Josh Rosenau has tweeted and done a post about how stupid I am to think beliefs aren’t a matter of identity*. Well that would be somewhat stupid if I had just stated it like that, but I didn’t. As is typical of Rosenau, he ignored all the qualifying language that would have made it clear that I wasn’t just stating it like that, and quoted 15 words as if they were all I had said.

Rosenau’s version:

beliefs aren’t actually a matter of identity and shouldn’t be treated as if they were.

With his commentary:

This claim seems so obviously false that I can’t really imagine how she could have written it.

The version I actually wrote:

What if there are people whose New Age or “alternative” beliefs feel like commitments and part of their identity?

Well there are such people, and there are also their cousins who are that way about their religious beliefs. So actually articles about whacked beliefs can draw a lot of heat, and can make people feel very outraged.

That’s a kind of category mistake, in my view, because beliefs aren’t actually a matter of identity and shouldn’t be treated as if they were.

That’s one way to make the distinction that Eric asks about, but it won’t be as satisfactory to people who do think of their beliefs as their identity as it may be to us.

Ironically, or something, Rosenau ends the post with a paragraph that says pretty much what I was saying.

What was the point of truncating what I said so drastically, do you suppose? Just a friendly gesture?

*And Chris Stedman agrees with him. Surprise!

This is a bad day. Ajita Kamal has died – in “an incident” in Tamil Nadu, which sounds as if he was killed, which seems different from just dying. Anyway he’s gone, which just sucks.

He founded Nirmukta. He was an inspiration to a lot of people.

NPR’s Barbara Bradley Hagerty haz a sad about the war on religion in the US.

If you’re looking for evidence that the Obama administration is hostile to faith, conservatives say, the new health care law is Exhibit A. The law requires employers to offer health care plans that cover contraceptives. Churches don’t have to, but religiously affiliated charities, hospitals and colleges do. That doesn’t sit well with the Catholic monks at Belmont Abbey College in North Carolina.

“When the government said to them, you’re going to have to fund contraception, sterilization, in violation of your deeply held religious convictions, the monks at Belmont Abbey College knew that they just couldn’t do that,” says attorney Hannah Smith at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty.

Oh the poor poor poor martyrs. How dare the evil gumbint force their colleges to offer health care plans that cover contraceptives? They have deeply held religious convictions which tell them that they – monks – get to prevent people from separating sex from conception. How evil of the gumbint to interfere with their convictions just because the disgusting secular harlots want contra hissssssssss ception.

Religious conservatives see an escalating war with the Obama White House. One Catholic bishop called it “the most secularist administration in history.” Another bishop says it is an “a-theocracy.” Bishop William Lori of Bridgeport, Conn., who heads the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ new Ad Hoc Committee on Religious Liberty, believes the First Amendment is clear: The government cannot make people choose between obeying the law and following their faith.

Oh yes? What if “following their faith” means having sex with children or murdering rebellious daughters?

The piece goes on and on and on in this vein, with a very brief interlude to hear from Rob Boston of Americans United. It’s…tawdry.

Eric asked, on the last thread,

When, say, Muslims say that, if we speak of their religion is such and such ways, they simply get angry and can’t see our point, what response do we give? For that’s what so many people have been saying about the new atheism. They’ve been calling it strident and shrill and things like that, and we’ve been accused of writing about religion in ways that simply offend the religious instead of engaging with them. Is there are clear way to make the distinction between the first point about taboo words, and the second about ways of expressing our distaste for, or our criticism of, certain ideas?

I had some related thoughts while these posts were gestating yesterday.

Part one is the thought that any discussion that features claims or assumptions that people of a particular type or group are inherently inferior is not going to remain on the level of reasoned inquiry, at least not if the people in that group are part of the discussion. (That’s one reason ingroups can be so sinister.) Reasoned inquiry is easier when you’re talking about something that doesn’t make you the fool or the loser or the subordinate or the horrible female genitalia. Ben Radford’s article wouldn’t have drawn such heat if it had been about the Loch Ness monster.

Or would it? What if there are people whose New Age or “alternative” beliefs feel like commitments and part of their identity?

Well there are such people, and there are also their cousins who are that way about their religious beliefs. So actually articles about whacked beliefs can draw a lot of heat, and can make people feel very outraged.

That’s a kind of category mistake, in my view, because beliefs aren’t actually a matter of identity and shouldn’t be treated as if they were.

That’s one way to make the distinction that Eric asks about, but it won’t be as satisfactory to people who do think of their beliefs as their identity as it may be to us. Then again, we could always undertake to avoid epithets when discussing their beliefs. Could I do that? Hmm…would I have to abandon the word “woo”? I’m not sure I could manage that.

