Ultra-orthodox Jewish newspaper doctors photos of Charlie Hebdo rally to remove women

January 13, 2015 • 12:34 pm

The Charlie Hebdo affair gave extremist Islam a bad image, and it’s ironic that it also gave rise to something that also erodes the image (which is already pretty bad) of extremist Jews, i.e. the ultra-Orthodox believers. I’ve discussed recently the extreme misogyny of ultra-Orthodox Jews, which in that case took the ludicrous form of Jews on planes refusing to sit next to women lest they get polluted with female cooties. They even offered other passengers money to switch seats so they wouldn’t have to sit next to someone with one X chromosome more than they had. This nonsense, which has happened three times in the last six months, delayed the planes.

The latest episode, which makes no sense to me at all, involves an ultra-Orthodox Jewish newspaper, The Announcer, editing a photo of the Charlie Hebdo “Solidarity March” in Paris to remove two female participants! As Mediaite reports:

The image that ran on the front page of the Israeli newspaper The Announcer edited two female world leaders out of the image, originally provided by wire service GPO: German Chancellor Angela Merkel and EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini. A third woman in a blue scarf who we can’t identify was also photoshopped out. [The site has an update saying that the third “woman” might actually be Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris]

Here’s the original photo:

Below is version that ran in the paper sans females. As Mediaite notes, “Merkel and Mystery Woman are gone completely, while Mogherini was simply cropped out of the photo”:

The site gives details showing evidence of emendation, though it’s hardly needed in light of the above. And Swiss President Simonetta Sommaruga appears to have been cropped out, too.

Yes, I know these crazy religionists don’t want to touch or sit next to women, but what on earth is their excuse for removing women from a news photograph? Can it be that they’re so bull-goose crazy that they can’t even tolerate women next to men in a picture? I have no explanation, but it’s clear that the anti-female aspect of the faith is involved.

h/t: Several readers who sent me diverse links

“Yiddish girl” corrects Ami magazine about geocentrism

January 3, 2015 • 11:30 am

Wikipedia describes Ami Magazine (“ami” means “my nation” in Hebrew) as “an Orthodox Jewish news magazine published weekly in New York and Israel.”A pseudonymous reader using the monicker “freethinking Jew” sent me a scan of a recent letter to the magazine’s offshoot, AIM, which Ami‘s Facebook page describes as “an educational and entertaining magazine for teens.”

Any time you see a statement that begins “As [a member of random religion] we believe,” you know it will be followed something delusional. What’s worse is “Esty’s” reply, in which the magazine refuses to take a stand on heliocentrism. It reminds me of BioLogos’s refusal to take a stand on whether Adam and Eve were real people.

Lest you think that BioLogos’s real mission is its avowed one—to help evangelical Christians accept the truths of science—here’s its weaselly answer to the question, “Were Adam and Eve historical figures?“:

Genetic evidence shows that humans descended from a group of several thousand individuals who lived about 150,000 years ago. This conflicts with the traditional view that all humans descended from a single pair who lived about 10,000 years ago. While Genesis 2-3 speaks of the pair Adam and Eve, Genesis 4 refers to a larger population of humans interacting with Cain. One option is to view Adam and Eve as a historical pair living among many 10,000 years ago, chosen to represent the rest of humanity before God. Another option is to view Genesis 2-4 as an allegory in which Adam and Eve symbolize the large group of ancestors who lived 150,000 years ago. Yet another option is to view Genesis 2-4 as an “everyman” story, a parable of each person’s individual rejection of God. BioLogos does not take a particular view and encourages scholarly work on these questions.

Here’s my answer to “Yiddish girl”:

Dear Yiddish Girl,

Regardless of what “we Jews believe”—and I consider myself a secular Jew—you’re simply wrong about the Sun going around the Earth. The truth about that, which is the reverse, was established 500 years ago by observations, and only those blinded by adherence to ancient books of fiction could think otherwise. —Professor Ceiling Katz

And to BioLogos:

Dear BioLogos,

Get real. There is no evidence that Adam and Eve existed, much less that they were the ancestors of all humanity—unless you see the Old Testament as a historical document. And of course you know that that book contains many other falsehoods, including the existence of the Exodus of the Jews and the Flood of Noah. (Or do you see the Flood as simply a parable for humanity drowning in sin?) Your weasel words about Adam and Eve do your organization discredit, making it clear that you’d rather hedge the science than rile the Christians. It’s like saying that you take no stand about the historical existence of Paul Bunyan and his giant blue ox.

