Jessica Ahlquist wins the case

The judge said yes that’s a religious prayer. A Daniel come to judgement. Also a guy who can read with his eyes open.

Why yes, that does seem quite religious, doesn’t it. Also patriarchal.

The prayer banner that hangs at Cranston West High School must be removed immediately said U.S. District Court Judge Ronald Lagueux in his decision issued Wednesday.

According to the Justice’s decision “The purpose of the prayer banner was clearly religious in nature,” and that “No amount of debate can make the school Prayer anything other than a prayer, and a Christian one at that.”

Jessica Ahlquist, a Cranston West student brought suit against the city over the banner saying it made her feel excluded and ostracized because she is an atheist.

Not to mention she is a girl.

Beliefs are mutable (with qualifications)

Josh Rosenau keeps bombarding me with Tweets demanding I explain my views on identity (on Twitter ffs!) and sniping on his blog, so I’ll explain what he professes to find so perverse. I think there is a difference between aspects of identity that are not optional and those that are.

Wo, super twisted and weird, huh? Nobody ever had a thought like that before.

That’s what I had in mind when I said (slightly abridged)

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…

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.

Maybe I put that too loosely (but it was a blog post, not a scholarly article, so Josh’s outrage is a tad overblown). I realize that people may think of some of their beliefs as central to their identity (that is, after all, what the post was about). My point put more carefully is that we all ought to be (at least) cautious about that, because in fact beliefs are optional or mutable. Yes I know that can be so difficult that that becomes just a theoretical possibility, but still – we can change our beliefs in a way we can’t change our histories.

But it’s complicated. Identities become more or less salient depending on circumstances. Josh is right that atheism is salient that way to gnu atheists and that that’s what makes them gnu. (He didn’t put it that way, so he’s not as right as he could be, but he gestured in its direction, so I’ll count it.) It’s true that the backlash (including the bit of it that Josh manages) makes my atheism more salient. I keep being irritated (as predictably as a clock) that people are frothing at the mouth just because people are being outspoken instead of apologetic about their atheism, so I become all the more atheist. I dig in.

This is where Chris Mooney is right. Embattled identities become more salient. (Cf Sartre on anti-semitism.) New atheism probably makes theists feel embattled, and thus probably makes a lot of them dig in just as I dig in.

But that’s not all there is to it. It’s still the case that ideas and beliefs can change. We all think that, or we wouldn’t bother with all this endless ARGUING, would we.

Call it identity 1 and identity 2 if you like. Identity 1 is what you can’t change, identity 2 is what you can. (And if you choose to be precise and insist that identity means not changing, then identity 2 isn’t actually identity. But whatever – I don’t mind if what feels like identity is called identity. Though I may change my mind about that tomorrow. It’s not part of my identity or anything.)

Addendum: FTB was down, as you may have noticed, so I had to wait to post this; in the interim Rosenau has been yammering at me at Twitter, demanding I give him a yes or no answer to a complicated question, and being fucking obnoxious into the bargain. Remind me never again to engage with his provocations.

Misogyny? What misogyny?

Reading Greta’s most recent post about…about friends and allies and misogyny and how to deal with it and talk about it. You know: what we’ve been talking about for months and months and months now. One thing that happened in the comments is that Justicar showed up to discuss the issues in a calm, reasoned, civil way…deceptively calm, reasoned, and civil. He’s not like that everywhere. He’s not like that at ERV and he’s not like it on his own blog.

Aerik pointed out one example that I don’t think I’d seen before (although who knows, maybe I did, I saw a lot last summer and no doubt I’ve forgotten most of it by now).

On top of attacking Watson in a most misogynist manner, he does it to ophelia benson, too!  Screams in his title “HAHAHA DISREGARD THAT, ORWELLPHIA SUCKS COCKS! ”  Also calls her “wicked bitch of the west.”

Oh yes? So I looked it up, and found this.

That’s Justicar.

That’s what she said

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!

When certain Muslims voiced their offense

The Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society at University College London is the object of attempted censorship by the university’s student union because the former used an image from Jesus and Mo on its Facebook page, and that, of course, is “offensive.”

 Citing a “number of complaints” regarding both the depiction of Muhammad and the fact that the image shows him with a drink that looks like beer, the union contacted the ASHS president demanding that he remove the image as soon as possible…Pointing out that UCL was the first university in Britain to be founded on secular principles, the ASHS have refused to remove the Jesus & Mo image and have launched an online petitionto defend free expression at the university. The petition, which you can sign, includes the following statement:

“In response to complaints from a number of students, the University College London Union has insisted that the UCLU Atheist, Secularist & Humanist Society remove the following image from a Facebook event advertising a pub social. It has done so on the grounds that it may cause offence to Muslim students.

This is a gross infringement on its representatives’ right to freedom of expression taken by members of the first secular university in England. All people are free to be offended by any image they view. This does not give them the right to impose their beliefs on others by censoring such images.
We the undersigned urge the University College London Union to immediately halt their attempts to censor the UCLU Atheist, Secularist & Humanist Society and uphold its members’ right to freedom of expression.”

And then there’s an unpleasant little update:

Update: one of the Islamic societies at UCL, the Ahmadiyya Muslim Students Association, has put out a statementarguing that the ASHS is wrong to refuse to take down the image from Jesus & Mo. The author argues that there is a difference between freedom of speech and freedom to insult, and suggests that once something has offended someone, it should be withdrawn:

“Once a particular act is deemed to be offensive to another, it is only good manners to refrain from, at the very least, repeating that act. In this particular case, when at first the cartoon was uploaded, it could have been mistaken as unintentional offense. When certain Muslims voiced their offense over the issue, for any civil, well-mannered individual or group of individuals, it should then be a question as to the feelings of others and the cartoons should then have been removed.”

Bollocks.

The monks at Belmont Abbey College knew

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.

What we talk about when we talk about woo

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.