Magic Statistics

Scientists have announced a breakthrough toward the invention of material that can render walls and buildings invisible.

Research involving microscopic crystals has prompted the theory that walls could be built using materials which homeowners could render transparent at will.

Such a discovery would revolutionise 21st-century building techniques. Contractors would be able to study pipes and wires behind the brickwork; police and soldiers would be able to spot dangers lurking behind walls.

This invention could also help Batman in his upcoming showdown with al Qaeda.

As protests against the Mohammed cartoons continue to take place in Europe and across the Islamic world–and have now spread to the United States–there has been talk about the need for Western media to restrain their exercise of freedom of the press in order to avoid insulting or offending Muslims. Several organisations of European Muslims have also jumped on board this bandwagon, e.g., the Belgian intercultural lobby group KifKif. Here’s an excerpt from their recent statement, as translated by Koenraad Elst of The Brussels Journal:

Kif Kif is of the opinion that there are limits to freedom of expression. It is at least necessary that those limits are the same for everybody. […] We wish to live in a tightly coherent society with equal rights and duties for everyone. A society without racism, whether it is Islamophobia or anti-Semitism.

Same limits for everybody, equal rights and equal duties. Responsible expression and mutual respect all around. No disrespect or animus for any religion or religious believer. Sounds reasonable. Wait a minute: Many passages in the Koran are extremely antagonistic toward other religions. (Mr Elst spells the name of the Islam's holy book Quran.)

The Quran contains dozens of verses that preach hostility to Pagans (polytheists, Zoroastrian ‘fire-worshippers’ and atheists), Jews and Christians. It denounces their teachings as false and evil and a sure passport to hell. By modern Western standards the author of the Quran is entitled to his freedom of opinion on religions. But by KifKif standards, these insulting comments on other people’s religions are not so innocent and ought to be curtailed, especially in a multicultural society. (And indeed, the orthodox sources agree that it was Muhammad’s lifetime achievement to have transformed Arabia’s multicultural society into a monolithic Islamic one.)

The Quran also expressly forbids conversion from Islam to other religions, while allowing and encouraging the reverse. This becomes problematic in the light of the KifKif authors’ plea for equality and reciprocity. It is also in contravention of the ECHR’s [European Convention on Human Rights] article 9, to which they purportedly adhere, for this article defines freedom of religion as including the right to change one’s religion.

In addition the Quran rejects the principle of equal rights and duties for everyone, which KifKif now invokes.
. . .
There is even grimmer reading, however, in dozens of Quran verses that go further than mere doctrinal disputation and actually enjoin the Muslims to go out and fight the ‘infidels.’ The core text of Islam is not merely disrespectful towards other religions, it extols killing and glorifies dying in the war against the non-Muslims.

So, if KifKif and other advocates of limiting freedom of speech in the interests of avoiding offence and promoting mutual respect get their way, there would appear to be a solid legal basis for banning the Koran. I don't think that’s what they have in mind.

Martin Luther died on this day in 1546. Todd Granger has posted a brief biography and a collect in his honour at The Confessing Reader.

Darwinian Fairytales by the late Australian philosopher David Stove has just been re-issued with a new introduction by Roger Kimball of The New Criterion. The book can be ordered through the publisher Encounter Books as well as the usual outlets. Prof Stove did not reject natural selection as such, but he thought neo-Darwinian attempts to explain human characteristics were, to be blunt, patently erroneous, if not ridiculous.

Here are a few choice selection from Mr Kimball’s introduction, posted at Encounter Books (pdf format).

Stove maintains that Darwinism says many things, especially about our species, which are too obviously false to be believed by any educated person; or at least by an educated person who retains any capacity at all for critical thought.

Here a few examples are cited.

All of these quotations are from Darwin or his orthodox disciples. A moment’s reflection shows that none is even remotely true, at least of human beings. Take the last named: that anything in the least injurious to a species would be rigidly destroyed by natural selection. What about abortion, adoption, fondness for alcohol, anal intercourse, or asceticism, just to start with the As? As Stove notes, each of these characteristics [tends] to shorten our lives, or to lessen the number of children we have, or both. Are any on the way to being rigidly destroyed?

Prof Stove is particularly critical of sociobiology, or evolutionary psychology, which is based on the supposition that human behaviour evolved via Darwinian mechanisms of random mutation and natural selection.

[C]onsider Richard Dawkins, another eminent sociobiologist and author of The Selfish Gene, a hugely popular book whose basic message is that we are . . . robot-vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. (Yes, he really says this.) Of course, as Stove points out, genes can no more be selfish than they can be (say) supercilious, or stupid. The popularity of Dawkins’s book lies in the powerful appeal that puppet-theories of human behavior always exercise on those who combine cynicism with credulousness; but genetic puppet theories are no more credible than those propounded by Freudians, Marxists, or astrologers.

Many of David Stove’s articles and other writings are posted here. See also this 1994 obituary at the site of the Australasian Association for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Science. His Wikipedia entry can be found here.

For more on Richard Dawkins, click here or here.

via Armavirumque, weblog of The New Criterion.