Category Archives: Abortion

“The New New Atheism” my Foot!

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Theo – the vacillating, ‘not quite sure whether I’m cut out to be a priest’ – Hobson wrote an article for The Spectator recently, entitled “Richard Dawkins has lost: meet the new new atheists.” He begins by asseverating that

Richard Dawkins is now seen by many, even many non-believers, as a joke figure, shaking his fist at sky fairies. He’s the Mary Whitehouse of our day.

For those of you who were not around when Mary Whitehouse was a household name in practically the whole of the English-speaking world, Mary Whitehouse was a social activist prude, railing against what she saw as an increasingly permissive society. And of course it was an increasingly permissive society. The 1960s was undoubtedly a watershed decade in Western cultural history, when it seemed, especially to those who had been brought up in the 1950s, the world was being overthrown by sex, violence and rock and roll. She was, though, a stereotypical, comic figure, trying to command the tide of change, which washed over Western societies during the sixties, to cease, and people took considerable joy in poking fun at her. Search ‘Mary Whitehouse’ on YouTube, and you will find it hard to find anything besides parody.

It is simply ridiculous to suppose that Richard Dawkins is regarded in this way. What evidence does Theo Hobson provide for his opening claim that Richard Dawkins has turned into a parody of the Mary Whitehouse variety? None at all, really. He says, with considerable aplomb, about the new atheist “movement”:

So what was that about then?

– as though the new atheism were past and finished with, and we can now see it in historical perspective – when, of course, it is as lively as ever, and producing such phenomenal results as A.C. Grayling’s soundly philosophical The God Argument. Hobson wants us to think that the new atheism was just a flash in the pan, instead of a real shot, prompted mainly by the 9/11 attack on New York and the Pentagon, and the 7/7 attacks on London, which, now that we see them as fairly limited and not all that frightening, can be dismissed with a casual wave of the hand and a reference to vicarage tea parties, as though all religion were quite anodyne and harmless.

But, quite aside from the horrific impact of those religious atrocities on the Western consciousness, let’s not forget Christopher Hitchens’ classic remark:

Many religions now come before us with ingratiating smirks and outspread hands, like an unctuous merchant in a bazaar. They offer consolation and solidarity and uplift, competing as they do in a marketplace. But we have a right to remember how barbarically they behaved when they were strong and were making an offer that people could not refuse. [god is not Great, 67] 

Of course, he might have said:

But we have a right to remember how barbarically religions behave where they are strong and making an offer that people cannot refuse.

For there are, after all, many places in the world where people have no choice at all about religion. Muslims will still quote the Qur’an to the effect that there should be no compulsion in religion. But we have a right to remember where people are still imprisoned (and often murdered) for blasphemy and executed for apostasy, where any perceived insult to the “prophet” Muhammad touches off social paroxysms of frenzied crowds baying for blood. How blind, really, is Theo Hobson? Can he not see?

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On the Difficulty of Criticising the Public Face of a Religion

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My last post spoke of Islam as “a bossy domineering sexually warped abusive misogynist sack of shit,” with thanks to Ophelia Benson for this comprehensive put-down of a religion. I am then accused by one commenter (using the name Rahman) of conflating peaceful Muslims with the more extreme variety, thus, it is claimed, aiming my criticism at the wrong people entirely. Most Muslims, I am told, are peaceful, and do not intend to subvert governments or to overturn existing cultures in which Muslims have come to dwell. I am guilty of conflating extremist Muslims and perfectly harmless Muslims who simply want to get on with their lives and practice their religion in peace. It was always thus, of course, and it is a perfect excuse to do nothing at all about the problem of radical Islam.

However, here is the criticism, so that you know what I am addressing here:

 [I]n your article you subtly conflate the views of ‘Islamic fundamentalists’ and extremest muslims with muslims as a whole. I sometimes think all billion muslims are viewed by westerners as pretty much the same, all live in the desert, depraved, primitive, chopping of peoples hands and stopping their women driving. In a way I think this view has been promoted by western powers who profit from wars against muslim countries.

There are all sorts of things wrong with this, and the rest of the comment to which it belongs carries these mistakes further and further than this opening gambit seems to suggest, going, almost at once, to list a number of completely irrelevant supposed facts. I find this kind of thing tiresome, so I thought perhaps I should make another stab at this. It is almost impossible to escape the accusation of “Islamophobia,” and doubtless the following will be no exception to this, but the Islamophilia that is proposed in response to any of my attempts to criticise Islam is, if anything, less discriminating than the Islamophobia that Western critics of Islam are, almost by a reflex, accused of.

