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Alternative Thought for the Day |
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"The
so-called New Atheists are responding to a
provocation, not mounting an arbitrary and
uncalled-for attack. Instead of turning a politely
blind eye to religion as we all did until recently
(when those with religion had the good taste, mainly,
to keep quiet about it in return), we have chosen to
speak out against the absurdities, distortions and
even dangers that the presence of religion in our
societies cause. For nearly twenty centuries the
religionists have had it their way: what a squealing
they put up now that half a dozen "New Atheists" have
argued back" |
"At this season of |
Almost all arguments for the existence of God are based
on analogies to human performance. For ancient humans the analogy was this:
Humans move objects, objects in nature move, and so these objects must be
moved by an invisible intelligence or designer. For the 19th century
theologian William Paley, the analogy was this: Humans make watches which
are complex, objects in nature are complex, and so objects in nature must
have been made by an invisible intelligence or designer. For RTB adherents
the analogy is this: Humans fine-tune their machines for a purpose, values
of the universe’s physical constants are extremely improbable but consistent
with the existence of human life, therefore the universe must have been
finely-tuned by a hidden super intelligent agent for the purpose of
producing humans |
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What's the Harm?
(a) |
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Respect for religion now makes censorship the norm |
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Religion vs science: can the divide between God and
rationality be reconciled? "A clergyman in charge of education for the country's leading scientific organisation – it's a Monty Python sketch," pronounced Britain's top atheist, Richard Dawkins, recently. The Independent October 11, 2008 The problem was that Reiss, as well as being an evolutionary biologist and population geneticist, is a non-stipendiary priest in the Church of England. When he said recently that science teachers should answer questions about creationism if pupils asked them he was deemed to have been advocating the idea that British schools should teach the idea that the world was magicked up (complete with fossils and ancient geology) just 6,000 years ago – and then tell pupils to make their own minds up between that and the theory of evolution to which the overwhelming scientific evidence points. The hapless Reiss made it clear that he insists creationism is scientific nonsense. But a handful of the Royal Society's most eminent members began a campaign to have him sacked. Sir Harry Kroto, Sir Richard Roberts and Sir John Sulston said in a letter to the president of the Royal Society: "We gather Professor Reiss is a clergyman, which in itself is very worrisome." We must all now be on the look-out, it now seems for Revs under the beds. The idea that science and religion are incompatible is a fairly recent import into contemporary culture. It has been given huge credence by the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States. The pronounced motivation of Islamic fundamentalists in 2001 hammered home that some people are prepared to inflict outrageous acts of inhumanity in the name of religion. Yet the roots of the shift in attitude go back much further. "It came about because of a perfect storm – a wide range of factors came together," says the atheist philosopher Julian Baggini. Among them were a shift from liberal to evangelical Christianity in Britain, the rise of creationism in America, advances in scientific techniques in biology and changes in public perception on issues as disparate as homosexuality and assisted dying. But we are leaping ahead here. The relationship between science and religion has had a long and chequered history since the settled days of the medieval consensus, which saw faith and the natural sciences as part of a cosmic whole. Galileo put paid to that with his insistence that the earth revolved around the sun. The Catholic Church, which saw man and his planet at the centre of the universe – and which already felt its authority threatened by the rise of Protestantism – locked horns with him. The clash became a metaphor for the irreconcilability of scientific materialism and biblical literalism. Things changed with Isaac Newton. His laws of physics led to a world view which relegated God to background status as the designer of a clockwork world which he wound up and then left to its own devices. Newton's celestial mechanics brought an advance in our scientific understanding but didn't really work for a faith that wanted to believe that, through the historical Jesus, God had become, in the words of the song "a slob like one of us". Next came Darwin. At first many saw his theory of evolution as a threat to religion but mainstream Christianity soon accepted evolution as the answer to the "how" of creation, leaving the "why" questions of meaning and morality to faith. Science and religion exercised authority over two discrete compartments of life between which there could be no link. But through the latter half of the 20th century a synergy developed. In cosmology the science of the expanding universe and the Big Bang chimed in with a moment of creation. The inherent uncertainty that quantum physics discovered at the subatomic level overturned Newton's mechanics and created room for a "God of the gaps". Process theology embraced evolution and said men and women are called to play a part in an ever-ongoing creation. Advances in neuro-science showed that mental and spiritual phenomena depend upon biological processes, undermining the old dualist notions about body and soul