Humanism, atheism and other freedoms

As always, Tim Minchin is able to cut through to the heart of the matter…

Spotted this today in the right-hand panel of Facebook (which I normally ignore). I’m not sure why Facebook is recommending the page ‘I LOVE ALLAH’ (note the uppercase shouting). I’m even less sure why I was quite so amused by the comment ‘Many who like Facebook Security like this’.

I mean, seeing the words ‘Allah’, ‘security’ and ‘What are you planning?’ in close proximity should be sinister, no? Oh well, maybe it’s just me.

You have to pity people who suffer from anatidaephobia. This, according to many websites, some of them serious, is the irrational fear that, somewhere, a duck is watching you.

Scary? No. Funny? definitely.

It would be hard to take seriously. There’s some poor soul quivering in terror at the thought of being stalked by a small, feathered animal and all you can do is laugh. And it’s unreasonable to trivialise someone’s deeply held fears in this way. Or maybe it isn’t. Maybe this fear is so ridiculous that it doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously.

But wait a minute. Is a fear of duck surveillance any more ludicrous than the idea that we are being constantly watched – and judged – by some big, bearded bloke in the sky?

Actually, the duck thing is less ludicrous. We know ducks exist. We’ve seen them. Bred them. Eaten them. Why shouldn’t we fear something we know is real? It’s fearing something for which absolutely no evidence exists that’s silly.

God is a fiction. But then so is anatidaephobia. It’s a made-up phobia with its origins in Gary Larson’s The Far Side (a bizarre world that also makes far more sense than religion).

Still, if I have to believe I’m being watched by something, it clearly makes more sense to believe it’s a duck.

Before The Times goes pay-per-view, check out this story:

Vienna Boys’ Choir caught up in sex abuse scandals

It’s not so much the story itself that caught my eye – it seems pretty much par for the course with church institutions these days.

No, it’s the byline. The article is by the The Times‘ Berlin correspondent – Roger Boyes.

If I were him, I’d change my name.

Pope John Paul II - not a well man

According to a new book, Pope John Paul II regularly whipped himself. At other times, and in spite of illness, he slept on a bare floor. This, apparently, makes him eligible for sainthood.

To the faithful, the self-flagellation and hardship, in emulation of Christ’s suffering, are heroic. But outside the warped logic of faith, is there any other context in which this kind of behaviour wouldn’t be regarded as unbalanced?

The details of the late Pope’s masochism come in a new book, Why He Is a Saint: the Real John Paul II. It’s by Vatican official Monsignor Slawomir Oder who will be in charge of the process that will probably end in John Paul II’s canonisation (so it’s probably not a very balanced view of the erstwhile Pontiff).

There could be no clearer illustration of how religious and real-world perspectives do not align.

To the faithful Roman Catholic, John Paul II’s actions demonstrate devotion and courage.

To the ordinary human being, such behaviour seems suspiciously deviant. Indulging in such masochism suggests mental disorder, perhaps with sexual overtones. Masochism, after all, frequently has sexual implications, and in a sect that imposes lifelong celibacy (in theory) on its priests, one might expect many different manifestations of aberrant psychosexual pathology.

Even without such dark overtones, this behaviour still seems odd. To deliberately hurt oneself in emulation of a character in a fictional story is hardly normal, is it? What would we make, for example, of a teenager who chose to live in a wardrobe to honour the story of Narnia? That’s right – we’d get them help. And that’s without them self-harming – a sure sign of psychological issues.

This wouldn’t be the first time that behaviour which would seem odd or unacceptable to society at large is excused by religious adherence. There is a broad spectrum ranging from violent jihad to the Church of England’s recent fight to protect its ‘right’ to discriminate against homosexuals. Right now, in Kansas, a man is claiming that his religious beliefs left him no choice but to murder a doctor.

It’s also worth remembering that, when he wasn’t enjoying a sound self-whipping, Pope John Paul II lived in an environment of fantastic wealth and privilege.

Still, the Roman Catholic church has elevated people to sainthood on any number of feeble premises. It’s a form of marketing. By making people saints, you’re saying, ‘See how our church contains so many good and righteous people’. It helps counter the bad press the church gets for its paedophile priests and its effective genocide-by-AIDS in Africa.

Most organised religions are fundamentally bizarre. They involve a wholesale acceptance of strange and improbable ideas. Most of the time, we let this slide, because many of these ideas have become entrenched as part of the whole patchwork that is our mythological and historical landscape.

But occasionally, something crops up that makes you step back and think, “wow, now that’s weird”. This is one of those occasions, and it’s the clearest sign you could ask for of the gulf between faith and the real world.

We are wearily familiar with the way certain religionists attempt to impose their ideas on others. You don’t have to travel back to the days of the Inquisition to see this happening. You can find examples in most societies today – sometimes in overt forms, sometimes in more subtle ways.

It doesn’t come more overt than the terrorism of Islamic extremists. That’s the dangerous end of the spectrum – dangerous, that is, to life and limb. The same goes for loony evangelicals willing to murder doctors because they believe everyone must agree with an attitude to abortion guided by antique superstition.

