Humanism, atheism and other freedoms

There are many assertions that the religious make – either in defence of their faith or as an attack against atheism – that have been so thoroughly discredited that they amount to bald-faced lies. This random and sporadic series of posts will look at some of the most popular.

One of the problems with those infected by religion is that their faith often takes the place of research, a willingness to learn and – yes, it has to be said – intellect. That’s why many of these untruths remain in circulation. The faithful never question them, never learn the truth, because religion deals in unquestioning belief, not logical debate or rational enquiry. And so the same old platitudes and myths get trotted out time after time.

I thought I would collect together responses to these lies as a resource for atheists and rationalists. Some of those I intend to deal with over the next few months include:

• Darwin embraced Jesus and recanted evolution on his deathbed.
• Atheism is a religion.
• Only religion can provide a basis for morality.
• Evolution is just a theory.
• Atheists are believers in denial.
• The worst wars and acts of genocide were caused by atheism.
• Atheism is the cause of social decline.

I would greatly welcome suggestions for other subjects, other myths. I will also update each post in the light of any suggestions or comments. Stay tuned…

Bill’s at it again…

And then his ‘apology’…

A comment by Virgin Media’s new boss that net neutrality is “bollocks” could have repercussions for the company. Let’s hope so.

Virgin’s CEO Neil Berkett is far from unusual, aside from the stupidity he displayed in being so blunt about his attitude to the Net. Businessmen do not view the Internet as a public good: to them, it is simply a way of making money. And they will seize every opportunity they find for exploiting the Net, and their customers. That’s business.

The suggestion, by Berkett, that Virgin will charge major content suppliers for faster access to its customers means that the company gets two bites at the cherry. It would be charging customers for access to the Internet, and then charging suppliers on the Internet for access to customers. It is like a car dealership charging GM or Ford for selling its cars to members of the public.

It is also a form of extortion. What Virgin (and other companies considering this approach) are saying is, “cough up or no-one will get to see your site”.

No doubt Virgin will argue that it isn’t banning sites or preventing its subscribers from reaching them. But these are typical corporate weasel words. The fact is, if some sites are so slow to load that people give up, then that is de facto censorship. It is censorship not for political or moral motives, but for pure commercial gain.

This puts Virgin in the position of deciding what you get to see. That’s bad enough. Worse, not even Virgin will decide this: the selection will be made by market forces. And experience shows that this will lead to the prioritising of the crass, the populist, the lowest common denominator. In terms of quality, the Internet will go the same way as TV. Down.

Infomatics quoted Cory Doctorow, internet activist and journalist as saying:

“As a Virgin customer, I am not paying to see those services that bribe Virgin to reach me. I am paying to reach the entire web, whichever bits I think are useful, as quickly as Virgin can deliver them.”

Doctorow says any move in this direction would be a breach of his contract with Virgin, leaving him free to ditch the company as his ISP and look elsewhere. Hopefully, others will join him.

The storm brewed up by activists like Stop Virgin is already having an effect. Virgin has issued statements trying to water down Berkett’s words without actually changing the company’s position – in other words, they’ve been indulging in the usual corporate PR bullshit in an attempt to avoid bad publicity while carrying on with their original plan.

ISPs are a kind of choke point between the general public and the Net. That’s why governments target them when they want to impose filters or implement spying programmes. Maybe it’s time for an official investigation into the power of ISPs to control what we see and what we can do on the Internet. They are in a privileged position. It’s time we had ways of preventing abuses of that privilege.

In the meantime, maybe Virgin Media should consider whether Berkett really is suited to this job.

Speaking on his US tour, the Pope has recalled some of the horrors of his own past. But only some.

While in New York, the Pope addressed a Seminary in Yonkers and said:[photopress:ratzinger_nazi_youth.jpg,full,alignright]

“My own years as a teenager were marred by a sinister regime that thought it had all the answers.”

It turns out he was talking about Nazism, a cause he briefly served, and not about Roman Catholicism, his current brand of totalitarianism. He went on to praise respect for human rights. Really? What, like the right to control one’s own fertility? Like the right to use condoms to reduce the risk of AIDS? No, thought not. So I guess he favours only some human rights.

Spiritualists, psychics and other frauds are up in arms about a proposed change to UK law that will make them prove their claims (how did they not see that coming?). But the law doesn’t go far enough: it’s time to extend it to all religion.

