Russell Blackford gets my dander up
Ophelia Benson has posted a reasoned and passionate article on Toleration, from a refreshingly feminist viewpoint, responding to an appallingly weak-kneed godly-coddling crypto-misogynistic article in the pommy rag: “The Telegraph”.
Read Ophelia’s short peice here…
The comment thread that follows is of particular interest, fairly reasoned and humanistic up until Mr. Blackford’s puzzling comment.
You’ll need to navigate to Ophelia’s article (above), and left click on the Comments hyperlink.
It is a strange commenting system where the comments window is a sort of ‘pop-up’.
If you are interested, read the comments, esp Russell’s and my curt response to his worst points, which appear to wilfully ignore the plight of trapped theists, especially women. He even obliquely suggests that their plight of subjection and nominal slavery is their own fault, for not leaving their abusive religion and starting their own!
Tell me if you agree or not.
As Mr. Blackford is slated as a speaker at the Global Atheist Convention, 2010 in Melbourne, it is as well to get his position on religion quite straight before-hand.
I have previously criticised Russell for his ‘faithest’ stance on an interview that he did in the past, and did not recieve what I considered to be a satisfactory response.
| Print article | This entry was posted by Michael Kingsford Gray on January 11, 2010 at 12:38 pm, and is filed under Activism, Politics, Society. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. |











about 2 years ago
I wrote a comment on the original article. It remains to be seen if they post it on the Telegraph site or not.
It seems to me that the Catholic church has had free rein for far too long, with their backward, misogynistic, guilt-ridden teachings, rape of children and repeated cover-ups of the crimes.
The Catholic church continues to claim falsely that condom use promotes HIV. They claim this for doctrinal reasons, not anything to do with logic.
They continue to abuse young children in their care. It is only a matter of time before the media reports the next paedophile priest and associated cover-up.
They continue to promote a policy of non-equality of women, a backward concept women have had to fight against, and this is ongoing. So what if Emma Willcox said Jesus had no female disciples – Jesus had no TV either but the Catholics haven’t banned television. It pains me to think that in the year 2010, people in supposedly educated nations continue to cling to a bronze-age set of morals and religious precepts. Around the beginning of the Christian era women had few, if any, rights, were bought and sold with dowries, and slavery was common. In fact the bible gives us rules for slave ownership, in Leviticus 25:44-46, “you may buy male and female slaves from among the nations that are round about you”.
So I think you should not presume to use your religious prejudices to influence the laws of a country.