Humanism, atheism and other freedoms

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.”

A recent debate, hosted by the South West London Humanists, tackled what I believe to be a very loaded question: can humanists be spiritual?

Jeremy Rodell and Marilyn Mason led the arguments from the ‘yes’ and ‘no’ camps respectively (click on their names to see summaries of their points on the HumanistLife blog).

Why is this question so loaded? Because, I think, answering ‘no’ makes you vulnerable to judgment – usually silent, always unjust.

Spirituality is on the rise as organised religion declines. Many people reject the pomp, prejudice, prescriptions, proscriptions and silly stories that are the basis of most of the market-leading faiths. Yet they yearn for the fantastic in their lives, they want to touch the numinous and have some degree of mystery and wonder in their lives. And there’s no end of alternative wackiness they can be sold, from feng shui to crystal swinging.

But being ’spiritual’ doesn’t just mean being credulous. For some reason, the term has managed to attach to itself some measure of moral righteousness. To many – too many – being spiritual automatically earns approbation.

Marilyn Mason (with whose ‘no’ verdict I entirely agree) points out that spirituality, of course, implies spirit, and thus takes us into the realm of the supernatural. So what does being spiritual actually mean? As far as I can see, it means believing in things you can’t see, can’t prove, can’t predict, can’t use in any meaningful way and can’t possibly explain.

Yet, when I say to people that I am not spiritual, they regard me with either pity or suspicion. Not having a spiritual side is like not being able to see or hear. It’s almost impossible to explain to people who consider themselves spiritual that not sharing that characteristic is not a disability. In fact, I regard it as a form of freedom.

Not being spiritual is not the same as not being capable of emotion. There is much that moves me profoundly. The sight of the Earth seen from a distance – Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot. The marvel of replication by DNA and the staggering profusion of life it has produced via natural selection. In fact, science provides an endless seam of treasures capable of evoking deep contemplation and great emotion. You don’t need the fantasies of the supernatural realm to encounter the marvellous – it’s right there in front of you in the natural world.

While New Age spirituality may lie beyond the pale of organised religion, I think the term has carried over some of the prejudice it acquired within those faiths, especially Christianity.
There are some people for whom saying ‘I am not a Christian’ is synonymous with saying ‘I am immoral’. It is a form of arrogance, of course, but to them the only source of morality is faith. It is generally a fruitless exercise to point out to them the millions of good, moral people who must have existed on this planet before their particular brand of mythology came into being. Faith is about prejudice: the two words are themselves virtually synonymous.

So it is with ’spiritual’ people. To say that I am not spiritual is, to them, to say that I am unable to marvel or to empathise. They believe that I am missing something – perhaps even my humanity.

And they couldn’t be more wrong. By rejecting the supernatural, by insisting on remaining in this corporeal, temporal world, I am not putting my hopes in the unreal, I do not shift the responsibility for my actions to some ethereal force, I do not attribute the authority for my beliefs to some unimpeachable, unreachable entity. Instead, I find everything I want and need within humanity itself. Knowledge, wisdom, beauty and empathy are human attributes we should value and celebrate. Why look anywhere else?

Belief is justified and our faith must be true, religionists tell us, because of the beauty it inspires.

It’s an argument we hear often – that we have religion to thank for the treasures of da Vinci, Michaelangelo, Titian; the Masses, Passions and cantatas of Bach; and the monumental architecture of the Middle Ages.

It’s true that, in the 2,000 years or so since Jesus was said to preach his apocalyptic message, most art in the western world has been religious. But not all.

Pieter Breughel : peasant wedding

In painting, and even without venturing as near as the 20th Century, without even mentioning the Impressionists, there is much secular work to admire. As far back as the 16th Century, Brueghel the Elder painted ordinary people living ordinary lives. There was a strong humanist streak in the Dutch masters. And we honour Rembrandt especially for his portraits.

Most of Bach’s output was religious – he was, after all, employed specifically to churn out church music. Yet the Goldberg Variations were written to make a man more comfortable on sleepless nights.

Religion gave us towering cathedrals, but think of the great buildings of our age and see how many are churches. (The mega-churches of American evangelicals are, without exception, vulgar and tasteless expressions of ill-gotten wealth.)