But what of those subtle forms? Well, how about a pharmacist who makes it difficult for you to get the medicines you need?

The UK’s General Pharmaceutical Council (GPC) is currently drawing up new regulatory standards for the profession, covering areas such as confidentiality, education and ethics. You wouldn’t think that issues of faith would be a factor here. Alas, myths and prejudices formed thousands of years ago continue to affect our daily lives, however much we like to believe we live in a rational age.

It seems that some pharmacists like to bring their prejudices to work with them. There have been cases, for example, of pharmacists refusing to supply patients with the morning-after pill, in spite of doctors having prescribed it legally and in the best interests of the patients.

I’m not suggesting that only rationalists and humanists may become pharmacists. I’m simply saying that, when you’re a pharmacist, your duty and obligation to society must override any faith you hold, not the other way around.

The British Humanist Association (BHA) is participating in the GBC’s consultation process. The BHA’s stand is, as always, very reasonable:

If pharmacists are allowed to refuse certain services to patients because they believe it conflicts with their beliefs to supply such services, it should never be the case that those accessing services should suffer. At a minimum, it should be expected that the patient or the public be referred to someone who can meet their needs – but only if this would not cause them any distress or particular inconvenience.

It’s not just pharmacists who sometimes encounter a conflict between their social responsibilities and their mystical beliefs. In the past, we’ve seen examples of registrars employed by local councils refusing to conduct civil union (ie, marriage) ceremonies for same-sex couples. In fact, one can easily draw up a list that might also include doctors and other medical professionals, government functionaries and other posts where people perform important tasks for members of the public. These are posts where the performance of the job may have profound effects on people’s lives. And they are jobs in which religion plays no part, per se.

So, should religionists be able to decide whether to carry out their job functions based on their faith?

Of course not. That’s a clear dereliction of duty, both in the strict context of the person’s employment and in the wider context of their duty to society. It is an imposition of their own, narrow beliefs on the people they should be serving.

So, what is a religionist with deep convictions to do? If, for example, a pharmacist genuinely believes that supplying a morning-after pill to a women is tantamount to the murder of a would-be baby, what is the right course of action?

It’s simple. Get another job.

Even better, don’t become a pharmacist in the first place. If you have deep-seated beliefs that make it difficult or impossible for you to carry out certain actions, don’t take a job that involves those actions. Dispensing contraceptives is a regular part of a pharmacist’s job. If your beliefs prevent you from doing that, then you are not fit to be a pharmacist. Civil unions are legal in the UK. If your faith stops you from conducting such ceremonies, you are not competent to be a registrar.

You can be religious and still be a pharmacist or registrar or hold some other post that impinges on people’s lives. Just recognise that your spiritual beliefs are a personal choice that have nothing to do with the job. So leave your faith out of it.

I’m currently reading, and enjoying, Richard Dawkin’s new book, The Greatest Show on Earth: the evidence for evolution. Apparently, he was inspired to write it when he realised that, in spite of the fact that the evidence for evolution is overwhelming, many people don’t know that.

The book lays out the evidence in an easy-to assimilate way. Dawkins has had to be careful: he has been maliciously misquoted in the past by having short statements repeated out of context by creationists. (Apparently their ‘Christian’ morals don’t extend to honesty. And intellectual rigour is antithetical to creationism.)

As well as elucidating the scientific evidence, Dawkins tackles some of the muddle-headed ideas often thrown up by those who can’t cope with, or are scared of, evolution. For example, he carefully repeats that mankind is not descended from chimps, or any other kind of ape in existence today. We simply have a common ancestor – as we do with every other living thing.

Some of the other accusations thrown at evolutionists are more bizarre – almost to the point of cretinism, in my opinion. “I’ll believe we’re descended from monkeys when a chimp gives birth to a human” is one. This is so phenomenally stupid it’s hard to know where to begin. Dawkins makes a good stab at it, though. He also deals with the alleged ‘missing link’ (it isn’t missing), the lack of weird hybrids like the crocoduck in the fossil record (evolution doesn’t work that way so they should be missing) and the accusation that fossils show no intermediate stages (flat wrong on two counts: 1. There are plenty of fossil sequences that show steps along the evolutionary path; 2. Virtually all fossils are intermediate stages).

Then there’s the rallying cry of anti-evolutionists everywhere (or ‘history deniers’ as Dawkins rightly calls them): “what about the gaps in the fossil record?”.

Why wouldn’t there be gaps? What else could you expect? Fossilisation is a random happenstance relying on special conditions. Only a portion of the world’s rocks are capable of fossilising animals and plants during the rock’s formation. Special conditions must apply – conditions that don’t occur everywhere (a forest, for example, is not a good environment for creating fossils). Then the plant or animal has to be in the right place at exactly the right moment. Then we have to find the fossil. Untold millions must have been destroyed in the intervening period, by natural and human activity. Many more will be in strata where they will never be found. The fossil collections we have represent just a small fraction of the fossils that have been formed over the millennia.

Let’s consider an analogy. How many humans have lived and died? How many millions have been carefully buried, with clothes and grave goods in specially prepared ground? And yet how few do archaeologists find?