and offering a more holistic body-mind-spirit axis. "Attacks on religion, when I was a student in the Sixties, were largely on political grounds," says Dr Denis Alexander, the Director of the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion in Cambridge. "It was seen to be on the side of capitalism and the rich." In Anglo-American philosophy, says Baggini, "religion was seen as wrong but as something that didn't really matter much. The world was going secular and eventually it would just die out." But the rise of Christian fundamentalism in America in the past few decades – the word fundamentalist in its religious sense was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in only 1989 – was mirrored in a milder way in Britain too. Liberal Christianity, so long in the ascendant in the Church of England, began to lose ground to evangelicalism. "Non-literal Christianity failed," says Baggini, "because it doesn't capture the popular imagination. The certainties of evangelical Christianity appeal more to those for whom the attractions of religion are on a more visceral level." This appeal was symbolised through the 1990s by the Alpha course on the basics of the Christian faith devised in London by a curate at Holy Trinity, Brompton, which has since been used by more than 10 million people in 160 countries. The idea that the miracles of the New Testament may have been metaphors rather than literal truths suddenly went out of fashion in Christian circles. Throughout this time scientists such as Richard Dawkins had evidenced a disdain for such simple certainties. In his 1976 book The Selfish Gene there were a few side-swipes at religion and in 1986 in The Blind Watchmaker he conducted a sustained critique of the 18th-century deist argument that the world is too complicated to have sprung into existence by accident so a rational observer should conclude that it must have been designed, just as someone finding a watch would conclude that somewhere there must be a watchmaker who made it. And by 1991, in response to the question of why evolution had allowed religion to thrive, he had coined the notion that religion was a virus. But it was the terrorist attacks in 2001 that turned Dawkins into an Alpha atheist and transformed him from an academic backwater into a populist ideologue. Before 9/11, he said, religion may have appeared a "harmless nonsense". But the attacks in New York showed it to be a "lethally dangerous nonsense". Previously, he said, "we all bought into a weird respect, which uniquely protects religion from normal criticism. Let's now stop being so damned respectful!" The gloves were off. But another prominent atheist, medic and secularist, the Liberal Democrat MP, Dr Evan Harris, is not so sure that 9/11 was the nodal point. "It's not the main thing to scientists," he insists. "When you talk to them the thing that comes up most often is the influence religion has had on science in America under George Bush." Religious pressures there have had direct impacts on a wide range of policy – from a ban on public money being put into stem cell research to a refusal to allow US aid programmes to hand out condoms to fight Aids in Africa. "Scientists who are publicly funded can't go to conferences and speak without being obliged to stick to the Bush line," says Harris. Advances in bio-technology have opened up new areas for disagreement. Test tube babies, embryo selection, saviour siblings, stem cell research and animal-human cybrids have all created new battlegrounds between those who think that an embryo is a person from the moment of conception to those who think it is merely a cluster of cells before implantation or even birth – and all variety of opinions in between. "There is a definite danger of our desire for research outstripping our capacity to anticipate the ethical implications of those advances," says the feminist theologian, Tina Beattie, whose book The New Atheists argues that Dawkins & Co misuse Darwin and evolutionary biology as much as the Christian fundamentalists misuse the Bible. "Some scientists experience religion as merely an irritating brake on their striving to do new things." The public, after a list of scientific disasters from thalidomide and nuclear weapons to BSE and the stealing of dead children's organs at Alder Hey, are much more suspicious, judging that "scientists have problems policing their borders". From a very different perspective Andrew Copson, the director of education for the British Humanist Association, agrees. "Scientists are fearful so the issue has become very emotive," he says. "They fear that, behind what people like Michael Reiss say, there lies a Trojan horse." It is perhaps significant here that the two main instigators of the campaign to have Reiss ousted from his Royal Society job, Sir Harry Kroto and Sir Richard Roberts, are now based in the United States where creationism is a major phenomenon. Polls suggest that around 45 per cent of Americans are creationists with 40 per cent believing that God worked through evolution and just 10 per cent saying it was nothing to do with a God. The experience of being a secularist in the US is clearly a radicalising one. "I don't know if it is too late to stop the slide in Britain but I think it is in the US where [the religious right] have now almost complete control over politics, the judiciary, education, business, journalism and television," Kroto, who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1996, has said, adding darkly: "The Royal Society does not appreciate the true nature of the forces arrayed against it." The position in the UK is nothing like that, though the statistics are unclear. A 2006 BBC poll claimed that 48 per cent of the British public accepted evolution with 22 per cent preferring creationism but the definitions it used were so sloppy as to be almost meaningless. A survey of schoolchildren