Category Archives: Theocracy

The Debate that was lost before it began

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Lawrence Kraus took part in a debate at University College London that he won hands down. He won it before he had said a word. The proposition to be debated was: “Islam or Atheism: Which makes more sense?” The debate, organised by the Islamic Education and Research Academy, despite assurances that the audience would not be sex segregated, was indeed sex segregated nevertheless, and by being so made clear that Islam makes no sense, and is an ideology that self-respecting women, as well as men, should avoid. Kraus himself threatened to walk out, and last minute adjustments were made, but the issue was not really resolved, and (in my view) it would have been better had he not appeared at all. That would have been a much more powerful message than any he could have delivered in words, and he could with some justice have claimed that he had won by default, the behaviour of the Muslim organisers having made his point as eloquently as it could be made in any case.

The problem, apparently, goes much deeper, for this is not the only sex segregated event that has been hosted at University College London. As Richard Dawkins made clear in a Tweet, it is an offence that University College London, the first university in England that did not have religious tests for admission, and the first university to accept women students, should allow its facilities to be used in such a way as to flout its most sacred traditions of freedom of thought and the principle of the equality of women and men. This should not have happened, and it certainly should not happen again.

To my mind, however, this poses deeper questions. Not only does it show clearly that Islam makes no sense — but no sense at all — for it simply cannot encompass the idea that humanity is composed of women and men in roughly equal numbers, and thinks it appropriate to segregate men from women in response to a supposed revelation from a god; but it shows that Islam is a danger to democratic polities and a subversive element within democracy. When the best educated Muslims consider it their duty, in the name of Islam, to contradict a fundamental premise of European culture, that men and women are equal participants in society, in governance, work, opinion setting, education, teaching, leadership, and consider it their duty to introduce sex segregation into one of the leading secular institutions of higher learning in Britain is not only an offence, it is a clear indication of the danger that Islam is to the values upon which British freedoms are based. And this applies pari passu to democracy and freedom throughout the West, as well as in nascent democracies that could be stifled at birth, if the reign of Islamic theocracy is given room to spread its illiberal ideas unhindered by the severest criticism — something that, because of terrorist threats, is already in doubt.

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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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Wafa Sultan and the Position of Women in Islam

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Lately, I have been reading Wafa Sultan’s book, A God Who Hates, and it is certainly a bracing read from the point of view of someone, like me, who has been trying (and not always succeeding, no doubt) to give Islam the benefit of the doubt. It began a few days ago when Ophelia Benson (over at Butterflies and Wheels) put up Wafa Sultan’s talk at the Women in Secularism Conference 2012. It’s a powerful speech, and expresses well the desperate plight of women in Islam. In a comment I made under Ophelia’s post, I mentioned that the speech had convinced me to buy her book, and I ordered it from the Book Depository shortly thereafter. Wafa Sultan is a psychiatrist who escaped from the imprisonment of Islam by moving to the United States, and now writes and speaks widely against what she calls the “prison of Islam.”

Part of the book is about Wafa Sultan’s own experiences of growing up in Syria. One of the most poignant is the account she gives of moving to the United States. Her husband preceded her, and when it came time for her to leave, she had to get passports for her children. But she had no authority, as their mother, to apply for such documents. The children did not belong to her. They belonged to their father. In order to get passports, she had have a male relative, who could vouch that she had the permission of her husband to do this. As she says:

When I submitted a request for a passport for my children, the officer at the emigration and permits department refused to give me one on the grounds that, under Islamic law, I was not my children’s legal guardian and that it was up to their father to submit the request. [107]

When she presented the power of attorney she was told:

That’s a power of attorney, not proof of guardianship. It gives you the right to dispose of his property, but you do not have guardianship of his children.”

