Count me skeptical whether there is a ‘right’ to die, or a right to very much else for that matter, but a truly humane society would not force this helpless man to go to the courts for the relief he seeks:

LONDON (AP) – Former rugby player Tony Nicklinson had a high-flying job as a corporate manager in Dubai, where he went skydiving and bridge-climbing in his free time. Seven years ago, he suffered a paralyzing stroke. Today he can only move his head, cannot speak and needs constant care.

And he wants to die.

To try to ensure that whoever ends his life won’t be jailed, the 57-year-old Nicklinson recently asked Britain’s High Court to declare that any doctor who gives him a lethal injection with his consent won’t be charged with murder. This week, the court will hold its first hearing on the case

.

Euthanasia · Tony Nicklinson · UK

The New Atheists are much too shrill for my decidedly agnostic tastes. In many respects, they are on a hiding to nothing. The religious impulse will always be with us and so will be a belief in the supernatural. But not all atheists are new atheists: It’s also quite possible for an atheist to admire much of the structure, cohesion and sense of tradition that some religions bring to society, not to speak of the happiness they can bring to many of their adherents.

Nevertheless these comments by Alain de Botton, an atheist playing nice, go too far:

The starting point of religion is that we are children, and we need guidance. The secular world often gets offended by this. It assumes that all adults are mature – and therefore, it hates didacticism, it hates the idea of moral instruction.

Oh come on: I suspect that there are many secular folk who are very far from convinced that “all adults are mature”.

De Botton continues:

But of course we are children, big children who need guidance and reminders of how to live. And yet the modern education system denies this. It treats us all as far too rational, reasonable, in control.

Really? Has he any idea about the stifling speech codes, the numbskull impositions of zero tolerance, and, to name just one more example, the endless environmentalist nagging that pollute today’s schools and universities.

Wait, there’s more:

We are far more desperate than secular modernity recognizes. All of us are on the edge of panic and terror pretty much all the time – and religions recognize this.

Who is this “all”, I wonder? I do agree that religions recognize that profound anxiety can be part of the human condition. But then so do pharmaceutical companies, and for many people their remedies will be a better route to take, either with the additional help of religion, or without.

De Botton:

Religions are fascinating because they are giant machines for making ideas vivid and real in people’s lives: ideas about goodness, about death, family, community etc. Nowadays, we tend to believe that the people who make ideas vivid are artists and cultural figures, but this is such a small, individual response to a massive set of problems. So I am deeply interested in the way that religions are in the end institutions, giant machines, organizations, directed to managing our inner life. There is nothing like this in the secular world, and this seems a huge pity.

A pity? Nope, I would say that it is a cause for celebration. There was plenty of talk about engineering the soul back in the old Bolshevik days. No-one needs that lot back in town. For those who are looking for the sort of guidance de Botton is discussing, but who believe that the religious route is not for them, there are many other places to look, from family, to tradition, to history, you name it. But to be able to look in that way does require a broadly rational education. And a broadly rational education ought never to deny our own immense capacity (for good or bad) for irrationality.

H/t: Andrew Sullivan

Alain de Botton · atheism · Paternalism

Occasions such as the National Prayer Breakfast are not the sort of thing that I spend a lot of (or any) time worrying about. If that’s what politicians want to show up to a harmless, by now somewhat traditional, civic ritual, that’s fine. It’s a free country. But it seems like the people organizing this event are not above bearing a little false (or misleading) witness, and that’s a shame:

Doubting Thomas at Secular News Daily takes up the story:

This year’s invitation…is festooned with quotes from presidents lauding the role of the Bible in public life.

Among those quoted is Thomas Jefferson.

“In extracting the pure principles which Jesus taught,” the Jefferson quote says, “we should have to strip off the artificial vestments in which they have been muffled…. there will be found remaining the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man.”

If you read the quote without knowing its origins, it looks like Jefferson is praising the teachings of Jesus. And in the context of the prayer breakfast program, there is the implication that these teachings should be integrated into government policy.