has suggested that more than 10 per cent now believe in creationism. But the Evangelical Alliance, whose members now number around 3 per cent of the UK population, reckons that only a third of its members – about 1 per cent of the population – are creationists. About a third think Genesis is merely symbolic, and a third believe that God worked through evolution but is still capable of intervening in specific ways. Its most recent, unpublished, survey shows that the proportion seeing the Genesis account as symbolic is increasing, the EA's Head of Theology, Dr Justin Thacker, says. Evan Harris accepts that the number of British schools teaching creationism is tiny. But, as an MP, he is worried about the increasing activity of religious lobby groups in public life. "Groups like the Evangelical Alliance, the Christian Institute and Christian Action Research and Education are now all much more organised and active in seeking to change public policy. They are making the running in parliament, much more than the leadership of the Catholic Church. The Church of England's bishops are much more evangelical too; their centre of gravity has changed form the days when liberals ruled the roost. And the C of E has been much more active in Parliament." All this is having a real impact, Dr Harris suggests. "In the days of Thatcher all the mainstream Tories voted in favour of embryo research. Twenty years on most of the new suave modernising Cameroonian Tories vote against it." Academics detect a similar shift. Professor Steve Jones, of University College London, who has been teaching genetics and evolutionary biology for 30 years, has said that religious students – even those studying medicine – are becoming increasingly vocal in their opposition to evolution, demanding to be exempted from classes and exam questions on the subject. Creationism, like Coca-Cola, came here from the United States. The American lobby group Answers in Genesis, with its $13m annual budget, now has an office in the UK from where staff go round giving illustrated talks about how humans and dinosaurs roamed the earth together. Another conservative group, Truth in Science, has adopted a strategy of lobbying for schools to "Teach the Controversy" in an attempt to get Intelligent Design, a spin-off of creationism, taught alongside evolution in school science lessons. In 2006 it sent resource packs to the heads of science of all British secondary schools; New Scientist claims that 59 schools have used, or plan to use, them. The fear generated by such tactics is what did for Michael Reiss. "Even if he doesn't support all this, what he said might be seen to give succour to it," says Andrew Copson of the British Humanist Association. "I can understand why alarm bells go off with people who are familiar with 'Teach the controversy' tactics of people who want to baby-step creationism into our science classrooms." All of this mystifies the vast majority of the nation's Christians who have been taught since the time of St Augustine, who died AD430, that where there appears to be a conflict between demonstrated knowledge and a literal reading of the bible then the scriptures should be interpreted metaphorically. They see no conflict between faith and reason because, as Pope John Paul II put it: "God created man as rational and free, thereby placing himself under man's judgement." Just last month the present Pope reiterated the same line, warning of the dangers of fundamentalist readings of the Bible. Each generation, he said, needs to find its collective interpretation of the text. For this task of interpretation – which can never be never completely finished – science offers a major tool. It all perplexes academics who specialise in the interplay between science and religion too. Creationism doesn't just involve many scientific errors, it relies on a major theological one too. "When Robert Burns tell us his love 'is like a red, red rose', we know that we are not meant to think that his girlfriend has green leaves and prickles," says the particle physicist and Anglican priest, Sir John Polkinghorne. Why, he wonders, would any rational person want to read the Bible in that way? The world of science he encounters is a much more subtle one. "There's a cosmic religiosity among physicists," he insists, though "biologists see more ambiguity, perhaps because they look at the wastefulness of nature, and perhaps because sequencing the human genome has made them triumphalist." It is more complex even than that: the head of the Human Genome Project, Dr Francis Collins, last year published a book about his journey from atheism into faith arguing that science and religion, far from being irreconcilable, are in fact in deep harmony. In the past 30 years an area of inter-disciplinary activity has opened up to explore this. Areas of research include cognitive neuro-sciences and issues like freewill and consciousness and whether human minds are merely matter or something more. In evolutionary psychology they have also explored together questions like the origins of altruism – asking whether evolutionary biology can give an adequate account of why people are willing to sacrifice themselves on behalf of others. In paleobiology they are asking questions like how eyes evolve in different lineages – suggesting that evolution isn't a random or chance process but is channelled by certain chemically-determined pathways. In cosmology there is a universe versus multiverses debate. "All that going on, but all the public knows about is Dawkins," says Dr Denis Alexander of the Faraday Institute in Cambridge. "Academic discussion on the relationship between science and religion is genuinely exploratory, not polarised. To most people in it Dawkins just sounds rather odd." John Hedley Brooke, who recently retired as the first Professor of Science and Religion at the University of Oxford, is more