When I was 5, I had a teacher, whom I now recognise was a fundamentalist Christian. Which actually is quite rare in the reasonably affluent, relatively liberal area of London I live in.
She used to talk regularly about the glory of God and Jesus, and how Jesus came down to save us all, blah blah blah. We’ve all heard it.
R. Joseph Hoffman is a flaming authoritarian, about as illiberal as you can get without joining the Tea Party. He’s very, very upset at Terry Jones and that gang of blithering idiots who assembled that terrible movie slandering Muslims, provoking riots in Egypt and Libya. Oh, and also his comrades-in-arms, Jerry Coyne, Eric MacDonald, and me.
I have just one question for PZ: What are you thinking now? God save the First Amendment?
Actually, I suppose he could bothered to read what I wrote on the “work of a group of incompetent fundamentalist Christian assholes pissing on entire cultures”, but that would be too much too ask — R. Joseph Hoffman is very busy raging at the voices in his head. I don’t even know why he bothers to ask what I’m thinking, since it won’t matter what I say, what with his fantasies informing his perceptions. I mean, we went around on this before, and he interprets what I wrote as “Hoffman coddles Muslims”. Go ahead, read what I wrote; you’ll have a very tough time pulling that interpretation out of what I said.
But what do I think of this situation? May reason save the rule of law.
Terry Jones and his compatriots are idiots, but they have a right to say hateful, awful, evil things. I’d say the same is true of the Rev. Phelps, the KKK, the Catholic Church, the Mormons, and R. Joseph Hoffman. I should have the right to say how much I despise them all, and I should also have the right to tune them out and ignore them. I’d actually rather they spoke up and made their positions clear; the threats I get in email don’t trouble me so much as the worry that the ones who’ll actually do something dangerous aren’t so stupid as to open their mouths and announce their intent.
Terry Jones is an intolerant ignoramus, but I don’t worry about him. What bothers me more are the intolerant ignoramuses who riot and murder when they’re offended; I’d rather they went out and made an incompetent propaganda film, for instance. I worry that our president might actually listen when Egypt calls for world-wide censorship, as when the White House explored the idea of having an offensive video removed from youtube (Google said no, fortunately — but they do assist in local censorship efforts).
Decide that a Terry Jones must be silenced, and who is next? I can tell you: atheists. Egypt has arrested Alber Saber for the crime of atheism.
On Wednesday, September 12th, a Muslim friend and neighbor using Saber’s computer reportedly discovered that he was the admin for the Egyptian Athiests Facebook page, which is the largest of several such groups online with over a thousand “likes”. On September 10 the notorious “Innocence of Muslims” had been posted on the site. Over the next two days crowds began to gather outside his house, threatening Saber and his mother.
On Thursday night Saber’s mother called the police, hoping for protection. When the police arrived however, rather than fending the threatening mob outside, they arrested her son.
The charge according to his lawyer and supporters, focuses on videos in which Saber discusses his own Coptic faith or lack thereof. This makes sense as to charge anyone for posting the “Innocence of Muslims” video would set an impossible precedent. Even conservative broadcasters have also shown the video, or sections of it on their shows. It is not yet clear however, which materials will be included in the case against him, which is currently in the hands of the General Prosecutor. The next hearing is expected in four days.
After talking with Saber’s friends it seems likely to me that Egypt’s Islamist leaders are hoping to create a local issue where they can be seen as the tough guys, to distract Egyptians from how the furor in the international arena, in the context of which they seem impotent.
There is no difference between what the Egyptian government has done to this man, and what R. Joseph Hoffman asks the American government to do to Terry Jones:
Arrest him without delay. Deploy the National Guard. Surround the Church.
No. That’s totalitarianism. Free speech isn’t free if you’re only allowed to speak government- and church-approved opinions. It’s surprising how many people cannot comprehend that.
(via Why Evolution Is True)
I’m an anti-theist. I used to be an atheist but I realized that it did not describe my true feelings. And let’s face it somewhere between theist, atheist, and anti-theist it’s all about your belief system. I grew up Mormon in the deep south. My family are multi-generational Mormons active in both their faith and church leadership. I left my religion at the age of 18 as I watched friends of mine coming back off their missions. Young men and women who had been brainwashed and inculcated into the hyperbolic microcosm that is the mormon religion.
That Deveny…she’s always causing trouble. And good for her.
She recently appeared on a panel debate show on Australian TV, Q&A, with Peter Jensen, an Anglican bishop. Jensen is smug, smarmy ass: when he wasn’t whining that we need a respectful discussion about the issues, he was announcing that women should submit to men in marriage, that same-sex marriage is unbiblical, that homosexuality is a disease, and no, the homophobia of the church can’t possibly contribute to gay teen suicide rates. He’s one of those guys who puts on his politeness with his clerical collar, and thinks both make him absolutely right, and able to say the most vile lies with smooth confidence.
