Ignoring the royal “we” of Qunta’s tweet below, as well as the (perhaps 140-character induced) spelling, there’s still enough here to ask why anyone would this an opinion worth expressing.

We question City press, s decision to publish the painting. If legality is only thing tht mediates art& speech why have norms and values?

— Christine Qunta (@ChristineQunta) May 19, 2012

Legality isn’t the only thing that mediates art and speech. Legality is, though, the thing that ‘mediates’ (or rather, dictates) whether something is legally permissible or not. Beyond that, it’s a matter of taste whether you approve of something or not. But the point of a roughly free country is that your subjective preferences need have no bearing on what I’m allowed to see. Zuma, his daughters, his wives or whomever can say “we don’t like that” (the artwork, that is, rather than the penis. They could think that of the penis too, but that’s again a matter of taste. For the wives, at least) – but they can’t say “that’s not allowed”.

So, we have norms and values to inform (or mediate) the debate outside of law – to make the case for thinking something praiseworthy or blameworthy and so forth. But all this within a framework of recognising that it’s allowed, even if we don’t like it. And we have norms and values to guide us in areas that aren’t covered by law, and also to influence law via democratic processes, where you can vote according to those norms and values, and in doing so, hope to eventually influence the law.

But you can’t expect your norms and values to simply be the law. Because they are yours, not ours, and they’re not obviously the ones “we”should adopt. Because no matter how royal the “we” in your mind might be, it doesn’t include me – I see a portrait of a man who can’t be taken seriously for well-documented reasons, where that impaired moral standing is being highlighted through a certain form of artistic insult, and where the insult has been earned.

Of course this is insensitive to “culture”. But in this matter, where “culture” demands respect for a buffoon, or asks us to endorse the subjugation of women, it’s the culture that’s the problem rather than those who are disrespectful of it.

There is a proposal to remove the ‘sexual orientation’ clause in the Constitution. This clause in the Bill of Rights serves only to provide homosexuals the power to demand special rights.

Homosexuals are protected as human beings in the Constitution like every other citizen. The sexual orientation clause provides special protections and privileges for their sexual preference and more importantly, provides legal sanction to penalise anyone who disagree with their lifestyle.

The clause in question (9.3) reads as follows:

The state may not unfairly discriminate directly or indirectly against anyone on one or more grounds, including race, gender, sex, pregnancy, marital status, ethnic or social origin, colour, sexual orientation, age, disability, religion, conscience, belief, culture, language and birth.

So, following Naidoo’s logic, if the “sexual orientation” clause only exists to “provide homosexuals the power to demand special rights”, it’s surely also the case that this is true for the “religion” clause (and all the others), and he’d have section 9.3 read something like “The state may not unfairly discriminate directly of indirectly against anyone”.

This might be the first, and only, time that I can say he’s on to something which isn’t completely crazy…

In May 2011, a 13 year old lesbian was raped in Atteridgeville, Pretoria. We can’t say for sure whether this rape was an attempt to cure her of her lesbianism. But in June of that same year, Noxolo Nkosana was given a clear signal that her lesbianism was part of the motivation for her assault by two men, who reportedly taunted her with shouts of “Hey you lesbian, you tomboy, we’ll show you”. Then they did “show her”, stabbing her twice with a knife.

Nkosana was not raped, but Noxolo Nogwaza from KwaThema township near Johannesburg was less fortunate in being stoned, stabbed and raped by eight men in April 2011. She died as a result of these injuries. Many similar stories could be told, and have motivated increasing pressure on the government to consider recognising corrective rape as a hate crime.

Corrective rape is of course not the only threat faced by lesbian and gay people in South Africa. The Out LGBT Well-Being (Out) and UNISA Centre for Applied Psychology (UCAP) community survey (pdf) conducted in 2003 revealed widespread verbal and physical abuse motivated by homophobia, but also the finding that 62% of those who encountered such victimisation did not report their experience to the police.

In her 2004 paper Arranging Prejudice: Exploring Hate Crime in post-apartheid South Africa, Bronwyn Harris suggested that “Institutionalised heterosexism and homophobia, combined with negative social attitudes towards lesbian and gay people, create the conditions for hate crime and the reluctance to report it to the authorities. An important reason for this is the tendency towards the sensational, dramatic and exceptional, by the media. This selective bias in media coverage contributes to a tendency not to notice or report ordinary everyday experiences of hate victimisation”.

I doubt that the situation has changed much since then. After all, why would you think the police would care when those higher up the food chain include a homophobic Chief Justice, and a President who believes that “same-sex marriage is a disgrace to the nation and to God” – so much so that he’s willing to appoint a homophobic ambassador (Jon Qwelane) to a country (Uganda) that considered a bill legislating the imposition of the death penalty or life sentences on homosexuals?

Meanwhile, The House of Traditional Leaders have submitted a proposal to the Constitutional Review Committee, suggesting an amendment to section 9 (3) of the Constitution, which reads “The state may not unfairly discriminate directly or indirectly against anyone on one or more grounds, including race, gender, sex … colour, sexual orientation, age, disability, religion, conscience, belief, culture, language and birth”.

It might come as no surprise that The House of Traditional Leaders is well-stocked with members of the Congress of Traditional Leaders of South Africa (Contralesa). The Constitutional Review Committee of the National Assembly, who will consider the proposed amendment, is chaired by ANC MP Patekile Holomisa – president of Contralesa.

For a little insight into Holomisa’s attitude towards social justice issues, consider his response to the Traditional Courts Bill, currently the subject of a public participation process. The bill, he says “is being rammed down our throats by a government that is half-hearted on the issue of traditional leadership and a government that is half-hearted in its support of traditional authority”.

An assortment of 20 or so civil society groups and individual activists also don’t like the bill, and stand in support of the UCT Law, Race and Gender Research Unit’s submission to Parliament. As their submission makes clear, the proposed bill “overtly privileges the interests of traditional leaders over those of other rural residents, in particular rural women”.

The bill removes checks and balances on the power of traditional leaders, eliminates women from decision-making, and allows forced labour as punishment. You can never ask for legal representation in matters before a traditional court, and there is no mechanism for opting-out of the system. Clearly half-hearted in its support of traditional authority, then, in that it stops way short of the public floggings that one might imagine Holomisa to think a minimally acceptable power to be enjoyed by himself and his fellow Neanderthals.