sanguine. "These eruptions take place from time to time historically," he shrugs. "Dawkins is just a throwback to 19th-century rationalism. He has a strong emotional antagonism that is very indiscriminate and treats all kinds of religion the same. A lot of fine distinctions that get lost in the polemics. The problem is that it is all a cumulative process in which the extremes feed off one another." "Paradoxically, Dawkins is the biggest recruiter for creationism in this country," says Denis Alexander. Recently, he says, Bill Demcksi, a leading US creationist, e-mailed Dawkins to thank him for his assistance. "The danger is that all this polarisation will make some believers more anti-science which is not a clever move tactically." He hopes that whoever succeeds Dawkins as Oxford's Professor of the Public Understanding of Science is more interested in promoting science than in attacking religion. On the other side of the argument Evan Harris is unapologetic about contributing to what Julian Baggini waggishly calls this "assertiveness inflation". "It's good that there's this tension," the MP says. "These debates need to be had in public. Science has nothing to fear from them. I don't think we're winning; we've won a few battles; but there's a war to be fought." He concedes that Michael Reiss may have been sacked unfairly – saying that the "overstrong line" taken by Kroto and Co should not be taken as representative of all on the secular side – but points out that employment injustices are perpetrated every time a church school refuses to appoint a maths teacher because she doesn't "have Jesus in her heart". The danger is that between the strident secularists and the fanatical fundamentalists some important middle ground is being squeezed out. "Dawkins sees religion as credulous, superstitious and prejudiced but mature religious traditions teach people to challenge all that," says Tina Beattie. "Science will never offer an answer to the parents of Madeleine McCann. Nor will it ever be irrational to go to a Mozart concert, though science can never explain the genius of his music. The new atheism completely misunderstands the way that human beings experience the poetry and narrative of life." Perhaps the conflict is not between science and religion but between good and bad ways of doing both. In all of us there will always be a struggle between the craving for certainty, purity and closure and the acceptance of mystery, brokenness and provisionality. At their best, both scientists and people of faith are in a permanent state of awe-struck humility before the wonder and strangeness and messiness of things. At their worst, they are arrogant, dogmatic, and incurious. There's a bit of both in all of us, of course. |
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Faith schools may be Blair's most damaging legacy Labour's new rules mean that anyone who works in these institutions may have to get down on their knees to keep their jobs Polly Toynbee The Guardian September 2 2008 Children start their new schools this week for the 12th year under Labour. Who could have predicted that more pupils than ever will be going to religious schools this term, as the churches boasted gleefully? Pews empty but faith schools multiply. There are about 14,000 non-religious schools, and nearly 7,000 faith schools. This year the figure has risen again as new academies open: a third are faith-run - and religions have taken over some community schools. Next year 13 more new faith schools open, mostly Christian with three Muslim. This risks being among the most indelibly damaging of Tony Blair's social legacies, his permanent bequest to his own beliefs. Yesterday a new campaign was launched to oppose segregating children by faith. The Accord coalition brings together surprisingly disparate interests, with some teaching unions, the British Humanist Association (of which I am president) and Ekklesia, the Christian theological thinktank. No sooner was the new group made public than its chair, Rabbi Jonathan Romain, minister of Maidenhead synagogue, paid for his outspoken bravery with a savage personal assault from the Jewish Chronicle. Ekklesia can expect similar fury from Christian denominations. Meanwhile secularists are suffering a backlash from the faiths, as if books by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and AC Grayling were any match for the mysterious bully power that religions hold over government. Accord wants faith schools to abide by the same admissions criteria as other state schools, with no selection by belief. Teachers should be employed for their skills, not for their faith. It opposes Labour's new rules for faith schools, which came into law yesterday, allowing them to keep all jobs for the faithful. Teaching assistants, dinner ladies and caretakers may need to get on their knees to keep their jobs from now on. Official policy says it's up to local communities to decide the kind of schools they want. In practice, the academy programme encourages widespread faith takeovers, though in future they must offer half their places to outsiders. Years of Labour handwringing over community cohesion hardly squares with dividing children by religion. Ask why and here's the doublethink answer: religious academies now have a "duty to promote community cohesion". Look no further than evidence from Northern Ireland to see how much worse divisions grow when 95% of children meet no one from outside their sectarian schools. There, a majority tell pollsters they would prefer mixed schools, but politicians ignore it. A Guardian/ICM poll showed 64% across Britain oppose religious schools - which is also ignored. Odd that Christian and Muslim schools are on the increase just as we are warned that faith wars are now so much more threatening than either the cold war or IRA bombs that habeas corpus must be suspended for 42 days. David Blunkett