Geoff Coupe's Blog

Reflections on life at “De Witte Wand”…

Category: Society

  • Another World

    I see that the Dutch "Scientific Council for Government Policy" in its report to the Dutch government has stated that the fact that a person holds dual nationality need not be an obstacle to their integrating into Dutch society. Phew, that’s a relief I thought, metaphorically clutching my British and Dutch nationalities to my bosom.
     
    It seems perfect common sense to me. And for that reason of course it gets right up the nose of rightwing politician Geert Wilders who claims that the council is living in "another world".  Well, suck it, Geert. 

  • Denial…

    …is not just a river in Egypt. Here’s President Ahmadinejad in full flow:
    "In Iran, we don’t have homosexuals. In Iran we don’t have this phenomenon. I don’t know who has told you we have it."
    Of course, he appears to be doing his best to kill them off or make them flee the country, so I suppose in that sense he is merely anticipating what he sees as the desired outcome.  

  • Just Talk It Over

    Flea points out how easy it is to lose trust between parents and children, often without ever realising that the process is happening. Boiling frogs again. 

  • The Savages Are Taking Over…

    This time, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown writes with a modicum of rationality. As she says, people deny facts, or commit the perversion of calling violence a question of honour.
     
    (hat tip to Ophelia for the link) 

  • The Council Of Europe On Creationism

    I’m pleased to see that the Council of Europe has got to the facts in its report on Creationism:
    Creationism in any of its forms, such as “intelligent design”, is not based on facts, does not use any scientific reasoning and its contents are definitely inappropriate for science classes.
     
    However, some people call for creationist theories to be taught in European schools alongside or even in place of the theory of evolution. From a scientific view point, there is absolutely no doubt that evolution is a central theory for our understanding of life on Earth.
     
    The Assembly calls on education authorities in member states to promote scientific knowledge and the teaching of evolution and to oppose firmly any attempts at teaching creationism as a scientific discipline.
    It’ll be interesting to see what happens when this report (The dangers of creationism in education – Document 11375, dated 17th September 2007) is submitted to the full Council for voting on its draft resolution. It will be even more interesting, if the Council supports its findings and the draft resolution, as to whether the 47 member states will have the guts to implement the report’s suggestions.   
     

  • The Mayor’s Epiphany

    The Mayor of San Diego, Jerry Sanders, has an epiphany and realises that the right thing to do is to support gay marriage. Watch the video to see the depth of emotion that is here. He did the right thing. It’s a pity that in too many places in this sorry world his humanity isn’t followed as a shining example of what is right. 

  • Ernst Tungendhat

    I’ve only just come across Ernst Tugendhat. He’s German, and a philosopher. There’s a rather good interview with him here, and via that, I came across this excellent piece that he wrote examining religion as a human need. It’s a very good exploration of an aspect of what Daniel Dennett calls the "belief in belief". 

  • Mary’s At It Again

    Mary Midgely, that is. And by "it", I mean a total misrepresentation of the views of Richard Dawkins. There’s a piece in today’s Independent which seems to show that, almost thirty years on from her crass misunderstanding of Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, she still hasn’t learnt anything and continues to peddle falsehoods. I’m almost inclined to believe that the term "moral philosopher" is an oxymoron in her particular case. 

  • Quite

    Jason Kottke Makes a good point. I’ve just been reading Rupert Everett’s Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins, and while I grant that he writes well, the milieu that he describes I find singularly repulsive.  

  • The Accident

    There was a road accident involving a car and a bus in London’s Tower Hamlets last Saturday night. Here’s the view from 30,000 feet, as reported by the BBC News.
     
    And here’s the view reported at ground level by Tom Reynolds. Tom speaks directly to each of us, and makes us stop to pause and reflect. 

  • Life’s Rich Tapestry

    As I’ve said before, families come in all shapes and sizes. Here’s Layla Kumari writing about her plans to marry Gian and raise a family. What makes their part of life’s tapestry a little more technicolour than most is that she is lesbian and Hindu, and he is a gay Sikh. Good luck to them both, I wish them well. 

  • Another Country

    Jean Kazez worries about those around her. I’m glad I don’t live where she does. 