“But they are my children, too, sir,” [Wafa replied]

“A woman is not the guardian of her children. Do you understand?” [108]

The upshot was that she had to find a male member of her husband’s family (an alcoholic, “notorious for his ill nature and poor character, because of which my husband had never wanted to introduce him to me,” she comments laconically), and it was he, not the children’s mother, who was entitled to speak on behalf of her husband. That says a lot about the position of women in Islam.

Wafa had to leave her children in Syria, until she and her husband could afford to support them in America. Her description of leaving Syria is very telling and poignant:

I fled my prison with suitcases containing nothing more than painful memories. [109]

But she not only fled the prison-house of Islam, she fled towards freedom, determined to raise up those whom “Allah had cut down to size until they were smaller than flies.” [109] She had no clear vision, she says, but

America re-formed me, armed me with knowledge, clarified my vision, and helped me to outline my plan to save those victims. I decided to bring “Allah” to justice on criminal charges. [109]

The rest of the book shows us just how she did this.

She began by writing essays that were printed in Arabic language papers in the United States, some of which raised the ire of her readers. Eventually, she was invited to speak on Al Jazeera to a Muslim “scholar.” She suggests that the main reason she was asked to do this is that it was held that when she was demolished on TV, her voice would be silenced once and for all. But she did not back down, and gave as good as she got. At one point she actually told the “scholar” to shut up and let her speak, which, for a woman in Islam, is simply unheard of. Al Jazeera later apologised for her appearance and the offence she had caused to Muslims. But what she has to say goes right to the heart of Muslim beliefs, because she attacks Islam at its central point, by criticising its prophet Muhammad. She calls him a false prophet, and gives chapter and verse for making this judgement.

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Margaret Somerville/Wanda Morris Debate Assisted Dying on HuffPo. So far, Margaret is Winning!

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Over at the Huffington Post there is a debate between Margaret Somerville, purported ethicist from McGill University in Montreal, and Wanda Morris, Executive Director of Dying with Dignity (Canada), the voice for choice at the end of life in Canada. Somerville, as is her wont, brings out all the usual suspects, none of which are really compelling, and all of which depend on two things, making you afraid of it, and claiming that it’s simply — it’s really that simple folks! — wrong to kill people. She forgets, of course, that people have been killing other people since the dawn of time, and will go on doing it. Certainly, many acts of killing are wrong and to be regretted and condemned, but merely saying that something is a matter of killing another human being is not enough all on its own to make it wrong.

Margaret’s biggest argument — the real big argument so far as Somerville is concerned — is that permitting the act of assisting someone in great suffering to die (she doesn’t like that euphemism, so we’ll come back to it) is changing something fundamental about the way in which we regard human life, and it will bring about untold changes in our society, and may — in fact she is sure that it will — change the way we regard killing others, so that legalising it in the case of those who choose to die in order to end their suffering will set society off on a slippery slope to disaster and depravity. She’s said this numerous times before, and she puts so much weight on it that it really constitutes her main argument against assisted dying (a ”sanitised” form of language that she deplores, but we will come back to that). Margaret’s problem, not to put too fine a point on it, is that she is left asking a vague question about the future: “What long term effects might result from that?” She doesn’t know, but she has this in common with the pope: she believes firmly that this will usher in a “culture of death,” if it hasn’t already arrived, and that there will be much weeping and gnashing of teeth because we didn’t listen to Jeremiahs like her.

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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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Another Anti-Modernist Pope

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The Syllabus of Errors was a catalogue of sayings, gleaned from earlier papal documents, issued on 8th December 1865, in which certain propositions were condemned as heretical. Amongst the propositions condemned were the following:

“The Church ought to be separated from the State, and the State from the Church.” (No. 55)

“Every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which, guided by the light of reason, he shall consider true.” (No. 15) and that “It has been wisely decided by law, in some Catholic countries, that persons coming to reside therein shall enjoy the public exercise of their own peculiar worship.” (No. 78)

“The Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with, progress, liberalism and modern civilization.” (No. 80)

Notice how these condemn precisely those freedoms upon which liberal democracies are founded. In his homily at a mass celebrated on the Epiphany (6th January), three new archbishops were consecrated in St. Peter’s Basilica, and the pope reiterated the last of these errors of modernism, firmly rejecting, in the words of the Reuters report, ”suggestions that the Church should change to suit public opinion.” He told the newly ordained archbishops that courage was needed to stand up to the “intolerant agnosticism.” According to the report the Pope Ratzinger said:

Today’s agnosticism has its own dogmas and is extremely intolerant regarding anything that would question it and the criteria it employs.