We’re lucky to have any fossils. And yet, the tens of thousands – or it is millions? – that we’ve been fortunate to find still paint a detailed and consistent picture. And they all fit beautifully with the theory of evolution. Indeed, ever since Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, with his brilliant insight into the most important evolutionary mechanism – natural selection – every important discovery and advance, such as DNA, has fitted perfectly into the overall evolutionary picture.

(I’ll be dealing in more detail with some of the anti-evolutionary ‘arguments’ in my occasional series, Lies Believers Tell.)

All the arguments against evolution stem from one source. Ignorance. The very basis of these arguments is false because they rely on assumptions that simply are not true.

Creationists are the worst offenders. (Let’s remember that many religious people have no problem with evolution.) They listen only to each other. They repeat the same baseless lies and distortions because they don’t want evolution to be true. They prefer their ignorance because, however disconnected it might be from reality, it allows them to indulge in their bronze-age fantasies.

And this, sadly, is why I think Dawkins’ book won’t reach the people who need it most. Where truth and faith collide, the faithful will stick their fingers in their ears, incant loudly and give themselves up to ignorance.

The Greatest Show on Earth is available from:
 Amazon.co.uk |  Amazon.com

As one of the world’s more famous atheists, Bertrand Russell always had the knack of combining a brilliant intellect and profound insights with a startling clear expression of his ideas. Here’s a classic example.

I have a few favourite moments. He describes how he examined religious ideas and found no good reason to believe in them. When asked by the interviewer whether religion is useful to some people to help them through their lives, Russell says:

“If you can’t find out whether it’s true or whether it isn’t, you should suspend judgment. But it seems to me a fundamental dishonesty and fundamental treachery to intellectual integrity to hold a belief because you think it’s useful and not because you think it’s true.”

The interviewer then asks whether faith nevertheless provides people with a solid foundation for morality, to which Russell replies:

“They could probably be able to find a rational morality that they could live by if they dropped this irrational taboo morality that comes down from savage ages.”

The interviewer suggests that many people would be unable to do this for themselves and need something imposed on them from outside. Russell dismisses this with:

“What is imposed on you from outside is of no value.”

The UK Government is looking to amend the law to allow organisations to discriminate against their workers on grounds such as sexual orientation and marital status. But these organisations will be allowed to act in this bullying and prejudicial way only if they are founded on arcane, unverifiable, supernatural beliefs.

The ability to harrass and oppress workers, or discriminate against potential new hires, will continued to be denied to any organisation whose attitudes are founded on rational, modern principles.

As the British Humanist Association points out, the UK’s Equality Bill already provides some scope for religious organisations to behave in an unreasonable and unfair manner. However, there is a possibility that they will be given even more leeway in applying their prejudices in the workplace if proposed amendments to the Bill go through.

Some commentators have seen this as just another piece of fallout from New Labour’s multiculturalism. It’s certainly an example of how religion enjoys a privileged place in society. Attitudes and actions that would be seen as immoral and unconscionable in any reasonable society are automatically excused when they are given the cloak of protection by religion. Identical behaviour would be criticised or banned if it stemmed instead from political or philosophical beliefs.

For example, a religious organisation may be allowed to fire someone who turns out to be gay, if homosexuality offends their religious sensitivities. But would we tolerate the firing of a gay person by, say, a far-right political group?

This comes at the same time that the Department for Communities and Local Government (CLG) has appointed a bunch of ‘faith advisers’ to advise on “the big issues facing society such as the economy, parenting, achieving social justice and tackling climate change.” No-one has explained how being religious has any bearing on these issues, or why these people are better qualified than those whose knowledge is based on, say, facts and research rather than superstition and mythology.

And while the current Government has affirmed its support for the right of humanists to have equal status with religious believers in the Equality Bill, the Conservatives (who will probably form the next government later this year) are trying to weaken the status of non-believers. They want to change the meaning of the term ‘religion or belief’ by removing the words ‘and philosophical’ in the definition of belief, which, in the current Bill, reads: ‘”belief” means any religious or philosophical belief’.

Given the state support for faith schools and its appointment of faith-based organisations to carry out work that has nothing to do with religion, this all points to a worrying trend. Not only is religious prejudice granted a free ride in society, it is also getting special treatment in the halls of power.

We are all capable of being moved by the plight of Haiti. You don’t need to be told – by either earthly or unearthly authority – that the victims of the earthquake need and deserve our help.

Compassion and empathy are human attributes. They are a cornerstone of humanism and the source of morality, in all cultures and at all times. Faiths may claim ownership of moral codes, but for them to assert that their brand of belief is the only route to good and honourable action is as bizarre, arrogant and unjustifiable as claiming that only through religion can you walk on two legs.

We feel because we are human.

And because we are human, we want to help.

And now there is a way of giving for those who want to ensure that their money does not go to aid organisations that confuse faith with compassion.

The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science has set up a fund that will be distributed to two organisations:

• Doctors Without Borders (Médecins sans Frontières)
• International Red Cross

To donate, go to: Non-Believers Giving Aid