Magic Statistics

Alec Russell, a British reporter living in the United States, is shocked to discover that his two boys have never heard of Adam and Eve. (He doesn’t say how old they are, but it sounds like they’re in elementary school.)

I was telling my two boys last week about a creationist I had met who believed that Adam and Eve played with dinosaurs and they turned to me and said: “Who was Adam?” I paused and asked in reply: “Do you know who Eve was?”

They shook their heads. After all in their school, as in schools all over the United States, there are no lessons on religion. So much attention has been paid in recent years on the influence of the Christian Right that it is sometimes forgotten abroad that there are very rigid laws here separating church and state - hence my boys’ unfamiliarity with the best-known Old Testament stories.

This illustrates so many differences between the US and the UK concerning religion and public life that it’s hard to know where to start. The United States has no officially recognised religion and schools are prohibited from teaching the Bible; yet Americans have probably the highest level of religious commitment in the Western world. Britain has a state church and the Bible is taught in schools; yet Britons have a low level of religious allegiance, if church attendance is anything to go by.

Where, then, do Americans come by their religious commitment? For one thing, Christian parents teach the faith to their children as something to be taken seriously and believed as of fundamental importance.

"It is time to reach for the Bible stories at bedtime in the Russell household", and the boys are being treated to "a fortnight’s intensive blast of Bible stories". Interestingly, Mr Russell doesn’t say if his purpose is to encourage his children to believe or to provide them with cultural background: He just instinctively knows that he should do this.

Just over two weeks ago, the London Telegraph reported on the opinions of Dr Patrick Sookdheo, director of the Institute for the Study of Islam and Christianity, who argued that, within a decade, some parts of Britain will be governed by sharia law, not English common law.

The article has now disappeared from the Telegraph's website; in its place is this notice: "This story has been removed for legal reasons". No information is given regarding the specific legal issues involved or how they were brought to the Telegraph's attention.

Fortunately, the original article is cached here.

I blogged the story when it first appeared.

via YARGB via Infidel Bloggers Alliance.

UPDATE (8 Mar.): David Haslam left a comment saying that the Google cache of the article has been displaced by the one-sentence notice now posted at the Telegraph site. Follow-up here.

UPDATE (13 Mar.): Editor responsible for removed article removed.

International Women's Day (IWD) is comin’ up real soon, as Margaret Wente reminds us. (That had completely slipped my mind.) Judy Rebick and other Canadian feminists complain that things are getting worse for women because of—you'll never guess—the success of "neo-conservative politics". So, Stephen Harper is at fault, not to mention those millions of Canadians—men and women—who voted his party into power. Plainly, Canadian women face bleak prospects.

Or not.

Women in the West, even minority women, have never been more economically and socially equal than they are today. . . .The vast majority of women can only dream of oppression as exquisite as ours.

Women in some parts of the world actually do suffer from discrimination and coercion, but their trials seem to be overlooked in IWD press releases.

Yet, when it comes to women who really are oppressed, Western feminists have nothing useful to say. How can we help Afghan girls whose schools are being burned down by the Taliban, or women in South Africa who endure one of the highest rape rates in the world? What about the unwanted female children of rural India whose parents let them starve, or the millions of African women suffering from HIV-AIDS because of the deeply sexist sex habits of the men? And how can we help the millions of Muslim women who live under the worst kind of gender apartheid?

Phyllis Chesler also thinks that Western feminists should be more vocal in support of liberal freedoms.

Both women and religious minorities in non-Western and Muslim countries, and in an increasingly Islamized Europe, are endangered as never before. In 2004 the Dutch film maker Theo van Gogh was butchered by a jihadist on the streets of Amsterdam for having made a film, Submission, which denounced the abuse of women under Koranic Islam. However, the eerie silence both from feminists and film makers about van Gogh's assassination is deafening and disheartening. The same Hollywood loudmouths so quick to condemn and shame President Bush for having invaded Afghanistan and Iraq have, as of this writing, remained silent about the chilling effect that such an assassination in broad daylight can have on academic and artistic freedom.

Both Ms Wente and Ms Chesler maintain that feminism has been rendered largely irrelevant by its attachment to an outdated leftist mindset that insists on blaming the United States for all the world's ills.

For access to Ms Wente's complete column, click here.

Previous related posts:

• Why do Western feminists avoid criticising Islam?
• Remember Theo Van Gogh