Jefferson was praising Jesus – sort of. He was praising his personal interpretation of Jesus. And that Jesus is one the Family and its Religious Right allies would never acknowledge or accept.

On Oct. 13, 1813, Jefferson wrote a lengthy letter to his friend John Adams, outlining his latest project. It involved cutting up copies of the New Testament and tossing all of the stuff about Jesus that Jefferson did not accept – mainly claims of his divinity and the miracles.

“In extracting the pure principles which he [Jesus] taught,” Jefferson wrote, “we should have to strip off the artificial vestments in which they have been muffled by priests, who have travestied them into various forms, as instruments of riches and power to themselves….We must reduce our volume to the simple evangelists, select, even from them, the very words only of Jesus…. There will be found remaining the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man.”

Jefferson went on to write, “I have performed this operation for my own use, by cutting verse by verse out of the printed book, and arranging the matter which is evidently his, and which is as easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill. The result is an octavo of forty-six pages, of pure and unsophisticated doctrines.”

The Prayer Breakfast invitation – currently circulating on Capitol Hill — thus selectively edits Jefferson’s passage to remove his criticism of greedy, power-hungry clergy and cover up his Bible-cutting project…

Jefferson Bible · National Prayer Breakfast · thomas jefferson

Inspired by Razib’s earlier post, I put this up on the Corner:

Via the New York Times:

CAIRO — Egyptian authorities confirmed Saturday that a political coalition dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, the 84-year-old group that virtually invented political Islam, had won about 47 percent of the seats in the first Parliament elected since the ouster of Hosni Mubarak. An alliance of ultraconservative Islamists won the next largest share of seats, about 25 percent.

The tally, with the two groups of Islamists together winning about 70 percent of the seats, indicates the deep cultural conservatism of the Egyptian public, which is expressing its will through free and fair elections for the first time in more than six decades.

This result only goes to underline the mistake made by Mubarak (an American ally now on trial for his life, a fate that must send an interesting message to other leaders in the region still prepared to work alongside the US) in ceding so much of Egypt’s cultural space to the men in the mosque. Turkey’s Ataturk knew better.

Over at Secular Right Razib Khan has an acid response to this news:

Nevertheless I do recall back in the heady days of the Arab Spring some commenters infected by revolutionary fervor would scoff that the purported Islamist sympathies of the people. What this goes to show is that enthusiasm and hope does not translate into reality. If secular liberals in Egypt bow before the principle of popularity, then they accept that it is right and proper that their present their throats to their new overlords. I don’t view this as an apocalypse. It is what it is. But it was predictable.

The Times notes:

A coalition of parties founded by the young leaders of the revolt that unseated Mr. Mubarak won only a few percent of the seats…

Predictable indeed: revolutions have been devouring their children for a long time.

If there is any glimmer of hope, however faint, it lies in the divisions between Muslim Brotherhood and the ultras.

The two groups have described very different visions and appear to be rivals rather than collaborators. The Brotherhood has said it intends to respect personal liberties and will focus on economic and social issues, gradually nudging the culture toward its conservative values. By contrast, the ultraconservatives, known as Salafis, put a higher priority on legislation on Islamic moral issues, like the consumption of alcohol, women’s dress and the contents of popular culture.

Even if we accept the Muslim Brotherhood’s reassurances at face value (a stretch, to put it mildly), something (not least their own history) tells me that it will see the greater threat to its position as coming from the Salafists, and will thus tack strongly in their direction.

I hope I’m wrong.

Egypt · Islamic fundamentalism · Islamism · Muslim Brotherhood

After Gingrich’s disastrously strong win in South Carolina, I can only repeat what I wrote over on NRO as one of my predictions for 2012:

Let’s start with a prediction that will make me as miserable as it might make you mad: Barack Obama will win thoroughly undeserved reelection, because none of the possible GOP candidates has what it takes (politically) to beat him. The Republicans should, however, hang on to the House and grab hold of the Senate. They will not, however, achieve the latter if the GOP’s presidential nominee is someone whom a large number of voters will go out of their way to vote against. My second prediction is that most NRO readers will know to whom it is that I am referring.

