Humanism, atheism and other freedoms

A blanket lifting of excommunications by the Pope has had the effect of bringing back into the Roman Catholic church a bishop who also happens to be a notorious Holocaust denier.

Richard Williamson, from Britain, was one of four bishops appointed more than 20 years ago by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who was himself ousted from the Roman Catholic church for his refusal to accept ‘liberal’ reforms such as the abandoning of the Latin Mass.

Now Williamson is back in the club, in spite of the fact that he is a forthright Nazi apologist. According to the BBC:

Bishop Richard Williamson recently told Swedish TV: “I believe there were no gas chambers. I think that two to three hundred thousand Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps but none of them by gas chambers.”

The Vatican has said that the four bishops – who also include two Frenchmen and one Argentinian – have agreed to accept current Catholic teachings and papal authority. And that’s enough to save them from everlasting torment. Aligning themselves with some of the greatest mass murderers in history isn’t a problem, it seems.

Clearly the Roman Catholic church will take anyone these days. Maybe it’s a reaction to their dwindling numbers.

One has to wonder about the morality and ethics of a sect where a willingness to accept dogma and the word of the boss is deemed far more important than, say, the truth. Or simple decency. Or, for that matter, morals.

The Roman Catholic church was always far too cozy with the Nazis. During the war, the Pope liked to send Hitler birthday greetings and there is plenty of evidence of colusion. After the war, the Vatican was implicated in helping leading Nazis to escape. But one would have hoped that they’d have got over their infatuation with (other) vicious totalitarian regimes. Not entirely, it seems.

I’m watching the BBC series ‘Around the World in 80 Faiths‘ with great fascination and enjoyment. Anglican vicar Peter Owen Jones is an engaging, entertaining and (up to a point) honest guide to the world’s rich variety of spiritual wackiness.

Peter Owen Jones

Owen Jones ‘heard the call’ 15 years ago, having previously spent his time running discos and advertising campaigns. According to the BBC’s website, this rustic padre feels that the Church of England “is too much a faith of the head and not enough a faith of the soul”. This televised journey, then, is a search for the pure spirit of the divine and how it manifests itself in so many ways.

As our guide, Owen Jones is remarkably willing to immerse himself in beliefs and practices very alien to the genteel rituals of an Anglican service. Sometimes he is moved, sometimes bemused and (so far – I’m three episodes in at this point) only once really disgusted. A voodoo ceremony at which animals – including a kitten and a puppy – were bloodily sacrificed left him very disturbed. His revulsion, it seems, was not on theological grounds but simple humanitarian ones and was easily shared by atheists like me. Believe all the hocus pocus you like, but leave the kitten out of it.

Naturally he has his limits. As a believer, Owen Jones is rather too willing to see people – and feel himself – moved by the holy spirit where a more neutral observer might witness hysteria, hyperventilation or simple credulity.

On the whole, though, Owen Jones is accommodating and open. Indeed, the only note of disdain so far was reserved for atheists. He said something to the effect that we infidels would regard all these manifestations of the divine as a “form of disease”. I’m not sure if Owen Jones is aware of the variety of attitudes towards religion among atheists, or whether his generosity of spirit simply stops short of those who don’t share his belief in the divine. Either way, it’s worth noting that not all of us consider religious belief per se to be a disease or shared dementia. In fact, I believe that a predisposition to spiritual experience is a natural result of evolution – a subject to which I will return in a future blog.

I’m looking forward to the rest of the series, keen to know if Owen Jones will address the one big question that so far he has avoided. There seems to be a implication, from what he has said, that the prevalence of religion across the world means that there is a common phenomenon behind it – no less than the divine itself. This is an argument that crops up often: if so many people believe in a divine spirit, it must be there.

This, of course, is poor logic. There is an obvious counter argument which hinges on the fact that the very nature of religious belief is exclusiveness. Religions are not mutually compatible. You cannot accept more than one. You must, by that token, believe that all the others are wrong. And yet there are thousands of separate religions and, within each faith, many variations of the type. The divisions between them are so hotly debated that the supremacy of one over another is often expressed violently, at the cost of many lives and much suffering.