Sincerely,
J. A. Coyne

Misogynist Jews on a plane

December 31, 2014 • 10:00 am

I don’t use the term “misogynist” lightly, because to me it means “someone who hates women,” not simply “a sexist.” But what else can one call a group of orthodox Jews who won’t sit next to women on planes for fear they’ll be polluted?

This has happened three times in the last couple of months. First, in September, a group of Orthodox Jewish males caused an eleven-hour delay on an El Al flight from New York to Tel Aviv because they wouldn’t take their assigned seats next to women. As the Independent reported then:

. . . the flight did not take off on time, according to Shalom Life, after a group of Haredi Jewish passengers refused to sit next to women, believing that men and women should be segregated.

“People stood in the aisles and refused to go forward,” a passenger on board the flight, Amit Ben-Natan, told the publication.

“Although everyone had tickets with seat numbers that they purchased in advance, they asked us to trade seats with them, and even offered to pay money, since they cannot sit next to a woman. It was obvious that the plane won’t take off as long as they’re standing in the aisles,” he said.

The Haredi passengers agreed to sit in their assigned seats for take-off, but one passenger described the overall experience as an “11-hour long nightmare,” referring to the difficulty before take-off and the ensuing disturbances on board, caused by the Haredi passengers “jumping out” of their seats when the fasten-seatbelt sign was switched off.

Then on December 20, a Delta flight on the same route experienced the same trouble, though this time the flight was delayed by only half an hour. The Independent reports again:

The cabin crew on the Delta flight out of John F. Kennedy Airport tried to find seats for the men, but were met with refusal by other passengers, some of whom who took a dim view of the reasoning behind the request.

The same thing happened in October as well, and again on the same route, delaying the flight for an hour.

This is unacceptable. No passenger should be able to request not being seated next to a woman, even on religious grounds, and no passenger should be forced to move to comply with such a request. Any Jewish person causing such a disruption should be immediately booted off the plane. The scene of frenetic ultra-Orthodox men offering other people money to get a seat next to a man is simply repugnant.

Finally, lest you think this is a simple religious stricture that has nothing to do with regarding women as inferior (and you’d think this only if you knew nothing about Orthodox Jews), have a gander at what else the Independent says:

Many Haredi Jewish communities practice strict gender segregation and refrain from touching people of the opposite gender who are not close family members.

Haredi publications in Israel generally do not print pictures of women and girls. In 2009, the Israeli newspaper Yated Ne’eman famously doctored a photograph of the Israeli cabinet in order to replace two female ministers with images of men.

In the UK, the ultra-Orthadox [sic] Jewish community in Stamford Hill, north London, was recently criticised after signs requesting women to walk on a certain side of the street were erected, promoting segregation for a Torah parade.

Here’s one of those signs, and note that there’s no explanation:

This gender segregation is one way that extremist “ultra-Orthodox” Jews resemble Muslims. In their synagogues men pray on the main floor while women are restricted to the back of the temple, often upstairs behind a screen.

Further, many Orthodox Jewish women, like Hasids, are the equivalent of breeder cattle, whose duty is simply to tend the home and pump out more young Jews. They usually are forbidden to have real jobs, and must cut their hair short and wear wigs or other hair coverings because natural uncovered hair is considered “immodest.” In this way Jews also converge with Muslims. Finally, menstruation is considered unclean among the ultra-Orthodox, and women are obliged to take ritual purification baths after their periods. (Two good books on the repression of Orthodox Jewish women are Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots, and Cut Me Loose: Sin and Salvation after my Ultra-Orthodox Girlhood.)

Finally, there’s that infamous prayer. MyJewishLearning gives the history and context of the phrase that begins the morning prayers of many Orthodox Jews:

“Blessed are you, Lord, our God, ruler of the universe who has not created me a woman.”

As the article notes, Orthodox apologists argue that this phrase merely shows gratitude that males have the privilege of performing more religious rituals, but it comes across as intolerant and sexist. And why would only men have that privilege? My own version of the prayer is “Blessed are you, O Ceiling Cat, who has not created me an Orthodox Jew.”