Over the last 17 years, the Constitutional Review Committee has rejected every proposal made to it for amending the Constitution. This one – to remove sexual orientation as grounds for protection against discrimination – has somehow made it through to being put forward for deliberation in the National Assembly. Simultaneously, the protection offered by the Bill of Rights on the grounds of sex or gender would seemingly be ignored in traditional courts.

It is surely beyond the realms of possibility that either the Traditional Courts Bill or the Constitutional amendment in question will be passed. But the fact that it’s possible for anyone to think it reasonable to propose them, or to defend them, is cause for shame on the part of those that do, and anger in the rest of us.

And we do get angry – the people of Twitter, for example, spent an entire day being angry about a racist airhead, many going so far as to report her to the Human Rights Commission. Somehow, though, what’s trending on Twitter seldom gives one the impression that human rights are at stake when women, gays or lesbians are told they’re less human than the rest of us.

It goes without saying that industrial meat production entails harm to animals. While much of this harm might be avoidable, the costs of producing meat ethically (if such a thing is possible) in sufficient quantities to satisfy a hungry market could end up making meat unaffordable to most. But lay debates on whether it’s ethically permissible to eat meat often don’t touch on these economic factors, preferring the extreme positions of either asserting human dominion over other animals, or the essential wrongness of killing animals for food (where, for most of us, this food source is fully replaceable).

The argument for human dominion is of course largely a matter of cultural habit, and as Peter Singer has pointed out in talking about speciesism, it is by itself difficult to distinguish from racism or sexism. In his paper “Eating animals the nice way” (pdf), Jeff McMahan succinctly highlights our prejudices on this matter by pointing out that “human intuitions about the moral status of animals are so contaminated by self-interest and irrational religious belief as to be almost wholly unreliable”.

The position that it’s always wrong to kill for food also seems extreme, in that it’s surely possible to imagine meat without suffering, even if only on a small scale. So, the harm caused and whether it’s needless or not, compared to the benefits of meat production and consumption, need to be part of the debate for our vegetarianism or our meat-eating to be ethical.

I’m of course already taking a stand in the paragraph above in not giving significant attention to some vegan positions, where the treatment of animals as a commodity is universally regarded as ethically wrong. This is simply because I’m not persuaded that we have a duty to maximise the lifespans of (some) other animals, because “being alive” is not something they can value. For those animals that do have a theory of mind, I’d think we would have that duty. As for chickens and cows, though, the issue of suffering seems to be what would determine the ethical status of meat-eating.

The position I’m taking is that, for a practice to be ethically wrong, someone or something’s interests need to be harmed. The thing being harmed needs to be capable of experiencing harm (whether emotional, financial, or other) – this is what it means to be a moral agent. However, even harm is in itself not sufficient for ethical wrongness, as some cases could justify causing a certain amount of harm in order to prevent a larger amount of harm.

When considering whether it’s ethical to eat meat, utilitarian arguments are most commonly marshalled in defence of the view that meat-eating is ethically wrong, due to the harms caused to animals. But the harms cited are not convincing, or are at least not an argument against meat-eating per se, but rather against the particular conditions under which most animal meat is produced.

Non-human animals can suffer pain. If we assume that causing them unnecessary pain is wrong – as I do – what follows is that we need to produce and consume meat in ways that don’t cause unnecessary pain. It would only be ethically wrong to eat meat, in principle, if meat production necessarily caused harm to animals. But meat can be produced under non-harmful conditions, and animals can be slaughtered without distress to themselves or other animals in their immediate environment.

As I say above, farming of this sort would be more costly than factory-farming, and this approach would mean a significant increase in the price of animal meat. But here again, there is no necessary harm – those who cannot afford to eat meat will not suffer significant harms through being forced to eat less or no meat, and farmers who cannot compete under these conditions would have to develop alternative ways of making a living.

There would certainly be some harms resulting here – to the farmers – but these harms would on balance be less than animal suffering under factory-farming. Again, though, the key point is that meat-eating per se would not be ethically wrong, even if certain market-orientations in the production and consumption of meat could result in more harms than others.

Regarding the more general economic arguments around the production and consumption of meat, if meat was a significantly more wasteful sort of foodstuff to produce than alternatives, the argument could be made that eating meat is ethically wrong. But only if a) we grant that we have moral obligations to others and/or the environment; and b) if we have good reason to believe that meat production is indeed more resource-intensive.

Point (a) does stand in need of support, but I’d imagine that most of us would accept its truth. But even if true, it remains possible that a significant price-premium on meat – putting it only in the hands (or rather, mouths) of the wealthy – could result in a net benefit to those less fortunate. The farmers and others involved in meat production could receive greater profits, and potential taxation revenue could be directed explicitly at poverty-relief, or feeding programmes (whether involving meat or not). Much could go awry with this sort of scheme, of course, but the practical problems of allocating this revenue are again not an argument from principle.

On point (b), the argument is far less settled than many seem to believe. It’s often cited as a truism that meat-production is vastly more resource-intensive, but evidence cited in books such as Simon Fairlie’s Meat: A Benign Extravagance offers good reason to be suspicious of this truism (as is often the case with dogmatic utterances of any sort).

It might well be the case that 50 years from now, we’ll look back in disbelief at our current dietary practices, perhaps considering them a form of savagery and exploitation. Our cultural practices don’t always overlap with what’s ethically right, and it can take time for us to realise this. And I can’t deny that part of the reason I eat meat is simply because I assume that it’s okay to do so, and refrain from (potentially) burdening my conscience by thinking about it too much.

But if it’s true that ethical wrongness entails actual, necessary, harms rather than potential harms, then arguments against meat-eating that appeal to potential harms (under existing rather than immutable conditions) aren’t persuasive. The precautionary principle is a poor justification for restricting liberty – if harms cannot be demonstrated, we should be free to eat whatever we like.

The burden of proof should always fall on those who want to restrict liberty, and as things stand, it seems to me that the only justified restrictions on what we eat relate to some ways of producing and eating meat – but not meat-eating in general.

This column was prompted by The New York Times, and their call for submissions to the Put Your Ethics Where Your Mouth Is contest.

It’s always a surprise to find oneself agreeing with Floyd Shivambu, but if President Jacob Zuma really did say what he’s reported to have said at a church service on Sunday, he should certainly face his day in court. Not only a court involving advocates and charges of corruption, but also the court of public opinion, where he should be found guilty of a gross lack of judgement in using intolerant and divisive rhetoric to divert attention from the ANC Youth League’s criticism of him.

