Just 6 books

AC Grayling in CiF:

The magazine Publishers Weekly reported earlier this year that the member publishing houses of the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association between them produced 13,400 new titles in the two years 2005-6 alone. This is just one segment of the religious publishing industry in just one wing of one of the world religions…
Yet a mere half dozen anti-religious tomes have stirred up all the hornets in their nests, have offended and outraged the devout… To me this suggests a profound insecurity among the religious.

Part insecurity, part role-playing. The idea of Christians as a besieged minority, suffering for their faith, is at least 1700 years old, and many of them cling to it even when it’s clearly absurd.

Congratulations Lewis Hamilton

Lewis Hamilton at the Canadian Grand Prix: first pole, first victory, total command of the race! Wonderful.
But what a bizarre race. Crashes, black-flagging, crashes, pit errors, crashes. Raikkonen and Alonso duking it out – that’s not unexpected, but they were fighting over 10th place! Alonso was completely out of form, making mistake after mistake and finally being beaten in a fair fight by Takuma Sato. There were four safety cars. Behind Hamilton, Heidfeld and Wurz came in second and third. And Kovalainen, after a horrendous practice and qualifying during which he wrecked the car, blew an engine, and then wrecked the car again, came through from dead last to finish fourth. Of the 22 starters, 8 retired and 2 were disqualified.
The biggest crash of the day was Robert Kubica‘s frightening 180 MPH barrel-roll, and the medical team seemed to take an age to get him out of his shattered car. However they took him to hospital in Montreal and (at this point) he seems to be awake and in stable condition with a broken leg.
As for Hamilton, in his first six Grands Prix he has finished 3rd, 2nd, 2nd, 2nd, 2nd, and 1st. Simply amazing.
UPDATE: As The English Guy points out, the frequent safety car periods mean that Hamilton’s final margin of victory (4.3 seconds) doesn’t reflect the extent of his domination. In addition, the new (U.S. style) safety car rules allow lapped traffic to overtake the safety car and rejoin at the back of the “train”. Without this, Hamilton would certainly have lapped most of the field – perhaps all of it.

"No, I suppose not."

I’m re-reading Ludovic Kennedy‘s book All In The Mind: A Farewell to God. Many of the childhood experiences that Kennedy writes about in the first chapter remind me of my own formative years. For example:

Another puzzlement was the assertion in sermon after sermon that Jesus had died for our sins. Although my mother had proved something of a broken reed in my previous enquiries, I decided to tackle her again. For whose sins, I asked? She looked pole-axed. “Well,” she said after a long pause, “everybody’s, I suppose.” I said, “Yours and mine?” and my mother said, “Well, yes,” so I then said, “What would you say yours were?” She gave a little embarrassed laugh, a pause for thought and then with an air of triumph said, “As you know, I’m very unpunctual.” I said, “That’s hardly a sin,” but my mother insisted it was. “You see, it’s being very inconsiderate of other people, making them wonder if you’re coming or not.” I said, “Hardly something Christ died for?” She looked deflated. “No,” she had to agree, “I suppose not.” And as she presumably had no major sins in her locker like defrauding the railways or grievous bodily harm, and wasn’t going to admit to any other minor ones, that was really that.

I had a similar conversation, though not with my mother, and I remember that it all seemed rather silly. Soon afterwards I learned the official explanation, the “original sin” nonsense concocted by Ambrose, Augustine et al. That idea wasn’t just silly, it was offensive. This happened while I was growing up in England, just 12 years after the end of the Second World War. Anti-German sentiment was still a staple of English culture, ((perhaps it still is)) and I remember that a German boy came to our school one day. Our teachers emphasized that we were to treat him politely, because it would be unfair not to: children aren’t responsible for the actions of their parents. I agreed – it was “obviously” a matter of natural justice.
A few years later I would cite this issue of the fundamental injustice of the core of Catholic dogma during my farewell conversation with my parish priest. And like Ludovic Kennedy’s mother, his relectant response was embarrassment. “No, I suppose not.”

The abhorrent misogyny of Saudi Arabia

Megan Stack looks back on being a woman reporter in Saudi Arabia:

One afternoon, a candidate invited me to meet his daughter. She spoke fluent English and was not much younger than me. I cannot remember whether she was wearing hijab, the Islamic head scarf, inside her home, but I have a memory of pink. I asked her about the elections.
“Very good,” she said.
So you really think so, I said gently, even though you can’t vote?
“Of course,” she said. “Why do I need to vote?”
Her father chimed in. He urged her, speaking English for my benefit, to speak candidly. But she insisted: What good was voting? She looked at me as if she felt sorry for me, a woman cast adrift on the rough seas of the world, no male protector in sight.
“Maybe you don’t want to vote,” I said. “But wouldn’t you like to make that choice yourself?”
“I don’t need to,” she said calmly, blinking slowly and deliberately. “If I have a father or a husband, why do I need to vote? Why should I need to work? They will take care of everything.”