2012 Elections · Newt Gingrich · South Carolina

Am I the only one to note the relative lack of salience of the Catholic-Protestant divide in the Republican primaries? Commentators routinely ignore the fact that the two candidates with the greatest appeal to evangelical Protestants are Roman Catholic. Not only that, but one, Rick Santorum, is a staunch Catholic affiliated with an organization which is not ecumenical in the least. But all that doesn’t matter now. It goes to show how abstract labels and sectarian divisions which are stark to those prone to over-rationalize religion melt away in the face of historical forces.

The American Republican party is the faction of white Protestants. And yet currently the only white Protestant candidate, Ron Paul, has no particular appeal to that demographic.

Sectarianism

Islamists Win 70% of Seats in the Egyptian Parliament:

Egyptian authorities confirmed Saturday that a political coalition dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, the 84-year-old group that virtually invented political Islam, had won about 47 percent of the seats in the first Parliament elected since the ouster of Hosni Mubarak. An alliance of ultraconservative Islamists won the next largest share of seats, about 25 percent.

…

The tally, with the two groups of Islamists together winning about 70 percent of the seats, indicates the deep cultural conservatism of the Egyptian public, which is expressing its will through free and fair elections for the first time in more than six decades.

But the two groups have described very different visions and appear to be rivals rather than collaborators. The Brotherhood has said it intends to respect personal liberties and will focus on economic and social issues, gradually nudging the culture toward its conservative values. By contrast, the ultraconservatives, known as Salafis, put a higher priority on legislation on Islamic moral issues, like the consumption of alcohol, women’s dress and the contents of popular culture.

The data was there for us to infer that this would be the outcome. Nevertheless I do recall back in the heady days of the Arab Spring some commenters infected by revolutionary fervor would scoff at the purported Islamist sympathies of the people. What this goes to show is that enthusiasm and hope does not translate into reality. If secular liberals in Egypt bow before the principle of popularity, then they accept that it is right and proper that they present their throats to their new overlords. I don’t view this as an apocalypse. It is what it is. But it was predictable.

Islam

It looks like the Left-leaning Center for American Progress is under fire for “anti-Semitism.” The issue at hand is the use of rhetoric such as “Israel-Firster.” CAP’s problem is that it fancies itself a mainstream organization which endeavors to effect policy. That means an honest and candid assessment of America’s peculiar relationship with Israel, and the rather lopsided center of gravity of the American political landscape in relation this issue, is not politic. Over at Salon Glenn Greenwald outlines exactly how CAP and its junior staffers were subjected to a organized campaign by AIPAC and its fellow travelers. He relates the following:

(more…)

anti-Semitism · racism

In the in-tray today an apocalyptic, adjective-crammed appeal to support the Gingrich campaign. It began as follows:

Dear Conservative:

In 1964, Ronald Reagan told conservatives that this was a time for choosing. Faced with a radical, progressive President who would weaken America abroad and at home, they could either fight to preserve America as the last, best hope on earth, or consign their children to a thousand years of darkness.

This year is another such time for choosing. We can either nominate a timid Massachusetts moderate Republican to take on a secular socialist who threatens to turn us into a nation like the decrepit Republics of Western Europe, or we can nominate a bold Reagan conservative who will take the fight to Barack Obama in the Fall. Will you join me?

Uh, no (there are others who will pose a more effective challenge to the Democrats), but it’s entertaining to see “secular” up there with the other scare-words.

2012 Elections · Newt Gingrich · The Secular Menace

Via El Pais:

The Spanish Catholic Church is also concerned about homosexuality. During his Boxing Day sermon, the Bishop of Córdoba, Demetrio Fernández, said there was a conspiracy by the United Nations. “The Minister for Family of the Papal Government, Cardinal Antonelli, told me a few days ago in Zaragoza that UNESCO has a program for the next 20 years to make half the world population homosexual. To do this they have distinct programs, and will continue to implant the ideology that is already present in our schools.”

H/t:Andrew Sullivan

homosexuality · Roman Catholicism · Vatican