If a Helen Zille tweet speaking of “education refugees” can result in a week of widespread outrage, how is it the case that Zuma can effectively say that the non-religious have no humanity without (at least) equivalent levels of outrage? In fact, he should not only face criticism from the public and censure from the party, but if you support the hate speech provisions in our law, this should perhaps also be a matter for the courts.

“We need to build our nation because presently we have a nation of thugs. This is a task faced by the church. Fear of God has vanished and that means that humanity has vanished”, is what Zuma is reported to have said to the United Congregational Church of Southern Africa. We do indeed need to build our nation, but as I’ve previously argued, when it comes to moral leadership Zuma is hardly the man for the job.

The church can certainly play a part – a large and possibly effective part, seeing as the majority of South Africans are members of some church or another. And when the church focuses on respect, love, compassion and other sorts of virtuous qualities, I wish them all possible success. But when the church that our new Chief Justice belongs to endorses the view that homosexuality is a sickness that can be “cured”, it should be immediately clear that churches have no monopoly on morality.

My previous columns have frequently discussed the absence of a positive correlation between religious belief and moral virtue, but this is not the point here. Whether it’s true or not that religion can encourage those virtues, the fact remains that non-believers are in no way handicapped when it comes to discerning right from wrong. We use different standards to do so, yet mostly end up with the same conclusions as the religious do.

This is obviously so, because most of these conclusions are obvious ones that anyone living amongst others would reach. We all have an equal investment in social cohesion and freedom from fear, and shared rules make those goods possible, regardless of how we reason our way to them. In South Africa, as in many poor countries, humanity “vanishes” largely because people are materially insecure, and resort to opportunism to address those insecurities.

If your life is miserable, you’re less invested in the future, and more invested in seizing opportunities where you find them. The narrative of a harmonious “rainbow nation” only gains traction if you have reason to care for the welfare of others, and it’s not always the case that we do. The church can provide reasons of this sort, yes – but stronger and more universally respected reasons are secured when people have jobs and food, perhaps along with a government they can trust to not exploit them.

If it’s only fear of God that keeps religious people from breaking laws or harming others – or even from having humanity – then we should be seeing far worse moral crises in secular countries than we do in religious ones such as ours. And what does lacking humanity mean? Are secular folk simply lacking some moral property, or are we somehow not even human on Zuma’s reckoning? And what does it say about the moral character of the religious when the implicit claim is made that without religion, they’d suddenly discover or rediscover the impulse to rape, rob and murder?

Whether you call it “humanity” or not, President Zuma, many of us don’t do these immoral things due to the belief that it’s wrong to do them. As much as I’m willing to say that your religious beliefs are false, I’ll only start saying that you lack humanity when you act like you lack humanity – not only because you have a different worldview to mine.

Like perhaps now, where you essentially tell me and all other non-believers that we are qualitatively inferior to you and other believers. You – the man who hasn’t gone more than a couple of months without some press coverage on things like rape trials, dodgy arms-deal allegations, shady friends, financial mismanagement, corruption or reckless sexual behaviour.

I get that you need to defend yourself against the current round of attacks from Shivambu and others, and that you’re heading into a delicate situation in Mangaung later this year. You’re entitled, and would be expected to, defend yourself by rallying religious support. But you can do so without calling my humanity into question. Choosing to do so is divisive, inflammatory, and intolerant of any worldview that doesn’t accord with your belief in God.

And it certainly seems to lack humanity to me. But then, perhaps I lack the necessary qualifications to speak as a human at all.

In my view the deceased’s rectal cancer was present and causing bleeding and other symptoms from at least 31 October 2001. During the period 31 October 2001 until at least the end of November 2002, the deceased regularly described the symptoms of her rectal cancer to a homeopath, Francine Scrayen. It was not until November 2002 that Mrs Scrayen and the deceased discussed the possibility of reporting her rectal bleeding to a medical practitioner and it was not until 5 December 2002 that she first reported those problems to a doctor.

I accept that Mrs Scrayen believed that the deceased had suffered from haemorrhoids years earlier and the bleeding and pain was “an old symptom coming back”, but a competent health professional would have been alarmed by the developing symptoms and would have strongly advised that appropriate medical investigations be conducted without delay.

As I’ve said before, pseudoscience doesn’t only cause the (relatively trivial) harm of lightening the wallets of the gullible. When it’s taken seriously, it can not only result in these sorts of tragic stories, but also helps to contribute to a general climate of unreason, where people become less discerning about what to believe and why to believe it. In fact, an increasing concern is the ways in which this climate of unreason can be leveraged in favour of political and economic interests. Conspiracies are attractive to many folk, because we sometimes prefer grand narratives to the conclusions reached via the application of Occam’s Razor (on this topic, Rosenberg’s new book The Atheists Guide to Reality makes for good reading).

Alternative medicine that works is simply called “medicine”, as Dara o’Briain reminds us here:

The Dingle story is now a few years old, but it’s back in the public eye thanks to the recent publication of the coroners report and Dan Buzzard’s highlighting of that report’s contents. And now, Scrayen has sent Buzzard a cease and desist letter, demanding that he retract his allegations regarding her complicity in Dingle’s suffering and her potentially avoidable death. You can read Buzzard’s two posts on Scrayen via that last link, and it’s difficult to see how Scrayen thinks he’s done anything wrong – except, of course, for exposing her as a dangerous quack.

It is ultimately the consumer’s fault if she makes choices which endanger her own life. The issue here, though, is that while Dingle (and most of us) live(d) in a society which protects us from all sorts of misrepresentation and fraud, that protection is absent in the case of things like homeopathy. The politically-correct, relativistic way in which opinions and evidence are treated make us afraid to tell people that what they believe is sometimes nonsense, and sometimes dangerous nonsense.

Medical aid schemes should of course not reimburse for homeopathic treatments. Pharmacies, who are associated with treatment and good health, should ideally not sell them, no matter how profitable exploiting the gullible can be. Pharmacies are of course free to sell anything legal, though – my point is more that it’s unfortunate that they often don’t take any proactive role in reminding consumers that what they’re buying is pure placebo, and shouldn’t take the place of medicine.

Most important, perhaps, is that in an age of manic labelling of everything consumable, down to the most minuscule ingredient, it’s an almost criminal neglect that legislation doesn’t exist to force producers of homeopathic remedies to spell out the simple fact that a glass of water will “treat” your ailment just as effectively as a homeopathic “remedy” will.

Also see Angela Meadon’s post on this, reminding Scrayen that she can’t bully Buzzard into silence, and that the Streisand effect might well result in her attempts to do so having the opposite effect to what she hopes.