The problem with faith schools

November 16, 2014 • 1:28 pm

It baffles me why the good citizens of the UK permit children to be educated in government supported “faith schools.” Why do they even exist? What good do they do, except to inculcate fairly tales in children and prevent them from intermingling with those of other backgrounds—something that is desirable in a democracy. Even the U.S. doesn’t have them, though in some cases state governments support religious education through a voucher system.

The dangers of these schools don’t just reside in the Islamic ones, which was what you probably thought I was getting at. That is a problem, but there are problems in schools of other faiths—probably of every faith. The latest comes from a Jewish girls’ school in Hackney (an area of London), Yesodey Hatorah Secondary School, in which every student is a girl from an Orthodox Jewish home.

And, as many of you know, Orthodox Judaism is not friendly to evolution. Most are creationists, and I’ve met several Orthodox Jews who, after accepting evolution, were expelled from their family and shunned by their friends. They became atheists, and are deeply wounded.

According to the National Secular Society, Yesodey Hatorah has been redacting evolution questions on the GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education) exams, tests given to every student in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland, and whose scores determine one’s eligibility for higher education. After being caught simply eliminating the questions from the GCSE exam, Yesodey Hatorah’s principal, Rabbi Avraham Pinter, expressed no contrition, but said this:

“if we can’t redact [questions], then we won’t redact them.” However, the Rabbi went on to state that “our children will be aware of which questions they should be answering and which ones they shouldn’t be.” Pinter also said that evolution was not compatible with the school’s strict, Orthodox ethos. It is now clear that rather than redacting questions as they had in the past, the school is advising students not to address the questions.

This, of course, lowers the students’ scores, as they get no credit for evolution questions. But it’s apparently more important to keep the faith than learn the truth.

And it’s not just evolution where students are shortchanged. The school also refuses to teach required courses in human reproduction, for that, too, violates Orthodox strictures. Questions on human reproduction, like those on evolution, were being “redacted” from the exams by the teachers. This violates national standards for education, and keeps the kids in the faith-based cocoon where their parents want them.

One would think, since the school has admitted violating government standards, and seems committed to continuing these violations, they’d be called out or punished by the government.

One would be wrong.

OFSTED, the UK governmental organization for Standards in Education, Children’s Services, and Skills, rated Yesodey Hatorah school for 2014. The rating? “GOOD”! Here it is:

How can this be? As the British Humanist Association (BHA) notes,

Against this backdrop, it was surprising that the school’s inspection in September, which was published in October, not only found the school to be ‘good’, but does not mention evolution, creationism or sex and relationships education at all.

The BHA has made inquiries, so far with no response:

BHA Faith Schools Campaigner Richy Thompson commented, ‘Every young person is entitled to a broad and balanced education, including understanding evolution’s central role in biology and that it is the only evidence-based view of how life came to be. The Government has made it clear that if a school teaches creationism as scientifically valid, then that, in its view, would be unbalanced. Equally, all the best evidence shows that full and comprehensive sex and relationships education leads to the best outcomes for young people in terms of sexual health and wellbeing.

‘How can it be right that a school, never mind about a state school, can deny pupils a broad and balanced education in these important areas, and yet still be deemed by Ofsted to be ‘good’? We have asked Ofsted how this happened and why these issues are not mentioned in its report, and are currently awaiting a reply.’

I’ll be curious to see how Ofsted justifies its “good” rating. In the meantime, you heathens and science-friendly UKers should be raising holy hell about this, and, above all, trying to end the practice of having government faith schools. Now I’m sure that since the schools are firmly embedded in the UK system, this won’t be easy, but there is simply no justification for an enlightened democracy to support religious education. When it does, you get stuff like this happening.

Rabbi Sacks goes after atheists and Dawkins with the usual religious inanities

September 29, 2014 • 8:39 am

Oy vey! As an atheist but also a cultural Jew, I have to say that Rabbi Jonathan Sacks is an embarrassment. As he was the Commonwealth’s Chief Rabbi for 22 years, a member of the House of Lords, a Ph.D. graduate in philosophy, and now a professor at Yeshiva University and New York University in New York, I would have expected better than his inane pronouncements in an interview in Saturday’s Salon. The title of the piece is below; click on the screenshot to get to the piece:

I am continually disappointed in my expectation that religious Jews will behave better than, say, religious Christians. True, most liberal Jews are a hairsbreadth from atheism (there’s the old joke: “What do you call a Jew who doesn’t believe in God?”, with the answer being, “A Jew”), but Sacks is an Orthodox rabbi and the orthodox, as we’ll see later today, are the most retrograde and misogynistic branch of Judaism (I suspect Sacks is not nearly as conservative as most Orthodox, though).

