Honor Killing. How to Murder Your Four Daughters Calmly and Proudly

Nazir Ahmed. Associated Press. Source

There is an unforgettable description of an honor killing, below.

Nazir Ahmed, a 40 year old Pakistani Muslim, with calm and with no shame or sense of wrong doing, told police about how he slit the throats of his four daughters.

He slit the eldest daughter's throat because she defied his wishes. She was his step daughter.

He slit his own little daughters' throats because he was afraid that they might do as the eldest had done and one day defy his wishes.

He spared his son.

His wife watched the entire process in horror. He threatened her with the bloody knife and warned her not to stop him.

He calmly and without shame told the police he did this because it is his job to protect his family's "honor."

We can learn much from Nazir Ahmed's calmness and openness. He is calm and open because he believes in a religion that tells him that it is a good thing for a father to murder his daughters, if they act against the father's wishes.

Cultural relativism is wrong. There are such things as good beliefs and bad beliefs.

The belief that a man has the right to murder his own flesh and blood because he fears that that woman or girl is a stain on family honor is a bad belief.

'Honor' Killings Shock Pakistan

Associated Press Multan,

Pakistan, Dec. 29, 2005

Nazir Ahmed appears calm and unrepentant as he recounts how he slit the throats of his three young daughters and their 25-year old stepsister to salvage his family's "honor"--a crime that shocked Pakistan.

The 40-year old laborer, speaking to The Associated Press in police detention as he was being shifted to prison, confessed to just one regret -- that he didn't murder the stepsister's alleged lover, too.

Hundreds of girls and women are murdered by male relatives each year in this conservative Islamic nation, and rights groups said Wednesday such "honor killings" will only stop when authorities get serious about punishing perpetrators.

The independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan said that in more than half of such cases that make it to court, most end with cash settlements paid by relatives to the victims' families, although under a law passed last year, the minimum penalty is 10 years, the maximum death by hanging.

Ahmed's apparent actions -- witnessed by his wife, Rehmat Bibi, as she cradled their 3-month-old son -- happened Friday night at their home in the cotton-growing village of Gago Mandi in eastern Punjab province.

It is the latest of more than 260 such honor killings documented by the rights commission, mostly from media reports, during the first 11 months of 2005.

Bibi recounted how she was awakened by a shriek as Ahmed put his hand to the mouth of his stepdaughter, Muqadas, and cut her throat with a machete. She said she looked on helplessly from the corner of the room as he then killed the three girls -- Bano, 8, Sumaira, 7, and Humaira, 4 -- pausing between the slayings to brandish the bloodstained knife at his wife, warning her not to intervene or raise alarm.

"I was shivering with fear. I did not know how to save my daughters," Bibi, sobbing, told AP by phone from the village. "I begged my husband to spare my daughters but he said, 'If you make a noise, I will kill you."'

"The whole night the bodies of my daughters lay in front of me," she said.

The next morning, Ahmed was arrested.

Speaking to AP from the back of a police pickup truck late Tuesday as he was moved to a prison in the city of Multan, Ahmed showed no contrition. Appearing disheveled but composed, he said he killed Muqadas because she had committed adultery, and his daughters because he didn't want them to do the same when they grew up.

He said he bought a butcher knife and a machete after midday prayers on Friday and hid them in the house where he carried out the killings.

"I thought the younger girls would do what their eldest sister had done, so they should be eliminated," he said, his hands cuffed, his face unshaven. "We are poor people and we have nothing else to protect but our honor."

Despite Ahmed's contention that Muqadas had committed adultery -- a claim made by her husband -- the rights commission reported that according to local people, Muqadas had fled her husband because he had abused her and forced her to work in a brick-making factory.

Police have said they do not know the identity or whereabouts of Muqadas' alleged lover.

Muqadas was Bibi's daughter by her first marriage to Ahmed's brother, who died 14 years ago. Ahmed married his brother's widow.

