Humanism, atheism and other freedoms

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

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?

All in the Mind: a farewell to God

Ludovic Kennedy, who died today aged 89, was a great freethinker who championed civil liberties and campaigned against the harmful influence of religion.

His book, All In The Mind: A Farewell To God, published in 1999, detailed the harm he believed Christianity had done to society. The book was developed from his Voltaire Lecture, given in 1984 for the British Humanist Association – an organisation for which he was a staunch advocate.

‘Ludo’ was also was also frequently in the front line in fighting against miscarriages of justice, and believed that the adversarial approach used by the UK and US legal systems inevitably leads to corruption and errors.

He was a skilled journalist and TV presenter, and outstanding writer and, above all, an outstanding humanist. He will be missed.

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.

Not long after the laws of England & Wales were finally cleansed of the archaic offense of blasphemy, there are forces in Ireland that want to actually introduce such a law there.

While most of us have made it into the 21st Century, there are people who would prefer to drag us back into the Middle Ages.

Dermot Ahern, Minister for Justice, is one of the main agitators for a clause in the Defamation Bill, currently before the Irish Parliament, that would make blasphemy illegal.

With fines of up to €100,000, the law would punish “A person who publishes or utters blasphemous matter” which is defined as “grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby causing outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of that religion; and he or she intends, by the publication of the matter concerned, to cause such outrage”.

One might assume that the clause is intended primarily to protect the Roman Catholic faith, and that the “any religion” definition is there to make it appear more reasonable.

But let’s say I invent a new religion (and why not? All religions are invented) – perhaps a faith that sanctifies the abuse of little children (no, wait, the Catholics have done that one), or maybe a religion that claims the moon is made of cheese and that the Queen is a shape-shifting alien. Presumably I could use that law in Ireland to prevent anyone taking the piss. After all, as the only follower of the faith, I would easily represent “a substantial number of the adherents”.

I present this reductio ad absurdum scenario to make a point. Even a casual examination of most faiths reveals them to be full of bizarre, outlandish, indefensible and often dangerous claims. Religions are used all too frequently to repress and oppress, to close minds and hold back progress. Far from being protected, they must be open to criticism.

I find many of religion’s ideas and precepts outrageous and offensive: there are, for example, people who genuinely believe they regularly eat the flesh and drink the blood of a man who’s been dead for 2,000 years, and that those of us who fail to engage in this necrophiliac cannibalism must suffer eternal torture. Any law that restricts my ability to say that such beliefs are idiotic piffle is an unwarranted attack on free speech.

Ireland has made great strides in the past few years in loosening the manacles of the Catholic church. It would be a shame to see the country slide back into superstitious intolerance.

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.