once said he wanted to "bottle the magic" of Christian schools, but their mystery is often their social class. Anxious parents who get on their knees to get a church school place are not to blame. If prayer is what the government demands to win a place in its more selective state schools, that's what parents must do. These schools would be near empty if they admitted only genuine believers. Research from the London School of Economics tells the story. In the capital, where admissions are most fraught, faith school pupils are "significantly more affluent" than average for their area. Only 17% of faith pupils are eligible for free school meals, compared with 25% in non-religious schools. Faith schools take fewer than a fifth of lowest ability children, compared with a third across London - and they take many more high achievers. Only 1% of Pakistani or Bangladeshi children are in faith schools, though they often need most help. In Muslim schools, the numbers go into equally damaging social reverse: 34% are on free school meals. Yesterday the schools adjudicator, Philip Hunter, handed in his report on admissions: soon we shall see if faith schools breach the admissions code. A furore followed Ed Balls' revelation that in three sample areas, faith schools illegally interviewed parents, demanded extra fees and asked questions about social background. Just a little screening can make a big difference to a school's "ethos" if it deposits difficult families in next-door schools. This matters because the OECD finds the countries with schools that segregate least according to class and ability do best overall: Britain lags behind partly because of its many forms of segregation. Brighton this year has shown what can be done. Appeals by parents over admissions rose this year nationally but the proportion fell in Brighton, due to its first year of a lottery for oversubscribed schools. It was devised by the previous Labour council and supported by the present Conservatives. Eight secondaries were grouped together and where there was oversubscription names were picked from a hat. The result was that free-school-meals children are becoming more evenly spread. Knowing that abilities and social classes are a bit more fairly mixed than before has benefited everyone. Sadly however, the one Catholic school could not be included. Class, ethnic and faith segregation are the most damaging reasons why the Accord coalition needs to prevail. But consider too the craziness of creationism now taught in many more schools than before. Homophobic bullying is worse in faith schools - hardly surprising since most sects preach that gay sex is sin, in Islam one punishable by death. Stonewall found 23% fewer gay pupils able to tell anyone about their sexuality, and least sex education in faith schools. All religions were founded on women's inferiority. In Islam what women wear is a battle-flag of identity, in Catholicism governing women's fertility is the die-in-the-ditch issue. The state can't protect children from pernicious views and doctrines at home - but it has a duty to protect them in state schools. More religious schools open this week, more still next year, all covertly. Labour MPs were never told a third of academies would be faith-run. Yet again, we who were deceived by those who said Gordon Brown would do things differently, were wrong. He may not have Blair's God in his ear, but on every issue his impulse is to pay any price to avoid a fight with any powerful interest group. Result? Loss of respect from just about everyone. |
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“I no more believe that Jesus was born of the virgin Mary
than I believe Krishna was born of the Virgin Devaka, Horus was born of the
Virgin Isis, Mercury was born of the Virgin Maia, or Romulus was born of the
Virgin Rhea Sylvia. As the preceding examples help to demonstrate,
parthenogenesis would not be proof either of divine paternity or of the
truth of any subsequent teaching… Christianity insults our intelligence as
well as out innate morality by insisting that we believe absurdities that
are drawn from the mythology of paganism and barbarism” |
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High IQ turns academics into atheists Intelligence is a predictor of religious scepticism, a professor has argued. Times Higher Education 12 June 2008 Belief in God is much lower among academics than among the general population because scholars have higher IQs, a controversial academic claimed this week. In a forthcoming paper for the journal Intelligence, Richard Lynn, emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Ulster, will argue that there is a strong correlation between high IQ and lack of religious belief and that average intelligence predicts atheism rates across 137 countries. In the paper, Professor Lynn - who has previously caused controversy with research linking intelligence to race and sex - says evidence points to lower proportions of people holding religious beliefs among "intellectual elites". The paper - which was co-written with John Harvey, who does not report a university affiliation, and Helmuth Nyborg, of the University of Aarhus, Denmark - cites studies including a 1990s survey that found that only 7 per cent of members of the American National Academy of Sciences believed in God. A survey of fellows of the Royal Society found that only 3.3 per cent believed in God at a time when a poll reported that 68.5 per cent of the general UK population were believers. Professor Lynn told Times Higher Education: "Why should fewer academics believe in God than the general population? I believe it is simply a matter of the IQ. Academics have higher IQs than the general population. Several Gallup poll studies of the general population have shown that those with higher IQs tend not to believe in God." He said that most primary school children