"Women are treated as property and those committing crimes against them do not get punished," said the rights commission's director, Kamla Hyat. "The steps taken by our government have made no real difference."

Activists accuse President Gen. Pervez Musharraf, a self-styled moderate Muslim, of reluctance to reform outdated Islamized laws that make it difficult to secure convictions in rape, acid attacks and other cases of violence against women. They say police are often reluctant to prosecute, regarding such crimes as family disputes.

Statistics on honor killings are confused and imprecise, but figures from the rights commission's Web site and its officials show a marked reduction in cases this year: 267 in the first 11 months of 2005, compared with 579 during all of 2004. The Ministry of Women's Development said it had no reliable figures.

Ijaz Elahi, the ministry's joint secretary, said the violence was decreasing and that increasing numbers of victims were reporting incidents to police or the media. Laws, including one passed last year to beef up penalties for honor killings, had been toughened, she said.

Police in Multan said they would complete their investigation into Ahmed's case in the next two weeks and that he faces the death sentence if he is convicted for the killings and terrorizing his neighborhood.

Ahmed, who did not resist arrest, was unrepentant.

"I told the police that I am an honorable father and I slaughtered my dishonored daughter and the three other girls," he said. "I wish that I get a chance to eliminate the boy she ran away with and set his home on fire."

Pete Seeger Remembrance of an Historic Night. Not What You'd Expect Me To Say

Town Hall 

My parents were peasant immigrants from Eastern Europe. My mother cleaned houses and worked in factories. My dad mined coal as a child and did manual labor as an adult.

My mother was very bright. She was certainly one of the best writers I've ever read. There was no chance that she'd ever be anything but a cleaning woman. Her father, my grandfather, had contracted emphysema in the coal mine. My mom had to quit school and support her younger siblings. She cooked and clean and worked as a nanny for a Jewish family. She learned some Yiddish and introduced us to the Jewish foods she used to cook.

My dad also had to quit school young. His dad had had to fight to pay back his passage from Poland. The "Johnny Bulls" – Americans of English, Irish, Scotch and Welsh ancestry – thought that they could beat my grandfather as he was a small man, a "little Polak." But he beat them. They bushwhacked him one night. Eventually, he died, and my dad, speaking Polish as a first language and only eleven years old, hit the rails during the Depression, trying to find work to support the family. Underage, he joined the Army under false papers and served as "Stanley" though his name was Tony. When he came of age he re-enlisted under his real name. He fought in New Guinea and the Philippines.

I grew up knowing we were different but not sure how or why. My parents regarded our Bohunk identity as shameful, and as trouble. American culture communicated to us that we were the bad guys: people with names and accents like ours fought James Bond and even Rocky and Bullwinkle. Boris Badenov and Natasha were baby boomer's famous cartoon enemies.

As I moved beyond my working class hometown I discovered that many American elites were convinced that we were the world's worst anti-Semites.  

This confused me. One thing I knew for sure was that my mother embraced Jews as "us" not "them." One of her warmest friendships was with a traveling salesman named Dave. Dave and my mother would sit around the kitchen table and exchange stories from the Old Country. I would sit in on these sessions just to enjoy the warmth and sense of home I got from no other visitor to my mother's kitchen. She had other Jewish friends, and the one time she fixed me up with a blind date, it was with the son of another Jewish friend.

In any case, my exploration of why elites label Bohunks as the world's worst anti-Semites would become, one day, my prize-winning scholarly book "Bieganski."

So, we Bohunks were America's Cold War nemesis. We were stigmatized as anti-Semites. Other than that, though, we had no identity. There were no books in the town library about Poles or Slovaks. I know because I looked, obsessively. My teachers could tell me nothing. Unlike Italians, with their Godfather movies, we did not appear in the popular culture. The only really noticeable Poles in popular culture were the "meathead" on "All in the Family" and Stanley Kowalski, a crude, foul rapist, in "Streetcar Named Desire."

