The Catholic Taliban

The Italian government has given the mayors of their towns new powers to help them crack down on crime and ‘anti-social’ behavior. So what does the mayor of the seaside town of Castellammare di Stabia want to use these powers for? To ban mini-skirts, low-cut jeans, sunbathing, playing football in public places, and blasphemy.

Of course, a local Catholic priest approves, because when it comes to upholding the highest standards of morality, the Catholic Church is the first institution that comes to mind, no?

How Adam and Eve killed the dinosaurs

In my earlier post titled Gen fight at the Baptist corral, I discussed the hoo-ha that is currently going on in some religious circles because of William Dembski’s attempt at reconciling the doctrine of original sin with evolution and an old Earth.

The reason that this is a problem for Christians is that they believe that all suffering is due to the fall from grace caused by the original sin of Adam and Eve. If you believe in an old Earth and evolution, then how do you explain the natural disasters and suffering that occurred during the time of our pre-human ancestors? Dembski’s book presumably answered this question but since there was no chance in hell that I would buy that book and read it, I thought his solution would be forever lost to me.
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The war on WikiLeaks

As Glenn Greenwald points out, the hatchet job on WikiLeaks and its head Julian Assange has begun with innuendo and character attacks, led by the New York Times, CNN, and the rest of the major media.

Why?

Because they were all cheerleaders for the Iraq war and WikiLeaks is making that war look bad by revealing details of torture, civilian killings, and cover-ups. And Assange also makes the media look bad by breaking stories that they were either did not investigate themselves or did not want to report for fear of losing their access to US and Iraq government officials.

This is why we need to support WikiLeaks.

The ugliness of racism

A homeowner in Missouri put up a Halloween display on their front yard (visible even to motorists going by on interstate I-55) that consisted of a robed and hooded Ku Klux Klan figure standing next to an effigy of a black man hanging from a noose. He seemed to feel that his display showed “white pride”.

What is disturbing about this is not that some people have such attitudes. We surely know that such people exist and will always be among us. What is disturbing is that it is a throwback to an undesirable past when ugly manifestations of racism were blatant and overt. If such incidents start to become more common, it will not reflect well on the political climate that is developing in this country.

New WikiLeaks release

As anticipated, Wikileaks has released over 400,000 new secret documents, this time on the Iraq war. The Guardian report on the leaks says that it has new revelations of deaths and abuses of Iraqis.

As predicted, the anti-Wikileaks propaganda has begun, with the Pentagon saying: “This security breach could very well get our troops and those they are fighting with killed. Our enemies will mine this information looking for insights into how we operate, cultivate sources and react in combat situations, even the capability of our equipment.”

We should bear in mind that similar alarms raised after the previous leaks proved to be highly overblown.

More on the Juan Williams firing

As I have said before, my delight with the firing of Juan Williams was simple. I thought he was a lousy journalist and I was glad not to have to listen to him anymore. But Jason Linkins captures why the firing was so unusual and it is not because of free speech issues:

Yesterday, NPR cashiered correspondent Juan Williams for doing something that had hitherto never been considered an offense in media circles: defaming Muslims. Up until now, you could lose your job for saying intemperate things about Jews and about Christians and about Matt Drudge. You could even lose a job for failing to defame Muslims. But we seem to be in undiscovered country at the moment.

Glenn Greenwald explains that some are expressing outrage because creating anti-Muslim fear is their goal and the NPR action has threatened their drive towards it by making it seem as if bigotry towards Muslims should be treated the same way as bigotry towards any other group.

The double standard in our political discourse — which tolerates and even encourages anti-Muslim bigotry while stigmatizing other forms — has been as beneficial as it has been glaring. NPR’s firing of Juan Williams threatened to change that by rendering this bigotry as toxic and stigmatized as other types. That could not be allowed, which is why the backlash against NPR was so rapid, intense and widespread. I’m not referring here to those who object to viewpoint-based firings of journalists in general and who have applied that belief consistently: that’s a perfectly reasonable view to hold (and one I share). I’m referring to those who rail against NPR’s actions by invoking free expression principles they plainly do not support and which they eagerly violate whenever the viewpoint in question is one they dislike. For most NPR critics, the real danger from Williams’ firing is not to free expression, but to the ongoing fear-mongering campaign of defamation and bigotry against Muslims (both foreign and domestic) that is so indispensable to so many agendas.

That sounds right to me.

James Wolcott has his usual droll but accurate take on the event. He points out that Williams can now fully be the kind of person that Fox News loves, the minority who panders to white resentment by validating their stereotypes about minorities, saying “Well, clearly that day has come and such a relief it must be for Williams, able to capitulate to conservative middle-aged white men without having to fret about whatever flak he might get back home at NPR.”

Gen fight at the Baptist corral

A battle has broken out in the genteel world of Baptist theology over the proper understanding of the book of Genesis.

It began with the publication in 2009 of the book The End of Christianity: Finding a Good God in an Evil World by William Dembski. Dembski’s name will be a familiar to those who followed the controversy over so-called ‘intelligent design’ (ID) because he was one of their key leaders. He is a clever and well-educated man, a glutton for formal education whose bio says he has a B.A. in psychology, an M.S. in statistics, a Ph.D. in philosophy, a doctorate in mathematics, and a master of divinity degree. Much of his work during the ID debates was aimed at producing mathematical and statistical arguments for god using information and complexity theories. He is also a prolific writer, churning out books and papers at a prodigious rate, which made him a moving target. By the time scientists and mathematicians had analyzed his latest book and pointed out flaws in his arguments, he would have a new book out where he would claim that he had addressed them.
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