For our final item for this brief but exciting miniature blogathon – David Gibson at Religion News Service looks at the way bishops strain at imaginary gnats while gulping down very large smelly camels.

When the bishops gathered under intense public pressure in Dallas in June 2002, they seemed determined to take dramatic steps, and to a degree they did. Their Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People developed a “one-strike” policy to remove priests credibly accused of a single act of abuse, and jump-started efforts to have the Vatican streamline the process for defrocking abusive clerics…

Yet after all was said and done in Dallas, the bishops exempted themselves from any real sanctions. That self-absolution was considered outrageous at the time, and the passing years have not eased the anger.

“The Vatican also needs to do its job. It appears to have no problem investigating nuns and theologians, but investigating mismanagement by a bishop is not a priority,” the Rev. Thomas Reese, a well-known Jesuit commentator, told a symposium last month at Jesuit-run Santa Clara University to mark the 10th anniversary of the Dallas charter.

“Even when a bishop is indicted, no one has the sense to tell him to take a leave of absence until the case is over,” Reese said.

Quis custodiet, eh? Eh? It’s very like the bankers and hedge fund managers getting themselves put in charge of everything so that all the people who had nothing to do with all that gambling with other people’s money get to lose their jobs and houses and savings, while all the people who had everything to do with it continue to pocket millions every year, much of it via taxpayers. It’s very like that. We will fix all the things except the ones that have anything to do with us; those, of course, we will carefully bracket and put aside, because we want to be happy. Thank you for your understanding in this matter.

And so my part in the blogathon comes to an end and I get to rush outside for fresh air and rapid motion.

It is 1:58. This is post 13 of 13.

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Maureen Brian (whom I met at QED, much to my delight) makes an eloquent point on the government’s education plans. It’s so eloquent that it gets the 1:30 slot.

In an ideal world we would have the active encouragement of all a person’s natural languages throughout life, GCSE and A Level exams available in most of them and an end to the notion that passing an exam 20 years ago beats speaking the language every day to your Granny.

We will not be getting that ideal world under the current government whose aim seems to be to have people reciting infant school poetry before they sleep, unpaid and in fear of losing benefits, under the bridges of the nation.

Zing.

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Ron Lindsay points out in the Huffington Post that coming out as an atheist is significantly different from coming out as LGBT.

True. Nobody is saying that being straight is based on a lot of unexamined and untenable beliefs. Nobody is saying or hoping that straightitude will wither away. A good many atheists are saying that religion is based on mistaken beliefs and that it does harm as a result, and should either wither away or become very much less obtrusive and demanding and Special.

I don’t foresee a best-selling book entitled “The Straight Delusion” or “Heterosexuality Poisons Everything.” The LGBT community wants acceptance; they don’t want to persuade others to join their “team,” and even if they had that objective, they would strive for it in vain.

By contrast, the amount of literature that has been produced in the last decade criticizing religious belief is extensive and continues to grow. Moreover, these critiques of religion seem to have had some effect.

So the fact that we don’t have two heads or spikes isn’t enough to make us acceptable, and we might as well get used to it. In fact it’s what we want. (“We” as usual are gnus, or outspoken argumentative atheists.) We want to chip away at social deference to religion, and we can’t combine that with claims to be jes’ plain folks like everybody else.

12:49. I can spend a luxurious 11 minutes eating lunch.

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It’s not the thing you fling – it’s the fling itself.

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Uh oh, it’s 11:50. That’s cutting it too fine.

The UK education secretary has decided to fuck up science education.

All children are to be taught a foreign language – which could include Mandarin, Latin or Greek – from the age of seven under reforms to the national curriculum being unveiled by the education secretary, Michael Gove.

In other reforms, children will be encouraged to learn science by studying nature, and schools will be expected to place less emphasis on teaching scientific method.

Less emphasis on teaching scientific method? What the hell? Why would they do that? They might as well say they’re going to place less emphasis on teaching children critical thinking and just stuff them with a Box o’ Facts.

The science curriculum is expected to emphasise using the natural habitat around schools – learning biology by studying the growth and development of trees, for example.

There will be less of a focus on doing experiments. Instead, children will be taught to observe their surroundings and learn how scientists have classified the natural world.

Seriously? Seriously? Forget experiments, just look at stuff and learn some lists?

That sounds like me at my teenage worst. “Uhhh, I like to look at stuff, that’s good enough.”

One of the first few comments captures it nicely.

Learning foreign languages from age 7 using songs and poetry and learning about science by spending time outside observing nature – that’s not news, my step-son did that at school 15 years ago. But then he did go to a Steiner school…

Precisely.

Whew – 11:58.

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This just in – today’s installment of Boko Haram attacks on churches in Nigeria. Body count for this week: 4 so far.

The violence Sunday in Jos and Biu, a city in hard-hit northeastern Borno state, comes as almost every weekend this year has seen churches targeted by a radical Islamist sect known as Boko Haram and other shadowy assailants exacerbating the country’s unease. While no group immediately claimed responsibility for Sunday’s dual attacks, they bore the hallmarks of the sect’s previous assaults, which continue unstopped despite a heavy military presence in the region.

You know this idea we were talking about, making the world a better place? This isn’t it.

Killing people isn’t it.