We also appeared in America's humor. We were the funny ethnicity, the ethnicity with the word "joke" after it: "Polak joke." You could tell jokes about Polaks that you wouldn't tell about other ethnicities. Johnny Carson, America's favorite humorist, told these jokes.

"How can you tell if your house was robbed by a Polak? The dog is pregnant and the garbage can is empty" gives you the sense of these jokes.

Some thirty years ago an amazing thing happened. The very people who used to despise Bohunks like my parents and me began to show admiration for people like my parents and me. Why? One word: Solidarnosc. The labor union in Poland inspired the world. Us – manual laborers, Catholics, Jews, people with difficult-to-spell names – we were inspiring the world.

I was living in New York City when Jaruzelski cracked down on Solidarity. I hit the streets with my comrades. I was a fellow traveler in those days. Steve Rabinowitz, my boyfriend was a true believer. And Jewish, by the way. Town Hall, a legendary meeting space, hosted an event expressing American Solidarity with Polish Solidarnosc members.

I was more thrilled than I can say. For once in my life it would be cool to be a Bohunk. For once in my life the people around me cared about what I cared about.

I had traveled to my mother's natal village in Slovakia and to Poland and I had seen the horrors of the Soviet Empire with my own eyes. Finally the Americans around me CARED. I felt like electricity was running through me. I felt the world expand in a profound and beautiful way.

Now, thirty years later, that night of support for Solidarnosc at Town Hall is a chapter in history books. Then I was just a kid, with wide, dewy eyes. I knew the people on the stage were celebrities; I could tell from audience reaction to them. I really didn't know who they were, though.

Susan Sontag was there. I had probably not heard of her before that night. She said something I've never forgotten, because I thought it was such a brilliant way for her to get her point across. She said, if one person read nothing but Reader's Digest, and another person read nothing but – and she named some leftie publication with which I was totally unfamiliar – I've since forgotten the name – which person would know more about the failings of the Soviet system?

She was making a point. Mainstream America was telling the truth about how bad Communism was, while American leftists were not.

I was, of course, at the time, an American leftist. Some decades would pass before I would put two together with two and realize that the left was not for me.

I'm learning just now, through Google, that Sontag's comments that Solidarnosc night at Town Hall were reported in the New York Times, TIME, The Washington Post, the New York Post, The LA Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Village Voice, the Nation, and the New Republic. Of course I didn't know that at the time. I just thought that that one lady said something neat.

Pete Seeger took the stage. My image of him was positive. He was a kindly folksinger. He was way more of a celebrity than Susan Sontag. I was thrilled and moved that he was on our team. He was a real, live Americans – no hyphen, no last name ending in a vowel, no grandparents who couldn't speak English, no parents who did the work no one else wanted to do, no relatives in the Old Country who lived under the boot. Pete Seeger was one of the real, live Americans who suddenly was not only seeing us, the Bohunks, but respecting us. Joining in our cause! Helping us to come out from under the boot!

Pete Seeger took the stage.

Now, see, what I am about to type is so horrible, so much not what you want to hear about this kindly folksinger, I want to stop my narrative right here. I want to fast forward to the present day and tell you that I just listened to a slew of encomiums for Pete Seeger on NPR, his natural habitat.

Prof. Alan Chartock, a friend of Pete Seeger's, was just on NPR talking about what a great guy Seeger was. Chartock says that Burl Ives testified against Pete Seeger to the House Un-American Activities Committee. Seeger eventually forgave Ives for this. I greatly admire forgiveness and it touches me no end that Seeger forgave Burl Ives. Chartock also talked about Seeger's environmental activism and I admire that, too. I'm also an environmentalist. It's the cause I donate money to the most regularly.

I know it. Pete Seeger. Great guy.

I hate Pete Seeger. Mere mention of his name makes me angry and sad.

Let's go back to that night at Town Hall, where the idealistic daughter of a Bohunk coal miner and house cleaner, there with her date Steve Rabinowitz, is thrilled finally to feel part of a group in the country she was born in.

Pete Seeger took the stage.