Section 45 of the SCA judgement reads (excerpted):

It clearly is in the public interest that the issues raised in the review application be adjudicated and, in my view, on the papers before us, it cannot seriously be contended that the DA is not acting, genuinely and in good faith, in the public interest.

The ANC press release, penned by dear Jackson, wants

to highlight the following: The continued attempt by the DA to use the Courts to undermine and paralyse government

Significant respect for the judiciary there. And of course, no attempt at political point-scoring. Which is good, seeing as Mac Maharaj had also remarked on the ruling and was quoted as saying “anyone who wishes to use Zuma SCA judgment for party political point-scoring would be doing a disservice to our country”. Good thing Jackson didn’t do that, then.

The other idiots are those intent on seeing malice or racism in anything that Helen Zille, Western Cape Premier, might have to say on Twitter. And, of course, to accuse anyone who dares to defend her as some sort of mindless zombie. Zille is a loose cannon on Twitter, no doubt. And as I’ve argued before, I think she’s got some strange and silly ideas. Today, she caused her regular round of outrage as a result of a tweet from yesterday which spoke of the Western Cape accommodating “ECape education refugees”.

If you can’t see why this is racist, then apparently you are a racist. Or so goes logic on Twitter (and also for Jackson, but more on him in a moment). Perhaps we should start at the beginning, by consulting a dictionary. One definition of a refugee could be “one who flees in search of refuge, as in times of war, political oppression, or religious persecution”. Of course, usually refugees flee a country, not failing education systems in the Eastern Cape. But Helen Zille was presumably using the word metaphorically. As I said on Twitter, her usage could certainly be described as hyperbolic, but racist? How does that work?

The way it works is simply that the pupils fleeing the Eastern Cape happen to be black. Hence, describing them as refugees is racist. Now, many refugees everywhere in the world are black. And the cause of this involved a fair amount of racism, in economics, in politics, in every aspect of the way some countries have operated (and some continue to). In this country, with our demographics and our history of social inequality, it stands to reason that most people who have something to flee would be black. Note that Zille never referred to race – she described them as refugees, which seems to have been intended as a description (while hyperbolic, as I mentioned) of the situation they faced themselves in, and which they decided to flee.

It’s a contingent detail that they are black, and that’s not a detail that’s relevant here – the material circumstance of a bunch of pupils (who happen to be black) is the issue, and the one Zille was presumably referring to in describing them as refugees. That they came to be refugees would undoubtedly involve racism, yes – but that’s not the issue here. Once they experience conditions that are worth fleeing from, how they got into that position is a matter for historians – describing them as being in that position doesn’t endorse it, or make the claim that they are there because of their race.

And now, let’s welcome Jackson back into the conversation:

The ANC is vindicated by the statement made by Helen Zille. This is typical of the erstwhile apartheid government’s mentality that resorted to influx control measures to restrict black people from the so-called white areas. (eh? These “refugees” are coming into the Western Cape – Zille’s made no effort to keep them out. Bit of an apartheid-Godwin, methinks.)

Zille’s racist statement underpins the DA’s policy of exclusionism of blacks. She will never say the same thing about whites who relocate from one area of the country to the Western Cape or even those who relocate from other countries to the Western Cape. To reduce South Africans who have free movement in their own country as refugees is tantamount to… labelling them with a tag associated with foreigners.

Zille’s reference to the Eastern Cape pupils as refugees is motivated by political opportunism, to be sure – it’s a chance to highlight how much better the Western Cape primary education system seems to be when compared to that of the Eastern Cape. But it also indicates sympathy, or at least an awareness (back to the definition of the word) that they are fleeing from an unpleasant situation. Any other sort of relocation, such as the examples Jackson uses, would only be of relevance as counterexamples or evidence of Zille “reducing” these pupils to anything if the situations were comparable.

Typical migration – whether for economic reasons, or to get an education – is driven by preference, not by need. Or rather, the needs are less severe. A word like “refugee” makes sense in the context of a systemic failure of some market, not simply someone moving to Gauteng because they find it difficult to find a job in the Cape. The point is that these pupils have been “reduced” to leaving their home-towns because the Eastern Cape education system has failed them – not because of anything Helen Zille has done.

But as is sadly so often the case, outrage and race-baiting are winning the day, both on Twitter and in the hypothetical mind of Jackson Mthembu. I agree that Zille’s Tweet was poorly-considered, as many of them are. And I think she’s said many unfortunate (and in the case of HIV/AIDS, appalling) things. But in this case, all she’s been is hyperbolic – and the racism exists only in the minds of those who see it in her use of the word “refugee”.

P.S. From the Kieno Kammies show in CapeTalk567, a 10 minute conversation on this between Jackson Mthembu and Helen Zille.

In 1983, MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin drafted an ordinance restricting pornography which was briefly adopted by the Indianapolis legislature before being declared unconstitutional. Much of the language defining pornography in this ordinance can also be found in ICASA’s “Reasons” document (pdf) explaining why On Digital Media (ODM, trading as Top TV) were refused permission to add three pornographic channels to their product line.

This ordinance defined pornography as the “graphic sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures and/or words”. The tests for whether or not a item was pornographic included “women are presented dehumanized as sexual object, things, or commodities”, “women are presented as sexual objects experiencing sexual pleasure in rape, incest, or other sexual assaults”, and women being presented in “positions of sexual submission, servility, or display”.

ICASA accept the MacKinnon definition uncritically, much like their entire argument accepts various normative moral claims uncritically. In fact, you might struggle to find a more clear example of a regulator having its work done for it by remote-control, whether via the selective retreating of contested arguments from the likes of MacKinnon or by the latter day moral hysteria of the Christian Action Network (who have previously accused the Cape Times and the Cape Argus of censorship when those papers refused to publish obituaries for the 900 000 South African babies killed by abortion).

Many of the problems with ICASA’s reasoning were skewered in Ivo Vegter’s column on this topic and also my previous column on Multichoice’s similar experience, so won’t be repeated here. Suffice it to say that their argument is still premised on every young person being an expert in both psychological manipulation of his parents, and perhaps also a master hacker of set-top boxes (but one who mysteriously seems to never have heard of the Internet and the pornography available there).

