PZ Myers has the story. The most bizarre story. It involves religious lunatics sneaking in to the Senate judicial confirmation room and ‘anointing’ the seats with oil. Tip to senators: find these lunatics, prosecute them for breaking and entering and sue them to get the money for dry cleaning your clothes. As has been said, this is a sad indictment of America’s Homeland Security. Everyone in New York has to have their bags searched, but random religious lunatics (they carry Bibles, but could quite easily carry Korans - it’s only accident of upbringing) can sneak in to the Senate. How is that secure?
Bewildered by the yet to air
Media Watch Watch are reporting on the ‘backlash’ to Dawkins’ programme The Root of All Evil. Of course, it’s not actually been broadcast yet, which makes it all rather academic - none of us non-“meeja” people have seen it yet. It’s funny how they condemn Dawkins’ attempts to engage with religion (“He’s a scientist!”), yet no such ad hominems seem to come out when the religious crazy people want to “engage” (read: ignore, trash, attack, compulsively wreak havoc on the education thereof) the biological sciences with that piece-of-shit idea, ‘Intelligent Design’.
Of course, it shows a rather amusing lack of backbone that the faithful get all offended when we suggest that atheists shoulde allowed to give homilies on Thought for the Day and that the level of religious broadcasting is perhaps not quite equivalent to the dwindling faithful. We sit pretty through badly-researched programmes on religion (and have to fight to get well-researched ones like Miller’s Brief History broadcast on a mainstream channel) and uncritical acceptance by the media of all sorts of theological and quasi-theological hoo-hah like crystal healing and the like.
We put up with the religious running our schools (though not doing us the minor convenience of paying for it), shutting down debate by excluding from their pupils anyone who dissents from their God-fearin’ views (or at least, whose parents dissent) and promulgating fear of science and critical thought (a long tradition accompanies the phrase “Too clever for their own good”, which has culminated in chronic distrust of scientific advancement).
At a conference, I caused gasps a few months ago by questioning the “testimony” of a Muslim man, by suggesting that secular education might be (gasp) better than religious education. You could hear the crowd breath in, and it was only due to the presence of a senior police officer that I wasn’t hanging from the chandelier.
The presumptuous “preaction” to Dawkins’ programme only backs up one of his main theses - that society sets religion up to be something very special and to be discussed uncritically, as opposed to politics. Imagine if he’d made a programme about how the personality clash of, say, Ariel Sharon and the late Yasser Arafat, or the clash of the secular Western world and the (secular) traditionalist Arab world, was the reason behind the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The reaction would not be as hyperbolic.
The logic behind this all is simple. Violence is caused by intolerance. Religion breeds intolerance in many societies. In reaction, the old canard is then brought up about how Hitler and Stalin are ‘atheistic humanists’. But nobody has been driven by their atheism to blow up churches or firebomb pro-life rallies. The atheism of the Communists was part of a comprehensive and, in my opinion, deluded, worldview. Hitler used Catholicism and Christian imagery in order to whip up the masses.
To use that as an example of violence by atheists is to beat up a straw man. It’s especially amusing when compared with the constant exhortations by the same people that “moderate Muslims condemn the violence of the terrorists” and that Islam is a “religion of peace”. Ah, of course - the aging, tweedy members of the NSS are the real cause of international terrorism, but the Muslims who believe, according at least to their book even if not their conscience, that jihad is a holy duty.
What comes out of Richard Dawkins’ writings on religion is a sense of moral outrage. And, based on the prejudice (pre-judgement) of a yet-to-be-broadcast television programme combined with the stunning ability of both the religious and their middle-class accomplices who preach a debased version of tolerance in order not to practice it when faced with a dissenting opinion, that outrage should be seen as a minimum not a maximum.
The accomplices to superstition will argue (rightly) for the rights of a man to stand up and say he hates Western civilisation and that Muslims should destroy it. I agree with said man’s right to say it, even though he’s obviously a kook. But they get very shaken up if you stand up and say that the man is deluded. I guess their belief in freedom of speech doesn’t extend to letting an Oxford professor talk about religion.
I await Dawkins’ programme with excitement, though I do not expect to be surprised by either the content of it, or the hyperventialting reactions to it in the media. Good timing on the programme though. If the Government get their way, this sort of thing will be illegal. And when it is, I’ll be setting up secret free speech clubs to show video tapes of this sort of “religious hatred”.
Ophelia Benson on the religious reaction to civil partnerships: “We don’t want religious pseudo-reasons for public policy, we want real reasons, based on actual arguments. But we don’t get them - not from people who think their ‘faith’ is reason enough. That’s because they don’t have any. All they ever manage to come up with is meaningless hand-waving about the family.” The precious, precious family. Unless the government bow to the demands of bigots, all families are going to just disappear in a puff of smoke?
If you want to understand the pathetic philosophical basis for New Labour’s governance, Guy Herbert’s post regarding a statement made by Lord Gould of Brookwood on identity cards. If anyone gains a feeling of “recognition” coming “in the form of this identity card”, call me. I’m sure I can find you a therapist who might be able to find you something, anything, that’s better. I’m sure with sex, intellectual enquiry, disco music, religion, suicide, Chinese takeaways and reality television to choose from, there’s something out there which will give you a “kind of freedom” cheaper and more efficiently than having to pay to be branded by Charles Clarke.