According to the report on the BBC website, ‘There may be trouble ahead’, the change to consumer laws will generally tighten up the need for suppliers of services to show that they do what they say they can do. The rules will apply to all areas of commerce that fall under the Consumer Protection Regulations. By including spiritualists, mediums and the like, the rules will also replace the rarely used Fraudulent Mediums Act 1951.

Most sane and intelligent people will applaud this. Psychics, mediums and spiritualists prey on the weak and vulnerable. They exploit grief, fear and uncertainty to fill their pockets or exert their influence.

The Office of Fair Trading has said it won’t target seances or services at spiritualist churches – it is more concerned about out-and-out scams (although telling the difference could be tricky). Nevertheless, it’s a useful precedent.

A real paranoid might see darker forces at work here. Psychics and other fringe practitioners are often sought out by people who feel they have been failed by the more conventional religions, but who still have a weakness for spiritual solutions. Criminalising such practices would be a first step to forcing people back into the main faiths where they are more easily controlled. That would be the preferred totalitarian solution.

I don’t see that happening here, though. This seems more like a rational and socially beneficial acknowledgment that these practices are fraudulent and should be treated accordingly.

Apparently, some spiritualists have complained that they are being victimised, that they are not being treated on an equal footing with other religions. And I agree. They have a very good point. Let’s face it, all religions are fraudulent: not one of them can substantiate its claims. So why not push this law to its logical conclusion? Let’s have all religions either put up or shut up.

Enforced conformity is the lynch pin of totalitarian regimes. We have just had yet another example of how religions try to enforce their narrow world views on others when a Christian radio station got its panties in a bunch over some schoolkids dressing up.

The Associated Press report, ‘Kids’ Dress-Up Day Draws Christian Ire’, explains how children at Pineview Elementary in Reedsburg, Wisconsin were enjoying ‘Wacky Week’, where they could choose to dress as either senior citizens or as members of the opposite sex. Note the word ‘choose’. The kids themselves chose this event and were, by all accounts, having fun.

Until, that is, word got to the right-wing Christian radio station Voice of Christian Youth America (VCY America). It seems that Jim Schneider, one of the hosts of the station’s Crosstalk programme, was so incensed by children enjoying themselves that he felt compelled to interrupt regular programming to condemn it. This resulted in the inevitable deluge of complaints to the school from his flock.

What was it that upset Schneider?

“We believe it’s the wrong message to send to elementary students,” said Jim Schneider, the network’s program director. “Our station is one that promotes traditional family values. It concerns us when a school district strikes at the heart and core of the Biblical values. To promote this to elementary-school students is a great error.”

Those are very revealing comments. First, he has assumed that there is any kind of ‘message’ being sent. Schneider seems incapable of understanding that people, even kids, sometimes just have fun. But then religious extremists are often of a profoundly paranoid bent, seeing secret agenda everywhere.

We move on to ‘traditional family values’. Would this be where Jesus told would-be disciples to ditch their families to follow him? No, must be some other kind of values. It’s interesting that when traditional values are invoked, they are so rarely explained. Who gets to decide what constitutes ‘traditional’. We used to send children up chimneys as sweeps – is that traditional? We used to keep slaves (the Bible even tells us how to go about it). Is that traditional?

This is another facet of the argument about who decides what is ‘Christian’ (see: The wrong religion). Each group, each sect, gets to decide what it considers ‘traditional’. Rationality, intellect, common sense and logic need play no part in this. A tradition is whatever each group decides matches its core values or ideas. Thus, one wacko offshoot of Mormonism might decide that polygamy – and possibly child abuse – is still a traditional value, while the rest of the church has somehow decided that there are some traditions that are no longer traditional.

The point of this is that these values are not in any way inherent – they are chosen. Schneider is invoking vague ‘traditional family values’ as if these are fixed, beyond debate and shared by all. And then he is condemning others for not complying with these values.

This is profoundly dishonest language and arrogant behaviour. Schneider is attempting to impose his ideas on the rest of us – effectively condemning anyone who does not share his narrow world view.

This is how totalitarianism operates. You must conform to its way of thinking. It is not about external rules – though there are always plenty of those in any repressive regime (religion included). It is about how you think, that matters. Why? Because totalitarian regimes – and especially religions – are intrinsically absurd. You must swallow the entire mindset otherwise there is a danger that, by rejecting one aspect, you come to perceive the stupidity of the whole system. It’s important, then, that everyone is brought around to the same way of thinking, that no dissent is permitted at any level.