He’d need to be all these things to a) persuade an adult to subscribe, pay the monthly fees, and reveal the two independent pin codes and b) crack those two pin codes if necessary. I checked the sums with the mathematician John Allen Paulos, who confirmed that there are 10 000 possible combinations of one 4-digit pin code, and 100 000 000 combinations for two pin codes. Parents would in other words have to stay away for months, if not years, for children to be able to guess the pin numbers in question. To put it another way, you would be seven times more likely to guess the Lotto numbers than to guess these two pin codes.

The 17-page Reasons document concludes with a summary of its three reasons for refusing the application. First, “the right of women to equality and human dignity overrides the Applicant’s right to freedom of expression, as well as the rights of viewers to receive pornography on television in the home. The Authority holds this view because it regards the consumption of pornography as one contributing factor, amongst others, to the normalisation of violence against women in South Africa”.

While it’s true that the Authority holds this view, the document fails to explain why this is the case. The data they present on sexual offences certainly show a high incidence, but certainly not an increase in the period reported on (2003-2011) – if anything, they show a slight decrease. The data might of course be poor, but that’s the Authority’s problem to resolve if they want to make the connection between pornography and sexual violence.

Oddly, though, ICASA seems reluctant to make that connection despite using it in their conclusion. “The Authority is not saying that there is a direct causal relationship between the consumption of pornography and violent sexual crimes against women. … However, consumption of pornography may contribute to the incidence of rape by making it more likely that those who are already inclined to rape may feel validated by seeing women as sexual objects to actually rape, thereby increasing the overall incidence of rape”.

This thinking is utterly disingenuous, or entirely circular. I suspect the latter, as the document is riddled with phrases like “probable consequences” and “harmful effects” – the seeds of a moral panic are in other words widely planted. The point here is that either pornography does cause these effects, or it does not, or we don’t know. We’ve got some reason to suspect that it doesn’t (and, in fact, better evidence to suggest that it decreases sexual violence), but let’s assume – as ICASA does – that the “empirical evidence for this is not conclusive”.

In other words, we are being told that we should limit it just in case, on the precautionary principle. But unless we have reasons to suspect that pornography validates the perception of women as sexual objects more than Baywatch (for example) does, we also need to prevent the screening of Baywatch. Which is to say, the data needs to support the banning of pornography to prevent this decision from being based purely on an established moral conservatism.

This brings us to the second of the three reasons, namely that ODM “misconstrued the objections to its application as moral or religious grounds rather than as serious stakeholder engagement on constitutional or legal grounds”. The grounds referred, broadly speaking, are rights to equality and dignity. And again, if only consenting adults have access to this material and it cannot be shown to lead to increased sexual violence, the argument makes its case only by saying something to the effect of “pornography undermines equality and dignity because pornography undermines equality and dignity”.

As Margot St. James observed in response to the MacKinnon ordinance, “I’m against the censorship … [one] line that worried me tremendously was, `Pornography represents women as whores by nature.’ Well, what’s wrong with that? I’m a bad girl. I like being a bad girl. I like my whore status. I have control and power over men, in private certainly, and now also in my public life”.

Whether ICASA disapproves of these women or not, they feel empowered through pornography. And while we do have to balance the right to free expression against harms, evidence of such harms is necessary to override the presumption favouring freedom. (For those who want to retort that pornography isn’t a free speech issue, note that ICASA frames it as such, which legitimates a response on those same grounds.)

The second of the three reasons also includes an aside on ODM’s failure to participate in the public hearing. Earlier in the document, this is described as “inexplicable”, and ICASA laments how they “did not receive a courtesy” of being informed that ODM were planning on missing “such a golden opportunity”. The language, in other words, is fairly smug and not exactly impartial in tone. More relevant here though is that only the merit of the case should decide the issue. While ODM certainly erred in not being there to respond, this shouldn’t act as a reason for rejecting their application. Citing it as one seems to confuse making an impartial judgement on a case with teaching a moral lesson to ODM.

The final reason notes that the government has already “limited citizens’ rights to freedom of expression with regard to the consumption of pornography by law. Accordingly, the Authority sees no reason to expand access to pornography on the airwaves into the home”. For a regulatory body that proudly asserts that it is “regarded as pro-active rather than re-active”, this is an odd thing to cite as a reason. They had the opportunity – even if they ended up not taking it – to assert that current limitations are too severe. Instead, this appeal to precedent (and authority) seems to indicate the same intention to justify a foregone conclusion discussed in respect of the other two reasons.

Of course pornography can change the social landscape, and I’m even persuaded that it can do so negatively. Naomi Wolf is quite persuasive in arguing that pornography may be responsible for “deadening male libido in relation to real women, and leading men to see fewer and fewer women as ‘porn-worthy’”. If you agree, you should be free to choose to not subscribe to pornography channels. But you’re no longer free to make that choice – it’s been decided for you that you don’t have that option, and also that you’re not capable of keeping a pin number safe from your children.

P.S.: This FreakoStats post, crunching some porn-related numbers, is well worth reading.

To regard something as permissible does not necessarily entail that you’d like to see it encouraged, or to become a widespread practice. It’s also not necessarily the case that simply entertaining a possibility in thought or speech means that you are favourably inclined towards that possibility. But we seem to sometimes forget this, becoming nearly as offended by someone merely thinking or speaking about that which we find abhorrent as we would had they actually committed the act in question.

In the Journal of Medical Ethics, Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva recently suggested that if abortion is permissible, infanticide (in certain cases) might also be. The public reaction – and also the reactions from other bio-ethicists – seemed to suggest that Giubilini and Minerva had been spotted introducing toxic feeding formula into the supply chain of their local maternity ward.

Their view, in short, is this: many of the existing instances in which we consider abortion justifiable hold equally for an infant, at least during a short period after birth. The authors don’t define the period in question, but this is irrelevant to the questions of principle and consistency that they raise. If, for example, an abnormality such as perinatal asphyxia is discovered only after birth, how is it that ending that life is now considered intolerable where the same severity of abnormality would have justified abortion six months earlier? I can’t do the article justice here, so please read it before assuming their position to be obviously wrong.

Of course many would find it shocking to imagine that compelling arguments for infanticide might exist. Some might even be shocked or horrified that people spend their time coming up with these arguments. For the most part, though, the arguments aren’t new – Michael Tooley and Peter Singer, among others, have said similar things in the past.

Tooley wrote “Abortion and infanticide” in 1972, though, so it’s mostly only those of us who studied philosophy who got to hear these arguments, because it was difficult for these sorts of texts to get widespread attention without the assistance of platforms like Twitter, Facebook and blogs. Consequently, it was also more difficult to foment the kind of moral outrage now being directed at the authors, including death threats and questions regarding when, if ever, it’s too late to consider (belated) infanticide for ethicists.