And he trashed us all. He dumped the sticky, ugly substance of hate on us. He did it because he hated us. And his hate was okay.

Seeger, instead of voicing support for Solidarity, delivered a self-righteous lecture about how Poles oppress Jews.

If you haven't read "Bieganski," I can't begin to explain to you here how wrong this was. Because you don't really think about us – Bohunks – in any serious way. We are the joke ethnicity. We are the bete noir. We are the prototype of the brutish hater.

Solidarity thrilled and inspired the world, and your image of us began to raise its head up above the mud.

Seeger's speech, on that night, at that moment, pushed us back down into the mud again.

Since Bohunks aren't taken seriously, let me try this.

Suppose, on the night that Barak Obama was inaugurated, Pete Seeger stood up at a celebration in a legendary public space and said, "Let us never forget that black people beat and torture white people. Remember Reginald Denny?"

That's how bad what Seeger did that night was.

Great guy. Great guy.

He's gone now, so I can't wait for him to ask me for my forgiveness.

***

There's a short film, Marcel Lozinski's 80 MM Od Europy. Eleven minutes. A salute to Bohunks. Watch it here. 

We are not beasts.
Still of Bohunk workers from one of my favorite films, Marcel Lozinski's 89 mm Od Europy 

Pope Francis' Doves of Peace Attacked by Gull and Crow at Vatican

Source The Mirror 

Source: The Mirror 

Source: The Independent

Pope Francis and two children, a boy and a girl, released two white doves of peace in St Peter's Square at the Vatican on Sunday, January 26^th, 2014.

The doves were immediately attacked. Photos show what appear to be a hooded crow and a yellow-legged gull.

I'm shocked by these photos. I've never seen a crow or a gull attack a song bird in flight and attempt to eat it. I've seen accipiters, a rapid species of hawk, do this. I've seen small birds "mob" or pester crows.

Compare an accipiter, with its talons and hooked beak, to a gull with its webbed feet and heavy beak. You can see that the accipiter is built to kill other birds in flight, while the gull is not.

I talked about this with other birdwatchers, and they say that it happens, but I've never seen it.

Robert Spencer reads this as an omen here. I think he's reading too much into the event.

Two accipiters, a sharp shinned hawk and a Cooper's hawk, face off and show off their talons.
Photo by Jay MacGowan.
Source

"Charlie Argues Religion" A Poem about Movies, Internet Love, Suicide, the Afterlife, and Hope

Source

The Popcorn Farm is a new literary journal dedicated to writing about movies. It's a lot of fun. In the inaugural issue, there is a poem about 1940s film star John Garfield, and another about watching Bruce Willis get dressed to fight crime, and a really moving poem about a woman who discovers she is a lesbian and wants to hold hands with another woman at the movies in spite of her husband's presence. There's an essay by an author who liked monster movies as a kid because the author is transgendered.

My favorite poem is by Penelope Scambly Schott and it is entitled "I'm Just Not a Movie Person":

"…I file out of the cinema to where tree tops
tremble against the wide screen of the sky.
then the music comes up and the credits: my parents,
my children, my first husband, my next poem even
the childhood cat…"

There's a poem by me, as well, entitled "Charlie Argues Religion." It's below.

***

Charlie Argues Religion

with thanks to Charlie "Fabrizio" Ryan

Charlie and I used to argue religion.
Charlie was gay and a smoker and he lived in LA.
I was marooned in the Midwest, Catholic, a spinster,
the type that nags strangers,
"The Single Worst Thing you can do to your body,"
while pointing to the cigarette in their hands.
We argued online. Hair pulling; death threats: there were no holds barred.
But we shared a love, in a word: movies.
"I want to rub against your calves and purr," he mused,
after reading my review of "Cluny Brown."
After reading one of his, I blurted – typed – "I love you," and did not delete.
Still surprised by that. Haven't said it to any of my lovers.
Not in English, anyway.
But – my church-going, his atheism – believe me, it got ugly.