believed in God, but as they entered adolescence - and their intelligence increased - many began to have doubts and became agnostics. He added that most Western countries had seen a decline of religious belief in the 20th century at the same time as their populations had become more intelligent. Andy Wells, senior lecturer in psychology at the London School of Economics, said the existence of a correlation between IQ and religiosity did not mean there was a causal relationship between the two. Gordon Lynch, director of the Centre for Religion and Contemporary Society at Birkbeck, University of London, said that any examination of the decline of religious belief needed to take into account a wide and complex range of social, economic and historical factors. He added: "Linking religious belief and intelligence in this way could reflect a dangerous trend, developing a simplistic characterisation of religion as primitive, which - while we are trying to deal with very complex issues of religious and cultural pluralism - is perhaps not the most helpful response." Alistair McFadyen, senior lecturer in Christian theology at the University of Leeds, said that Professor Lynn's arguments appeared to have "a slight tinge of intellectual elitism and Western cultural imperialism as well as an antireligious sentiment". David Hardman, principal lecturer in learning development at London Metropolitan University, said: "It is very difficult to conduct true experiments that would explicate a causal relationship between IQ and religious belief. Nonetheless, there is evidence from other domains that higher levels of intelligence are associated with a greater ability - or perhaps willingness - to question and overturn strongly felt intuitions." |
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Who Loves Designer Vaginas? Science and nature are mocking America's fickle God. Please, no screaming. Mark Morford SF Gate Columnist Wed June 20, 2007 What are you gonna do about it? What are you gonna do about the fact that Mother Nature once again appears to be thwarting and mocking and then grinning like a wicked divine trickster at every cute rigid godly idea of how humans and animals are supposed to move and hump and lick and behave, as loosely and, yes, rather bitterly delineated in the Bible and by the Bush administration and Focus on the Family and every other uptight sexually confounded person you have ever known, et al. and ad nauseam? What, furthermore, are you gonna do about human knowledge? About how science insists on marching hell-bent forward with such astonishing speed and with such incredible dexterity toward some glorious otherworldly nightmare dreamscape of anima manipulation, a land where we can effortlessly rescramble our genetic code and reconfigure this none-too-solid flesh as we "play God" in so many bewildering ways the Christian right can't even figure out where to aim its hollow, horrified indignation? Here is the thing you must know: It is all changing with incredible, butt-tingling speed. It is all fast becoming more than we ever imagined, with ramifications we are only beginning to fully taste. There is no stopping it. There is little that can slow it down. There is only the single, looming question: How will you respond? Will you recoil and gag and spit, or will you gurgle and swallow and smile? Example: We are on the cusp of being able choose, should you so desire, the exact size and length and speed and eye color and specific pleasing fur markings of ... your dog. And your cat. And your baby (well, minus the fur). And by the way, we have also invented new drugs to eliminate menstruation and we can now grow designer vaginas in the lab and plastic surgery is more common than bad sacrum tattoos and it's becoming increasingly obvious that males of many species -- including our own -- are largely unnecessary for procreation (but not, say, parallel parking, the lifting of heavy things or buying you a nice postcoital breakfast). Fascinating, that last thing. Have you heard? Scientists are discovering more and more creatures, from sharks to bees to ants to turkeys to Komodo dragons to turtles to sea bass, that can reproduce via parthenogenesis (i.e., virgin birth; i.e., no father) either by actually switching sexes so as to fertilize themselves, or via storing sperm for years for later use, or because they're hermaphrodites, or by way of undertaking all manner of clever unholy gender trickery so as to circumvent their own extinction and confound creationists and ensure that all humans everywhere will continue to look around and blink furiously and go, Wait wait wait, didn't we have some of this figured out already? What the hell happened? Wait, did I say designer vaginas? Indeed I did. Doctors can now grow new vaginal tissue in a lab, from the original stem cells, for eventual replanting (not to be confused with the hot trend in cosmetic vaginoplasty, by the way, which is an entirely different fascination and has to do with reshaping the labia for improved aesthetics and, you know, functionality. God bless America). Fabulous news for victims of birth defects and cancer and rare vaginal disorders? You bet. Intriguing implications for all sorts of cosmetic applications, not to mention what it might mean for transsexuals, not to mention how close we are to doing the same thing with other organs -- and even, eventually, entire limbs? One guess. It is, we can all agree, a lot to take in. It is a great deal to attempt to process in one tiny and oh-so-fleeting lifetime. The notion of human eugenics alone is, for many, overwhelming enough, the idea that new parents will soon have some sort of checklist at the gynecologist's office wherein, when docs go in to tweak your fetus' DNA to eliminate diseases, you can also easily choose not only its sex, but also the skin tone and hair color and eye tint and muscle dexterity and 0-60 