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Islam is a bossy domineering sexually warped abusive misogynist sack of shit

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The title comes from Butterflies and Wheels, where Ophelia is decrying the Islamist drive to get some Bangladeshi atheist bloggers imprisoned for “defaming a religion.”  The penalty for this “crime” stands at up to 10 years imprisonment. It is not unreasonable to make, regarding this, the point that it Islam is not unique in this respect. David Hume, for example, when he wrote about religion, was very conscious that he was living within a social order which, within living memory, had executed a young Scotsman for blasphemy. Thomas Aikenhead, 20-years-old, a student at Edinburgh University, was prosecuted, and then, on 8th of January 1697, charged with blasphemy. The indictment read, in part:

That … the prisoner had repeatedly maintained, in conversation, that theology was a rhapsody of ill-invented nonsense, patched up partly of the moral doctrines of philosophers, and partly of poetical fictions and extravagant chimeras: That he ridiculed the holy scriptures, calling the Old Testament Ezra’s fables, in profane allusion to Esop’s Fables; That he railed on Christ, saying, he had learned magick in Egypt, which enabled him to perform those pranks which were called miracles: That he called the New Testament the history of the imposter Christ; That he said Moses was the better artist and the better politician; and he preferred Muhammad to Christ: That the Holy Scriptures were stuffed with such madness, nonsense, and contradictions, that he admired the stupidity of the world in being so long deluded by them: That he rejected the mystery of the Trinity as unworthy of refutation; and scoffed at the incarnation of Christ. [see the Wikipedia entry under Thomas Aikenhead]

Interesting in this indictment is the charge that he preferred Muhammad to Christ. Hume, born in 1711, was extremely cautious regarding causing offence to the religious, and delayed publication of his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion until after his death. When we criticise contemporary Islam we should bear in mind the record of Christianity in persecuting dissenters.

That does not, however, mean that we should not recognise the danger that Islam poses for Western democracy, as well as to the freedom of those who live in Muslim majority countries. We should remember that it was over three hundred years ago that Thomas Aikenhead as hanged for the offence of blasphemy. We know better now, and we must not permit Muslim backwardness in this respect to govern the future, either in the West, or in areas where Islam is in the ascendant. Women in Egypt are now beginning to recognise that, not only did their efforts, during the misnamed “Arab Spring,”  in overthrowing the Mubarak autocracy, not achieve the freedom that they sought, their position in Egyptian society is now under greater threat than it was at any time under the more secular tyranny of Mubarak. This was, of course, predictable. That it was not predicted in the breathless excitement that accompanied the revolutionary movement that ousted Mubarak is due, in no small measure, to the Western belief that democracy will always be preferred to autocracy or to religious hegemony. It will not. The priorities of the Republican Party in the United States present clear evidence that this is a myth. Zealous religionists will always prefer rule by the redeemed to rule by popular vote. In his 1984 book, The Pope and the New Apocalypse: The Holy War Against Family Planning (downloadable here) Stephen Mumford puts the point bluntly:

The Roman Catholic Church will stop at nothing within its power, quite literally I’m convinced, to impose its pro-natalist agenda on the American people and their government.

If the destruction of U.S. Constitutional and representative democracy is found by the Vatican to be necessary to achieve its goals, the Church will not hesitate to attempt this. [4]

We can be assured that Muslims also will not hesitate to undermine democratic polities if it is in the interests of their religious commitments to do so. To suppose for one moment that religions are happy with democratic political arrangements would be very foolish. Religions consistently give preference to legislation which upholds religious moral prejudices to legislation which favours individual choice. This is quite clear in relation to legislation regarding abortion and assisted dying, two areas where religions are determined to win, regardless of the consequences for individual freedoms.

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Stephen Woodworth and the Vagina Man

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vaginaStephen Woodworth, MP for Kitchener-Centre, was invited to speak at the University of Waterloo, where he encountered a man dressed up as a vagina — who, Rex Murphy says, “was chatty to the point of incontinence — and a woman who kept shouting out about what “cunts” would and would not tolerate, and the outcome was that the talk had to be closed down because Woodworth could not make his voice heard above the hubbub. Woodworth was there, of course, to ride his favourite hobby-horse, namely, to argue that we need to have a clear definition as to when human personal life begins. He is not satisfied with the traditional common law definition in terms of extrusion of a live human being from a woman’s body, and clearly wants to see personhood defined as occurring at a point much earlier than that, when the foetus is still in utero.