And it’s self-evidently true that they can’t all be right. At most, there could be only one true faith. Therefore, even if you are a believer, you must believe that the vast majority of faiths are … well … nonsense. No matter how fervent your faith in your god and your prophets and your mythical tales, you have to contend with the simple fact that the majority of people in the world – even the religious ones – think that what you believe is rubbish.

How would we recognise the true faith? For me, a key test would be reliability. If a faith is real, it should work – not now and again, not in strange and oblique ways, but reliably and repeatedly. And yet we know that no faith matches this criterion. Prayers and imprecations are, at best, a hit and miss affair. Even the most extreme piety, the most self-abasing unctuousness, only rarely seems to deliver results. And if a faith really was the genuine article, then surely it would seem self-evident. Everyone would flock to it. All others would fall away.

The faithful, of course, get around these problems with a blinding array of excuses and prevarications. Chief among these is the idea that we are being tested. Yes, even supposedly loving gods, who are keen to bring us to their ethereal bosoms, enjoy tormenting us – to an extent, in fact, which means that most of us will fail.

Now try applying common sense to this situation. If even the faithful insist that the vast majority of religions are wrong – indeed, all but one of them – then it stands to reason that there is a very good chance that all of them are. As we’ve already seen, if you pick any one faith you’ll find most of the people in the world are against it. You can do this for every religion.

So, if all the religions are demonstrably wrong, and they all have the divine as their common thread, the inescapable conclusion is that the very concept of the divine is itself wrong. It might be a delusion. It might be the ‘misfiring’ (as Dawkins would put it) of part of our psyche (which is kind of where I’m heading with the evolution thing). It might simply be that we poor mammals are simply not up to the task of comprehending the entire universe and must weave stories to accommodate what we can’t fully grasp.

Whatever the explanation for our tendency towards superstition, if we are honest we must at least acknowledge the possibility that at the heart of the world’s religions lies … nothing. That the divine is merely a common and rather simple device employed by the other thing we all share – our brains. So far, this is what Owen Jones has failed to do. Oh well, just sit back and enjoy the wackiness.

A furore in Germany over an Islamic scholar’s claim that Mohammed might not have existed highlights a fundamental difficulty in many religions – that they emphasise faith and dismiss calls for proof while simultaneously basing their beliefs around alleged facts.

The two most problematic faiths in this regard are Christianity and Islam. Both, of course, claim Christ as a once-living prophet. A critical tennet of Christianity – at least for the vast majority of Christians – is that Jesus was the embodiment of god on this earth. Similarly, for Muslims, it is vitally important that Mohammed was a real person who took dictation from the Archangel Gabriel.

There is a fairly long tradition in Christianity of examining the historicity of Christ. We all know that there is no documentary evidence for his existence. Even the biblical ‘evidence’ is contradictory. The Gospels offer conflicting portraits, depending on the agenda behind their creation and subsequent amendments. And the Epistles portray a figure who is far more consistent with a mythological character, ‘existing’ in the lowest realm of heaven (where, according to the theology of the day, demons lived) than a human who walked the same earth as ourselves. In short, no amount of historical research is able to settle the question of whether Christ ever lived, while rational analysis of the texts and the lack of supporting evidence would suggest that he didn’t.

Muhammad Sven Kalisch, chair of Islamic Studies at the University of Münster, has applied similar historical analysis to Mohammed. And he’s come up with a similar result.

“My position with regard to the historical existence of Muhammad is that I believe neither his existence nor his non-existence can be proven,” he said. “I, however, lean toward the non-existence.”

The problem this creates is that it would seem to invalidate the Qur’an. According to Islamic tradition, the Qur’an was the result of Mohammed being visited by the Archangel Gabriel on many occasions, starting in 610CE and lasting until 632CE. Mohammed himself did not write down what was said to him: he was illiterate. At first, Islam was largely an oral tradition, though certain of Mohammed’s followers each wrote down parts of what they heard. It was only two years after the Prophet’s death, when the new faith had already started to factionalise and war had killed many of those who had learned the Qur’an by rote, that the first caliph, Abu Bakr, ordered the whole text to be written in a definitive version. A single copy was created. Twelve years later, the third caliph, ‘Uthman, ordered additional copies to be made. This ‘Uthmanic Codex is regarded by most Muslims as the canonic text. The Qur’an, then, has some advantages over the Christian Bible in terms of textual integrity.

