You have a right to be offended

You might take offence at all kinds of things. If someone suggests that your dress-sense isn't all it should be, or derides your taste in music, you may believe they have offended you. Indeed, someone might have intended to offend you.

But offence is a consensual state of mind. If someone intends to offend you by taking certain actions, then they will only succeed in their intention if you agree to it. You must consent to the offence, by agreeing with the offender that their actions are offensive to you. Whether or not you are, in fact, offended, is entirely up to you. You can choose between being offended and not being offended.

You can take offence or not, as you please. That is your right, and your choice.

Anyone who maintains that they are being offended against their will is admitting defeat. I think religious people who claim offence know this, and that's why their response is so often to seek to reprimand or silence the offender, or in more 'serious' cases, to seek recourse to law. Or in the 'worst' cases, to kill the offender.

When there's no sound, reasoned argument that can be put forward in defence of the offended, the offended resort to playground tactics: whining to teacher about 'what someone said', or in the case of the offended who tend towards the bully-boy approach, plain and simple violence against the offender.

These tactics are similar to those employed by the purveyors of quack medicines. If someone points out that a quack medicine doesn't do what it's claimed to, or that the evidence presented by its purveyors is flawed, you can be sure that they won't respond by presenting sound evidence. They will seek to silence the dissenter, by law if necessary. It's a reliable test of genuineness - if the medicine was genuinely efficacious, but the evidence was unsound, surely the way forward would be to get better evidence. If, instead, the lawsuits start flying, you can be pretty sure the product is bogus.

And so it is with religion. The most bogus religions are the ones that bleat loudest about being offended. What about those religions that don't protest about 'offence'?

Can you think of any?

UPDATE, 2008-10-22: See this important post on the Center For Inquiry website:
http://www.centerforinquiry.net/news/cfi_pushes_back_against_religious_restrictions_on_free_expression_joins_deb/

Burnee links for Sunday

YouTube - Why Atheists Care About YOUR Religion



(That the above is followed by this next link is, I promise, entirely coincidental.)
Skepchick: Critical Thinking at its Finest: "for reedbraden: monsters, magic, and boobs"

Terry Sanderson: The BBC's director-general holds non-believers in contempt | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
While there's a link to Mark Thompson's speech (in .DOC format) in the above article, Times Online has link to an mp3:
http://del.interoute.com/?id=762ccee9-5396-48d2-8330-3dbcb69306e8&delivery=download

AC Grayling: Free to think for themselves | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
Grayling's article on the Council of Ex-Muslims' conference elicited this response:

Nesrine Malik: Death for apostasy? | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

This is not to say that Muslim governments – and Arab ones in particular – have a tolerant view of apostasy but the death threat is invoked only rarely and more for political reasons rather than religion ones: to set an example or to save face as a proxy punishment for challenging the social or political status quo. While this is in no way acceptable, it is an extension of the general lack of enshrined civic human rights and evolved political institutions and processes – a historical, social and geo-political reality in many Muslim countries that makes a mockery of any comparison to the experience of those renouncing Christianity or Judaism.

Apostates may be let off with being lightly killed. So that's okay then.

The Guardian's love affair with the Koran :: Damian Thompson
Always fun to watch the papers having a go at each other...

Catholic chaos over gay adoption :: Damian Thompson

Rowan Williams says "human greed" to blame for financial crisis - Times Online

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Impressive animation - important message:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTlrSYbCbHE



(via BoingBoing)

Burnee links for Sunday

Skeptic: eSkeptic: Wednesday, October 8th, 2008
"Puncturing the Acupuncture Myth" by Harriet Hall, M.D.

In Defense of Dignity - Features - The Stranger, Seattle's Only Newspaper

Richard Smith: This week's boost for open access research is good news for science | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

Women bishops again . . .
Church of England was 'sinful' in voting for women bishops :: Jonathan Wynne-Jones
. . . and again . . .
The Bishop of Fulham has got a nerve to accuse loyal Anglicans of sin :: Damian Thompson

Broadsheet bloggers and comments :: Shane Richmond

Andrew Brown: Kenneth Copeland thinks God is six foot tall | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

Asim Siddiqui: A novel opportunity | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

The 'thinking cap' that could unlock your inner genius and boost creativity | Mail Online
This is over a week old, and it's from the Mail Online, but having just finished Ben Goldacre's excellent book Bad Science I found this article - and the comments - instructive (not necessarily in a good way).

You've read the Bad Science blog, now buy the book

For some years I've been suspicious of mainstream media. Almost everyone I know who has had even the tiniest bit of media coverage has told of some distortion, misrepresentation or downright lies (um ... I mean, things reported as facts when they're not). Reading articles about matters on which I do have some expertise, I've been struck by the preponderance of inaccuracies. So the idea that the media don't tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth isn't new to me, as it probably isn't new to anyone. And though I've been reading Ben Goldacre's blog for over a year now, and on that basis was looking forward to reading his book, I wasn't prepared for the sheer scale of misrepresentation he so clearly and entertainingly documents in Bad Science (Fourth Estate, 2008).