Since he is himself a Roman Catholic, the presumption must be that he thinks that personal life begins at conception, which means, of course, that no woman would have a right to abortion, unless the woman’s life is in danger, but only in a case where it would be impossible to save the foetus whatever is done to save the woman’s life. If the foetus could be saved, although the woman would die, it has as much right to life as the woman, and so abortion to save the woman would not be permissible, the two having equal value as human persons. It follows that a conceptus has as much right to life as an adult woman, and it would become a criminal act to act in such a way as to endanger life within the womb (or anywhere else, for that matter, as in the case of an ectopic pregnancy).

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Am I Anti-Catholic? Damn Right! I am!

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Just in case you may have wondered about my attitude towards the Roman Catholic Church, I want to make it clear that I am deeply anti-Catholic. While I think Islam is perhaps the greater danger to the world, the Roman Catholic Church in my opinion runs a very close second. Both religions are reactionary religious sects, no matter how large they are. Their aim is to put a lid on the liberalisation of our laws and practices, to keep women in a secondary role in society, and to impose a frightened masculine heterosexuality on everyone without exception. Both religions are focused on achieving and holding onto power, and do not shrink from attempting to subvert democratic processes wherever such opportunities present themselves. In the United States, as I have pointed out recently, the Roman Catholic Church has challenged governments and is deliberately buying up or suborning medical real estate in order to make sure that their death-cult writ reaches more and more people, whether they are Roman Catholics or not.

This is why Simon Jenkins’ op-ed in the Guardian yesterday is perhaps the only comment so far on the election of Pope Bergoglio which has hit the nail directly on the head. The opening paragraph, in a sense, says all that needs to be said:

Papal elections are God’s Olympics. The splendour, the global publicity, the weeping crowds, the human drama, the race to the finish, all dazzle the senses and beg interpretive meaning. There is none. The conclave is showmanship. Those who believe the pope to be God’s minister on Earth must regard his choice as no more than an act of God. Those who believe otherwise see him as leader of a large but declining conservative sect, a genial figurehead but with a mostly baleful influence on the societies over which he claims authority. It is in the latter respect that his election matters.

Remember what I quoted from something that Jason Rosenhouse said yesterday about Bergoglio’s much touted humility:

Let us recall that with his new position comes the ability to speak infallibly, at least some of the time.  It is part of the job description that he is closer to God than the rest of us, and has unique authority to hold forth on the will of God.  It is the teaching of his Church that they, and they alone, are qualified to interpret scripture.  You place your eternal soul in jeopardy by rejecting their moral teachings.  I could go on.

Humble people do not accept such positions.  Quite the contrary, in fact.  It is only the most arrogant of men who speak with the Church’s level of certainty.  The new Pope may be many things, but humble definitely is not one of them.

This is something, apparently, that needs to be repeated constantly. This is not a humble man! No matter how ordinary a man he is, he is a man of power. Not only because of the claims that the church makes about the exalted position of the pope, or about the arrogance of those who speak with the church’s level of certainty. No, this is something that those who knew him in Argentina knew, quite independently of his position in the church. According to Eduardo de la Serna, a coordinator of an left-wing Argentinian group of priests who focus on the plight of the poor,

Bergoglio is a man of power and he knows how to position himself among powerful people. I still have many doubts about his role regarding the Jesuits who went missing under the dictatorship.

This is in an article by Uki Goni and Jonathan Watts in the Guardian: “Pope Francis: questions remain over his role during Argentina’s dictatorship.” A man of power such as this would know exactly how he would have to position himself to come out of the regime of the generals in a strong position and with plausible deniability.

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The Holiness Illusion

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I distrust holiness, and believe that it is almost always a pose. There was a time, though, when I thought it was real, and even aspired to it myself. Indeed, some people thought I was holy, and I was secretly pleased when I overheard people saying that I was truly a “man of God.” But, pleased or not, I knew that I was far from holiness, if, indeed, holiness can be thought to be real thing. There may be people whose thoughts and feelings are, in the appropriate sense, “pure,” but if there are I have not met any, though I have met many who have pretended to be.

I’m not sure when I began to think of holiness as a sham, but it is probably related to two events, widely separated in time, when my father, a minister in the United Church of Canada, who spent twelve years as a missionary in India, and then several years in Bermuda, revealed the skull beneath the skin. I do not report this to disparage my father, who is not here to defend himself, though, truth to tell, he was always a distant and rather forbidding figure to me, though he mellowed a bit when Elizabeth and I were married, when both he and my mother made up — with some deliberateness, it seems to me now – for some of the misery they had visited upon me as a child.

