Humanism, atheism and other freedoms

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.

There’s an excellent article – My Christmas message? There’s probably no God – by the reliably feisty Polly Toynbee over at the Guardian website. Aside from being a leading journalist, Ms Toynbee is the president of the inestimable British Humanist Association (BHA – of which I am a proud member).

The piece is largely about the disestablishment of the church in the UK – a fine ambition but one not likely to be realised any time soon. For those who live in more enlightened countries with regard to religion, one might need to explain that the ‘establishment’ of the Church of England refers to the fact that it is the official state faith. And this has greater implications than the choice of carols sung at the House of Commons Xmas party.

For example, although there has been some slight reform of Parliament’s upper house, the Lords, there are still 26 unelected bishops who sit – and vote – in the house purely by dint of their cassocks. And the very existence of an established church provides ammunition for those who would perpetuate the myth of Britain being a ‘Christian’ country.

And yet, though I (and, as it happens, many church leaders) would like to see disestablishment, the fact that the UK has a state religion bothers me less than the more surreptitious ways in which religion is creeping into government business.

Given that ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair was so cosy with soon to be ex-President George W Bush, one might not be surprised to find that – following the American model – faith-based organisations are playing an ever greater role in government programmes in the UK.

Such faith-based initiatives have been a disaster for the US. For instance, there are countless examples of evangelists with no training or experience running such things as drug counselling programmes. Usually, the hapless victims who attend them do so under duress – usually at the order of a court. And the so-called ‘counselling’ often consists of no more than religious indoctrination.

In the UK, both Blair and his successor, the equally god-bothering Gordon Brown, have seen to it that organisations with religious agenda have been given preferential treatment in winning contracts to carry on what should be government work. There are more details at the BHA site, which explains:

Faith communities already have privileged access to Government. But the Government also wants to involve them in policy making, and to expand their role in the provision of services in the community. And why doesn’t Human Rights Law apply when public services are contracted out to charities?

Depressingly, President-Elect Barack Obama has stated that he wants to increase the use of faith-based initiatives. And there is no sign that this trend is abating in the UK.

The BHA is highly active in campaigning against this. It has the respect of politicians and the more progressive and intelligent members of the clergy. And I would recommend that anyone who lives in or cares about the UK should become a member.

What the UK needs isn’t just disestablishment but a genuine separation of church and state – along the lines of that in France, rather than the somewhat poor impementation of the principle in the US. The state should and must represent all citizens. Faiths are, by their very nature, exclusionary and discriminatory and they have no place in government business.

Deciding what constitutes ‘discrimination’ isn’t always an easy matter.But an employment tribunal in London has just made a very wise decision.

Lillian Ladele was a registrar with Islington Council, in North London. One of her duties was conducting marriages – and, with recent changes to the law, this now extends to civil unions for gay and lesbian couples.

But there was a problem. Ladele is a Christian, and she decided that her beliefs did not allow her to carry out such unions. She refused to perform gay weddings. Islington Council fired her.

She took the council to an employment tribunal, which sided with her. They found that she had been discriminated against on religious grounds. But the case went to appeal, and the employment appeal tribunal rightly concluded that it was not the council but Ladele herself who was guilty of discrimination.

The duties of a registrar are defined by law. Ladele’s religious beliefs are her own, personal choice. If these prevent her from carrying out the duties of a registrar then, clearly, she is not competent to fulfill that role. When the law – and therefore the duties of a registrar – changed, Ladele should have asked herself whether she should continue in that role. It was a matter for her personal conscience. What she decided to do was to attempt to remain in her job and force her views on others by saying that she would not carry out that job properly. This was a selfish and unreasonable decision by her.

She claims that she never intended to deny the rights of gay people. But that was precisely what she was doing. They do, indeed, have a right to a civil union. She has no right to deprive them of this merely because of her personal beliefs. This is not a religious issue – religion has no place in such government business. This is a civil liberties issue and Ladele is clearly guilty of eroding the civil liberties in Islington.

The council is not guiltless in all this. The tribunal found that they had handled the situation badly. Nevertheless, the key issue has been successfully resolved: it is now clear that a government functionary does not have the right to discriminate against people purely of the basis of that functionary’s private and irrelevant beliefs. A victory for common sense.

Spirituality is religion’s last-ditch defence, the final redoute of superstition. Let me explain.

Currently in the UK, around one million people attend Anglican church services on Sundays. That’s about 2% of the population. A recent study by Christian Research, part of the Bible Society, has suggested that, by 2050, this will decline to around a tenth of that figure. The response of the church has been to say that people are celebrating their religion in different ways – at home, for example, or at car boot sales (seriously).