  • People’s Lives

    A night on Earth. Lovely. We make of life what we can.

  • Six Degrees…

    And here’s another visit to the world of six degrees of separation again. Although this time it’s even more macabre than the last time. This time, I have to report than I am two degrees separated from the serial killer Dennis Neilsen. A good friend of mine knew Nielsen in, shall we say, the biblical sense. Thankfully, he survived to tell the tale. Others did not.  

  • Apostasy

    Here’s an English-language article (from The Times) about today’s launch in The Netherlands of the committee of ex-Muslims. Good luck to them. The Volkskrant today carries a perhaps-less-than-helpful political cartoon showing Ehsan Jami, the leader of the committee, caught in the tentacles of an octopus. One tentacle, behind him, holds a cudgel spiked with nails, which it is raising to strike at Jami. 
     
    One thing that irritates me about the Times article is that it repeats the canard that links the assasination of Pim Fortuyn with Muslim extremists. Can we please put this to rest? He was murdered by a white, Dutch, non-muslim, animal rights activist…
     
    Update: Ophelia also picks up on some of the odd language of the article that I had missed… I’m getting lax in my old age.

  • One Drone Less

    While one shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, I fear I come perilously close to that after reading this hilarious obituary of what seems to have been a rather unpleasant man.   

  • Articulation

    There’s an interesting article published on the Radio Netherlands web site today. It’s an interview with Farish Noor. He’s clearly an example of a Muslim who embodies nuanced thinking about his religion, and rightly warns against an over-simplistic interpretation of the Koran as evidenced by much of the media, and the Dutch right-wing parties in particular.
     
    All the same, I couldn’t help but be slightly taken aback by one thing in the article:
    Labour party member Ehsan Jami established a committee of ex-Muslims in order to support the right of Muslims to leave Islam. What do you think of his initiative?
    "If someone decides to leave his religion, then this is his fundamental freedom of choice and the Labour party should support it of course. But the party has to be careful not to give the impression that it only supports apostates. I wanted to meet Ehsan Jami, but unfortunately he could not make it. If there is one thing I would like to tell him it is that he should be very careful not to be used by the right wing by implying that the only good Muslim is an ex-Muslim. He should not forget that progressive Muslims like myself and many others have been fighting since a long time for the freedom of Muslims to leave Islam. And we paid the price for it. A friend of mine had his house bombed. I have lived with death threats for 10 years. People have come to my house to kill me. When people like Jami start to distort the debate in this manner, it may put back our effort 30 years."  
    Erm, who is distorting the debate here?

  • Free The Buggers

    As I’ve already mentioned, this week sees the 50th anniversary of the publication of the Wolfenden Report. Doug Ireland, over at his DIRELAND blog, has a good summary of how life was for British homosexuals 50 years ago. He mentions the BBC’s "Hidden Lives" themed programming which has been running this week on BBC Four. That has been extremely good. A whole series of dramas and documentaries, some new, but many old ones getting a well-deserved airing again (TV biographies of Joe Orton, Frankie Howard, Leigh Bowery and Joe Meek, for example – all first-class).
     
    I had never seen the Face-to-Face interview of Gilbert Harding conducted by John Freeman before (it was first aired in 1960), and I must say it was a revelation. Freeman was clearly trying to get Harding say that he was homosexual, and it made for riveting, but very uncomfortable television. More on Harding himself, and that interview can be found here. It’s well worth reading. 
     
    The centrepiece of the week was Julian Mitchell’s dramatisation of the people involved with, or affected by, the Wolfenden Report itself. Consenting Adults, was an excellent piece of work, beautifully played (in particular by Charles Dance as Sir John Wolfenden, Sean Biggerstaff as his (gay) son Jeremy, and Mark Gatiss as a nasty policeman), and beautifully set-dressed. The period was caught exactly. I see that someone who knew both John Wolfenden and his son Jeremy has commented on how well the actors and the drama caught the essence of the real people.
     