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The Secret Life of Popes and Saints

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For his op-ed this morning in the National Post Paul Russell has printed a selection of letters that came in answer to his question: “Can a new pope revitalize the Catholic Church?” Some of them give a scary glimpse into the minds of some Roman Catholics. Take this one, for instance:

“Revitalizing” the Catholic Church is a myth. A new pope will continue with the teaching of the Catholic Church carrying the torch handed down from Christ to Peter. Such teachings are not a compromise to please a few and displease a few others. No one can change Jesus’ teachings or the Bible. The Catholic Church is not a crowd pleaser. There is an old saying, “Those who believe in God, need no explanation. Those who don’t, no explanation will suffice.”

The idea that there is a “deposit of faith” and that the Roman Catholic Church has access to this mother-lode of all mother-lodes runs through these letters like a golden thread. One response, almost word-for-word quoting from Ratzinger’s parting remarks, says:

The Catholic Church isn’t some corporation that needs revitalizing; it is the body of Christ. Christ is the head, represented by the pope on Earth, and the body is made up of us, ordinary people who are sinners. We are the ones who need revitalizing. And we get that through the sacraments.

As Andrew Brown says, the pope’s final speeches show him hubristically fashioning a illusory vision of the church completely loyal to his teachings. He quotes this example of the pope’s self-delusion:

The church, he said this morning, is “not an organisation, not an association  for religious or humanitarian goals, but a living body, a community of brothers  and sisters in the body of Jesus Christ, who unites us all. We experience the  church in this way and could almost be able to touch it with our hands, the very  power of his truth and love is a source of joy, in a time when many people speak  of it as in decline.”

One wonders whether Ratzinger, like Alice, has passed through the looking-glass. He’s spent his pontificate sacking bishops who disagree with him — two or three a month, according to the Tablet – which means that, for every bishop appointed there was at least one disgruntled, dissenting bishop who didn’t fit so nicely into that loving ”community of brothers and sisters in the body of Jesus Christ.” Who, really, did he think he was fooling? Well, obviously, some of those who responded to Paul Russell’s question. But did he really believe it himself?

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Medieval Torture Porn

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The title words come from an article exploring the Roman Catholic Church’s campaign to change defeat at the polls (for its favoured idiocies), to success in imposing its will on people, no matter how unwilling, by buying up hospitals, and merging secular hospitals with Roman Catholic health care operations, particularly (in this instance) in Washington State. It’s a feature story in The Stranger entitled “Faith Healers,” and provides an alarming account of the way in which the Roman Catholic Church is actively buying up or merging its operations with hospitals run by secular organisations (such as local municipal authorities), or by other churches that do not have the draconian rules about women’s health issues that the Roman Catholic Ethical and Religious Directives (ERDs) impose on all Roman Catholic health care services, with the understanding that the annexed institutions will observe the Roman Catholic bishops’ ERDs. The title words themselves were spoken by a physician (who agreed to speak to the reporter on the condition that he/she could speak anonymously). Let’s put them in context:

The physcians who agreed to meet me for coffee talked about the mindfuck of being raised Catholic, turning to atheism, and excelling in medicine — only to wake up one day with the church as your boss. The first physician joked grimly about the religious directives being “medieval torture porn.” He talked about the struggle of trying to balance his duty to patients with the edicts of a Catholic hospital.

This would be frightening enough, if Roman Catholic hospitals were private institutions run with Roman Catholic resources for Roman Catholics, but this is not the case, apparently, in the United States. No. These are hospitals funded by government, for which individual tax payers are (through their taxes) partly responsible, whether or not they support Roman Catholic torture porn. They are taxed without the option, and the Roman Catholic Church is actively seeking to buy up or merge with even more hospitals in order to spread their torture porn as widely as possible. There are parts of Washington state, apparently, where people would have to drive hundreds of miles to find a non-Roman Catholic hospital to access abortion services even for an ectopic pregnancy. As for Washington’s right-to-die legislation, this is completely out of the question for people “served” by a Roman Catholic health (or “health”) centre. As one activist, opposing the church’s gobbling up of Washington state’s health facilities, Monica Henderson, says:

We’re essentially paying a Catholic institution to deny us care. … It isn’t right.

Indeed, it is not right, but then, why should we expect justice or right from an institution that, world-wide, has been trampling on children’s rights with an abandon that in any other circumstances would be called a rampage. And it is this rampageous organisation that presumes to teach others their duty.