He went on to add that

the courage to contradict the prevailing mindset is particularly urgent for a bishop today. He must be courageous.

At the same time the pope denounced attempts “to push religion out of public debate” (which is a close relative of Error Number 55 above).

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A Closer Reading of Certain Aspects of the Pope’s Christmas and New Year’s Messages

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A few days ago I took Pope Ratzinger to task for some things he said in his address to the cardinals and the curia, seated in an over-decorated hall somewhere in the depths of the church headquarters these aged virgins consider to be a state. However, there were two speeches, and I originally mistook one for the other in my earlier post entitled “If it is so important to live according to one’s nature: Castrate the lot of them, I say!” His Christmas message to the Roman Curia is not the same as his message on New Year’s Day — “for the celebration of the World Day of Peace”. Together, the two speeches raise some serious questions that deserve closer reading, for they are, jointly, a clear indication that the Roman Catholic Church intends to interfere in the internal affairs of nations by prescribing moral legislation pertaining to matters now in dispute: specifically, matters concerning the marriage of homosexuals, abortion and assisted dying. Given the Vatican’s apparent status as a state, although, as Geoffrey Robertson points out, “[n]either the Vatican nor the Holy See, or [sic] both together, satisfy the legal definition of statehood” (The Case of the Pope, 65), these claims are intrusive and dangerous. That the leader of a religion, occupying a few acres of Italian soil, should have diplomatic representatives around the world would be laughable if it weren’t actually happening. States should recognise that for a nation to have diplomatic relationships with a church to which some of its citizens belong is already to have blurred the edges of the separation of church and state, and, as I shall mention later, the pope’s Christmas message makes it clear how dangerous an obfuscation this is. While I am no organiser of protests, this is something that should be protested and defeated.

Here are the reasons, clearly set forth by Geoffrey Robertson. The Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations (1961) provides that:

(1) Without prejudice to their privileges and immunities, it is the duty of all persons enjoying such privileges and immunities to respect the laws and regulations of the receiving state. They also have a duty not to interfere in the internal affairs of that state. [my italics; quoted in The Case of the Pope, 86]

Robertson points out that for many years the Vatican has done precisely that. It has reserved for itself and its own law, cases concerning clergy sexual abuse of children, and has refused, and often required silence on the part of the offended person or persons, until statutory limitations had expired, on pain of excommunication, to inform the appropriate civil authorities of the felonious actions of its employees. Besides this, the church has interfered in the internal affairs of countries to which it sends papal representatives, by the ‘spiritual blackmail’ of Catholic politicians, threatening excommunication if they do not, in relationship to legislation such as that concerning abortion and homosexual marriage, vote in accordance with orthodox Catholic moral principles. Robertson’s conclusion is clear:

The reality is that the Holy See has, by exerting its Canon Law jurisdiction over crime, and by making spiritual threats to democratically elected politicians, fundamentally ignored the Convention obligations of a state under Article 41 of the Vienna Convention, and should no longer be treated as if it is one. [86-87]

This is important, in view of what the pope, in his address to the Curia, has to say. It is my view also that we should cease to pay attention to the elaborate fiction of the papacy, by using the titles and names associated with the office claimed by the pope. The man’s a man for a’ that. He was given names by his mother and father, and used those names for most of his life. Now that he is the octogenarian totalitarian ruler of an effete collection of old cronies pretending to be a state, the name that he has so narcissistically chosen for himself, and which is imagined by some of the faithful to raise him above the common lot of humankind, should be reserved for intra-church occasions — they may, of course, call each other whatever they like — but we who dissent from the pretence of holiness and spiritual jurisdiction should not accord him the respect attaching to the customs of these few acres of Italy, whose presumed ”statehood” depends upon that scoundrel Mussolini, which was simply a fascistic con, just like all the rest of that man’s pretended power and glory.

