Whatever else we do, whatever metaphysical view gets us there, the first order of business has to be shackling women. We always have to make sure women don’t have too many rights. We have to make very damn sure they’re not as free to decide how to live their own lives as men are.
We have to carve away their genitals so that they won’t have sexual feelings. [Read more…]
Ah, this brings back memories – Jerry Coyne did an interview with Alex Tsakiris of “Skeptiko”– which is “Skeptiko,” please note, not “Skeptico.” There’s a difference. I didn’t know that in September 2010, which is why I accepted Tsakiris’s invitation to do an interview.
It was a complete dog’s breakfast. The guy’s an asshole. He’s not a skeptic at all, and the name is pretty obviously meant to trap people in just the way that several people – including me – have been trapped. He’s a woo-meister. He didn’t tip his hand for the first few minutes, so we had an amicable conversation for that long, but then he did, and we hit a brick wall.
He bullshitted Jerry Coyne, too. [Read more…]
Now I’ve seen everything – now that I’ve seen an editorial in the Telegraph saying how swell Islam is compared to those other timid religions that won’t stand up for themselves.
It’s another Warsi-flatter, saying how right she is to order everyone to be intrusively religious and to go urge the pope to be more intrusively religious along with her.
It is unsurprising that it has taken a Muslim member of the Cabinet to speak out clearly and forcefully on the importance of faith in the life of the nation; followers of Islam tend to be less mealy-mouthed about their beliefs than many Christians. [Read more…]
Remember the caring sensitive Mummy whose disabled daughter was raped and who decided not to let her have Plan B? Because “It’s about taking the life of an innocent child”?
Well Valerie Tarico has an excellent post on The Big Lie about Plan B.
Plan B doesn’t cause abortion. It stops or delays ovulation. No egg, no fertilization, no pregnancy – no abortion. It’s that simple.
Well then why did the caring sensitive Mummy say it did? Why did she get all maudlin about the innocent child whose life had to not be taken?
So why does the Religious Right keep telling us that post-coital contraceptives function by aborting teeny babies? Because in the minds of many true believers, when you’re on a mission from God the end justifies the means. That’s one reason religious belief has such inconsistent moral consequences, including wildly inconsistent effects on truth seeking and truth telling. Chris Rodda’s book, Liars for Jesus, focuses primarily on the way that Christian fundamentalists are rewriting history to justify theocracy. Katherine Stewart’s book, The Good News Club, sheds light on the deceptions fundamentalists use to woo grade school children for conversion. A NARAL investigation exposed a host of deceptions that are the stock in trade of Crisis Pregnancy Centers including the falsehood that abortions causing breast cancer. Different lies for different ends.
Not that they necessarily know they’re lies, Tarico adds. Self-deception is a powerful thing.
Houzan Mahmoud will soon have a statement on Iraq’s Women’s Minister Ibtihal Kasid Alzaidi, who thinks and says that women are not equal to men. Not a good thing for a Women’s Minister to think.
Something I’m ambivalent about:
On the one hand, there’s the value of being reasonable, and trying to see all sides of a question. There’s the value of not getting things wrong by being too one-sided; by confirmation bias; by seeing everything the way you see everything and so becoming blind to other ways of seeing everything. That’s different from the more political value of giving everybody a fair hearing, and letting people pursue the good in their own way as far as is compatible with the rights of others. The value I mean is epistemic and cognitive.
On the other hand there’s the value of countering a very loud, dominant, hegemonic, majoritarian, conformist brand of conventional wisdom.
Those two things are in tension. Hence my ambivalence.
On the one hand, as an atheist I think I have a duty to try to consider ways in which theism can be a good thing. On the other hand, as an atheist I also think I have a duty to help spread the minority view that theism is on the whole a bad thing, especially with regard to free inquiry.
Those two things are in tension.
The trouble is, there are already whole trainloads of people willing and eager to say that theism is wonderful and atheists suck. There are whole trainloads of people like that even in the UK and Australia and Canada and other places lucky enough to be more secular than the US, but in the US they also have a firm grip on the mainstream.
Given that fact I think we need a lot of unadulterated atheism just to make atheism more available. From that point of view, I actually don’t want to talk about ways in which theism can be a good thing. I want to insist that conventional wisdom notwithstanding, it isn’t.
But there’s always the nagging little voice in my ear droning away about confirmation bias and group psychology.
It’s a pain in the ass.
At Malaysia’s Home Minister, for one.
Lawyers for Liberty is simply astonished and outraged at Home Minister Hishamuddin Hussein and PDRM’s continuing attempt to spin further lies and deceit over the illegal and unconstitutional detention and deportation of Hamza Kashgari by now alleging or insinuating that he is a “criminal” or “terrorist” wanted by his home country.
The truth is Hamza had sent a few tweets on the Prophet Muhammad which he has since deleted and apologized. It must be noted a similar poem on the prophet was published on his blog a year ago but did not receive any negative reaction from anybody. More importantly, he belongs to a group of emerging young pro-democracy activists which among others had supported the Arab Spring. Just days before he fled Saudi Arabia, the police stopped him and his group of young activists from organizing a series of forums to show solidarity with the Syrian uprising. He has also been said to have been monitored by the Saudi Intelligence more than 8 months ago.
…
The cold hard truth is that Malaysia has bent over backwards to please Saudi Arabia, breached international law by not allowing Hamza to seek asylum and instead handed him on a silver platter to his persecutors and condemned him to torture and near certain death.
Keep the pressure on. Make it hot for them.
Roberto Malini, co-president of EveryOne Group, an NGO supporting Roma people and refugees, left a poem he wrote for Hamza Kashgari in a comment. I want it to be more visible than that, so here it is again.
Poetry Before the Law
on the deportation of the poet Hamza Kashgari back to Saudi Arabia
Spare the poet, O Law,
for his soul expands
beyond the sources of reason,
as far as truth.
Spare the poet, O Death,
for his heart is the brother of a quasar
that ignites the Universe.
Spare the poet, O Faith,
for his song rises like the Sun
and reawakens the eternal in stone.
Roberto Malini (English translation by Glenys Robinson)
Oh vomit. Sayeeda Warsi is off to visit the pope, and by way of preparation she and the Telegraph unite in telling us all that we need more religion and less “militant secularism.” Warsi says it in her own article, and the political editor says it all over again in an article about her article. Why two articles where one would do? I have no idea.
First Warsi’s bullying theocratic shit, under the sinister threatening headline We stand side by side with the Pope in fighting for faith: [Read more…]