Stedman to Sinema

Credit where it’s due: way to go Chris Stedman. He has a post at CNN’s religion blog – CNN! lots of eyeballs! – saying Kyrsten Sinema shouldn’t treat the word “atheist” as a contaminant.

Seriously, way to go!

Preamble: Synema’s a None, and some have called her a nonbeliever or atheist. But…

Sinema doesn’t actually appear to be a nonbeliever. In response to news stories identifying her as an atheist, her campaign released this statement shortly after her victory: “(Rep. Sinema) believes the terms non-theist, atheist or non-believer are not befitting of her life’s work or personal character.”

As a nontheist, atheist and nonbeliever (take your pick), I find this statement deeply problematic. [Read more…]

Rather, people care about their groups

Another interesting item from The Righteous Mind. People don’t vote on self-interest all that much – that is, “self-interest is a weak predictor of policy preferences.” [p 85]

Rather, people care about their groups, whether those be racial, regional, religious, or political. [p 86]

Or all those in sequence, which confuses things; or all those in sequence plus others plus all those not so much in sequence as in competition all the time, waxing and waning depending on which is most salient at any particular moment. That’s my gloss, not his, but I think it has to be right, since we’re all part of all the groups he named plus a bunch of others, and they’re not all equally salient at every moment.

But anyway, the basic idea is useful and suggestive. A lot of us have experienced our atheism becoming less salient while our our membership in the gender group “women” has become more so, lately. We’ve experienced this so strongly that many of us express considerable hostility to the atheist “movement” as such.

Why is this? I don’t even need to explain it, do I. It’s because big chunks of the atheist movement have taken to using a fairly large number of women as verbal punching bags, using gender-specific words and sexual disgust as boxing gloves. That makes our gender group a lot more salient while it makes our atheism group seem hostile.

I wonder how that’s going to work out over the long haul. I don’t know, and I wonder.

We the peeps

The Washington Post tells us there are some eccentric petitions on the White House’s petition site. That’s not really very surprising.

There’s a petition to designate the Catholic church a hate group. Yes well that’s not going to happen, but the idea itself isn’t crazy. The Catholic church does foster certain kinds of hatred. It’s silly to deny that.

The “We the People” petition was filed on Christmas Day and was prompted by Pope Benedict XVI’s Dec. 21 year-end address to Vatican administrators in which he denounced gay marriage as a threat to Western civilization.

The petition blasts Benedict for “hateful language and discriminatory remarks” and for implying “that gay families are sub-human.”

Well? Is that inaccurate?

Atheists and secularists could file a similar petition. What about Protestants? Muslims? Jains? Would that fly, or has the pope’s interfaith work immunized him?

I don’t know. I merely watch from the sidelines.

Fluttering

I went to the Monarch Grove this afternoon. That’s the little grove in (brace yourself for another “grove”) Pacific Grove, very near Point Pinos and the lighthouse, where migrating Monarch butterflies gather for a rest on the trip. It’s very cool.

They’ve moved to the other side of the path. They used to clump in some trees on the south side of the path, but now they clump in a Monterey Pine on the north side.

After looking at them there through the binoculars for awhile I took the docent’s advice and went down the little hill where she said they were fluttering around, and so they were, as well as perching singly on pine trees and a bottle brush tree.

They’re butterflies. Butterflies. Fragile as kleenex, and they fly thousands of miles.

Wonderful life.

Her mistake

It turns out the gangrape of Jyoti Singh Pandey was as much her fault as it was the rapists’. A self-declared “spiritual guru” called Asaram Bapu says so.

Addressing his followers recently, Asaram said that when the girl encountered six drunk men “she should have taken God’s name and could have held the hand of one of the men and said I consider you as my brother and should have said to the other two ‘Brother I am helpless, you are my brother, my religious brother.’

She should have taken God’s name and held their hands and feet…then the misconduct wouldn’t have happened.” [Read more…]

Once upon a time in Kerala

Sixteen years ago, in India, there was an extended gang-rape…by 42 men, to be exact, over a period of 40 days.

In the Suryanelli case, a 16-year-old was abducted by a bus conductor who raped her, then passed her onto others, some of who were powerful and well-connected in Kerala at the time.

She was then discarded with no money and in no condition to return home – she couldn’t sit or stand because of her injuries. [Read more…]

Murdered for saying no

Update: I changed the title. It was meant as angry irony, but – well I can see why it didn’t work.

And in Uttar Pradesh – a teenage girl resists “eve teasing” and the guy who was “eve teasing” her, i.e. demanding sex from her, throws kerosene on her and sets her on fire.

She died.

The girl, who suffered nearly 90 per cent burns, was rushed to the District Hospital and later she was referred to Aligarh Medical College for better treatment. [Read more…]

Only the best people turn up this road

Speaking of righteous and unrighteous, I’m still reading the Jonathan Haidt book. (I read several books at once, so that I’ll be sure to confuse them all.) I’m quite liking Part One, which argues for the primacy of intuition over reasoning. I’ve seen a lot of it before but not all of it, and anyway it’s presented well. It’s convincing.

Like the bit on p 55 about William Wundt and “affective primacy.”

Affect refers to small flashes of positive or negative feeling that prepare us to approach or avoid something. [Read more…]