 

Ron Lindsay wrote a post about freedom of expression and critical inquiry a couple of days ago, prompted mostly by the controversy over Ben Radford’s post (this is getting too meta already – so often the case) about pink toys and sexism.

Ron said:

The cornerstone of our mission is freedom of expression and critical inquiry. We see freedom of expression and critical inquiry as indispensable tools for arriving at an accurate understanding of just about any issue of importance, including, but not limited to, the truth of religious or fringe science claims.

Indeed.

There is a trope out there (this is nothing to do with Ron Lindsay) that goes something like: the “radical feminism” of a subset of atheists is a disgrace in people who claim to value critical inquiry and free thinking.

I think that’s wrong but not obviously wrong – or to put it another way, there’s some truth in that but it can’t and shouldn’t be helped. (Well, I don’t think there’s some truth in the claim that it’s “a disgrace,” but the claim isn’t always made in those terms. I think there’s some truth in the claim that there’s a tension or a difficulty.) [Read more…]

Last night the CBC’s the fifth estate reported on the murder nearly 12 years ago of Jassi Sidhu, and the fact that her mother and uncle are suspected of having arranged the murder but have never been arrested.

You’ll already know from that what kind of murder it probably was. When Jassi was 2o her family wanted her to marry a man in India who was 40 years older and a stranger to her. She didn’t want to. She married someone else instead, because she liked him, but he wasn’t rich (or 60) and he drove a rickshaw.

Her mother and uncle have been arrested. [Read more…]

You have got to be kidding, Beeb.

Headline:

Do politicians ignore the ‘men’s vote’?

Listen to the Westminster political debate in recent months and you will hear one group regularly given special attention: women.

Ed Miliband has accused the government of introducing changes in areas such as social security that are “hitting women twice as hard as men”.

Meanwhile, David Cameron says that, with government initiatives like lifting over a million people out of paying tax, “it is mostly women who benefit”.

But what you will not hear is the opposite – top politicians saying they have policies specifically directed at male voters, or “male issues”.

You’re joking. You’re joking. Please tell me you’re joking.

But some men say they feel increasingly alienated from politicians who seem to talk less about their concerns.

Glen Poole is strategic director of the Men’s Network based in Brighton, which recently held a national conference to raise awareness among other men’s groups and policy-makers about their agenda.

You have got to be kidding!

They don’t talk about “their concerns” because they take them for granted because men are the assumed sex and women are the weird pathetic aberrations who need special frowning worried mention. This is not because women are stealing all the things!

This goes back a long way. From the moment women achieved the vote in the 1920s, political campaigners have targeted them and what are categorised as “women’s issues” – family, for example, or household spending.

Or baby food, or how to get the floor sparkling clean, or shoes, or The Shopping Channel. The kind of shit women pay attention to.

 

Rushdie on Hitchens is simply…unbetterable.

I have often been asked if Christopher defended me because he was my close friend. The truth is that he became my close friend because he wanted to defend me.

The spectacle of a despotic cleric with antiquated ideas issuing a death warrant for a writer living in another country, and then sending death squads to carry out the edict, changed something in Christopher. It made him understand that a new danger had been unleashed upon the earth, that a new totalizing ideology had stepped into the down-at-the-heels shoes of Soviet Communism. And when the brute hostility of American and British conservatives (Charles Krauthammer, Hugh Trevor-Roper, and Paul Johnson) joined forces with the appeasement politics of sections of the Western left, and both sides began to offer sympathetic analyses of the assault, his outrage grew. In the eyes of the right, I was a cultural “traitor” and, in Christopher’s words, an “uppity wog,” and in the opinion of the left, the People could never be wrong, and the cause of the Oppressed People, a category into which the Islamist opponents of my novel fell, was doubly justified. Voices as diverse as the Pope, the archbishop of New York, the British chief rabbi, John Berger, Jimmy Carter, and Germaine Greer “understood the insult” and failed to be outraged, and Christopher went to war.

He and I found ourselves describing our ideas, without conferring, in almost identical terms. I began to understand that while I had not chosen the battle it was at least the right battle, because in it everything that I loved and valued (literature, freedom, irreverence, freedom, irreligion, freedom) was ranged against everything I detested (fanaticism, violence, bigotry, humorlessness, philistinism, and the new offense culture of the age). Then I read Christopher using exactly the same everything-he-loved-versus-everything-he-hated trope, and felt … understood.

QFT.