A guest post by Bruce Everett

Day two – Friday: Canapés and Entrées…

The official story was, I’m told, that the canapés were a part of some kind of standard package. This apparently counted against all the forms filled out by ticket holders, marking ‘vegetarian’ or ‘vegan’ (or whatnot).

I wasn’t around at the Global Atheist Convention in 2010 to compare, but I’m told there were similar issues then with vegetarian food. I can’t honestly say I was irked, myself, but there were grumbling veggies with grumbling tummies in earshot, that made their views apparent. [Read more…]

The Indian skeptic Sanal Edamaruku explained a “miracle” Jesus statuette that was dripping water: it was located near a drain, and attracting the water via capillary action. This was annoying to the people who had planned to sell the “holy water” in little bottles.

Some hours later, in a live program on TV-9, Sanal explained his findings and accused the Catholic Church of miracle mongering, as they were beating the big drum for the dripping Jesus statue with aggressive PR measures and by distributing photographs certifying the “miracle”. A heated debate began, in which the five church people, among them Fr. Augustine Palett, the priest of Our Lady of Velankanni church, and representatives of the Association of Concerned Catholics (AOCC) demanded that Sanal apologize.

But he refused. So they accused him of “blasphemy,” and he could be arrested at any moment.

 

Gonzaga University, a Catholic school, has invited Desmond Tutu to give the commencement address next month to Gonzaga’s graduating class. It also plans to give him an honorary Doctor of Laws degree. But that doesn’t sit well with some graduates. They think he’s not good enough and not Catholic enough (the latter not all that surprising since he’s not a Catholic at all).

Patrick Kirby, a 1993 Gonzaga graduate, said Tutu is pro-abortion rights, has made offensive statements toward Jews and supports contraception and the ordination of gay clergy and shouldn’t be honored by a Catholic institution. [Read more…]

Or you can have Alister McGrath (yes, really, again) recycling his jeers and fleers. He says about the (terrible) idea of rebranding atheists as “Brights”

Dawkins’s advocacy in the United Kingdom proved especially successful, persuading many in the media that a new force was emerging in western culture. “The future looks Bright,” they declared.

No they didn’t. McGrath is quoting a “they” who never existed. No one in the UK media was persuaded, and “they” certainly never “declared” that the future looks Bright. I think one editor once used that as a title. Editors do silly things with titles; that means nothing.

He goes on to make the obvious point that there are lots more theists going to church than there are atheists going to “Brights” meetings – which is true, but then one reason not to be a theist is so that one won’t feel obliged to go to church every week. (“Oh but community!” comes the cry. Yes yes, but all the same, Sunday morning staring at the hummingbirds instead.)

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation, like the British one (are the two related? or is the ABC just a slavish imitator?), has a Religion and Ethics page, as if the two were a natural pair, as if secular ethics didn’t and couldn’t exist, as if religion had a lock on the subject.

The page is (apparently) reacting to the Global Atheism Convention with an orgy of atheism-bashing.

There is for instance a numbingly self-important and over-written jeremiad by someone called Scott Stephens. I don’t know who he is; I hope my Oz readers will clue us in. Have a sample of the jerry:

But what is most pronounced and historically novel about this form of “agonistic hyperpluralism” is that it is dispersed among individuals themselves, and not simply bound up in adjacent communities. This reflects, does it not, the great cultural revolution that has taken place over the last four decades, a revolution every bit as thoroughgoing and perfidious as those that ravaged the East in the first half of the twentieth century.

Unlike socialism – which invariably took the form of the radical assertion of the state over the economy, culture and indeed the bodies of the people themselves – the revolution that has defined our time and continues to hold sway within western liberal democracy is the assertion of the freedom, the rights and the pleasure of the body over every other person or institution that might stake some claim over it, whether it be nation, tradition, community, marriage, children or religion. Or, as Herve Juvin has nicely put it, the western body is “a body without origin, character, country or determination.”

Interesting, isn’t it. Sophisticated in language, while the idea expressed is deeply sinister.

One could point, he says, to

 the widespread abrogation of our morally symmetrical responsibilities to the unwanted elderly and the inconvenient unborn: one group shovelled away behind the walls of third party care and the other sentenced to death; both in the name of choice and out of fear that our lives might be dragged down into their servitude.

Or to the increasing desperation with which voluntary euthanasia is being legislatively pursued in the West, where the fear of the slow loss of autonomy in old age has usurped the fear of death itself, and where the choice of one’s own death is deemed the ultimate assertion of freedom.

And there the Catholic bullshitter comes out from behind the sophisticated mask. That’s such crap. Nobody thinks the choice of one’s death is the ultimate assertion of freedom; people (in large numbers) think it’s sometimes the best option for people who want it.

It’s interesting that this ABC page is deluging Richard Dawkins with scorn and loathing while promoting good old-fashioned authoritarianism and Your Body Is Ours thinking.

A guest series by Bruce Everett

Day one – Thursday: It begins…

… or the fringe events begin, at any rate.

I’ve arrived in Melbourne, being greeted by more than a few pubs with closed doors and ‘For Sale’ signs, and hijab or ten. The voice of an invisible, satirical yokel cries in my mind ‘Sharia law! This was a Christian nation’.

We don’t have the same presence of far-right, totalitarian, Islamic groups here in Australia that Europe has. Our yokels object to Muslims, not Islam (which they don’t know anything about – ask them what they think of Wahhabism, and they’ll probably tell you they don’t like sushi), while our political left remains somewhat oblivious to the ways far-right political Islam can manifest, and don’t seem to understand why others on the left may have concerns. [Read more…]

No voodoo “cure teh gay” ads for London buses after all.

The posters, backed by Anglican Mainstream, read: “Not gay! Post-gay, ex-gay and proud. Get over it!”

The adverts were reportedly booked for two weeks by the Christian group Core Issues to display on vehicles running on five routes in central London, including top tourist destinations such as St Paul’s Cathedral, Oxford Street, Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly Circus.

Strange idea. Imagine posters saying “Not male! Not Canadian! Not tall! Not straight! Post-male, ex-straight and proud. Get over it!”

In other words, it’s strange to think “gay” is something people should be ex-. It’s thinking that they should be getting over.