    That comment was made on the BBC’s "Have Your Say" page devoted to the Hidden Lives week. The majority of the comments are deservedly complimentary, but I see that there’s the inevitable few denouncing the BBC for daring to devote air time to the subject. It’s very curious, and indeed very revealing in a Freudian sort of way, how every single one of these comments deplores the BBC for "shoving it down our throats". Oo-er, missus…

  • Maddy’s Myopia

    And talking about those who misrepresent Dawkins, Our Maddy of the Sorrows, Madeleine Bunting, demonstrates once again that she is ever-dependable in this department. She comments on that radio interview between Dawkins and Cornwell, and introduces her article with:
    Richard Dawkins, finally agreed to debate religion with one of his critics. He has repeatedly refused a head-to-head with protagonists such as his Oxford colleague, Professor Alister McGrath, but on the Today programme this morning, we got a snippet of a fascinating exchange between two very clever men. 
    Clearly she’s living in another world. As Richard Dawkins himself felt obliged to point out in the comments on her piece:
    She only had go google "Alister McGrath" and "Richard Dawkins" to find several references to our debate at the Oxford Literary Festival, chaired by Joan Bakewell in March of this year. It is available for her to listen to at http://richarddawkins.net/article,802,Richard-Dawkins-at-The-Sunday-Times-Oxford-Literary-Festival,Richard-Dawkins
     
    I would more strongly recommend to her, however, the long conversation between Alister McGrath and me which she will find at http://richarddawkins.net/article,1212,Richard-Dawkins-and-Alister-McGrath,Root-of-All-Evil-Uncut-Interviews
     
    Madeline Bunting will be disappointed to discover that, in both these debates, I am conciliatory, civilised, and not, I think it is fair to say, ‘shrill’ or ‘arrogant’. Perhaps, after this, and after examining the evidence of sharp practice by her hero John Cornwell at http://richarddawkins.net/article,1610,Honest-Mistakes-or-Willful-Mendacity,Richard-Dawkins Madeline Bunting might finally begin to get the message. Is it too much to hope that she’ll go the whole hog and actually read The God Delusion before the next time she sounds off about it?  
    I fear that the good professor hopes too much. It seems pretty clear that she hasn’t actually read his book. After all, she writes:
    And this is why I think Dawkins is dangerous. He has spent enough time now thinking about religion and listening to thoughtful religious people such as the Harries, yet he persists with a parody, a childlike perception of God and religion. Of course there’s no man with a beard crashing about in the sky.  
    As Chris White points out in the comments:
    Blimey Madeleine, you really haven’t read The God Delusion, have you? (Nor, in all probability, will you read this.)
     
    Page 31: "The God Hypothesis should not stand or fall with its most unlovely instantiation, Yahweh, nor his insipidly opposite Christian face, ‘Gentle Jesus meek and mild’. […] Instead I shall define the God Hypothesis more defensibly: there exists a super-human, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us."
     
    And, crucially, page 36: "This is as good a moment as any to forestall an inevitable retort to the book, one that would otherwise — as sure as night follows day — turn up in a review: ‘The God that Dawkins doesn’t believe in is a God that I don’t believe in either. I don’t believe in an old man in the sky with a long white beard.’ That old man is an irrelevant distraction and his beard is as tedious as it is long. Indeed, the distraction is worse than irrelevant. Its very silliness is calculated to distract attention from the fact that what the speaker really believes is not a whole lot less silly. I know you don’t believe in an old man sitting on a cloud, so let’s not waste any more time on that. I am not attacking any particular version of God or gods. I am attacking God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural, wherever and whenever they have been or will be invented."
     
    Please try reading the book before pronouncing upon it. You might actually learn something.  
    Amen to that.

  • Hearts and Minds

    And talking of heartrending, here’s a moment between a loving father and his eldest daughter:
    A Muslim man and his two daughters are enjoying a coastal drive in South Africa. It’s a happy scene, yet the easy banter belies the hardship this family has endured. The man, Mushin Hendricks, is a former imam who was cast out by his community when he declared his homosexuality. The girls’ mother has since remarried, and when Hendricks asks them what they would do if he were arrested, the answer comes without hesitation. The elder child, combining filial love with the lessons of her Islamic education, says she would ask that officials spare him a protracted death by stoning, and kill him with the first rock. 
    Words fail me.