freeinfidel

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.

In the intemperate controversy surrounding the Archbishop of Canterbury’s unwise remarks about Sharia, there are several voices - and not just muslims - pleading for a more liberal view of Islamic law. And they nearly all miss the more important point: why should religion play any part in shaping a nation’s laws?

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The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has once again proven how distant he is from reality by suggesting that UK law might incorporate some elements of Sharia. His statements have been widely condemned, but they are not entirely surprising. It is another example of how those infected with religion consider that faith always takes precedence over society in general.

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The UK’s blasphemy laws are an embarrassing anachronism. It’s time to get rid of them and an amendment to a bill going through Parliament might just achieve that.

If you’re a British voter, go to this site maintained by the British Humanist Association to find out how to contact your MP and make your views known. Time is short, so act now!

The ordeal of British schoolteacher Gillian Gibbons, who was jailed for blasphemy in Sudan, ended quickly. We can be grateful for that. But the religiously oriented regime in which she was convicted remains unchanged. Who will be its next victim?

It was an act of pure malice. The school secretary, who had been fired, reported Gibbons as a way of getting revenge on the school. Such grudges, such petty behaviour, are a fact of life everywhere. What is significant here is that Sudan’s laws, shaped and enforced by religious observance, provided a mechanism by which an otherwise trivial act - the naming of a teddy bear - could be exploited to extract a savage retaliation.

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The police state creeps up on us, step by stealthy step. Every law, every restriction, is invoked for our safety and convenience. But a totalitarian state feeds on laws, twisting them to its own ends.

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The hopeless dreams of anarchists aside, it seems a given that societies need rules. To live communally, and to mutually benefit from that proximity, we have to know what is and is not permissible. It’s not an easy decision, that’s why society sustains, in grand style, an entire section of its population that it otherwise despises — lawyers!

Some of the rules we call law. Others are encoded at a deeper level. These we call morals. A common accusation levelled at atheists by the religious is that atheism offers no basis for morality. Clearly, this is nonsense. Atheism is a broad term that embraces many philosophies, providing a rich foundation on which to build a good, worthwhile and moral life.

At the same time, it would be worth asking where religions obtain their oft-claimed moral superiority. Did they invent the concept of being ‘good’, or did they simply usurp concepts already in common currency?

There must have been rules in operation among the members of social groups long before there were written languages to record them. As we’ve said, groups cannot function without them. But whenever a new religion appears — Judaism, for example, or Christianity — what we hear is how everyone who does not conform to that religion is somehow evil and condemned to be ostracised, at best, or even to suffer for all eternity.

Each religion claims its superiority based on its written rules and the proclamations or sayings of its prophets. None of these religions makes any effort to prove that these ideas were in any way original. That has to be taken for granted, part of blind faith, because otherwise the faithful would have to acknowledge that others — the heathens and infidels — might actually be, in some way, right.

So let’s have a quick look at the most famous set of rules — the Ten Commandments. How many times are we told that these form a solid foundation for morality and even law? Remember the battle to have them displayed in a US courthouse? Are they really that good?

Let’s leave aside the fact that these 10 rules were not intended for everyone, but only the Jews. If we want to employ them in some general fashion, it’s actually just six commandments. The reason is that four of them are specific to protecting and honouring god and the faith. As a foundation for society and its laws, they have no relevance at all.

The six remaining commandments tell us not to kill, steal, commit adultery, make false accusations or desire what other people have, and to honour our parents.

Pretty basic, aren’t they? I mean, did we really need burning bushes, scary voices and all that drama on a mountainside to come up with this lot? I can’t help feeling that most civilisations would have had those six rules on their statute books for centuries, even millennia, before Moses came by.

In fact, to create a functioning society you’re going to need a lot more than that (cue the lawyers). In his book, God: a Guide for the Perplexed, theologian Keith Ward claims that these six rules “are fairly good ground rules for any healthy society”, but even he goes on to admit that:

…if you take them literally they are rather minimal. You can keep all of them simply by sitting still and minding your own business. More to the point, you can keep all of them in a society which is hugely unequal, which has slavery, violence and harshly punitive laws.

Ward expands on this to point out that the morality of a religion is based not just on easily quoted lists of rules, like the Ten Commandments, but on the totality of the teaching and guidance provided by, say, the Torah or the New Testament.

Alas, that makes a religion’s position on any given subject vulnerable to interpretation — just look at the varieties of opinion within the Christian church on homosexuality, abortion, birth control et al. Even more recent faiths, such as Islam, contain wildly opposing views based on different interpretations of the scriptures.

So any given belief — Roman Catholicism, say — constructs its rules (and therefore its decisions on who and what are ‘good’ and ‘bad’) based on interpretations of the texts it considers worthy and the ideas it considers authoritative and trustworthy.

Atheists do exactly the same. Only we benefit from a much wider choice of sources. We don’t have to stick to a narrow selection of texts. Nor are we dictated to by popes or rabbis and their own, perhaps rather blinkered, reading of the texts. We can pick the good bits from Judaism and Christianity (and ignore the bad bits, like instructions to murder adulterers). We can also adopt the best of Buddhism and the massive array of secular philosophies. We suffer none of the limitations believers face when it comes to being moral people. We are truly free to be good.