafirs’, those who have said anything against it. Islam prohibits listening to music and yet many of the surats and ayats of the Quran are in musical form. Islam conveys equality for both men and women while men are allowed to have four wives, and this liberty is not mutual. Living in Pakistan, I witnessed how women were brainwashed to believe that they only existed to be of service to men, how children were scolded to memorise verses that they didn’t even understand. Religion limits an individual to a certain way of life; it restricts us to grasp any other possibilities of existence. I believe in justice and freedom and I am proud to say I have renounced religion!

    No longer quivering.

  • Which twin has the Toni?

    Now it’s time for an ironic juxtaposition. Are you ready?

    First, from Vision Forum –

    Housewives Desperate for God

     

    Next, from lawyer-turned-designer Duncan Quinn –

     

  • Good girls don’t

    They laughed when I pointed out that Laundry Girl’s mouth and lower face were hidden (artistically) by her pile of laundry.

    Well…

    Coincidence? I think not!

  • Dramatic interlude

    I’m reading Patricia Churchland’s Braintrust, with much interest and profit.

    There’s a great bit at the beginning of chapter 6, “Skills for a Social Life.”

    The social world and its awesome complexity has long been the focus of performances – informally in improvised skits around the campfire, and more formally, in elaborate productions by professionals on massive stages. Among the cast of characters in a play, there is inevitably a wide variation in social intelligence, sometimes with a tragic end, as in King Lear. [p 118]

    I love that, because it’s not always noticed enough that much of Lear’s problem is that he’s just stupid. He’s stupid in the way that people who have too much status and flattery can be – he’s socially stupid. It’s a special kind of Dunning-Kruger effect that belongs to the rich and/or powerful and/or high-status – their money or power or status deludes them into thinking they are clever and shrewd and wise, and they’re too stupid to realize it’s a delusion. Prince Charles is a classic case of this – he persists in thinking the world wants and needs his views on things, and that they’re good views, informed views, wise views, when if he had the sense of a gopher he would know they’re no such thing.

    Poor Lear is thick as a plank. He says to his three daughters “I’m going to reward you according to how much you say you love me” and then he does just that – because he’s lived a whole lifetime without ever realizing that people can lie?

    He lacks social intelligence, to put it mildly. Cordelia and Kent make a doomed last-minute effort to teach it to him, but since he lacks it, he sees this as a reason to banish them. Dunning-Kruger, you see.

    It’s not really a tragic flaw in the usual sense – it’s not impressive or awe-inspiring, it’s just pathetic and laughable. It’s clever of Shakespeare to be able to make the results tragic all the same…and yet one of the great, blood-chilling things about the play is the way the pathetic laughable aspect is always right there, in your face. Lear is an ancient spoiled baby, like Mr Woodhouse, yet the tragedy is still tragic.

  • We wanted to do a bruised-up Barbie shoot

    Commenter Grace pointed out an interesting fashion shoot by the photographer Tyler Shields…

    Photo of Glee's Heather Morris by Tyler Shields

    Amusing, eh?

    “Even Barbie gets bruises,” writes Shields on his blog, where he’s hawking 100 limited edition prints from the shoot.

    More shocking than the photos’ light-hearted depiction of domestic violence, is the de ja vu factor. Haven’t we seen this before, like, a lot? Only a few weeks ago, we were talking about a Salon ad with a photo of a bruised model. And before that, a handful of high fashion campaigns featuring women being beaten, bruised, and impaled. Domestic violence, it seems, has become the surefire way to get your fashion spread to stand out.

    “In no way were we promoting domestic violence,” Shields tells E! News. “We wanted to do a bruised-up Barbie shoot and that’s exactly what we did!”

    A jokey smirky “playful” “ironic” bruised-up Barbie shoot.

    Let’s see…How about a jokey smirky “playful” “ironic” bruised-up Bobby shoot, in which Bobby is a gay man who’s been beaten up by the local homophobes? Or one in which Bobby is a black man who’s been tied to the back of a pickup truck and dragged? Would that seem like a good idea for a fashion shoot?

    Ah but you see those are not domestic. Domestic violence is next door to a sitcom.

  • The minister for the menz

    Amity Reed at The F-Word and Cath Elliott have been finding out more about our new friend and regular commenter MRA Tom Martin.

    Reed pointed out a Twitter account of his, Min4Men. One striking tweet is

    MIN4MENThe Missing Minister

    All Muslim women are whores, as The Holy Whoran says men MUST provide for women. If you’re a woman WITH a job, then you’re NOT a true muslim

    15 MarFavoriteRetweetReply

    Elliott found a lot of material, including a lengthy ad for a would-be comedy group seeking members –

    Over the next three months, we are mounting a street-based campaign, in conjunction with a website, to raise awareness and fighting funds, to help a man bring a sexual discrimination damages case against an elite university’s gender studies department, because he found its curriculum grounded in academic misandry – anti-male bias, rhetoric, propaganda, hostility, and anathema (typical across most media). A specialist lawyer and barrister believe the case is very strong, and await further instruction. The Equalities Commission has shown support too.

    He doesn’t seem to have found any takers yet, which is odd, considering what a big thing misogynist “comedy” is at Facebook.

    I await further developments with interest.