At any rate, the first screwup is not Sack’s but Salon’s: the interview is about many things, and Dawkins is mentioned only briefly. Further, Dawkins is not accused specifically of lacking a sense of humor as the title implies. It’s all of us atheists who lack a sense of humor. The headline is clearly meant to draw clicks—or else the headline writer (generally not the piece’s author) is totally clueless.

I’ll try not to bash the good rabbi too hard, but here are a few snippets (indented) from his interview with the writer, Michael Schulson, a freelance writer with a degree in religious studies). Schulson’s questions are in bold, and Sacks’s answers are in plain type.

You write that “the mutual hostility between religion and science is one of the curses of our age.” What’s made this relationship so fraught?

There was a time when the church felt it could censure truths that it felt to be inconsistent with its own deeply held beliefs. Now it’s as if it were almost a mirror image. Science is claiming a monopoly of knowledge, and thus some scientific atheists are intent on depriving religion of any cognitive status. I think this has been a swing of a pendulum, and I think it has more to do with power than with intellectual integrity.

I will indeed claim that science broadly construed (i.e., the use of reason, evidence, observation, hypothesis testing, and replication) has a monopoly on knowledge about the world and Universe. If religion can give us knowledge, then do tell us, Rabbi Sacks, exactly what that knowledge is, and how it’s unique to faith. I will grant that religion appeals to emotionality, and can give some people a sense of community and solace, but knowledge? I still have not heard from anyone, though I’ve asked several times, about what knowledge religion imparts about the world that can’t be derived from empirical observation. (Or, if you consider philosophy to be “knowledge,” what does religion tell us that secular philosophy doesn’t?)

Well, at least Sacks tacitly admits above that “scientific atheism” is gaining power. Good for us.

In a recent interview, Richard Dawkins described you as very nice, but he said that attacking you was “like attacking a wet sponge.” Why does Dawkins have such trouble with your arguments?

Because Richard, who is a brilliant scientist, thinks that morality is a simple matter. Oh, we’ll get a few scientists and we’ll work out what we should do and what we shouldn’t do. And quite frankly, the whole history of humankind has borne testimony to the fact that we may quite reasonably know what is the right thing to do. Actually getting people to do the right thing is the hardest thing on earth. I really admire Richard Dawkins’ work within his field, but when he moves beyond his field, he must understand that we may feel that he’s talking on a subject in which he lacks expertise.

Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts them together to see what they mean. And I think the people who spend their lives taking things apart to see how they work sometimes find it difficult to understand the people who put things together to see what they mean.

See? No mention of Dawkins’s humorlessness. In fact, I find Richard funnier than Rabbi Sacks, who has never made me chuckle even once. Dawkins, like Sam Harris, has a sort of dry humor that comes across in their prose. But that aside, I don’t recall Dawkins every saying that “morality is a simple matter,” nor even that science will settle all moral questions. If a reader can find a quote to this effect, by all means cite it. But I’ve written Richard with the link to this piece, and perhaps he’ll deign to give us his take.

As for the sentence, “the whole history of humankind has borne testimony to the fact that we may quite reasonably know what is the right thing to do,” well that’s just crazy. Is Sacks ignorant of history, or how morality has changed so much over the centuries? Perhaps he could do with a read of Steve Pinker’s last book that shows exactly the huge temporal changes in our feeling of what is moral. For, after all, it wasn’t so long ago that the “right thing to do” was to treat women like chattel, kill gays, torture animals, mete out terrible punishment for crimes, and possess slaves. It was also right (indeed, an obligation) to kill blasphemers and heretics.

And I wonder if Sacks isn’t “talking beyond his expertise” when he pronounces on science. Really, there’s too much credential-mongering going around in both the religious and atheist communities. Can’t we just deal with people’s arguments and not attack their credentials?

