Geoff Whelan at QED recommended to me Lord Justice Laws’s judgement in McFarlane v Relate Avon Limited. It’s a joy to read, he said, so I read it. It is.
The case is the guy who was dismissed for refusing to provide sex counselling to gay couples even though that was part of his job. He claimed religious discrimination. George Carey, the retired archbishop of Canterbury who now writes for the Daily Mail, gave a witness statement. [Read more…]
A high school in Iowa got a Christian rock band to come to the school to tell the students some good stuff, but it didn’t work out as well as the school expected. (Secularism? What secularism? We don’t do no stinkin’ secularism round here.)
Everyone anticipated the message from Junkyard Prophet, a traveling band based in Minnesota, to be about bullying and making good choices. Instead, junior and senior high students at Dunkerton High School and faculty members said they were assaulted by the group’s extreme opinions on homosexuality and images of aborted fetuses.
“They told my daughter, the girls, that they were going to have mud on their wedding dresses if they weren’t virgins,” said Jennifer Littlefield, a parent upset with the band’s performance. [Read more…]
An attendee at QED, Al Johnston, posted a pic of me doing my talk on my Facebook page today. It’s quite amusing and characteristic, so with his permission I made it my profile pic. (Note that it’s copyright, so don’t copy it anywhere without asking him – not that you’d want to, but you know.)
(C)2012 Al Johnston, all rights reserved
Anyway – that’s very me.
Thestupiditburns.
Melvyn Bragg?! I liked Melvyn Bragg; I think In Our Time is a great thing and I wish we had anything nearly as good in the US. But this is a nasty, ragey, wrong, silly outburst.
What he says about reason is ridiculous, for a start. He begins with a superfluous and venomous announcement that Hume is a much better philosopher than Dawkins, then goes on to argue from authority that Hume said so ha. He also misunderstands what Hume said (which must have been calculated; he’s bound to know better). [Read more…]
More showoffy pseudo-knowing “contrarianism” from Brendan O’Neill. This time it’s the daring dangerous idea that libbruls don’t give a shit about gay marriage itself, they just like having a shibboleth to filter out the unhip masses.
The speed and ease with which gay marriage has gone from being a tiny minority concern to become the No 1 battle in the modern culture wars has been truly remarkable – and revealing.
What it suggests is that gay marriage is more a tool of the elite than it is a demand of the demos. The thing motoring the gay-marriage campaign, its political engine, is not any longstanding desire among homosexuals to get married or an active, passionate demand from below for the right of men to marry men and women to marry women. No, its driving force, the reason it has been so speedily and heartily embraced by the political and media classes, is because it is so very useful as a litmus test of liberal, cosmopolitan values. Supporting gay marriage has become a kind of shorthand way of indicating one’s superiority over the hordes, particularly those of a religious or redneck persuasion. [Read more…]
Another chapter of Heathen’s Progress from Julian. The gist is that atheism is currently overcompensating for the stupid idea that atheism is nihilism and despair, by claiming that atheism is chocolates and a stipulated number of either raisins or virgins, and that this is a bad move because life can be shit and godlessness can’t help much with that.
Atheists have to live with the knowledge that there is no salvation, no redemption, no second chances. Lives can go terribly wrong in ways that can never be put right. Can you really tell the parents who lost their child to a suicide after years of depression that they should stop worrying and enjoy life? Doesn’t the appropriate response to 4,000 children dying everyday as a direct result of poor sanitation involve despair at the relentless misery of the world as well as some effort to improve things? Sometimes life is shit and that’s all there is to it. [Read more…]
Jerry Coyne has an interesting post about Jennifer Wiseman, who heads the “Dialogue on Science, Religion, and Ethics” (DoSER) program at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the largest scientific organization in the world.
I was recently informed (by someone likely to know) that the top people at AAAS are all Christians. I didn’t realize this – or possibly I once did and forgot it.
As I’ve posted before, DoSER is sponsored by not only the AAAS, but by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Smithsonian Institution. These are government organizations, so some of your tax dollars may be going to support a brand of theology. And, of course, the whole shebang is funded by the Templeton Foundation to the tune of 5.3 million dollars.
Not just a brand of theology but a particular, and bad, epistemology. Tax dollars are going to support claims that “faith” can know things just as science can know things, but by a different methodology or “way.” Really. If that claim is true, then it would seem reasonable for tax dollars to finance bridges built according to faith, medical research conducted according to faith, agricultural technology discovered by faith. Tax dollars pretty much don’t do that though (except when they do, as with “complementary” medicine). Why is that? Because “faith” is not in fact a way of knowing. Therefore, tax dollars shouldn’t be used to support claims that it is. Lying should be left to the private sphere. [Read more…]
More about QED later, but meanwhile, something I missed while packing – Afghanistan’s Ulema Council issued a statement outlining “the rights and duties of women under Islam” and Karzai backed it. Heather Barr of Human Rights Watch reports:
The statement said some good things. It prohibited a traditional practice of giving a girl to another family to resolve a dispute (“baad”). It spoke against forced marriage. It confirmed women’s rights to inherit and own property.
On women’s duties, however, the statement took a turn for the worse: Women should not travel without a male chaperone. Women should not mix with men while studying, or working, or in public. Women must wear the Islamic hijab. Women are secondary to men.
Now to tell you all about it. I realize the one place-holding “post” I did on the subject was just that, a place-holder. There was no need for the slightly acid comment telling me so.
I think I’ll do it in parts, and not necessarily in chronological order. So I think I’ll start with Sunday, with late Sunday morning. I did a panel with Maryam and D. J. Grothe, moderated (and also participated in by [yes you can end a clause with not one but two prepositions]) Paula Kirby. It was both fun and interesting. When it was over people drifted up to the table to talk, and among them was my good friend whom I had never met, Author of Jesus and Mo. I was expecting him, because we’d talked about it beforehand, but I naturally couldn’t mention it publicly beforehand. Paula took us out to lunch along with Rhys and Paul Morgan. (Alas Maryam had disappeared, no doubt to prepare for her talk in a post-lunch slot.) I felt a bit self-pinchy the whole time. I spent most of January blogging about J and M and much of that time blogging about Rhys-and-JandM.
(You know, FTB is about to add a very exciting blogger. No no not Author, not Rhys, not Paula – not anyone I’ve mentioned. But very exciting. Now is not a good time for you to wander far. Stay tuned.) [Read more…]
I’m back. I had a sensational time. Here’s a photo I saw via Twitter of me telling everyone what’s what.
Update: the photo is Adam Lappin’s; he has a whole post on the talk, along with posts on many other QED talks. (No one person can have posts on all of them because there were usually two going on at once.)
It occurs to me that it may not be strictly necessary to wear one’s badge while giving a talk. Typical. One minute I forget to take it with me and have to go back to 1224 to get it, the next minute I’m wearing it in the shower. You just can’t get it right, can you Basil.