  • The borders of my world seemed to explode

    There’s nothing like an escape narrative, is there. No Longer Quivering, naturally, is full of them – there’s a lot to escape from, and (happily) a good few women doing the escaping.

    Sierra enrolled at a Community College. She took a philosophy course. She worked at Wal-Mart. She felt uncomfortable in her godly clothes.

    Every day, I worked an eight-hour shift at Wal-Mart, and despite my best efforts to vary my wardrobe and to solicit comments on being overdressed rather than appearing strange, inevitably somebody noticed that I didn’t wear pants. “It’s Biblical,” I sighed. It was a shortcut other women had taught me to say when I didn’t want to have a long conversation about my dress…

    I felt as though the Holy Bible were plastered to my chest. There was nothing I could do to avoid mentioning it. I began to obfuscate when strangers and friends confronted me. “It’s religious,” I said sometimes. Other times, “I just like skirts.” As I looked around at my coworkers in cute jeans and tank tops, I felt less and less inclined to “witness” and wanted desperately just to go about my business without incurring questions from strangers…

    Every time I got dressed in the morning, I took a stand for the Message by donning yet another floor-sweeping handmade skirt. To dress otherwise would be to send up a battle flare, declaring my apostasy in one stroke. I’d be set upon instantly by a horde of Message women, all reminding me why Brother Branham said women shouldn’t wear pants and praying that the Lord would lead me to repentance.

    All that – and that’s only a sample – about wearing jeans.

    Then she takes a class in American literature to 1865, and she writes very good papers, and one day the professor says to her –

    Read it

     

  • Just ask them

    It was slightly surprising to see an article in USA Today that talks about atheism and feminism without sneering at either one.

    Now, more than a month after “Elevatorgate” erupted, freethinkers are assessing its meaning. Many acknowledge they have a “woman problem” — men outnumber women at atheist gatherings, both at the podium and in the audiences.

    In the audiences is tricky to fix. At the podium is dead easy – just invite them. Invite me, for instance. Invite Katha Pollitt, Wendy Kaminer, Kathryn Joyce, Michelle Goldberg, Janet Heimlich, Vyckie Garrison.

    Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation, notes that while men might fill their gatherings, women often lead freethought organizations. She has directed FFRF’s local chapters to use more women — at least 50 percent — in their billboard and bus banner ads.

    “We want to be proactive and make sure there is diversity,” she said. “The movement is big enough now.”

    That is reflected in a new “Women in Secularism” conference announced in August by the Center for Inquiry. The conference, billed as the first of its kind, will be held in May in Washington, D.C., and will feature an all-female lineup.

    “A lot of us think it is long overdue,” said Melody Hensley, executive director of the center’s Washington office and the organizer of the event, which will include Jacoby, Watson and Gaylor*. “If you have women leaders, you are going to have more women. So this conference is a step forward to attract more women to the cause.”

    *And me.

  • God damn it, smile!

    Ah, perfect. Woman is out in the world on a bright sunny day, at the wheel of her car, and a guy in a van shouts out his window at her –

    “Smile!”

    With that one word my amiable Sunday-morning state of mind was
    lost in a mushroom cloud of stranger-hate. What crime did I commit to warrant
    attention from such a dolt (story of my life)? I was squinting in the sun.

    See? See? See? This is what I’m saying. It’s exactly what I’m saying. I was just walking up the street, mind elsewhere, as one does, and as one is allowed to do, and some total stranger shouted at me for not smiling.

    I am so pleased to find that I’m not alone in not liking strangers telling me how to arrange my face.

    I know I’m not the only woman who has experienced the “Smile!”
    phenomenon. Mention such an incident to any woman on the planet and prepare for a stream of obscenity-laden anecdotes and suggestive hand gestures.

    In the top ten of female peeves it’s right at the top. I’d rather hear a frat boy scream, “show me your tits” than have one more middle-aged nincompoop command I say cheese in precisely the same spirit of “fun” that a movie cowboy pulls out a gun and tells the town drunk to dance.

    (To be fair, I already knew I wasn’t alone in not liking strangers telling me how to arrange my face, not least via comments on that post. But it’s pleasing to see it treated as common knowledge.)

    Weirdly, I’ve noticed these hyper-concerned male citizens aren’t exactly smiling when they offer up their unsolicited advice. In fact, they look pretty serious about their desire to see the world’s female population walk around with a goofy grin pasted on their faces.

    Precisely. Angry neighbor guy was savage with his  unsolicited advice.

    I can’t help but wonder if it’s that desire to see every woman behave as if she were ready, willing and able that’s behind the old “Smile” edict. I also think that the kind of man who yells it out is labouring under the impression that it’s a woman’s job to try and look pretty at all times and when she doesn’t he sees it as his civic duty to apply the corrective.

    H/t Benjamin Nelson.

  • Record numbers of women are living in poverty

    Tom Martin please note. (Not that he will.)

    When the U.S. Census Bureau released the latest poverty statistics this week, the news was predictably bleak—or at least the news that people were given. But there was a little something the major media omitted from their coverage.

    That minor detail? Half the population.

    The larger half.

    And when it comes to the latest economic data on women, the news is even worse than most people seem to realize. But you couldn’t learn that by reading The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal, neither of which even mentioned women in their front-page stories about the rise in the poverty rate, which has soared to its highest level since 1993.

    Yes but what about the menz?