No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attacks. Nigeria faces a growing wave of sectarian violence carried out by Boko Haram, whose name means “Western education is sacrilege” in Hausa. Boko Haram has been blamed for killing more than 560 people this year alone, according to an Associated Press count. The sect’s targets have included churches, police stations and other security buildings, often attacked by suicide car bombers across northern Nigeria.

That isn’t it. Boko Haram are not making the world a better place. The idea that any kind of genuine education is “sacrilege” or blasphemous or haram or Forbidden will not make the world a better place. (Genuine education does not include memorization of the Koran to the exclusion of everything else. That goes double when the memorization is in a language that the memorizer does not understand.) The spread of genuine education to all people will make the world a better place.

Just yesterday I published an article by Leo Igwe on Boko Haram and religious minorities in Northern Nigeria, in which he talks about some of the ways Boko Haram’s attacks will not make the world a better place.

Attacks on religious minorities could spark reprisal killings as has often been the case in the past, particularly in Southern Nigeria where Muslims are in the minority. In this way Nigeria is edging towards religious cleansing. Boko Haram attacks could provoke the cleansing of Christians in the Muslim majority states and of Muslims in the Christian majority communities. Already there are reports of Christians leaving Muslim majority communities for fear of being attacked and killed by militants.

That’s not a better world. People moving away from the places where they live because they are afraid of being killed or made destitute in religious cleansings – that’s not a better world. Boko Haram are doing it wrong.

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The final question from Brianne:

Any updates on Hamza Kashgari?

Not of the type “He is free!” alas…but there is what appears to be an update on how he’s doing, from a relative, translated on the Free Hamza Kashgari Facebook page:

We visited Hamza, thank God, he’s in a good mental condition, and he says “hello” to everyone asking about him, he was extremely moved ‘weeping’ when he heard about the Balloon’s launching on his Birthday, may God unite us with him again.

Well “God” kind of got him into this mess, but never mind. However, that’s something, but it’s still Hamza-in-prison as opposed to Hamza in New Zealand living a free life.

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Brianne’s topics part 2.

What work/speech/writing of Christopher Hitchens do you find most inspiring? What do you most disagree with?

Most inspiring: the literary/historical/foreign correspondent writing, because of its sheer abundance, erudition, wit, and style. Pretty much all the speech I’ve ever seen, even when he was both hungover and jetlagged, as he was the first time I saw him on a book tour, when he was promoting No One Left to Lie To. It was the morning after the White House correspondents’ dinner, and he’d taken the red eye to Seattle – so he must have been as hungover and jetlagged as it’s possible to be without expiring. It did show, but it didn’t make him slow or boring or unamusing.

I most disagree with just about anything he ever said about women, and in particular the Vanity Fair article that said women aren’t funny (and underlined it by adding you know what I mean, don’t deny it). I disagree with his views on abortion.

what does your superhero costume for Fighting Fashionable Nonsense look like?

To be literal first – I keep meaning to remove that from the logo. I never liked it, I just kept forgetting to remove it once I took full ownership of B&W (apart from the domain name for the old site, which has been witheld).

To stop being literal…hmm. Billie Burke’s outfit in The Wizard of Oz? No maybe not. Mr Greenjean’s green jeans? Ok but what else. Why, an evil little thing T shirt, of course.

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It’s 9:47. I took some time to read things, and have a little coffee, so it’s 9:47. Yikes.

Brianne – awake much too soon after her 24 hour stint – provides topics.

How can we get Americans more interested in world politics? Do we need to get Americans more interested?  Does that kind of interest and knowledge set have to start being rolled out in the younger school years?

We certainly need to get Americans more interested – because the US does a lot of [helping/meddling] in the world, and citizens should have more knowledge in order to judge what is helping and what is meddling. Because there are international charities and NGOs, which Americans – like anyone else – can work for, donate to, promote – or criticize and expose – or both. Because the world matters. Because internationalism is better than parochialism. (That will have to be just a flat assertion for now – it’s 9:53.) Because the world is interesting.

It helps to get people started early, but it’s not a now or never thing. I utterly failed to be interested in things like that as a child, but I changed later. On the other hand the need to make a living can get in the way of changing later. (I solved this problem by mostly not actually making a living. Not suitable for all audiences.)

Three minutes to the hour.

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EcksLibris (amusing nym!) replies to my request for topics to post about:

I would love to hear more about you, how you came to your beliefs/lack thereof, and how you became an activist (in the best possible sense of the word)!

I don’t generally like to talk directly about Me Me Me, but talking about how we come to our beliefs/lack thereof is another matter. It’s always interesting, at least to me.

I came to my lack of theist beliefs mostly by never really having theist beliefs in the first place, as well as I can remember. I was told things, as a child, but I think they must have always been hedged. I know they were sometimes, because I can remember bits of discussions with my mother and they were hedged. I don’t think “God” ever sank in. I don’t think it can have, because I had stronger feelings about tv characters and characters in children’s fiction than I ever did about “God.” If the idea of “God” really sinks in, you surely have strong feelings about “God.”

But atheism was mostly in the background for me, until the publication of Carl Sagan’s The Demon-haunted World. It wasn’t the book itself that changed that so much as it was a couple of interviews he gave to promote it, one on Fresh Air and the other on Science Friday. They galvanized me, somehow. That became my way of making the world a better place: not just being a non-theist but arguing with theism and the way of thinking that makes it “normal” and beyond dispute.

That’s not a very full account, but in fact it sums up quite a lot.

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