And that’s the nub of what’s going on here. For what this kind of religion cannot abide is difference. The right-wing end of the religious spectrum, which is what we see at work here, constantly attacks ‘alternative’ lifestyles. They are dangerous. Thinking or behaving differently puts people outside the constrictive mindset on which this fascist form of religion depends.

This particular controversy illustrates just how intolerant these religious fanatics are when it comes to non-conformance. For heaven’s sake, this was a bunch of kids playing dress-up. That’s it. No agenda, no attempt to coerce children into depraved lifestyles. It’s the sort of thing kids do naturally, with a wonderful and admirable lack of self-consciousness. But the religious extremists cannot allow this to happen. These children must be controlled.

And then there’s that striking ‘at the heart of Biblical values’. Oh come on. Get a grip, Schneider. I would have thought the heart of biblical values would be more along the lines of ‘thou shalt not kill’ rather than ‘thou shalt not cross-dress’.

There is also the not so small point that schools are under no obligation to uphold what Schneider might decide are biblical values. And there’s the matter of the separation of church and state. Schneider probably thinks this separation is invalid. But that’s tough, because that separation is something that does happen to be a shared value – the Constitution and the law make it so.

The sad thing is that the bullying by Schneider and the sheep who obeyed him – his radio-listening flock – has succeeded in forcing the submission of the school into not having this event in future. These children have certainly learned a lesson: Thou shalt not be different.

The process of destroying freedom often starts with steps that seem reasonable. If you want to strip everyone of their civil liberties, start with a group everyone despises. Few groups fit this bill better than paedophiles.

There is a famous and oft-quoted text that reads:

In Germany, they came first for the Communists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist;

And then they came for the trade unionists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist;

And then they came for the Jews, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew;

And then … they came for me … And by that time there was no one left to speak up.

The poem is generally attributed to Pastor Martin Niemöller (1892-1984), though there is some debate about both the attribution and the wording. But no matter: the sentiment is clear – it’s important we recognise dangers even when they are not targeted at ourselves.

But the poem has a weakness. It addresses our need to consider the fate of ‘others’, but it doesn’t extend that unambiguously to ‘despised others’. And this is where the erosion of our freedoms more typically starts.

The greatest resistance to an attempt to take away a freedom we cherish occurs when the law or regulation is first made. Once a rule is established, prohibiting this or regulating that, then many will see the battle as lost and will put their energies into the next fight. Little by little, freedom becomes eroded.

The trick, then, as far as the authorities are concerned, is to make the regulation seem reasonable. Phrases such as ‘for your safety’ or ‘good for society’ are often deployed whenever the result of a new law is to place limits on your freedoms.

It works even better if the restrictions affect a minority group within society that the majority despise or fear or for whom they can raise no compassion. And paedophiles are to today’s society what the Jews were to the Nazis. Who cares if paedophiles have their freedoms stripped away: they brought it on themselves, right? Surely they don’t deserve the same benefits and liberties as the rest of us.

The latest proposed restrictions in the UK would ban convicted paedophiles from social networking sites such as Facebook and Bebo. The ban would be implemented by the sites themselves, based on email addresses supplied by the Government. Paedophiles would be obliged to supply details of the email accounts they use.

Presumably, this is an attempt to prevent the cyberstalking of children. There is some debate about the extent to which this happens, and whether it presents a genuine threat. But I have sympathy for the attitude that one case is one too many.

The scheme is clearly unworkable. Computer forensic experts can tell you that the most active (and potentially dangerous) paedophiles are technically adept. They would know how to use proxies, TOR, wardriving, cyber-cafes and other technologies and techniques to hide their identities. Gmail and Hotmail accounts can be created in seconds. And most social networking sites are based outside the UK’s jurisdiction.

It might also have the opposite effect to the one desired. The restrictions would affect only convicted paedophiles. Those yet to be caught could still roam Facebook. And, believing that such sites are now safer places, children might be tempted to let their guard down.

What is more sinister for all of us is that this new rule would establish a mechanism by which the authorities can designate a group that is to be denied the use of some portion of the Internet. And the actual restriction would be imposed not by government authorities but by commercial organisations – the Government gets to keep its hands clean.