Of course, what the Qur’an actually says is open to wider interpretation. And if Mohammed did not exist, where did the text actually come from? Muslims believe that the Qur’an is the infallible and unalterable word of god. It is important to them that these words were dictated directly from god’s representative and that they have been captured accurately.

Kalisch takes a less literal and more spiritual approach.

“All the various sacred books are the product of human minds and experiences,” he said. God exists and works on a more spiritual level, he insists. Sacred texts should be approached as expressions of our relationship to (and, perhaps, desires for) a deity. They are also products of their time and place (which is why, for example, the flood story in the Old Testament mentions no animal that wouldn’t have been known to inhabitants of the Middle East).

That’s not going to please many Muslims. One of the great attractions of religion is that it offers certainties in an uncertain world. If the canonical texts of your chosen religion turn out to be nothing more than the works of humans striving to find answers and shape their relationships with god, then much certainty is removed. All becomes open to interpretation. The easy answers to difficult questions are taken away.

Once believers acknowledge that there are no facts at the heart of their faith, they must also face the uncomfortable consequence that they can no longer claim superiority. If the New Testament is simply a mythical tale, if the Qur’an is based on ideas spun around a mythical story, that breaks the direct link with god and belief becomes nothing more than a fanciful notion or wishful thinking. And so, believers find themselves insisting on at least one physical truth at the heart of their belief – that Christ and/or Mohammed walked the Earth. It is a shame for them that they are unable to verify even this one basic fact.

This festive season is traditionally a time when Christians get their knickers in a twist about the ‘meaning’ of Christmas. As usual, the traditionalists are loudly moaning about Xmas being devalued by materialism, about people forgetting why Christ was put on this planet (you know, the one about how he came to absolve us of sin – something invented for no apparent reason by his father).

Cathy Lynn Grossman has a nice piece about this over at USA Today. She reports:

Christmas without the specter of the cross, without awareness that this is a baby born to die for mankind’s sins, is a fancied-up fraud, says Horton, professor of theology and apologetics at Westminster Seminary California, and associate pastor at Christ United Reformed Church in Santee, Calif.

There are some slight surprises in the piece, too. One spokesperson for an interfaith organisation actually confesses that the US “is becoming a secular society” and that peace, goodwill to all people and generally ethical behaviour might be more important than archaic rituals and dogma. Quite.

But let’s not dismiss history and tradition entirely. There are good reasons for celebrating at this time of year.

So, what is Christmas all about? The Winter solstice, of course, when the days start to get longer again and we can look forward to Spring. This was a festival linked directly to nature – to an important marker in daily life that concerned the environment we all share, beyond the petty fantasies that a more ignorant age liked to concoct. It’s a shame the Christians stole it.

If you want to get back to the real meaning of this festival, forget about Christ.

Just how much are fundamentalist and bigoted religious views driving Sarah Palin’s bid for the VP slot?

And given that Palin has now been found, by an enquiry, to have acted unethically, can she be trusted in such a powerful position?

A storm has brewed up over the practice, by British faith schools, of hiring only those teachers who practice that faith. But once again, a deeper issue goes largely unchallenged.

Teacher unions have complained that the hiring policies at these schools is discriminatory. The schools and their supporters have responded that it is natural to want to have teachers who share the pupils’ faith. On TV this morning, I saw one religious journalist (didn’t catch her name) saying: “If you’re going to have faith schools, then they should teach the ethos of the faith and who best to do that than teachers who share that faith?” (the quote is from memory but is faithful to the meaning).

The argument over hiring practices is to do with the last part of that statement. The real issue lies in the first part.

Of the 21,000 schools in the UK, nearly a third – 6,850 – are faith schools. They are all government funded – that is, their money comes from our taxes. All but a small minority of these are Christian, either Roman Catholic or Church of England. Around 40 are Jewish and there are just a few for Sikhs, Muslims and Greek Orthodox.

Why do faith schools exist? It must be for the benefit of the parents, not the children.

A child’s mind is unformed, unfinished. The function of a school is to assist a child along the path of becoming a fully formed individual, and to do this through education, opening their minds to new ideas. As Richard Dawkins so memorably described in ‘The God Delusion’, a child is not a Christian or a Muslim or a Sikh. Those are complex belief systems with profound implications for one’s moral and philosophical outlook and adopting them requires – or, at least, should require – deep introspection and intellectual analysis. Children are not capable of this. Becoming a Christian, or whatever, is a process that should not take place, cannot honestly and convincingly take place, until adulthood.