Even if one accepts that excuse, there’s another conculusion that flows from it – one the church authorities probably would not like to acknowledge. And it’s that the figures then clearly show a decline in organised religion, or in any kind of religion if one defines the latter as adherence to specific creeds, philosophies or dogma.

That isn’t news. Religion proper has lost its grip in all modern, advanced societies (with, perhaps, the freakish exception of the USA). Even Tony Blair, ex-Prime Minister of the UK, confessed that he had had to mask the degree of his religious belief for fear of being regarded “a nutter”.

While it is often said that around three-quarters of the UK population (precise figures vary) are ‘Christian’, we know this to be a cultural rather than spritiual phenomenon, much like non-believers being cultural Jews or cultural Muslims. This is the proportion of the population that ticks the box marked ‘Christian’ out of habit, or because of a lack of a viable alternative. Similarly, people continue to have children christened because it is one of those social events that you do. (There are many members of my extended family who were so baptised, or had their children baptised, even though there isn’t a believer among the lot of them. Luckily, that doesn’t include me.)

So, being religious is increasingly regarded as an aberration. But this decline in religion has left behind a residue.

It’s not uncommon for someone who does not adhere to any specific religious mythology to say that they are, nevertheless ‘spiritual’. What exactly does this mean?

Even those who know me, who understand that I am an atheist, a humanist, and rationalist, sometimes ask me how I nurture the spiritual side of my nature. They are surprised, sometimes offended, when I explain that I don’t have one.
Spirituality is the human flaw that leads to religion. It is a weakness. It is the metaphorical throwing up of hands and saying, “I don’t understand, therefore it must be mysterious”.

Not everything can be explained. The fantastic and ever-expanding body of knowledge that is science – mankind’s richest treasure – is and always will be partial. This is why people become scientists. They are explorers venturing into the unknown, expanding our understanding, shining light where there was darkness. And yet there will always be elements of our existence and the universe around us that will remain beyond our comprehension.

There are many reasons for this. The universe is a staggeringly complex place. No body of knowledge, however large, could possibly match this complexity. And mankind has evolved to fill a niche in this universe: our minds and our senses are designed to function within this niche. They are specialised for a tiny subset of the phenomena the universe has to offer. For example, unaided, we cannot see things that are minutely small. We cannot perceive the passage of time on a geological scale. There may be many natural processes that we are not equipped to notice, let alone explain. And there may be phenomena we will simply never encounter.

The challenge is, what do we do about this?

We already know one response: it is to say that whatever is beyond our comprehension must be the work of supernatural forces. This isn’t just feeble, it’s dishonest and arrogant.

It’s intellectually dishonest because, at the same time as saying that we don’t know, we are inventing an explanation. Ascribing phenomena to the gods is a process of saying that we do know, that it works like this. By resorting to spirituality, we are saying that we have an answer for everything – a profoundly arrogant act for a lowly mammal that has existed for so short a time.

At the same time, this approach abandons all the disciplines that underscore rational philosophies. So it’s feeble because we’re saying “this is too hard, let’s just make something up”. Explaining the universe through science and mathematics is hard. It requires intelligence, intellectual rigour and training. It demands hard work and a constant struggle to expand the concepts, laws and techniques that enable this understanding. Above all, it requires the honesty to say, “We don’t know. Maybe we’ll never know”.

We are mere mammals. There is no good reason to suppose that we could know everything. To think otherwise is an anthropocentric conceit.

Actually, some among the religious also admit these gaps in our knowledge. They say that such things are only for god to know. This sounds like humility but is, in fact, the opposite. What it’s saying is: “It’s not my fault I don’t know. Neither I nor my philosophy is at fault here: because this is something that cannot be known.” That’s like a Victorian proclaiming “heavier-than-air flight is impossible because I cannot do it”. It is hubris.

As we know, science, in the few hundred years in which it has been established, has rapidly and repeatedly chipped away at the ignorance of the faithful. It has provided explanation and understanding for much that was in the dark pool of ignorance from which religion draws. To surrender to god in this way is a response that looks less and less tenable every day.

Resorting to a spiritual explanation is to give up trying. It is as though people reach a limit to their comprehension and beyond it simply scrawl “here be dragons”. Scientists, on the other hand, reach that precipice and use it as a vantage point from which to gaze longingly into the void thinking “what sense can we make of this?”.

I can understand how this happens. Some people are afraid of the idea that there are things we cannot explain. Others prefer the trite mythologies of faith to the intellectual challenges of science – it’s an easier option. I guess some just like the stories.

This is why I say that spirituality is a weakness. It is, indeed, the basic mechanism upon which religions are built.