How easy it would be to start extending this mechanism to other groups, other parts of the net, other areas of life. If someone notices, just blame it on ‘mission creep’. Because we feel a natural distaste for those branded as paedophiles, who will oppose this regulation? After all, ‘it’s for the children’. Once it is accepted, though, there will be little to stop its expansion to embrace us all.

There always was something slightly messianic about Tony Blair. Now he is calling for a greater role for faith in world affairs – as if religion were the solution rather than the problem.

[photopress:blair.jpg,full,alignright]According to The Guardian, Blair will be delivering a lecture at Westminster Abbey where he will say that “failure to engage with religious groups will drive believers to apathy or fundamentalism” (the Guardian’s words). Apparently, Blair believes that people are moving either towards religious extremism or a feeling that religion is a “spent force”.

That actually conforms with polls in the UK – religion is declining overall but evangelism and fundamentalism are increasing. But note the implication that both ends of the spectrum are a bad thing. And notice that there is no mention of atheism – just apathy. This is clearly a way of denigrating atheism without having the courage to do it directly. Blair is a slick spinmeister. He knows that atheists form a large section of British society. He can’t call them a problem outright. He has to resort to innuendo.

It is a common tactic for movers and shakers in the religious world to sideline secularism whenever there are debates about bringing world peace or social benefits. There is much talk about ecumenical approaches and multi-faith initiatives, but never the slightest consideration that taking faith out of the picture altogether might actually remove barriers to progress – that spending any energy and resources on considering the role of faith might be a wasteful irrelevance. Get rid of faith and you can get on with the job. But too many people in positions of power seem to think that the only solution to the world’s problems lies in medieval witchcraft.

This faith in faith says a lot about Blair. His crusading zeal in the role of Bush’s lapdog can best be explained, perhaps, by a common interest in supernatural phenomena. There seems no other reason why a pseudo-socialist prime minister would cosy up so snugly to a crypto-fascist president.

In an interview, Blair recently said that he largely kept his religion out of the public spotlight because “frankly, people do think you’re a nutter”. That’s an illuminating comment. It shows the massive gulf between the status of religion in the UK and the US. Indeed, in the UK, religious fervour is the perceived domain of the unhinged. In the US, it’s a requirement for the job of president.

But US-style religious extremism is creeping into the UK. Blair oversaw the rise of faith-based initiatives in areas where religion has no business – doing the work once done by government departments. Faith schools have become stronger. Even the anti-intellectual disease of creationism is on the rise. This may be Blair’s true legacy.

After leaving office, Blair converted to Roman Catholicism and is leading the Faith Foundation for young people (as the figurehead of New Labour, his experience of spin and indoctrination will come in handy here).

In case Blair hasn’t noticed, though, maybe we should point out that faith already plays a major role in world affairs. Ask anyone in Iran. Or Iraq. Or who lost loved-ones on 9/11. Perhaps what Blair, acting now as the acceptable face of the Inquisition, is trying to tell us is that people need the right religion. But we’ve been there before, haven’t we?

When atheists criticise the more risible aspects of religion or the actions of believers, the faithful often respond with something along the lines of “your point is worthless because that’s not real religion”. Do they have a point? Or are they indulging in a peculiar form of bigotry?

When I wrote When faith kills, one person on Digg denounced it as bigoted. The argument ran like this (I’m summarising): The people you criticised were not proper believers. What they were doing was not real Christianity. Therefore your arguments are invalid and unfair to Christians.

This raises an important question. Who gets to decide what is real religion? More importantly, perhaps, how do we discern which is the real Christianity, which the real Islam?

Islam, of course, has only a handful of variants. The miscellaneous flavours of Christianity, on the other hand, are many and various. Each one of them believes it has exclusive access to the truth.

At this point, one is reminded of the response to Christians usually attributed to Richard Dawkins but espoused by many atheists: that we are all atheists. Christians do not believe in many thousands of gods. Atheists just go one god further. This is rather well presented in this table of Christian and atheist beliefs.

It’s all about definitions. Every faith sets its own terms. Religions are self-defining. They are not constrained by evidence, by the historical record, not even by the physical laws of the universe or common sense. Every sect gets to define what it regards as ‘Christian’ behaviour.

The Digger mentioned above – who evidently defines himself as a Christian – had a very simple rule for determining what constitutes acceptable Christian behaviour. Give people a Bible and let them point to the section that validates their actions.