Religious education is a process of shutting off other avenues of thought – rational avenues. If you want evidence of that, just look at a recent investigation by More4 News which found that creationism (a profoundly anti-educational mythology) is being taught by 14 out of 19 Jewish schools that responded, all 21 of evangelical schools following the Accelerated Christian Education syllabus, and half the Islamic schools contacted. Even five state schools confessed to teaching creationism. The investigation concluded that over 5,800 pupils were being taught this irrational and insupportable fairy tale – that they are, in other words, being taught lies.

But that’s the answer to our question. Faith schools exist to teach lies. They exist to indoctrinate the children into the ways of their parents. They exist to narrow children’s minds, not open them.

Some parents argue that they send their children to faith schools because the schools have good performance records. And this is true. But it is purely because the schools have callously exploited loopholes in the law that allow them to select only the brightest children – which would be illegal for state schools. (Presumably that leaves equally faithful, but less bright children to take their chances.)

Religion should be a private matter. If parents want their children to believe in the same myths they do, then that particular form of child abuse should be confined to the home. Ultimately, we can’t stop vulnerable children’s minds being twisted and narrowed in this way, but this abuse should not be supported by the state.

So solving the issue of discriminatory hiring practices is easy. Get rid of faith schools. There is no good reason to have them.

Richard Dawkins’ ‘The God Delusion’ is available from:
 Amazon.co.uk |  Amazon.com

The ACLU in the US is celebrating a decision in Fredericksburg that it says is a victory for freedom of religion. Well maybe. But it’s a defeat for freedom from religion.

The issue, as reported on the ACLU website, revolved around the saying of prayers to open Fredericksburg City Council meetings. The decision of a three-judge panel of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals was that an existing policy – that the prayers be non-sectarian – should be upheld.

The ACLU statement says:

“This is a victory for religious freedom,” said ACLU of Virginia Executive Director Kent Willis. “The Supreme Court has long held that government officials are allowed to open legislative gatherings with a prayer, but that such prayers must in no way indicate a preference for one religion over others.”

“Individuals are free to express their own religious preferences, but religious equality cannot exist when the government is allowed to use its considerable power to promote one particular faith,” added Willis. “Today’s ruling reaffirms that fundamental principle.”

But Willis makes no mention of any right to be free of such religious mumbo-jumbo altogether. While the prayers may not be offered to the peculiar gods of Christianity or Islam or Judaism (or any one of thousands of other gods available to the credulous), presumably they will assume the existence of some kind of supernatural deity. Quite how this obeisance to some non-specific spirit is connected with council business is not clear.

It seems that the ‘fundamental principle’ referred to by Willis does not extend to atheism. Nor does it embrace the separation of church and state, about which Americans make so much noise and so little effort.

A new academic study suggests that religion is declining as people become more intelligent. But is that too simplistic a view?

The study, by Professor Richard Lynn, emeritus professor of psychology at Ulster University, points to the low incidence of believers among academics and scientists. To those of us who value reason and science, the idea that religion and intelligence are incompatible has an attractive logic.

But we need to treat this with a degree of caution.

We all know, or know of, intelligent people who are also believers. So there is no simple causal link.

And why is religion declining only now when intelligent people have always existed (most of whom were believers)?

I think a fundamental problem with the equation ‘more intelligence = less religion’ is that it conflates intelligence with education. And it ignores a plethora of other factors.

Dr David Hardman, principal lecturer in learning development at London Metropolitan University, is quoted by The Telegraph saying: “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 institutions.”

Quite. If you are intelligent and well-educated, you enjoy a freedom of intellect that will allow you to overcome other powerful factors such as your cultural environment. Whether you can shrug off religious traditions may depend on how strong that environment is. I have no figures, but I’m prepared to bet that there is a higher proportion of believers among academics and scientists in strongly Muslim countries, or in Bible Belt-type communities in the US.

It’s easy – sometimes too easy – to use terms like ‘indoctrination’ when discussing these aspects of cultural environment. Indoctrination suggests the deliberate brainwashing, when the inculcation of religious ideas is often simply a matter of habit and tradition. The outcome, of course, is the same, except that the development of an enquiring and questioning mind is an invaluable aid in overcoming the religous habit.