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Worse than I thought… Tories take leave of their senses over abortion with a move very familiar to those South of the Border, down America way

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Yesterday, I put up a short (for me!) — this will be even shorter – post about fundamentalist Tory MPs who are continuing their insidious campaign to get abortion back on the Commons docket. But it was far worse than I thought. According to a National Post article this morning, it seems that the abortions in question are abortions that take place after only 20 weeks gestation. In other words, these idiots are suggesting that every abortion that takes place after that time should be investigated as a homicide! This is more than just the few “life birth abortions” that seemed to me to be in question yesterday. These MPs, three of them, as it turns out, are under the strange impression (i) that as MPs, they should have some say in the scope of police work, and can even make requests for the police to act, and (ii) that the abortion law struck down in 1988 did not include abortions after 20 weeks gestation, and, accordingly, that

Section 223a of the Criminal Code, which says a person commits homicide when he causes injury to a child before or during its birth as a result of which the child dies after becoming a human being,

applies to these cases. Nothing of course, could be further from the truth.

You’ve got to hand it to these guys for chutzpah, and arcane legal interpretation, but it is quite clear that the Supreme Court decision which struck down Criminal Code prohibition of abortion, did not think that this section should apply to abortion. The inaccessibility of abortion was struck down on human rights grounds, as depriving the woman of security of the person. These Christian clowns want to turn the hands of the clock back so far that they would apparently imprison women (and their physicians) who seek to have abortions after an arbitrary cut-off point that their Christian imaginations have delimited as the point at which the foetus becomes a child for the purpose of the Criminal Code, without any regard for the security of women whatsoever. Humiliate the stupid bastards.

Here are three stooges:

Three Stooges copy

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Drip Drip Drip – Fundamentalist Tory MPs in Canada Continue their Backdoor “Pro-Life” Campaign

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Canadians should be very concerned about the continuing intrusion of fundamentalist MPs in life and death issues. Not long ago Mark Warawa (Member for Langley, BC) introduced a motion to “condemn discrimination against females occurring through sex-selective pregnancy termination.” While there is some justification for his concern, the purpose of the motion is to reintroduce control over women’s reproductivity into the law, which was ended in 1988. Warawa wants us to think that he introduced the motion as a support for the rights and dignity of women, portraying his Motion 408 as a move to end violence against women and girls. But this is a smoke screen. If this apparently woman-friendly motion were to be passed, it would open the door to much more control over women’s right to abortion. As I have stated before, it is important to change the attitude of immigrants so that women come to be valued. Primitive ideas of women’s subordinate position should be erased from the ethnic memory of those who have chosen to make a life in Canada, where women’s rights are equal to those of men. In this we are clearly failing, since we refuse to address the issue at the level of individual communities and practices which continue to disadvantage women. But women in general, including immigrant women, cannot be equal if they have no control over reproductive decisions, which means that abortion must not be reintroduced into Canada’s Criminal Code as it had been before 1988 merely on the pretext of dealing with misguided immigrants.

There have been other motions from backbench Tory MPs attempting to limit the abortion rights of Canadians (for example, Stephen Woodworth’s Motion 312, for which he was thanked by the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada – these guys are not subtle!), and now backbench Tories have added to these intrusions by requesting the RCMP to investigate some abortions as murders! They call them “post abortion killings,” but there is no evidence that there is a conspiracy to kill children who have been born. In fact, according to Statistics Canada, there have been 491 such cases, but a statement from Statistics Canada shows clearly that these are not cases of murder or post abortion killings. According to the account in the Globe and Mail, Statistics Canada made a statement about these cases as follows:

Statistics Canada said the 491 cases that it counted during the 10-year period referred to matters where “the cause of death or stillbirth is an abortion.”

“These are included in national cause-of-death statistics because when the aborted fetus is born alive and subsequently dies, each event must be registered,” the federal agency said in a statement.

Statistics Canada added it also included stillbirths when “the aborted fetus is born dead but meets the provincial requirements [birth weight and/or gestational age].”

Again we are faced with a Tory smoke screen, trying to hide fundamentalist Christian dogma behind something that they think will arouse the concern of Canadians. This continuous drip drip drip of Christian intervention in Canada’s secular law is to be deplored, and it is time for Canadians to let these antediluvian religious hacks know that their attempts to import Christian (and doubtless other religious) prejudices into the law is unwelcome, and contrary to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

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