Finally, science is essentially reductionist, as Sacks says, but that’s because we need to see how the individual parts work before we put things together. After all, the Big Bang is a Big Thing, but is understood via reductionist physics. The claim that religion “puts things together to see what they mean” can’t possibly apply to the same questions that science engages (the reductionist bits), but must mean “religion gives us the big picture of life, and answers questions about meaning and purpose.” But religion doesn’t do that in any way that’s dispositive. Really, Rabbi Sacks, how do you know that your own way of “putting stuff together” gives the same results as, say, that of a Muslim imam or a Southern Baptist preacher? It doesn’t of course. That’s because different faiths (or even different branches of a single faith, like Sunni and Shia Muslims) come to different conclusions when they “put things together”, showing that religion does not have any valid cognitive status.

Now for Sack’s atheist bashing:

In the past few years, there’s been a tendency to compare the New Atheists to certain fundamentalist religious groups. Is that a worthwhile comparison? Do you think that, when you look at the extremes of religiosity and scientism, you see a kind of kinship?

A fundamentalist is somebody who can’t really understand a point of view opposite to his own. He can’t really hear in stereo, he can’t really see 3-D. Whereas a really great scientist like Niels Bohr will say that the opposite of a superficial truth is a falsehood, but the opposite of a profound truth is very often another profound truth. Niels Bohr really got it. But some of today’s atheists don’t get it. They know that science is a profound truth, but they can’t understand that something opposite can also be a profound truth.

Sorry, Lord Rabbi Sacks, but many of us atheists can and have understood the point of view opposite to our own. For many atheists were formerly religious, often very religious. Look at Dan Barker, Mike Aus, Jerry DeWitt, and John Loftus: all former evangelical Christians, and now all nonbelievers and vociferous critics of religion. They don’t understand the religious mindet? PIFFLE! And of course while I’ve never been deeply religious, I have tried hard to understand where the faithful are coming from. But that doesn’t mean that I will agree with their claims—claims for which I’ll demand evidence. Finally, the stuff about the profound truth of science being met by the profound truth of religion is just word salad. If there are “profound truths” in Judaism, I want to hear them!

Here’s the best trope: the exhuming of poor old Nietzsche as an example of the best atheist ever. Why? Because he took its implications seriously: we’re supposed to be all melancholy and nihilistic when we truly realize that there is no God. The funny bit (unintentionally funny, because Sacks has no discernible sense of humor) is that at the same time he takes atheists to task for not being funny enough. We’re faulted for not being dolorous enough, but also for not being funny enough. What has the rabbi been smoking?

You write that “atheism deserves better than the new atheists.” What kind of thinkers do atheists deserve? Is there a type of atheism that our society needs?

Well, you know, Bertrand Russell was an atheist with a sense of humor. And the new atheists tend either to lack a sense of humor, or the only humor they’re capable of is sarcasm. I mean, somebody with a little intellectual humility does not say, “Anyone who disagrees with me is stupid.” That is fundamentalism. Fundamentalism is the attempt to impose a single truth on the plural world.

There’s no question, Nietzsche was the greatest of all atheists. Because it wasn’t just that he didn’t believe in God, he tried to understand what is at stake in the belief or disbelief in God. His fundamental value was the will to power. So I think right now, for instance, if we’re looking at the jihadists in Iraq and Syria, I think that is a desecration of religion, and they are really Nietzscheans. Because religion can mutate into idolatry really quite easily.

Well, Rabbi Sacks isn’t exactly Steve Martin, either. And if you read Bertrand Russell, and believe me, I’ve read plenty of him, he has the dry sense of humor that you can see in Dawkins and Harris. And Russell is full of sarcasm: here’s one quote from The Albatross; it’s the first sentence in Russell’s collection Sceptical Essays (“Why I am not a Christian” is also full of sarcasm.):

I wish to propose for the reader’s favourable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true. (Russell 1928, p. 1)

And to claim that Christopher Hitchens wasn’t funny? That’s insane: the guy could be a laugh riot. But really, Sacks just doesn’t like atheists, and is throwing every bit of mud he can at them, hoping some will stick.

By the way, who has said “Anyone who disagrees with me is stupid”? I think Dawkins said something about those who believe in creationism being ignorant, stupid, or deluded, but that was a one-off statement (and not far from the truth). New Atheists don’t go around saying what Rabbi Sacks claims.