Religious belief does not stand up well to intellectual scrutiny. Indeed, the majority of religious concepts, traditions and practices are clearly absurd. So one can see how natural intelligence will help in seeing these primitive and outdated ideas for what they are. But I think education plays an even more crucial role in developing greater intellectual rigour and to reject the intellectual brutality of religion’s  ‘don’t question, just accept’ attitude.

But this still doesn’t explain the current decline of religion. Dr Lynn’s suggestion that people are becoming more intelligent is unconvincing. I think there is another element at play here – that as a society there is less of a requirement for religion.

Dr Lynn’s ideas have been criticised for too crudely portraying religion as a certain primitiveness of thought (one could turn his suggestion around and say that you have to be stupid to be religious – again, a seductive thought, but not entirely sustainable). But in some senses, I think he’s right to at least allude to the crudity of religious concepts.

There are many ideas about why religion arises in the first place – why people invest so much in supernatural concepts. Among these ideas is the line of thought that says supernatural belief is a way of explaining a mysterious world. As science has progressed, we require fewer and fewer supernatural explanations.

Organised religion provides social cohesion. But now we have many social bonds from which we can choose – bingo, hobby clubs, football teams and the Internet.

Belief in supernatural powers and the community of the church also provides us with help in dealing with the terrors of sickness. Now we have modern medicine.

Religion simply doesn’t have the same role in our lives that it used to. Its ignorant, stone-age concepts can’t compete with modern knowledge and technology. Supernatural belief, as a mindset, is archaic and anachronistic. But because many societies still have the habit of religion built into the cultural fabric, it persists. That’s why separation of religion and state is so important. That’s why religion should have no place in schools, courtrooms or parliaments. Only when we excise the dirty habit of religion will we all be free – smart and stupid alike.

The UK Government has passed a law which means that fortune-tellers, mediums, spiritualists and other peddlers of the supernatural must label their services as ‘entertainment only’. I can think of a few other organisations that should do that.

In ‘Fighting fraud in the spiritual realm‘, I said how I felt this law should be extended to all religion. In essence, the new law – which has now come into force – puts a legal obligation on businesses to ‘trade fairly’ (as explained in this BBC report). This is a catch-all law designed to be used against scams of all kinds.

It will be illegal to make claims you can’t support or use dubious or fictional endorsements and testimonials.

No religion can support its claims, many of which are bizarre and outlandish (like heaven and hell, for starters. Faith healing comes to mind, too).

And religions are awash with fake and unsupportable testimony. That’s what miracles are.

And yet many religions get rich and powerful by feeding off the gullibility of their adherents. Religion is the greatest scam ever perpetrated against mankind.

This law really does need expanding.

The religious have long claimed Albert Einstein as one of their own. It’s always been a lie, and now there is further proof.

Einstein did have an unfortunate habit of using the word ‘god’. It has always been clear – not least from Einstein’s own writings – that his definition of ‘god’ was more in line with what the rest of us might call ‘nature’ or ‘the mysterious forces of the universe’ than the all-powerful imaginary friend of religion. Nevertheless, the religious have continued to claim that the famous physicist – a man who practically defines the concept of the rational thinker – was actually one of the mindless faithful.

One of the comments they cling to is:

“Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”

That blinkered (and dishonest) view has taken a major blow. A previously unknown letter written by Einstein in 1954 to philosopher Eric Gutkind, and which is now up for auction, includes the passages:

“The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this.”

And while Einstein was culturally Jewish (and had both Catholic and Jewish education), he clearly had little time for the idea of the Jews as god’s chosen people:

“For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything ‘chosen’ about them.”

As a boy, Einstein was given a religious upbringing by his largely non-religious parents. Throughout his life, he retained a respect for the cultural traditions provided by religion. But that is not the same as being religious. By the age of 12, he was questioning Biblical stories, and would later write about this awakening:

“The consequence was a positively fanatic [orgy of] freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is being deceived by the state through lies; it was a crushing impression.”

Einstein was clearly a spiritual person, in a generalised sense. He was moved and inspired by a sense of mystery. But to suggest that he believed in god, as most people understand that term, is now (and actually always has been) completely insupportable.