When people like Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens cite this kind of thing as an example of the evils of religion, a common response ((can’t find a good cite now – sorry)) is that it’s not religion, it’s just culture; the Saudi tribespeople were patriarchal long before Islam, and women have always been treated as chattels in that part of he world. But religion is the main reason why cultures fail to adapt, to evolve. Religions tend to divide the world into black and white, good and evil, “sacred” and “profane”, “kosher” and “non-kosher”, “halal” and “haram”. It also treats the “sacred” stuff as an inseparable whole: to challenge any part is to attack the whole. (Thus the wish of two lesbians in Vermont to celebrate their relationship becomes an attack on all families, undermines the moral fabric of the nation, and – Falwell, Robertson et al – is a root cause of the 9/11 attacks.)
This is why religion is so poisonous to the civic order: it stands foursquare against compromise, adaption, and personal choice. Saudi Arabia is just the most outrageous example.

Why "militant atheist"?

Jeffrey Shallit surveys the press coverage of books on atheism and wonders why atheists are always described as “militant”:

From the meaning of “militant”, you might expect that Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens are burning down churches, or at least leading protests, stirring up crowds with their fiery rhetoric. You would be disappointed, of course. What Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens have done is write books. Hitchens is more of a curmudgeon than a militant, and Dawkins and Harris are both rather mild-mannered. Nobody is leaving their public events carrying torches and singing the atheist analogue of the Horst Wessel song.

Over at Pharyngula, Jurjen has an historical explanation for the origin of the term. Of course this doesn’t explain why “militant” is always used with public atheists and rarely with (far more militant) advocates of religion.

"If we give up our way of life, the terrorists will have won"

Amid the government-sponsored hysteria surrounding air travel (“OMG – he’s going to blow up the plane with a tube of toothpaste and a bottle of baby formula!!!”), Josh reports that Wenger has come up with a Swiss Army Knife that has “a micro screwdriver, scissors, nail file/cleaner, toothpick, and tweezers” – but no blade. Josh is happy, but I found this, well, depressing. File under stuff that ought to be unnecessary….

Damn, damn, damn

Greg Djerejian lays out the big picture:

From the Subcontinent to the Levant, large swaths of the Middle East and South Asia are in turmoil. What follows are (somewhat random) dispatches meant to give a sense of the depth of the multiple crises that are contributing to a destabilization of the wider region.

Brilliant, in a scathing, world-weary kind of way. The Syrian connections are simply WTF head-shaking moments.
(Charlie will probably try to nit-pick, but he’ll be wasting his time.)

"Oh God, doctor, I was hoping it was cancer."

From Daily Kos: WHY I PROVIDE ABORTIONS

I was assigned a 40 plus year old, poverty stricken mother of several children… This care worn mother-of-several had a large abdominal mass that I rapidly determined to be a well advanced pregnancy. I asked my resident to come and break the news to this woman; it was very obvious to me that she was not going to be happy about the news of another pregnancy. When told that she – already unable to adequately feed and clothe her family – was again pregnant, she looked up at me and the resident. There we stood, two white males, well clothed, well feed young men with superior educations. We were, in her eyes, stunningly blessed and obviously going places in the world. She began to weep silently. She must have assumed, for good reason, that there was no way that we would understand her problems; she knew also that there was nothing that we could or would do to relieve her lacerating misery.
“Oh God, doctor,” she said quietly, “I was hoping it was cancer.”

Cruising to Bremerton

It’s another warm day here in Seattle. Back in Boston, the official definition of a heatwave is “three successive days over 90°F”. Seattlites tell me that the local equivalent is “three successive days over 75°F”, in which case we’re enduring a scorcher. So this morning I decided to get out on the water: I walked down to Pier 52 and took the 8:45 ferry to Bremerton. This is a really good deal: it’s a one hour trip, and for pedestrians it costs $6.70 westbound. Eastbound, it’s free. So I got to cruise across Puget Sound for a couple of hours, including breakfast. On the way out, the boat was almost empty, but on the return trip it was full of baseball fans of all ages. (I guess the Mariners are in town.) I took a few photos, and finished the last couple of chapters of Endless Forms Most Beautiful, Sean Carroll’s introduction to “Evo-Devo“. (Verdict: I liked it a lot, but it left me looking around for the next book that I can read to get more detail on some of the mechanisms.)