Catherine Deveny was brash, smart, and assertive, and openly atheist. She is also a woman. She spoke the truth — that the church is a medieval institution promoting homophobia and misogyny, and that the facts and an unbiased morality of equality do not support Jensen’s claims.
Guess which one got all the negative press?
…I should not have been surprised at the fall-out from Catherine Deveny’s appearance on ABC’s Q&A this week. Deveny’s opposition to Anglican Archbishop, Peter Jensen, resulted in an onslaught of vitriolic criticism and abuse – even from those who claim to support her positions on asylum seekers, same-sex marriage and women’s equality.
Even the Australian weighed in with an editorial reprimanding Deveny and the ABC for failing to show the Anglican Archbishop of Sydney ‘proper regard’ and ‘respect’.
While the Australian characterises (or more accurately, caricatures) Deveny as mocking, crude, crass and intolerant, Jensen is ‘frank, concerned and conciliatory on homosexual health issues’. Deveny, we are told, was guilty of ‘shouting down’ the Archbishop.
Don’t they realize that the proper regard and respect to show a leader of institutionalized dogma is to turn him away at the door, and to spit in his eye every time he demands a respect to his position that he won’t show to women, gays, the poor, the disabled, the disenfranchised? Catherine Deveny, rather than being excesively rude, showed remarkable restraint at having to sit next to the poisonous old fraud.
But no, Chrys Stevenson documents the insults flung at Deveny — she was a crazy bitch who should shut up and brought down the whole tone of the event by dominating the conversation. What about that?
Curiously, as this was one of the rare Q&A’s where the women (Catherine Deveny, Concetta Fierravanti-Wells and Anna Krien) outnumbered the men, the male guests (Peter Jensen and Chris Evans) still managed to dominate the conversation 55 per cent to 45 per cent.
To the contrary of her critics, I think the other panelists were all dreary bores who said a range of things (some sensible, some odious) and Deveny was the only person who made the event interesting. But this attention that the public pays to mouthy women (even when she clearly gave everyone else a chance to speak their piece) ought to be recognized for what it is: being nice is a tool of the status quo; complaining about tone is an attempt to silence the passion and outrage of the oppressed; privilege perpetuates itself by labeling difference as deviancy.
Keep on speaking up, Catherine Deveny!
Because of Santa Claus.
Yes, this is going to take a bit of explaining. I was raised by parents who encouraged creativity and curiosity, who had shelves upon shelves of books on all walls of the house. And I had access to books as well: science fiction, fantasy, nonfiction. I remember quite clearly reading and rereading a science encyclopedia aimed at young children. I remember regular trips to the museum in Denver. I remember learning about how science worked by observing the world, and rejecting a belief if what was observed did not match the belief.
On Monday at 10pm EST, AronRa will be debating Ray Comfort on internet radio. I’m planning to tune in, even though I suspect Ray will just babble out his usual, familiar schtick and never engage any of the arguments.
I’m glad we can illustrate it with one simple cartoon.
I wouldn’t have called myself an atheist during my childhood, but I certainly was un-churched and if someone had asked me about my opinion of god I would have shrugged my shoulders and said “I don’t know. Maybe”. But my friends believed in him and he seemed important to them, so I decided to test his existence by asking for him to show me a tornado because I had always wanted to see one. I mean, he was supposedly all powerful and such, so that shouldn’t be such a difficult task, right? I lived in Colorado where tornados were fairly common and I found that even under what should have been easy circumstances to produce a tornado (inclement weather), god could not do it when I asked. I mean, god, god, you couldn’t even give me a god damn tornado when it was like all windy and lightning-ing and thundering everywhere? Pathetic. And so I decided there was probably nothing out there.
Dear Ron Lindsay:
I have to take exception to one small part of your recent post.
Greta Christina and PZ Myers have recently suggested that is it not necessarily a bad thing to be divisive. True, it is not necessarily a bad thing. It depends on what one is separating oneself from.
In her blog post, Greta Christina responded to the charge that the Atheism Plus initiative is divisive by claiming that the secular community is divided already. As evidence for this claim, she offered several deplorable incidents and actions, principally involving hate-filled threats and comments to women, many of which would be familiar to anyone active in the movement. She then asked rhetorically why such vile conduct has not been called “divisive.”
But if hate-filled comments and threats to women have not been expressly called divisive, it’s because such conduct does not threaten to divide the movement. It has already been repudiated, both implicitly and explicitly, by many, if not most, of the organizations in the movement.
I hope I was always destined to grow up as a rational thinker and a questioner of the questionable. And I think I tended this way even as a child, however I recall a defining moment when I was aged 10 that had to have an influence on my world view.