One winter day I was inhabiting an oasis of triumph;
today would be my dissertation defense.
For once in her life this geek could afford glee.
I knew this shit inside out.
The little voice interjected: "Check e-mail."
There it was. A member of our invisible audience, who had seen Charlie and me spat and make up and roll around in film, wrote:
"Last night … Charlie couldn't breathe …
house-mates intervened …
an ambulance … a hospital … a death."
The Single Worst Thing you can do to your body!Oh, Charlie.
This was the first day in ten years my dissertation topic
was the last thing on my mind.
Still aced the damn thing.
"It's called 'acting'" as Charlie was wont to say.

Summer. Long-gone Charlie was the last thing on my mind.
I was homeless.
Couldn't find a job. A bad economy for new PhDs
from the wrong side of the tracks
with a history of illness.
Sleeping here and there.
My life a film noir.
From a previous surgery,
a stockpile of morphine:
small, round, maroon, nauseating –
I'd take Dramamine first.
Then, just, swallow them all.
"I'll do it tomorrow."

I lay, diagonal, across a borrowed bed.
And there was Charlie –
just so happy– the imprimatur.
No earthbound mind could fabricate that pure pitch of joy.
He pulled me into his store. He's got a bookstore, now. Rare books.
Which is just so very Charlie.
At first, discretely, as if we were just chatting,
and then, with urgency, like an older brother's,
his words found me and soothed me. They lifted me; I could take flight. They slid muscles back through sleeves of skin. Let me know I could go on. Let me know it would be beautiful. And mean something as fine as the very best movie.
In a word: God.
If I could, gentle reader, I would type here
what Charlie revealed
and then you'd know, too.
But then this happened.
I was limp on a dock.
The place I'd met Charlie was far across water.

An angel, officious, as these creatures can be, tapped my shoulder.
"You have to go inland."
"No … Charlie … there."
"You have to go."
Soft with gratitude, I obeyed;
as if I were swallowing,
with each step
all the things Charlie taught me
sank deep
so I cannot articulate,
or even remember them.
By the time my feet came to fall on land
I was awake on a borrowed bed,
But to this I can testify:
First thing I did –
not knowing, that night, where I'd find sleep
or if I'd ever land a job
or if I could ever replace the gift that was Charlie in my spinster's life –
was sprinkle maroon pills
into a dumpster.

***

Please consider reading the rest of The Popcorn Farm. You can find it here.

The Popcorn Farm's facebook page is here.

New Atheists, Rape Accusations, Feminism, and Rand's Identity in "Save Send Delete."

Edgar Degas "Interior" aka "The Rape" Source

The other day I received an intriguing email from my friend and colleague Dr. Linda Kornasky. Linda is a feminist and free thinker. Linda alerted me to a conversation Atheists and feminists are having about gender relations in the New Atheist movement. She informed me that there has been an accusation of rape against a high profile American Atheist, and much discussion of other harassment of women Atheists by male Atheists.

By the way, I'm capitalizing "Atheist" here. I'm not talking about all those who don't believe in God, but, rather, a subset of atheists who are organized and who devote time and energy to being part of the New Atheist movement.

Linda suggested something to me. Would I publicly announce the identity of Rand, the pseudonymous Atheist in my book "Save Send Delete"? Linda had read the book and was certain that discussion of it could make significant contributions to the conversation Atheist feminists had been having about gender relations.

I agreed with Linda. I would LOVE to be part of any such discussion. I read the links Linda sent.

***

Linda sent me a link to a post by Jennifer McCreight, who blogs under the handle "Blag Hag." McCreight's blog post entitled "How I Unwittingly Infiltrated the Boy's Club & Why It's Time for a New Wave of Atheism" included a critique of New Atheism that I agree with 100 percent. This critique was written by Natalie Reed, and it is brilliant – and devastating.