An increasingly common response to ideas we don’t like seems to be attempts at censorship, or the application of threats in pursuit of silencing, rather than debate. Debate and discussion should always be our preferred option though, because it can result in either the weakening of the viewpoint you’re contesting, or in giving us the opportunity to realise that we are wrong and should change our minds. If Giubilini and Minerva’s views are mistaken, in other words, we should be able to say why this is so.

Those who are opposed to abortion in general are obviously not challenged by their views, in that if abortion is impermissible, infanticide would clearly also be. (The authors use the term “post-birth abortion”, for reasons that are made clear in the paper, but this seems mostly to be in an attempt to avoid completely thoughtless outrage.) However, for those of us who think abortion in general permissible, the paper is usefully provocative in asking you to consider which features of the two cases make one permissible and the other not.

One feature which makes the cases very different is quite possibly simple human emotion, and the ability to make more dispassionate decisions with regard to a foetus than an infant. And while it’s common for philosophers to note this, and simply move on as if this human frailty is something to regret – certainly not a factor that should unduly influence our conceptions of right and wrong – I do think this is an important feature, and that Giubilini, Minerva and those that want to defend their views need to take it into account.

While I do think it’s true that we should aspire to being as rational as possible, this doesn’t mean that all non-rational or even irrational motivations are always flaws to be regretted and eliminated from our repertoire of responses. In this case, the disposition to value life (and especially life that is now exemplified in a fully-formed human rather than something more developmental) is in the majority of cases good for us and therefore perhaps a candidate for respect and encouragement rather than scorn.

Extending the range of beings that it’s permissible to kill, or the phases of development where they no longer count, serves as a signal to those of us who are living and aware of being so. The signal is one that lacks empathy for the majority of the population, who have the same fears as everyone else but often lack the resources to articulate those fears in the language of intellectuals. One could perhaps say that it would be ideal for us to be less sensitive and precious about killing and letting die, but this would only be on one model of the ideal human – the one that resembles a purely logical Spock more than it does any of the humans we actually know, and ourselves are.

The point is that both sides of debates like this are (at the margins at least) premised on caricatures of humanity. I do think it’s true that many cases of potential infanticide are no different from cases where we consider abortion justified. So to my mind, it’s true that we’re being inconsistent in being repelled by the former and not the latter. But to make this case in a way which presents both the foetus and the newborn as fleshy objects of logical analysis also misses something, namely the sorts of adult humans we’d like to be, and the sort of world that conduces to becoming that sort of adult.

We’re understandably reluctant to end lives, even though these are not the lives of persons. That reluctance is plausibly a virtue worth reinforcing, rather than trivialising. Yet we should be able to talk about these things without fear of death-threats, and without those discussions being hijacked by the likes of Glenn Beck as evidence of a “progressive” agenda to introduce eugenics.

Moral outrage is not a sufficient justification to shut people up, especially when those people could be pointing to an inconsistency in our reasoning we’d benefit from knowing about. We also don’t want the boundaries of debate to be set by those who are most strident, where death threats or accusations of eugenics become effective techniques in argument.

A level of despair at how quickly emotive topics such as this descend into that sort of name-calling is understandable and justified. But having these conversations is nevertheless important, and the reactionaries can’t be allowed to win through the rest of us simply not showing up to argue with them. So, Giubilini, Minerva, and others like them should keep asking these difficult questions. But even when the responses seem hysterical, let’s not forget that there might well be something to be said for remembering that we don’t only live in our heads, but in bodies, families and communities too.

Also see Keenan Malik and Peter Singer’s responses.

1) Can non-believers, especially atheists, be ‘fundamentalist’ in their views?

Of course, they certainly can. Being an atheist doesn’t guarantee that you’re sensible, fair or rational. In particular, it doesn’t guarantee that you are also skeptical of easy answers, or that you apply something like the scientific method to your own beliefs. So, for example, many atheists might be fundamentalist in their approach to various other emotive issue – perhaps climate change or fracking. They might also be fundamentalist in their blanket rejection of any possible good coming out of religion, which can lead them to be hostile and demeaning towards people who don’t share their views. They might believe in things which are (to my mind at least) as implausible as gods are, like a soul or free will.

Having said that, when atheists are fundamentalist, they cause offence and irritation. Religious folk who are fundamentalist cause death. And I do also think that fundamentalist is less likely with atheism than with religiosity, seeing as many (if not most) atheists are also skeptics.

2) I have come to view the bible not as a science or history handbook / manual (e.g. on the matter of evolution). I also accept that on those two subjects the bible is not a good source either. Also, many of the laws, etc. from the old testament, as well as the (indirect) acceptance of slavery in the new testament and other matters, I believe have to be viewed as having been crafted in an ancient world context and not applicable or at all acceptable, rightly so, in our time and age. Surely the God of the bible would also have known that the earth is actually round and circling around the sun, totally at odds with the bible’s description thereof. Yet he/she/it chooses not to point this out to the poor sods who are convinced otherwise (except for the Greek philosophers, et al).

Agreed. Not to mention the simple stuff like “women are not inferior to men” and “keeping slaves is a bad thing”.

As such, as a Christian, I’m potentially on a slippery slope. So I have the choice to reject the teachings of the bible out of hand (a completely logical choice), or to take a different approach to it. One where I approach it critically. I’ve chosen the latter. That’s why I referred to being more comfortable with ‘questions’ rather than ‘answers’ earlier on in this (very long) comment. If one for a moment ignore the ‘Christians’ for whom it is a purely nominal exercise, a cultural orientation if you like, would this not be a better route for Christians to pursue, as opposed to a fundamentalist literal interpretation of the bible? I’m directing this question to you in the context of your statement that “…it should be worrying for “believers” and “non-believers”, theists and atheists that the “Don’t Really Know” is so cluttered and so overwhelming”. Where the ‘don’t really know’ is a function of ignorance it is obviously problematic, but could it not be a function of acknowledging that in matters ‘spiritual’ we simply cannot ‘know’ in a scientific absolute manner? If so, is that not a good thing?

Yes, your route is a better route than the literal, fundamentalist one. But that doesn’t mean it’s the best route. Imagine a fresh world, without the centuries of privilege that religious viewpoints have enjoyed. Here, you have the choice between picking up a strange text that includes a bunch of weird injunctions, bad science and so forth, but which also contains passages that are inspirational. First, there are plenty of modern books like that around – Deepak Chopra and Rhonda Byrne come to mind. You’re using the book you are because it’s embedded in your culture, not because you’ve been able to make an objective choice that it’s the best book, despite it’s flaws.