He has a chapter (7) entitled "Dr Gillian McKeith PhD" in which he deconstructs the scientific pronouncements of a media nutritionist who is, apparently, a "prime-time TV celebrity", with a Channel 4 show entitled You Are What You Eat. Her name wasn't familiar to me, though I recognised the title of the show even if I'd never seen it. (I don't watch 'make-over' or similar shows - I find them embarassing and voyeuristic, especially with the modern trend of treating participants like recalcitrant schoolchildren.)

Goldacre's indictments of McKeith are damning and comprehensive, and given that (as I understand it) his book is a compendium of his Guardian columns and his blog posts, I imagined that McKeith would by now have been consigned to the media scrap-heap. But just to check, I did a little internet research, which yielded so many results that I found myself skimming the latest edition of Radio Times, to discover that You Are What You Eat was currently showing daily in an early morning slot on More4. As it happened I was due to leave the country for a few days, so I set my DVR to record a week's worth of these half-hour programmes in my absence.

I watched them back-to-back on my return (though I did fast-forward parts of the fourth and fifth, as the repetitious format had by then become seriously grating). What Goldacre says in his book is true - McKeith appeared to be obsessed with faeces and colonic irrigation, and repeatedly came out with scientific-sounding stuff for which there is no proper evidence. The programmes were strictly formatted to the point of tedium, and I was frankly amazed that they were still on TV.

Bad Science covers a lot of specifics, from the absurdities of Brain Gym to the scandal of the MMR vaccine scare - and nearly all of them are initiated, compounded and perpetuated by ill-informed and inexpert media. On the way through this quagmire of dumbing-down headlines Goldacre gives us primers on statistics, probablility, evidence-based medicine and ethical journalism. Anyone who reads the badscience.net blog will be aware of Goldacre's journalistic light touch, and will therefore be clamouring for a copy of this book.

For my own part, not since reading Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World have I found a book so enlightening.

Burnee links for Tuesday

The Freethinker › Put Palin in the White House – and kiss your ass goodbye!

Pharyngula: Aaargh — I have to disagree with Harry Kroto

I generally agree with PZ's assessment of Sir Harry Kroto's piece, when he says that Sir Harry's point that science and religion are incompatible should not have been sufficient to oust Michael Reiss from his post. But Reiss did more - he made some dangerous suggestions concerning creationism in the classroom, and that was why he had to go. Here's more:

Harry Kroto: Creationists such as the Rev Reiss don't have the intellectual integrity to teach science | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

Pullman defiant over US protests against Northern Lights | Books | guardian.co.uk

Alpha Mummy - Times Online - WBLG: I hope my daughter isn't a virgin when she marries

A biologist reviews an evolution textbook from the ID camp

Skepchick: Critical Thinking at its Finest The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe: Mouthpiece of Satan

Atheist Revolution: Atheism 101: A Reading List

Tiktaalik: a transitional fossil

Quackery creeps into good universities too - but through Human Resources

Sense about Science accuses ES-UK of scaremongering

On this morning's Today Programme there was a brief exchange about a pamphlet that Sense about Science have circulated (available as a PDF), saying that the electro-sensitivity protesters are scare-mongering. Unfortunately this short radio piece wasn't long enough for the 'research' claimed by each side of the debate to be properly challenged.

"Pressure groups are scaremongering about the effects of mobile masts and wi-fi on health, the charity Sense about Science says. Elaine Fox, a psychologist from Essex University who helped with Sense's research, and Michael Bevington, of the charity Electro Sensitivity UK, discuss whether there is any evidence that these devices cause harm. "

Streaming audio available here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_7654000/7654876.stm

Michael Bevington of Electro Sensitivity UK was quick to claim all sorts of valid research to prove his claims, though I don't think he really meant to say that there had been "hundreds of thousands of studies". The ES-UK website contains links to about 36 research studies, though as far as I can see not all of them support the ES-UK case. The page begins thus:

"Research Studies into Electrical Sensitivity

The following is a brief summary of the research that has found positive associations between the suspected electromagnetic causes and the symptoms of those with Electrical Sensitivity, in reverse date order:"

Does this imply that there's been no research that has found no associations? Michael Bevington said this morning that "there have been studies which show 100% accuracy between emission of the radiation and people feeling it". This doesn't, of course, rule out the existence of studies which show less than 100% accuracy (whatever such a statement might actually mean).

If nothing else, the short exchange points up the general futility of 'sound-bite radio' when it comes to emotive issues needing rigorous science to back them up.