Finally, there’s this:

I want to go a bit deeper into this relationship between religion and power. In your writing, you’ve made it clear that you believe individuals can be good without God. But you argue that societies can’t thrive without religion. So, for you, religion must play some role in politics, right?

Religion creates communities, and communities are essential for the moral life. They’re not essential for individuals, but they’re essential for any group cohesion. . .

My answer is this: Sweden and Denmark, dear Rabbi. Are those countries, which are largely atheistic, immoral and falling apart? I don’t think so.

Oy, my kishkas are in knots!

Israel arrests suspects in both murders: the Israeli teens and the Palestinian teen

July 6, 2014 • 1:01 pm

According to today’s Times of Israel, Israel has taken several people into custody for the murder of a Palestinian teenager. It now looks like the Palestinian teenager, Muhammud Abu Khdeir (see photo below) was indeed killed by Israeli terrorists, and in a gruesome way, in reprisal for the murder of the three Israelis. The Times reports:

Several people were arrested Sunday in connection with the murder of 16-year-old Muhammed Abu Khdeir, whose burned body was found in the Jerusalem forest on Wednesday morning, officials said Sunday.

The suspects are members of a Jewish extremist cell, the Shin Bet security agency said.

Officials suspect the killing was most likely carried out by Jewish extremists in revenge for the killing of three Israeli teenagers earlier in June.

Several Israeli media outlets reported that six people in total were arrested, including a number of minors.

The suspects are from Beit Shemesh, Jerusalem and the settlement of Adam, police said, according to Channel 2.

“Apparently the people arrested in relation to the case belong to an extremist Jewish group,” an unnamed official was quoted by AFP as saying.

An official speaking on the condition of anonymity told the Associated Press that authorities believe the killing was “nationalistic” in nature.

“Nationalistic,” of course, means they killed the kid because he was Palestinian. And the death was apparently horrible:

On Saturday, the Palestinian Authority attorney-general, Dr. Muhammed Abed al-Ghani al-Aweiwi, said that Abu Khdeir was burned alive, according to the preliminary findings of the autopsy.

He said flammable material was found in Abu Khdeir’s lungs and breathing passages, indicating he was still alive when he was set on fire. Aweiwi added that additional lab tests were needed and that the final autopsy report would be issued only after those tests were completed.

Aweiwi told Palestinian news agency Ma’an that Abu Khdeir had sustained severe burns across 90 percent of his body, including his head, where he was also beaten.

Abu Khdeir’s mother is of course devastated, and said this:

In East Jerusalem, Abu Khdeir’s mother, Suha, welcomed news of the arrests but said she had little faith in the Israeli justice system.

“I don’t have any peace in my heart. Even if they captured who they say killed my son,” she said. “They’re only going to ask them questions and then release them. What’s the point?”

“They need to treat them the way they treat us. They need to demolish their homes and round them up, the way they do to our children,” she added.

She’s absolutely right. If Israel demolishes the homes of Palestinian terrorists as a deterrent, it is obliged do the same with Israeli terrorists. Perhaps in that way terrorists from both countries will think twice before committing violence. I trust that Israel (If wants to have any credibility) won’t question and release the suspects without good reason, and if there is good reason to suspect them, they must stand trial for murder.

Here is the child who will never see adulthood:

dfsdfsd-e1404343721711 — 16-year-old Muhammad Abu Khdeir, a Palestinian teenager whose body was found Wednesday, July 2 in Jerusalem’s forest area (photo credit: AFP via family handout)

In a further development, The Jerusalem Post reports that one suspect in the killing of the three Israeli teenagers has also been arrested by the IDF (Israeli Defense Force

The IDF arrested a terrorism suspect in Hebron overnight between Saturday and Sunday, Palestinian media agencyMa’an reported.

Ma’an said the raid occurred in the city’s Qarn al-Thour neighborhood, and that the arrest was made “in connection with the kidnapping and killing of three Israeli teenagers weeks earlier.

It named the suspect as Husam Dufish, and cited his relatives and Palestinian security sources as confirming the raid on his home.

“Israeli intelligence accuses Dufish of involvement in the killing of the three teens along with Amir Abu Eisha and Marwan al-Qawasmi,” the report said.

Security forces said “Dufish had disappeared since the teens were kidnapped, while his family told Ma’an that he was in his house living his life normally,” it added.