Second, there are books that can serve these purposes without including a bunch of false/outdated claims. There are other sources of inspiration, awe, wonder and moral guidance. And all of these things speak to functions and events in your brain, not in your spirit. Your approach of thinking this sort of religious practice to be a “function of acknowledging that in matters ‘spiritual’ we simply cannot ‘know’ in a scientific absolute manner” not only gives extra credence to a particular way of “not knowing”, but is also somewhat circular in assuming that we can’t “know” in spiritual matters. We can’t “know” that leprechauns don’t exist in a scientifically absolute manner either – but we have no good reason to believe that they do. All that we do know about the brain gives not a shred of support to the existence of a soul. Yet, somehow this idea is still treated more seriously than the claim that leprechauns exist.

And it’s easy to see why. We would like to be immortal, we would like to be reunited with loved ones in the hereafter, and we might like to have a better life after death than the one we have now. I understand all that. But wishing for it to be so doesn’t make it the case. It’s far more plausible that we are born and then die, and if we apply the same level of critical thought to claims regarding souls as we do with regard to claims regarding leprechauns, we would all agree on this. But we can’t apply the same level of critical thought, because we’ve experienced centuries of brainwashing involving various metaphysical notions, where we now see them as innately plausible rather than implausible.

Lastly, I’m really not that bothered by believers like you. You’re unlikely to bomb abortion clinics or fly planes into buildings. But those that do that sort of thing count you among their number, and that number is used to buttress claims for teaching creationism in schools or other ways of making religion interfere with public life. That number is cited in censuses, and politicians can then say “we are a Christian country”, and act accordingly. And in general, these attitudes don’t contribute to fostering critical thought in terms of things like science, and might support truly dangerous beliefs involving prayer, homoeopathy or attachment therapy rather than medicine. They don’t contribute, in that they create a space for beliefs walled-off from the usual standards of critical enquiry.

3) I’m not bothered with defending Christianity, I believe it’s more than capable of surviving on its own. I’m more worried about increasing a more intellectual and critical approach amongst fellow ‘believers’ and (more negatively framed) opposing fundamentalism. I could however not fail to take notice of what I perceive to be a very aggressive movement amongst atheists in combating religion, which in the ‘West’ would mostly focus on Christianity. I accept that if atheists view religion as ‘evil’ (no pun intended) they would be very motivated to take it on. But why this, dare I call it ‘religious fervour’ in doing so? Am I simply connected via social media to a fringe group of atheists who try and nuke religion around every corner and on every subject or is this indicative of a larger atheist movement? I suppose being atheist rather than agnostic imply opposing something, opposing theist faith, but isn’t it getting a bit obsessive? In addition to statements such as ‘relax, there’s no God’, which has some indirect positive message, does the movement offer anything of real value – other than opposing religion? Is it not fundamentalist in this absolute approach it takes? Perhaps in the same way that anti-racism, while honourable in principle, may end up ignoring culture, class, etc. in an absolutist approach to the subject?

Some atheists are more angry than others. Some strategies to counter religious beliefs are more productive than others also. Being angry has worked to convince people of the flaws in religion, and being polite has also done so. It’s a strategic choice. Mine is (most of the time) to be polite, but I certainly don’t think there’s anything wrong with being hostile, by definition. The key problem here is, again, that your question comes from a position of religious privilege, in that there is plenty to be angry about. Organised religion protects child abusers, for example. It can encourage homophobia, and teaching nonsense to kids in schools. As I’ve argued on this blog on numerous occasions, it can infantilise us- particularly with regard to our ability to reason about moral judgements. Read Greta Christina on this – she’s got a litany of reasons why we’re angry.

This is the question where I strongly doubted your sincerity. It’s a very easy dismissal of atheist concerns to label us as angry or aggressive, because it allows for religious folk to appear to be the reasonable ones, who’d be willing to hear us out if only we behaved. Does the movement offer anything of real value? A bizzare question. First, because much of the good any person does is not because they’re religious, but because they are inclined to do good. Second, because you should ask whether religion, on balance, offers anything of real value that can’t come from elsewhere, at lower cost to the species (cf. why we’re angry). And third, isn’t encouraging rationality, and trying to eliminate unfounded beliefs “of real value”?

Try this thought experiment: Someone comes to you, and expresses views that you think are completely unfounded, and wrong, and are known to result in various forms of social ill. But the views comfort them, provide them with a framework by which to understand life and so forth. They might even have books, written by people they consider their spiritual leaders in these regards. You present them with all the evidence supporting your view, which obviously outweighs theirs. Their texts are pre-scientific, and their views are simply the result of ideological blindness as far as you can tell. But they have faith in their viewpoint, and are unpersuaded. Now imagine that this person is a racist, or a sexist, and that those are the views they are defending. And now, tell me how you’re different. And then, think about the double-standard – it’s not okay for them to hold the views they do, contrary to all available evidence, but it is for you?

Of course, religion can (in general) not cause the harms those beliefs do. But it also can do so. And until everyone who is religious is simply religious in the fuzzy way the Dakwins study revealed, it will keep doing so, and be allowed to get away with it because it’s been given immunity from the usual level of critical enquiry.

4) Is it not a sign of progress when Christians can’t be all bunched into the ‘evolution is evil’ corner, but actually start displaying less fundamentalist, even intellectualitst, tendencies?

Sure, and I suppose I’ve mostly answered this above. The point of the Dawkins data – as well as reported experience of people in the UK, Norway, Denmark, etc. is that religion is more and more a personal thing, or a social club, or something equally innocuous. So yes, it’s a sign of progress. But as I said in the column which prompted your comment, at one extreme this isn’t really religion in the typical sense anymore. And as I said above, these sorts of “believers” don’t really bother me, and they are going to keep increasing in number, which is great. But until it’s no longer the default that, for example, interfaith bodies are consulted by governments (with no secular representation), or that politicians can appeal to centuries-old texts to justify discrimination or bad educations, we’ve still got work to do.

The full comment:

I think I may actually lose a couple of followers with this comment. That’s because I’m actually a ‘believer’, but mostly interact with ‘non-believers’. This is not due to some secret mission to convert anyone, rather I enjoy a more philosophical and intellectual approach to life. Something sadly missing in discussions with many (not all) Christians.