Religion gave rise to great works because it was the church that held the wealth and the opportunity to patronise artists. Whatever else the church did, in terms of pastoral care, it certainly made sure it was itself comfortably well off. The church also wielded considerable influence over affairs of state and individuals’ lives.

So it was not religion that gave us these treasures – it was power.

In attempting to stem the tide of secularism, the faithful often resort to warning us about what we might lose. The implication is that there is some innate connection between the faith itself and what it has produced.

In the current issue of The Author, the journal of the Society of Authors, Michael Arditti writes a lament to modern literature’s lack of engagement in religious themes. He says:

Cranmer’s Prayer Book has played a greater part in framing our language than any other single source, including Shakespeare. Even the most diehard secularist would find himself hard-pressed to expunge religious idioms from his speech.

To which my answer would be, And your point is…?

That faith has resulted in great works of beauty, power and elegance is an accident of history. It does not mean that there is any intrinsic validity to faith. It does not mean that we cannot have works of equal majesty from other sources of inspiration.

You could argue that the stories of the Bible and the awe, wonderment and passion invoked by faith are what give rise to these creative masterpieces. But these sources of inspiration are easily replaced. The natural world at all levels of engagement – from simply gazing at a landscape to marvelling at the mysteries of quantum mechanics – have at least an equal power to move us.

At the same time, there is much to be said for artists engaging with their world on a more realistic level. Perhaps what Arditti doesn’t understand is that writers may have abandoned religious themes because they are irrelevant. Most writers want to explore the real world, not some arcane realm of fantasy (unless it’s to invent one themselves). It’s easy to be awe-struck by stories of miracles and supernatural phenomena. It takes more skill to find truth and beauty in our quotidian existence.

And so, by rejecting faith, we are not abandoning a source of beauty. We are seeking new and more meaningful sources.

Is god the product of our brains? A new documentary film seeks the answers.

Evolutionary studies have brought some bad news for certain types of evangelical Christian. According to new research, large broods lead to low-quality offspring, who then seek out low-quality mates.

Clearly, this is bad news for the Quiverfull movement. Adherents of this conservative, evangelical lifestyle promote large families as a way of populating the world with more Christians. Alas, it seems that what they may actually achieve is an increase in the world’s supply of idiots. Whether this is a good or bad thing for the continuation of the Christian faith will depend on your point of view.

The results of the research – which involved zebra finches – surprised the researchers, too. Scientists always believed that females of any species would always seek out the best possible males with which to mate. It turns out, however, that the female finches tended to mate with males of their own level. Low-quality females went for low-quality males – birds whose songs weren’t quite up to scratch or whose plumage was maybe a tad tatty.

Large broods have a tendency to result in larger numbers of low-quality females, because of the competition between siblings.

So where does this leave Quiverfull? Given that members of extremist cults tend towards intra-sect breeding, if not actual inbreeding, can one expect an inevitable decline in IQ levels among these Christian families?

As Eric Hoffer pointed out, hate is a major unifying factor in mass movements. And religions – even those that profess peace and love – are no exception.

In his book, The True Believer: thoughts on the nature of mass movements, Hoffer described how mass movements function through the suppression of individuality and independent thought. People who are unsatisfied with the present are brought together by an ideology that promises a better future. There are many mechanisms for bonding them into an effective whole: and one of those mechanisms is hate.

I was reminded of this when I read that a preacher in Arizona is praying – and encouraging his flock to pray – for the death of President Barack Obama. According to a report by Americans United:

The Rev. Steven Anderson of the Faithful Word Baptist Church told his Tempe, Ariz., congregation he prays that Obama “dies and goes to hell.” In an Aug. 16 sermon that recently came to public attention, Anderson said, “If you want to know how I’d like to see Obama die, I’d like him to die of natural causes. I don’t want him to be a martyr, we don’t need another holiday. I’d like to see him die, like Ted Kennedy, of brain cancer.”

The racism is overt. The hate is painfully evident. The exact political agenda may be inferred but is, perhaps deliberately, less clear.

Anderson’s hate speech has been widely condemned. But it’s wrong to see it as an aberration. We might more properly view it as the violent eruption of a force that powers many mass movements.