Reed suddenly had a realization. She realized that the New Atheists were often economically elite, white, heterosexual men. She realized that they were "activists" around Atheism, and only Atheism, because they had never experienced misogyny or poverty or racism. The only "enemy" these New Atheist men had ever fought was Christianity – a relatively easy target. In fighting Christianity, they suddenly were able to depict themselves as heroic champions. They could do this without ever looking in any critical way at their own economic, color, and gender privilege.

Reed reported suddenly having "the creepy thought that the reason a lot of outspoken, committed, passionate atheists are choosing [New Atheism] as their arena is because they're too selfish, too entitled, or too sheltered to allow any other issues to really matter to them…

There's some kind of weird psychological need that a lot of people, perhaps in response to feelings that their belief of their privileges being earned is under threat, to valorize and mythologize themselves as valiant Robin Hoods…

What atheism is offering so many middle-class, white, heterosexual, able-bodied men is the capacity to see themselves as these savvy, smart, daring, controversial rogues who are standing up against an oppressive dogma in order to liberate the deluded sheeple…they get to be the heroes of their own narratives, instead of a passive passenger adrift on social forces more or less beyond their control… social forces that happened to guide them into a relatively safe and comfy position.

No matter how limited your views, no matter how much privilege you have, when you prop yourself up against Christianity, you get to be clever, and you get to be the rebel."

Brava, Natalie Reed, brava!

Oh, gosh, my friend Linda Kornasky was so right! I did so want to be part of this conversation Atheist feminists are having! And yes, "Save Send Delete" could contribute to it!

I kept reading.

Again, on Jennifer McCreight's Blag Hag blog, I found one prominent Atheist's reply to a woman critic. I quote it, below. Fair warning. This is a vile piece of writing, purposely written to provoke pain in the reader.

"I will make you a rape victim if you don't fuck off...I think we should give the guy who raped you a medal. I hope you fucking drown in rape semen, you ugly, mean-spirited cow…Is that kind of like the way that rapists dick went in your pussy? Or did he use your asshole…I'm going to rape you with my fist."

There's a lot more to this, but this excerpt gives you the main idea of the whole paragraph.

Shocked, shocked

Atheist feminists are shocked, shocked to discover the worst kinds of misogyny in their ranks.

Their shock is symptomatic of their movement.

Look. Isn't it just a little bit disingenuous for New Atheist feminist to be troubled that New Atheist men speak badly to them and sexually harass them?

Look at their heroes. New Atheist Richard Dawkins compares religion to smallpox. New Atheist Sam Harris suggests that people should be killed for religious belief. New Atheist Christopher Hitchens smeared Mother Teresa. Scientist Pim van Lommel accused New Atheist Michael Shermer of using his column in Scientific American to misrepresent van Lommel's near-death research. New Atheist Daniel Dennett says that Atheists should be called "Brights" because they are smarter than non-Atheists.

Bill Maher's hateful comments about people of faith are too many to quote here. In internet discussions, Atheists frequently refer to Jesus as a "dead Jew on a stick" and communion as "dead Jew zombie cannibalism and vampirism." There's a reason why there is a spate of articles denouncing the New Atheists with one certain adjective: "obnoxious."

New Atheist feminists are shocked, shocked to discover that a community built on hate, unearned privilege, denial of responsibility for others, and violation turns its hate, privilege, irresponsibility and violation on its own.

We've seen this movie before. "Meet the new boss; same as the old boss." It's the repeat of a predictable pattern. The New Atheist movement has the exact same, shopworn and tired flaws that all Utopian movements have.

Utopian movements announce: "The past was really bad! The present status quo is corrupt and flawed! We will create a pristine, flawless future!"

As long as you announce yourself as capable of perfecting the world, the ends justifies the means. You are the savior of humanity, and in the course of that salvation, you allow yourself the right to destroy. You are the iconoclast. "I am become Shiva, the destroyer of worlds." As Maximilian Robespierre said, "You can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs." You can't bring on the New Atheist utopia without raping a few naïve followers. Small price to pay!