Yet, in some ways I can identify fully with some of the results in the poll you mention. For me this is not so much a case of ignorance to the bible’s contents, but rather a more modern approach to my faith. A faith in which, ironically, I’m much more comfortable with questions than absolute answers.

I’ll try to explain and keep it short(ish). I think post-modernism, the information revolution and many other factors have presented a challenge to Christians. A very healthy and necessary challenge. Furthermore our history in South Africa of having had a ‘Christian-Nationalist’ system didn’t do Christianity any favours. The irony is that it substantially watered down discussions around faith, religion, etc.

While I fully realise the conflict in this statement, I can fully understand that based purely on logic one should reject faith of any kind in anything that cannot be either scientifically proven or logically argued. It’s also incredible how quickly the first natural philosophers, through reason only, were able to theorise the existence of atoms. More than a 1000 years before the first electron microscopes came into being. They were able to do this once they (mostly) rejected the idea that fables or myths were a viable avenue of understanding the physical world / cosmos.

I’m not going to try and justify faith or my believe here. It’s a personal choice for me. Suffice to say that with some exposure to non-believers I have long since dropped the idea of non-believers going to hell or facing some eternal punishment. I have gotten to realise that judging someone on their believe or non-believe alone is about as reliable as judging someone on skin colour, language or eye colour.

It’s in relation to the last paragraph that I’m actually engaging with you here. As a ‘progressive’, ‘liberal’ individual coming from a Christian background and ‘Christian-nationalist’ environment (the latter still exists in many South African’s heads) the fact that most of the people who were also ‘progressive’ and ‘liberal’ tended to be non-believers influenced my view of believers to a great degree. I’m obviously referring to Christian believers as that reflects the context I have experience of. Thus, without conscious contemplation of the matter, I started to accept that Christians were behind the curve, conservative and often fundamentalist.

Now, I’m not saying that the previous sentence doesn’t hold, at least, some truth. But, in the same way that many (not all) ANC politicians seem to believe that racism is the sole domain of whites, I made (what I believe to be) the paradigm error that fundamentalism and its lessor cousins of prejudice and others were the sole domain of Christians (or other believers).

At this point I should perhaps point out that many of the ‘non-believers’ I refer to above would have been agnostic rather than atheist. Then I moved away from the city to the platteland about ten years ago and my ideas of ‘non-believers’ got a bit shaken up. I was suddenly thrown into a very small pond. In such a small pond one can’t be very selective of who you make friends with. This is both a ‘good’ and a ‘bad’ thing. On the ‘good’ side you’re forced to befriend people with ideas you’d normally be isolated from. On the ‘bad’ side you have to stomach things that you personally may detest, in my case it means, amongst other things, to stomach racism and homophobia (of course I’m not saying ‘accept’ or ‘keep quiet’ about). You also discover that the very same people who have these (for me) ‘shady’ qualities also embody some other very exemplary qualities, from which you can learn and by which you can be enriched.

Basically my idea of non-believers got shaken up because here I was no confronted with non-believers, including atheists, who were not in all aspects (in my view) ‘progressive’, ‘liberal’ or the like. In fact, I found many to be, in relation to some matters, fundamentalist… That was a shocker to me.

What follows is not meant as trick questions, I’m genuinely curious to get your take thereon. If you actually read this far into my comment and are willing to spend some time on this somewhere in future I’d welcome slightly longer answers than a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’.

1) Can non-believers, especially atheists, be ‘fundamentalist’ in their views?

2) I have come to view the bible not as a science or history handbook / manual (e.g. on the matter of evolution). I also accept that on those two subjects the bible is not a good source either. Also, many of the laws, etc. from the old testament, as well as the (indirect) acceptance of slavery in the new testament and other matters, I believe have to be viewed as having been crafted in an ancient world context and not applicable or at all acceptable, rightly so, in our time and age. Surely the God of the bible would also have known that the earth is actually round and circling around the sun, totally at odds with the bible’s description thereof. Yet he/she/it chooses not to point this out to the poor sods who are convinced otherwise (except for the Greek philosophers, et al).

As such, as a Christian, I’m potentially on a slippery slope. So I have the choice to reject the teachings of the bible out of hand (a completely logical choice), or to take a different approach to it. One where I approach it critically. I’ve chosen the latter. That’s why I referred to being more comfortable with ‘questions’ rather than ‘answers’ earlier on in this (very long) comment. If one for a moment ignore the ‘Christians’ for whom it is a purely nominal exercise, a cultural orientation if you like, would this not be a better route for Christians to pursue, as opposed to a fundamentalist literal interpretation of the bible? I’m directing this question to you in the context of your statement that “…it should be worrying for “believers” and “non-believers”, theists and atheists that the “Don’t Really Know” is so cluttered and so overwhelming”. Where the ‘don’t really know’ is a function of ignorance it is obviously problematic, but could it not be a function of acknowledging that in matters ‘spiritual’ we simply cannot ‘know’ in a scientific absolute manner? If so, is that not a good thing?

3) I’m not bothered with defending Christianity, I believe it’s more than capable of surviving on its own. I’m more worried about increasing a more intellectual and critical approach amongst fellow ‘believers’ and (more negatively framed) opposing fundamentalism. I could however not fail to take notice of what I perceive to be a very aggressive movement amongst atheists in combating religion, which in the ‘West’ would mostly focus on Christianity. I accept that if atheists view religion as ‘evil’ (no pun intended) they would be very motivated to take it on. But why this, dare I call it ‘religious fervour’ in doing so? Am I simply connected via social media to a fringe group of atheists who try and nuke religion around every corner and on every subject or is this indicative of a larger atheist movement? I suppose being atheist rather than agnostic imply opposing something, opposing theist faith, but isn’t it getting a bit obsessive? In addition to statements such as ‘relax, there’s no God’, which has some indirect positive message, does the movement offer anything of real value – other than opposing religion? Is it not fundamentalist in this absolute approach it takes? Perhaps in the same way that anti-racism, while honourable in principle, may end up ignoring culture, class, etc. in an absolutist approach to the subject?

4) Is it not a sign of progress when Christians can’t be all bunched into the ‘evolution is evil’ corner, but actually start displaying less fundamentalist, even intellectualitst, tendencies?

My sincere gratitude if you read all the way to this point! If we can have a constructive discussion on this I’ll appreciate it. I’m not looking for the shallow kind of to-and-fro one often encounter on the internet. I trust that my comment is above that