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If it is so important to live according to one’s nature: Castrate the lot of them, I say!

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Available in Polish translation here. Thanks again to Malgorzata!

Here’s a picture of the Clown of the Vatican giving Christmas greetings to a room full of celibate fundamentalists who have made a new year’s resolution to oppose gay marriage with all the power supposedly vested in them by the Ruler of the Universe. Indeed, Christmas, for the pope and his henchmen has become the occasion of the most virulent anti-gay campaign ever to emanate from the frowsty halls of the Vatican. Instead of peace and joy, and the sentimentality of cribs and cowsheds and a sacred baby, we have the pope in attack mode. The overly ornate hall is meant to intimidate us, but don’t let the pictures of angels dupe you. These guys know all about realpolitik.

?????

To be quite frank, it now simply makes me angry, that a bunch of celibate men should gather together and tell the rest of the world what sexuality is for, and how people should act with respect to their nature, as though human nature were a fixed datum which cannot be varied or further defined. If the Jesus they pretend to worship were to walk into this hall, they’d have him arrested and sent packing. But the thing is that here is a room full of contradictions, every man jack of them acting contrary to his nature (or at least pretending to do so). And yet they have the unmitigated gall to define how the rest of us are to live. According to a Reuters report, the pope (along with his gang of overdressed “virgins”) is forming a coalition of religions to defend “real” marriage and to oppose the legalisation of gay marriage, and it’s high time we told this geriatric failure of a human being that we don’t think this gathering of men sworn to celibacy has anything to teach the world about sexuality or the family. About love, clearly, they have nothing to teach, the pope’s hateful “Christmas” message having gone out to all the world. You know the pope thinks he’s in trouble when the substitutes gay marriage for the manger and the holy mother and child.

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Sensitivity in its place, but not always sensitivity

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My title could apply equally well to the overly sensitive people in Pakistan who are too often urged to mob violence by any perceived insult to Islam or its prophet. However, I mean it to apply to those engaged in the sort of mindless religious violence that got a man beaten and then burnt to death by an outraged mob in Sindh province in Pakistan. Jerry Coyne justly quotes Steven Weinberg’s famous remark that

[w]ith or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.

Clearly, free speech is a fantasy in a country where this happens so frequently, and it raises very serious questions about the ability of Islam to adapt to the modern world. I think this is something that needs to be faced very bluntly. While I am aware that there are those like Irshad Manji and Ed Hussain who think that Islam can moderate itself, and fit comfortably with democratic forms of governance, the evidence so far is not at all promising. I recall the televised conversation between Manji and Salman Rushdie in New York, where Rushdie’s dissent from Maji’s views, though politely expressed, was very clear. It was obvious that he did not think that Islam and democracy were easily compatible.

Many Muslims come to this country, sequester themselves in ethnic communities where women have almost the same status in a free democracy that their sisters have in Muslim majority areas of the world, and the Supreme Court has just muddied the waters as to whether a person’s freedom of religion permits her to wear the niqab, or the accused have a right to see their accuser. The question, to my mind, is whether people have the right to live in a democracy and yet practice age-old misogynistic customs which directly imply women’s secondary place in society and in the home, and whether other citizens are forbidden from raising the question of the conflict between these customs and democratic governance and the equality of citizens. Does sensitivity necessarily forbid criticism and distrust of those who practice customs so at odds with the presumed equality of all people which is enshrined in our Charter of Rights and Freedoms?

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