Nazism, Communism, France's Revolutionary Terror, and various notorious communes, like the Westboro Baptist Church, were and are utopian.

The perfect is the enemy of the good. As long as you insist on perfection, the only reward real life offers – just good enough – forever eludes you. The revolution eats its young. Maximilian Robespierre, known as "The Incorruptible One," was decapitated by his own purifying machine – the guillotine.

I am a Catholic. My church is deeply flawed. New Atheists understand my membership in, and support for, a deeply flawed church as a sign that I am a corrupt fool. They think this because they are intellectually and ethically immature. They don't realize that my membership in the publicly-confessed-as-flawed, trying-to-be-less-flawed Catholic Church is a sign that I am in the exact right church.

A prominent New Atheist has been publicly accused of rape and serial sexual harassment.

How did the New Atheist community respond?

Some women blogged about it. These whistle-blowers have received rape and death threats. At least two found the experience so daunting they publicly announced that they would retire from blogging, or retire from blogging about misogyny among New Atheists.

New Atheist acolytes set up a "defense fund" for the alleged rapist, an economically comfortable minor celebrity who gives no sign of needing extra cash. The fund collected thousands of dollars, in spite of there being no clear immediate need or purpose for the donations that came pouring in, exceeding the fundraisers' target.

I visited the Facebook page of the New Atheist in question. He was ranting about … sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.

Yes. Really.

Let me make this clear. A New Atheist accused of rape and sexual harassment was publicly excoriating the Catholic Church for sex abuse.

And his devoted little New Atheist acolytes were taking his bait, following along as robotically as a parody of a religious congregation emptily mouthing words in some arcane sacred tongue that in fact is completely void of meaning. "Oh yes," they chanted. "Catholic clerics are so bad because they sexually abuse their blinded and helpless followers," they insisted. "Catholics are such sheep because they don't turn in the alleged rapists."

How do you spell "irony"? I'm dyslexic. I think it's spelled N - E - W -- A - T - H - E - I - S - T.

As a Catholic, I wake up every day knowing that there is mud on my dress. And I know I have to deal with that mud.

I need to be a better person. I need to be more aware of what's going on around me. I need to speak up when I see injustice.

I do that because I live in an imperfect world that I can never perfect. I do that because I want to live up to the foundational documents and example of my faith. Those documents offer us our best map to a better world. We believe that we are all part of God, and all worthy of dignity and respect. We believe in confession and renewal. We are working on it. We are working very hard on what we did wrong and what we can do to make it right.

What are the foundational documents and doctrines of the New Atheists? "We're perfect; you're scum." See where that gets you.

There's something else that the hardcore New Atheist utopians miss. Not-perfectible humans, no matter who they are and what they believe, all share fundamental flaws. Those flaws are not rooted in religion that is something you can eliminate with your guillotines of perfection. Those flaws are rooted in human nature which you can never escape.

You are a charismatic leader who believes in God? You will be tempted to sexually abuse followers.

You are a charismatic leader who doesn't believe in God? You will be tempted to sexually abuse your followers.

Jettison belief in God and you will still burp and fart and your feet will still stink. The hardcore New Atheists really don't get that. No utopians do. That is why they are so dangerous, and so wrong.

So, for today, I will decline Linda's intriguing invitation, and I won't reveal, not in this blog post anyway, Rand's identity. Speaking is good, but being heard is necessary for dialogue, and I'm not confident that New Atheists can hear a Catholic, even if we are all feminists. And, yes, I acknowledge that I am not a name, and my book is not a bestseller, and probably most people don't really care who Rand is.

***

Natalie Reed's blog post entitled "All In," which included the above-quoted critic of the New Atheist movement can be found here.

Jennifer McCreight's blog entitled "How I Unwittingly Infiltrated the Boy's Club & Why It's Time for a New Wave of Atheism" can be found here.

Jennifer McCreight's blog entitled "Scratch the Amazing Atheist Off Your List, Too," which included the Atheist's ugly response to a woman, can be found here.

