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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"
- AC Greyling, Dec 2007
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"At this season of
The Winter Solstice
May reason prevail.
There are no gods,
no devils, no angels,
no heaven or hell.
There is only
our natural world.
Religion is but
myth and superstition
that hardens hearts
and enslaves minds"
- Atheist sign in Washington State, Dec 2008
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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
- Gary J. Whittenberger, eSkeptic, 04/03/09 |
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Atheism is NOT a religion
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What's the Harm?
(a)
What's the Harm? (b)
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You won't believe
what people believe
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Hitler WAS
Religious |
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Respect for religion now makes censorship the norm
When publishers are too intimidated to print even novels that
may offend, it shows how far we've lost our way on free speech
Jo Glanville
Guardian
September 30 2008
The firebomb attack this weekend on the publishing house Gibson Square in
London was an assault on one of the bravest publishers in the business.
Three men were arrested under the Terrorism Act 2000 on Saturday morning,
suspected of attempting to set fire to the premises. Martin Rynja, who runs
Gibson Square, is due to publish Sherry Jones's novel about Mohammed's wife
Aisha, The Jewel of Medina, next month. Random House had pulled out of
publishing the novel in August, stating that it had been advised that "the
publication of this book might be offensive to some in the Muslim community"
and that "it could incite acts of violence by a small, radical segment".
This is not the first time that Rynja, owner of a small, independent
publishing house, has shown himself to have more gumption and appetite for
controversy than the big boys. Four years ago, he published Craig Unger's
House of Bush, House of Saud after Random House, once again, pulled out -
this time for fear of libel action. He is also the publisher of OJ Simpson's
If I Did It and Alexander Litvinenko's Blowing Up Russia.
Rynja's support for free speech is proving to be exceptional, as is his
courage in standing up to bullies, at a time when other publishers will
surrender at any intimation of legal action - particularly from litigious
Saudis. Rynja, who trained as a lawyer, has shown that capitulation need not
be inevitable. I can only hope that the shocking attack on his office will
not dim his determination - but he will need support.
Random House dropped The Jewel of Medina in anticipation that offence might
be caused in an extraordinary instance of pre-emptive censorship. Let's
remember the similarly dire predictions that were made when Geert Wilders
released his provocative film Fitna, which links Islam to terrorism - it was
in fact a non-event.
Yet, in this instance, the row that ensued once the story broke about Sherry
Jones's novel has, like a self-fulfilling prophecy, served to escalate the
very scenario that Random House was apparently seeking to avert. It is most
telling that they sent a work of fiction out to academics for approval in
the first place - since when was a historian, however smart and literate, a
suitable judge of whether a novel should or should not be published? Surely
the only grounds for publishing a novel are whether it is of literary merit?
One of the academics they consulted, Denise Spellberg, was reported as
saying: "You can't play with a sacred history and turn it into soft-core
pornography." Why not? This is one person's subjective view of a novel - it
should not be grounds for censorship.
Random House's actions show just how far we have lost our way in this debate
over free expression and Islam: the level of intimidation, fear and
self-censorship is such that one of the biggest publishers in the world no
longer felt able to publish a work of creative imagination without some kind
of dispensation. Jones's book does not claim to be a piece of history - it's
a work of invention.
It was also disingenuous of Random House to suggest that the novel might
incite violence. Certain members of the population might choose to commit an
act of violence, but that is not the same as the book itself inciting
violence. To pass the responsibility in this way to the novel was a betrayal
of the author and of free speech. So it was left to a small publisher, with
none of the resources a major publishing house can enjoy in such a time of
crisis, to stand up for principles. Now that Rynja has come under attack, it
is more necessary than ever to counter any justification of censorship on
the grounds of offence (that may or may not be caused) and to condemn any
intimidation tactics.
This whole affair - from Random House's decision to drop the book, to the
attack this weekend - is evidence of a worrying trend. Twenty years since
The Satanic Verses was published, in the 60th-anniversary year of the UN
Declaration of Human Rights, we are facing a crisis for free expression. Yet
the threat comes not only from those who commit acts of violence, but from
those who ostensibly support human rights.
Respect for religion has now become acceptable grounds for censorship; even
the UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, has declared that free speech should
respect religious sensibilities, while the UN human rights council passed a
resolution earlier this year condemning defamation of religion and calling
for governments to prohibit it. As the writer Kenan Malik has so astutely
pointed out, "In the post-Rushdie world, speech has come to be seen not
intrinsically as a good but inherently as a problem because it can offend as
well as harm ..." Censorship, and self-censorship, Malik observes, have
become the norm. What we have seen, over the past two decades, is an
insidious new argument for curbing free speech become increasingly
acceptable.
Martin Rynja has consistently set an example to us all in not being cowed by
outrage, convention and legal action. It's an independent spirit that we
urgently need to cherish, support and emulate - and it's not only free
speech groups like Index on Censorship that should be standing up for him.
• Jo Glanville is editor of Index on Censorship indexoncensorship.org
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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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"Howard Rye (Newsline 18th July
08) seems to be missing a basic point about atheism when he states that “If
we want tolerance for our beliefs we had better tolerate the beliefs of
others”. The point simply is this: atheism is not a
belief! No more than being healthy is a type of
illness, being bald is a hair colour, etc. The reason why
non-believing teachers wish to opt out of acts of worship is not on the
grounds that it is against their ‘belief’, but on the grounds that it is a
waste of time. Like standing in a corner popping bubblewrap would be.
To an atheist, the concept of basing one’s worldview around ‘belief’
is as ridiculous as walking down the road with a blindfold on. Faith has no
useful purpose (in fact it generally proves to be worse than useless),
therefore we pay no heed to it – and use more reliable methods of gaining
knowledge. It’s a no-brainer, really, but try explaining this simple concept
to the credulous!"
- Carl Defoe, Newsline,
25 July 2008
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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”
- Christopher Hitchens
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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
- Paul Owen, The Times
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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?
- Johann Hari quoting Christopher Hitchens |
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International Committee Against Christian Calendar Imperialism
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"Secularism
is the constitutional brick and mortar for free religious expression, not
its downfall,
because it protects the free expression of all religions, not just the
dominant one"
- Shaunti Feldhahn and Diane Glass
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KNOW THYSELF (An Agnostic on Mortality)
Astrology, Theology,
Ancestors of Psychology
That new kid on the psychic block
To whom the modern sinners flock.
Where once the gods above the skies
Dispensed forgiveness for our lies,
We now seek solace from a 'Shrink',
Suppress our guilt with pot and drink.
But Ancient Greeks - all mighty smart
Foreshadowed Freud, Voltaire, Descartes
At Delphis Shrine where Truth was sought,
Found Know Thyself Mans wisest thought.
But what is Self that silver thread?
Unseen within confining head.
Not entity - just fleeting scans
Of games and pains and hopeful plans.
A mortal biologic fire
Predestined only to expire,
But twixt the spark and final ash
What fun we had throughout that dash.
- Paul Rattenbury
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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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"Religion
is the yeast of death cakes. It is the most awful agent on a vulnerable
mind. It is the refuge of alienated and lonely people. It's what people had
before television. It yokes people together into an imaginary world. It is
just people talking to their imaginary friends, at length. I would not mind
but some of the people are world leaders"
- Dylan Moran
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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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Resigning from Christianity nonsense
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