The IDF raided his home two weeks ago, but he was not at home, and his family received a summons to an intelligence office for questioning, which he failed to comply with.

Three more children—the murdered Israelis—who will always be missed:

Notice that in both cases it was Israeli forces who captured the terrorists. The accused Husam Dufish, had he eluded Israeli forces (a tough thing to do), would have been lauded as a hero in Palestine. Certainly Palestine wasn’t putting much effort into catching the terrorists, though there are reports that the Palestinian Authority did help the IDF.

What Israeli terrorists did to that child is as horrible as what the Palestinians did to the three Israeli children, and the punishments must be the same. Terrorism is terrorism, no matter who commits it, and needs to be stopped. The difference between Israel and Palestine is that the Israeli government does not see Israeli terrorists as heroes, but rounds them up and punishes them. It’ll be a cold day in Gaza when the Palestinian Authority or, especially, Hamas does that. And the condemnation of the Israeli terrorists in Israel was much more pervasive than the condemnation of the Palestinian terrorists in Palestine, where a few lame words from Abbas didn’t offset the widespread rejoicing and celebration of the dead Israeli children.

A universe fine-tuned for humans?

May 30, 2014 • 10:08 am

A few days ago I put up a video by Keith “Mr. Deity” Dalton, decrying a really insane piece by Jewish apologist Dennis Prager explaining why the story of Noah’s Ark was “one of the most moral stories ever told.” (There was also a funny video of Bill Maher’s take on The Great Flood.)

Prager’s piece included this gem:

Q: Why did God destroy animals as well?

A: In the biblical worldview, the purpose of all creation is to benefit man. This anthropocentric view of nature, and indeed of the whole universe, is completely at odds with the current secular idealization of nature. This secular view posits that nature has its own intrinsic meaning and purpose, independent of man.

All of creation, in the biblical view, was to ultimately prepare the way for the creation of man. But one does not need the Bible alone to hold this view. A purely scientific reading of the universe is in keeping with this view. Everything — every natural and physical law — is exquisitely tuned to produce life, and ultimately man, on earth.

What struck me was the argument for “fine-tuning” has now been turned from the production of life to the production of “man.” Yet the physical constants supposedly necessary to produce life are sufficient to produce humans as well: God clearly required no additional “fine-tuning”—even if you accept that fallacious argument—to allow for humans than to allow for, say, fungi and squirrels.

Over at the creationist website Evolution News and Views (where they don’t allow any comments), the equally batty David Klinghoffer, another Jewish apologist, lauds Prager’s ridiculous piece, and denigrates me at the same time (that’s usual for Klinghoffer, who, bereft of arguments for Intelligent Design, spends his time obsessing over my character and my criticisms of ID). Here’s a screenshot of part of his comment:

Exactly right???? Really? Even if the universe were fine-tuned for life (and I don’t think for a minute it was), how, my dear Mr. Klinghoffer, can you distinguish God’s fine-tuning the universe for life versus fine-tuning it for human life? After all, the physical constants required for both kinds of tuning are identical!

The fact that he and others make this argument is a clear sign that their arguments are based not on science but on religion. For it is only scripture and not science that argues that humans are special creatures on this planet. The phrase “the fine-tuning of the cosmos specifically for human life” gives away the religious roots of intelligent design—roots that people like Klinghoffer repeatedly deny.

And, as I’ve argued before, you can’t sensibly make the argument that the evolution of humans or human-like creatures was inevitable. Even given determinism, if mutations are inherently nondeterministic phenomena, and evolution depends, as it does, on what mutations appear, then we can’t say that the appearance of any specific species or morphology was inevitable.

Have a look at the trailer given below for the upcoming creationist movie “Privileged Species” touted by Klinghoffer. Notice that there is not one bit of evidence in this goddamned trailer that humans, as opposed to any other oxygen-using species, are “privileged.” The trailer emphasizes oxygen, which is of course a requirement for animal life. But that oxygen was produced by the photosynthesis of plants, not by God. And since hummingbirds have a higher per gram requirement for oxygen than humans, I conclude that if the Earth was was fine-tuned for life, the ultimate aim of God’s machinations was hummingbirds, the apotheosis of creation.

The trailer is narrated by Michael Denton, described as “geneticist and senior fellow, Discovery Institute.”

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