Source

"Saving Mr Banks" It Can Be Feminist to Depict a Witch as a Witch

"Savings Mr. Banks" is worth seeing for Emma Thompson's peerless performance as "Mary Poppins" author PL Travers. That Thompson was not nominated for a best actor Academy Award is a crime. Thompson's performance is one of the most compelling and convincing performances I've ever seen.

Thompson plays PL Travers as a witch, and I'm using the nice version of the word. You know what word I really mean. Thompson's Travers is thoroughly believable. This isn't a cartoon villainess. This isn't Cruella DaVille or Maleficent. This is a woman you could imagine having as a boss or a neighbor. You'd do everything you could to avoid her. She doesn't learn any lesson. She doesn't reveal that we are all warm and fuzzy if you just get close enough.

Some have criticized "Saving Mr. Banks" for this reason. They say that it's sexist to depict a successful woman author as being a witch. Baloney. It would be sexist to depict her as warm and cuddly. Women can be unpleasant. I know plenty of women like Travers. It isn't liberated to insist that all women are nice. Plenty of women are not nice at all.

I found Thompson's depiction of Travers to be so powerful that the rest of the film didn't measure up, for me. Part of the film takes place in 1961. Travers is in Hollywood, working with Disney studios on their film adaptation of her book "Mary Poppins." Part of the film is a series of flashbacks to Travers' childhood in Australia. In the flashbacks, Colin Farrell plays Travers' alcoholic father. The flashbacks didn't work for me. They had the feel of an afterschool special. Everyone was so good looking, especially Colin Farrell, even while suffering the health effects of alcoholism. Annie Rose Buckley, who plays the author as a child, is cherubically beautiful. The scenes depicting the alcoholic father disappointing and humiliating his daughter, and breaking her heart, did not affect me at all. They felt paint-by-numbers – oh, this is the predictable scene where the little girl realizes her father is a loser.

The 1961 scenes in Hollywood worked much better. Paul Giamatti is amazing in the small part of Travers' limo driver. He brings a wallop of humanity and poignancy to his role that really swept me off my feet. The two develop a real rapport, and they could have taken up much more of the film. Jason Schwartzman and BJ Novak are also brilliant as Robert and Richard Sherman, who wrote the songs for Mary Poppins. In one scene, Travers objects to Robert Sherman's walking with a cane. The film doesn't mention this; I wish it had. Sherman was only 19 or 20 years old when he participated in the liberation of Dachau. He was shot during the war. That's why he walked with a cane.

Tom Hanks as Walt Disney didn't really work for me. Walt Disney was a totemic figure from my childhood. I remember him, in his TV appearances, as rather godlike – avuncular and yet distant, impenetrable. While watching Emma Thompson as PL Travers, I got the sense that I was watching something like the real PL Travers – a real, complex, human being. While watching Tom Hanks as Walt Disney, I got the sense that I was watching Tom Hanks play a sanitized version of Walt Disney. "Saving Mr. Banks" was very brave in its depiction of Travers, but very vanilla in its depiction of Walt. Giamatti as the fictional limo driver had more depth and complexity.

The movie is most valuable as a character piece. It tries to say some big things about how people live through sorrow, like Travers' childhood, and survive that sorrow by creating art about it, like "Mary Poppins." That big idea really didn't wash for me. I know it's possibly true, but that message just didn't grab me, so the movie was not a ten, but it's certainly worth viewing for Thompson's performance, for her interplay with Giamatti and the Sherman brothers as played by Schwartzman and Novak.

On Meeting the Prominent Atheist Who Inspired "Save Send Delete"

Paul Henreid, Bette Davis, "Now Voyager." 

"Save Send Delete" tells the true story of my long distance, email relationship with a prominent atheist. We debated whether or not God exists, and we had a romantic relationship – all via email.

People sometimes ask me whether or not "Rand" – his pseudonym – and I actually ever met. Yes, we did. This blog post tells that story.

It was a very, very weird night.

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