acceleration and number of cupholders and overall genetic propensity toward an IQ that may or may not lead to voting for aw-shucks warmongering neocon imbecile politicians. Neat! Or, you know, not. They are, quite obviously, the sort of advances that open so many cans of ethical and spiritual worms it shakes us to the very core of what we believe, of who we think we are and where we fit in and What It All Means. You know, the good questions. At the same time, it's really nothing new. It's little different than previous periods of explosive growth in human knowledge that both titillated and terrified the populace, such as, say, when Galileo pointed out (much to the church's quivering rage) that not only is man's little spinning blue spaceship not at the center of the universe, but we're actually so far out on the fringes, so minute and insignificant in our Copernican swirlings that we're really nothing more than a wisp of belly-button lint in the giant laundry hamper of the gods. Talk about your existential angst. Hence, religion. This (at least partially) explains why so many are so eager to cling to religious dogma, to some sort of immovable, reliable framework of understanding, something that can help make sense of it all, even if making sense of it all involves shutting off your brain and killing your divine intuition and soaking up giant gobs of blind faith so you don't have to actually swim in those bloody murky confusing pools of ethics and meaning and actually thinking for yourself. Mmm, numb groupthink. It's what's for dinner. There are only two real options. One is to hold tight to the leaky life raft of inflexible ideology (hello, organized religion), to rules and laws and codes of conduct written by the fearful, for the fearful, to live in constant low-level dread of all the extraordinary changes and radical rethinkings of what it means to be human or animal or male or female or hetero or homo or any other swell little label you thought was solid and trustworthy but which is increasingly proven to be blurry and unpredictable and just a little dangerous. There is another option. You can choose nimbleness, lightness, a sly and knowing grin to go with your wine and your vibrator and your never-ending thirst for more and deeper information. It's possible. You can refuse to let your brain, your soul lock down into one way of looking at the world as you see all the science and genetic manipulation and designer vaginas, all the insane, incredible possibility as merely more evidence that we are, in the end, just one big karmic science experiment. Is this latter choice frustrating and brutally difficult and will it challenge every notion of self you hold dear? Hell yes. Is it the only way to enjoy this bizarre circus of a planet without grabbing a gun and cowering in the corner with your homophobia and your flag and your Army of Christ brochure, dead certain the terrorists and gays and hippies are coming to eat your soul for breakfast? Well, probably. Because, baby, the changes are coming, harder and faster than ever, with all sorts of juicy, terrifying, delightful implications. Really now, what are you gonna do about it? |
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What religion and the religious fear
most of all is ridicule because what they believe is absurd. Deep down they
all know that. We give far too much credence to 'the mirthless cretins of
jihad'. Much better to point and laugh at all such fundamentalists of
whatever creed. They feed and thrive on our pusillanimous silence and
respect for their beliefs |
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Do Christians, Jews and Muslims imagine
that before Moses received the Ten Commandments, he thought murder and theft
were good ideas? |
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"Secularism
is the constitutional brick and mortar for free religious expression, not
its downfall, |
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KNOW THYSELF (An Agnostic on Mortality) |
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| Faith's last gasp Despite superficial appearances of a resurgence in religious belief, we are actually witnessing the death throes of faith by AC Grayling (professor of philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London) Prospect Magazine Nov 2006 On the basis of apparently incontrovertible evidence, commentators of various persuasions, among them Eric Kaufmann in the last issue of Prospect, John Gray, writing recently in the New Statesman, and Damon Linker, author of The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege (Doubleday) are convinced that we are witnessing an upsurge in religious observance and influence. Kaufmann relies on the weak argument that demographic trends will turn Europe into a predominantly religious place, John Gray seems to hope that this will be so, and Damon Linker is convinced that a theocon conspiracy has so successfully captured Washington that the US has become a de facto theocracythe home of faith-based politics, faith-based science (creationism), faith-based medicine ("pro-life"), faith-based foreign policy (conducting jihad for American/Baptist values) and faith-based attacks on civil liberties. Add this to the all too obvious fact of political IslamIslamismand the case seems made. But I see the same evidence as yielding the opposite conclusion. What we are witnessing is not the resurgence of religion, but its death throes. Two considerations support this claim. One is that there are close and instructive historical precedents for what is happening now. The second comes from an analysis of the nature of contemporary religious politics. If a given interest group turns up the volume, it is usually reacting to provocation. We view the Victorian era as a sanctimonious period of improving movements such as self-help, temperance and university missions to city