Hoffer’s definition of ‘mass movements’ is fairly broad. The book was published in 1951, and so the horrors of European fascism – particularly the Nazis – and Japanese imperialism were fresh in the memory. Stalin was still in power. He delves further back, too, making frequent references, for example, to the French revolution. And he places religions – especially those of an evangelical or fundamentalist flavour – firmly alongside these other totalitarian and oppressive regimes. “The hammer and sickle and the swastika,” he wrote, “are in a class with the cross.”

The reasons for joining a movement are many, but commonly involve a conviction that the world as it stands is unbearably flawed. People who feel this way are, to use Hoffer’s term, the ‘frustrated’. They have no hope for the present. By joining a mass movement, they are able to slough off their unworthy selves, rid themselves of feelings of inadequacy and self-loathing, and find a new self-worth in the ambitions of a movement that promises a brighter future.

What the movement tells them is that change is required and cannot be achieved by gradual means. It requires a coup, a revolution, a jihad, mass exterminations, mass conversions, the absorption of all others into the corporate body, or perhaps a Second Coming. The movements’ leaders promise a hopeful future, often to be achieved by violent means: Christ, after all, claimed that the Apocalypse was at hand. (As it turned out, he was wrong – it’s been ‘at hand’ for two millennia now).

For the movement to be effective, its members must be united into a single entity: individual thought and action are destructive. Hoffer says of a movement’s members:

By renouncing individual will, judgment and ambition, and dedicating all their powers to the service of an eternal cause, they are at last lifted off the endless treadmill which can never lead them to fulfillment.

Hoffer lists a number of unifying agents of which the most powerful is hatred. This, Hoffer says, “springs more from self-contempt than from a legitimate grievance … That others have a just grievance against us is a more potent reason for hating them than that we have a just grievance against them.”

This is all more subtle than it sounds. For a start, the self-contempt may be effectively disguised. A convert who rejoices in the glory of the faith – a faith that may (consciously, at least, if not truthfully) preach peace and love – may not stop to think of what is at the root of their abnegation, of their surrendering to the cause. Sin, Hoffer insists, is a key concept in all mass movements. Indeed, George Orwell pointed out that the imposition of rules so strict (and often vague) that one is bound to break some of them is a key characteristic of the totalitarian regime.

Identification with the movement is important if one is to enjoy its status and benefits – including self-approbation. Members sacrifice themselves to the cause and, says Hoffer, “The act of self-denial seems to confer on us the right to be harsh and merciless toward others … the surrendering and humbling of the self breed pride and arrogance”.

Once we give ourselves up to the corporate body, we are also freed of personal responsibility. And this is how a political movement or a church is able to generate, harness and focus hatred.

Any violence which does not spring from a firm, spiritual base, will be wavering and uncertain. It lacks the stability which can only rest in a fanatical outlook.
— Adolf Hitler

Hate may take many forms. It might be the Rev Anderson’s frothing outburst of cretinous bigotry. Or it might come wrapped in smiles and charity, but be driven nonetheless by a deep conviction that if you are not part of the movement you are in some way ‘wrong’ and must be changed, whether you like it or not.

The True Believer is available from:  Amazon.co.uk |  Amazon.com

The bizarre pseudo-religion Scientology faces being banned in France if its leaders – currently on trial – are found guilty of seizing victims’ fortunes by “exerting a psychological hold”.

Given that this is a perfect description of what Scientology is all about, it doesn’t look good for the wacky cult.

The ‘church’ itself is on trial alongside the six leaders (there was a seventh who died).

There are two cases going through the courts. In one, the plaintiff alleges that the cult preyed on her when she was in a fragile psychological condition, relieving her of a large sum of money for worthless products.

In the other case, a woman claims her boss fired her after she refused to participate in Church of Scientology courses.

Both cases demonstrate how the cult operates through a process of indoctrination and brainwashing. Two other complainants dropped out: no reasons were given, but the Church of Scientology is notorious for its harassment and intimidation of those who stand against it.

This isn’t the first time the wealthy and powerful organisation has been in trouble in France. But this time it might face a complete ban – another good reason to live in France.