As organised religions lose their grip, some people still cling to more nebulous forms of spirituality – not because it contains any inherent truth or performs any valuable function, but simply because it is comforting in a complex, mysterious and threatening world. And so, as the more formalised faiths crumble, it is not surprising that their place may be taken by imported or home-grown mysticisms of various shades of woolliness and silliness.

Humankind has no destiny. We are the result of an incalculable sequence of accidents and random events. In the words of a cynical song from the World War One trenches (sung to the tune of Auld Lang Syne), “We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here”. But if one was to set us a goal, the achievement of which would be reasonable cause for pride, it would be the final eradication of the weakness that is spirituality and the summoning of the honesty to say that we can’t explain everything.

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.

The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, recently passed in the UK, was a triumph for reason, science and common sense. But not everyone has seen it that way: one religious group has tried to have the law overturned.

One of the advances permitted by the Bill is the use of cross-species research. Scientists believe this research – monitored and regulated by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) – may unlock the secrets of cures for such devastating diseases as cancers and HIV/AIDS. Two licences have been issued by the HFEA – to Newcastle University and King’s College London – allowing work on human hybrid embryos.

This research can only be of great benefit to mankind. It has the potential to release untold numbers of people from suffering and premature death. Yet one small section of society feels that its archaic and bizarre supernatural fantasies give it the right to deny this benefit to the whole of society. The scaremongering by certain factions – that this research would create ‘monsters’ – shows an ignorance of science that one might expect from people whose intellectual framework was formed 2,000 years ago and hasn’t evolved since.

The Christian Legal Centre (CLC) brought an action in the High Court in an attempt to have the law overturned. Fortunately, common sense prevailed. The judge threw out the case saying that it had no merit whatsover and was “unarguable”. More importantly, she underlined that this kind of research is clearly “the will of Parliament” (you know, the democratic body that represents everyone, not just minority cults). CLC was ordered to pay £20,000 costs.

I’m sure this won’t make these arrogant Christians change their minds about this research. Nor will it help them bring their thinking into the 21st Century. But it might just give them pause for thought the next time their try to impose their narrow beliefs on a society that doesn’t share them.

The freeing of Doctor Humayra Abedin is a sign of hope – that the medieval practices of some religions are at last losing their grip.

Dr Abedin was tricked into returning to her family’s home in Bangladesh. She was told that her mother was ill. The true reason for enticing her there was to force her into marriage. Her parents held her captive, even claiming that she was not mentally competent to make decisions for herself.

The doctor has lived in the UK since 2002, where she undertook medical studies. She is a trainee General Practitioner (GP).

The UK has a new law, the Forced Marriage Act, making the kind of arrangement her parents had in mind illegal in this country. Bangladesh had already outlawed forced marriages, and the lead judge in the case, Judge Syed Mahmud Hossain, went out of his way to make in clear that the parents’ actions were “not acceptable” – a strong statement in that culture.

So, thankfully, Dr Abedin is heading back to the UK, and we wish her well. What she went through must have been a nightmare: for an intelligent, highly trained woman in her thirties, living in a modern society, to be suddenly propelled back into the medieval mindset that can contemplate such barbarism as forced marriage, must have seemed like the world being turned upside down.

Her parents, motivated by religious fervour, were prepared not only to break the law, but to lie to and imprison their own daughter. So much for religion as the root of morality.

Of course, this is the moment when the religious trot out their well-rehearsed speeches. “My religion wouldn’t have caused this. My religion is better than that.”

But as faith involves the abnegation of reason, religious belief inevitably creates the potential for illegal or unacceptable behaviour, especially when it demands allegiance in prefence to temporal laws or the commonsense rules of society.

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 number of organisations have come together to create Accord – a campaigning coalition dedicated to making school a place of learning and discovery, not an excuse for religious indoctrination.

As I outlined in ‘Faith schools: the wrong issue‘, there really should be no place for religious practices in education. Yet, under current government plans, the schoolroom is set to become a place of ever greater faith-based discrimination.

Accord has been established to counter this. According to the press release from the British Humanist Association (BHA), one of its key members, it will campaign for:

• non-discriminatory admissions and employment policies in all state-funded schools
• an objective, fair and balanced syllabus for education about religious and non-religious beliefs to be pursued in all state-funded schools
• all state-funded schools to be made accountable under a single inspection regime for RE, Personal, Social and Health Education and Citizenship
• the provision of inclusive and inspiring assemblies in the place of compulsory acts of worship in all state funded schools

The current members of the coalition are: The Association of Teachers and Lecturers, The British Humanist Association, Ekklesia, Hindu Academy, The Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement, The Socialist Education Association, and Women Against Fundamentalism.

You can find full information about the group here: http://www.accordcoalition.org.uk/