slums. But prudishness and do-goodery existed precisely because their contrariespoverty, drunkenness, godlessness and indecencywere endemic: some streets of Victorian London swarmed with child prostitutes, and were too dangerous to walk at night. In the same way, todays religious upsurge is a reaction to the prevalence of its opposite. In fact, it is a reaction to defeat, in a war that it cannot win even if it succeeds in a few battles on the way down. Here is what is happening. Over the last half-century, sections of the Muslim world have become increasingly affronted by the globalisation of western and especially American culture and values, which appears arrogantly to disdain their traditions. Yet latterly, some of these same sections of Islam have been emboldened by the victory of warriors of the faith over a superpower (Afghanistans mujahedin over Soviet Russia); the combination encourages them to assert their opposition to the engulfing encroachment of western modernity, even by taking up arms. When a climate of heightened tension such as this prompts activists in one religious group to become more assertive, to push their way forward in the public domain to demand more attention, more respect, more public funds (faith-based schools are one example), other religious groups, not wishing to be left behind, follow suit. In Britain, Muslim activism has been quickly mimicked by othersby Sikhs demonstrating about a play, Christian evangelicals demonstrating about an opera, and all of them leaping on the funding bandwagon for faith and interfaith initiatives. To placate them, politicians lend an ear; the media report it; immediately these minorities of interest have an amplifier for their presence. The effect is that suddenly it seems as if there are religious devotees everywhere, and the spurious magnification of their importance further promotes their confidence. As a result they make some gains, as the faith schools example shows. Yet the fact is that only 10 per cent of the British population attend church, mosque, synagogue or temple every week, and this figure is declining in all but immigrant communities. This is hardly the stuff of religious resurgence. Yes, over half the population claim vaguely to believe in Something, which includes feng shui and crystals, and they may be C of E in the sense of Christmas and Easter, but they are functionally secularist and would be horrified if asked to live according to the letter of (say) Christian morality: giving all ones possessions to the poor, taking no thought for the morrow and so impracticably forth. Not even Christian clerics follow these injunctions. This picture is repeated everywhere in the west except the US, and there too the religious base is eroding. The historical precedent of the counter-Reformation is instructive. For over a century after Luther nailed his theses to Wittenbergs church door, Europe was engulfed in ferocious religious strife, because the church was losing its hitherto hegemonic grip and had no intention of doing so without a fight. Millions died, and Catholicism won some battles even as it lost the war. We are witnessing a repeat today, this time with Islamism resisting the encroachment of a way of life that threatens it, and as other religious groups join them in a (strictly temporary, given the exclusivity of faith) alliance for the cause of religion in general. As before, the grinding of historical tectonic plates will be painful and protracted. But the outcome is not in doubt. As private observance, religion will of course survive among minorities; as a factor in public and international affairs it is having what might be its lastcharacteristically bloodyfling. |
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| We thought this a
good antidote to the increasingly crackpot Thought for the Day slot.
It is from Matthew Parriss notebook in The Times: A VICAR who came to stay told me he was shortly to go on a retreat. I suggested he try an "advance". Why do people go on retreats? What is there to retreat from? Many of ones friends would benefit more from a rocket under them than from moping dreamily around in a meditation centre for a week. People should be encouraged to go on regular advances, where we would be urged to rise with the lark, take freezing showers, make whooping noises and bayonet sacks of straw. But religion of both the old and the new kind seems to want us to view the world, and life, as some kind of a problem a howling chaos from which we need to retreat; a troublesome interlude between birth and death, to be got over somehow. At a church service last week I noted the hymn: Drop Thy still dews of quietness Till all our strivings cease; Take from our souls the strain and stress . . . What drivelling nonsense. Why should all our strivings cease? Why dont people stop whining about how stressed they are, get up half an hour earlier and tackle the unfinished jobs that stress them? Hide me O my Saviour hide Till the storm of life is past . . . Storm of life? Look out of your window, my friend, at the blue skies, at the trees, the hills, the children playing and spare us this whimpering. Religion peddles consolation when most of us dont need consolation, we need a good kick up the backside. |
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| Swedes trust Ikea more than the church
Swedes have more faith in their local Ikea store than in the church. Ananova 26 Nov 2006 According to a survey by Dagens Industri, eighty per cent of Swedes said they trusted the furniture chain. And though four-fifths of all Swedes claim to be members of the protestant Swedish Church only 46 per cent of those polled said they trusted the religious group. People also trust Volvo (69 percent), Ericsson (59), Saab (57) and even pharmaceutical giant Astra Zeneca (47) more than the Church. |
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