Alas, this is simple to the point of being simple-minded. First, which Bible? Various translations have been used at different times to support widely varying behaviour. Second, the Bible, as we all know, is infuriatingly vague and frequently self-contradicting. It is not an homogeneous work but a rather slipshod cobbling together of texts with inconsistent and incompatible philosophies, ethics and narratives. Even the three synoptic gospels can’t get their story straight. So each Christian sect tends to pick carefully those sections most amenable to it.

Third, many Christian faiths insist that the Bible is not to be read literally. Only those fundamentalist sects whose appeal is mainly to the more knuckle-dragging sections of society ask us to take every word as literal truth. The majority of Christians accept some, if not all, sections of the Bible as allegorical or metaphorical. Everything, then, depends on interpretation. And if you want to behave in a certain way, if you want to invoke divine approval for your actions, you are likely to be able to find something in the Bible that you can interpret as supporting your actions. This is why the frequently made assertion that the Bible (and only the Bible) is the bedrock of ethics and morality is so laughable. The Bible can be made to endorse anything (including slavery and genocide).

So let’s look again at where we came in. Some self-defined Christians commit a particular act, in conformance – as they see it – with their beliefs. But it’s an act that those of us in the real world consider heinous or ludicrous, and we say so. Then some other Christian comes along and says, “hey, those guys aren’t real Christians. You’re just using their behaviour as a way of having a cheap shot at all Christians.”

What this person is doing is using their own, necessarily narrow definition of Christianity to condemn the others as “not really Christians”. They are saying, “only my definition is valid” and “these people are not entitled to call themselves Christian”. That’s bigotry.

It is also a cheap trick. Christians can simply keep moving the goalposts, claiming that any action or belief criticised as secularists isn’t ‘Christian’ anyway, so the criticism is obviously an egregious attack on ‘true’ Christians.

I’m not tarring every Christian with this particular brush. There are many who state their beliefs plainly and have the courage to stick to them and take responsibility for them. When someone’s faith leads them into actions that cause harm to others, we have a perfect right to criticise not just the people themselves but the faith that coerced them into irresponsible behaviour. For other Christians simply to wash their hands of this issue by brushing off the miscreants as ‘not really Christian’ is cowardly and dishonest.

The next time someone tells you that religion is a “force for good”, remind them of the Oregon fundamentalist Christian couple currently under indictment for the death of their 15-month old daughter. And, sadly, this looks like it’s not an isolated case. It’s time people were held fully responsible for their strange, and sometimes dangerous, beliefs.

According to press reports, Carl and Raylene Worthington have been indicted by a grand jury in Oregon’s Clackamas county following the death of their daughter Ava. She succumbed to bronchial pneumonia and a blood infection – conditions that could have been treated easily and effectively with antibiotics. The parents chose faith healing.

At the very least, entrusting the wellbeing of your child to supernatural forces is criminal neglect – child abuse of an extreme form. In this case it led to death, so the charge – quite rightly – is manslaughter.

If this were an isolated case, it would be easy to dismiss it as another instance of poor parenting. It is a sad fact that too many children suffer from the stupidity, ignorance, mental illness or inadequacy of their parents. Religion does not have a monopoly when it comes to dumb ideas that lead to bad parenting. Certainly, it doesn’t make the parents any the less culpable, but we would have no need to worry about a larger issue.

But that’s not quite the case here.

The Followers of Christ fundamentalist church, which boasts 1,500 members, has a worrying record. Back in the 1990s, the deaths of several children prompted the Oregon authorities to enact a 1999 law that removes a ‘religious defence’ in cases of murder, manslaughter and child abuse.

Some of us might see it as bizarre that it took that long. Why should we have ever considered strange and insupportable beliefs in supernatural forces to be a reasonable excuse for child neglect or worse? Would courts have ever considered belief in UFOs, CIA mind control or vampires as valid defences (other than proof of possible insanity)?

While this fundamentalist community has had an apparently clean record since the law was passed (an investigation into the 2001 death of the same couple’s son was dropped), there are now some concerns about an allegedly high infant mortality rate among families belonging to the church.

If you choose to turn your back on the immeasurable benefits given to mankind by science and rational progress and put your life in the hands of some imagined superbeing – well, that’s your funeral. When you make that decision on behalf of those in your care, innocent children dependent on your ability to make decisions critical to their wellbeing, then you carry a great responsibility. Rejecting life-saving treatment in favour of medieval superstition is a gross dereliction of that duty. At the very least, it makes you an incompetent parent. At worst, it makes you a child killer.