freeinfidel

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/

There always was something slightly messianic about Tony Blair. Now he is calling for a greater role for faith in world affairs - as if religion were the solution rather than the problem.

According to The Guardian, Blair will be delivering a lecture at Westminster Abbey where he will say that “failure to engage with religious groups will drive believers to apathy or fundamentalism” (the Guardian’s words). Apparently, Blair believes that people are moving either towards religious extremism or a feeling that religion is a “spent force”.

That actually conforms with polls in the UK - religion is declining overall but evangelism and fundamentalism are increasing. But note the implication that both ends of the spectrum are a bad thing. And notice that there is no mention of atheism - just apathy. This is clearly a way of denigrating atheism without having the courage to do it directly. Blair is a slick spinmeister. He knows that atheists form a large section of British society. He can’t call them a problem outright. He has to resort to innuendo.

It is a common tactic for movers and shakers in the religious world to sideline secularism whenever there are debates about bringing world peace or social benefits. There is much talk about ecumenical approaches and multi-faith initiatives, but never the slightest consideration that taking faith out of the picture altogether might actually remove barriers to progress - that spending any energy and resources on considering the role of faith might be a wasteful irrelevance. Get rid of faith and you can get on with the job. But too many people in positions of power seem to think that the only solution to the world’s problems lies in medieval witchcraft.

This faith in faith says a lot about Blair. His crusading zeal in the role of Bush’s lapdog can best be explained, perhaps, by a common interest in supernatural phenomena. There seems no other reason why a pseudo-socialist prime minister would cosy up so snugly to a crypto-fascist president.

In an interview, Blair recently said that he largely kept his religion out of the public spotlight because “frankly, people do think you’re a nutter”. That’s an illuminating comment. It shows the massive gulf between the status of religion in the UK and the US. Indeed, in the UK, religious fervour is the perceived domain of the unhinged. In the US, it’s a requirement for the job of president.

But US-style religious extremism is creeping into the UK. Blair oversaw the rise of faith-based initiatives in areas where religion has no business - doing the work once done by government departments. Faith schools have become stronger. Even the anti-intellectual disease of creationism is on the rise. This may be Blair’s true legacy.

After leaving office, Blair converted to Roman Catholicism and is leading the Faith Foundation for young people (as the figurehead of New Labour, his experience of spin and indoctrination will come in handy here).

In case Blair hasn’t noticed, though, maybe we should point out that faith already plays a major role in world affairs. Ask anyone in Iran. Or Iraq. Or who lost loved-ones on 9/11. Perhaps what Blair, acting now as the acceptable face of the Inquisition, is trying to tell us is that people need the right religion. But we’ve been there before, haven’t we?

A measure of mankind’s progress is not simply how long we’ve been on this planet, but how far we have come intellectually in that time. The advance of science offers us one scale by which to judge ourselves.

Most smart people have already given up on the BC and AD calendar designations. Before Common Era (BCE) and Common Era (CE) are considered less religiously chauvinist. However, as useful as they are for simple dates, they give no idea of the quality of a culture or society - of its progress towards reason or its grasp of knowledge.

The advent of true science, however, is a valuable watershed for determining when a culture emerged from the darkness of superstition, when it fully embraced the intellectual potential of our species. Dating a culture by reference to the number of years before and after its adoption of scientific rigour allows us to have an intuitive grasp of its maturity.

After all, think about how we often express our feelings about a particular time and place. “Oh, back then people still believed in [insert irrational nonsense of your choice]” or “yeah, but they thought [some risible superstition here]”.

This is not one scale applicable equally everywhere. The point where one era switches to the other varies not just from place to place, but from group to group within a society. After all, some people still believe in silly ideas like sin, heaven and talking snakes. In fact, there will be no clear change - in many places the two scales will run side by side, with the pre-science part diminishing as scientific thought gains ground.

Nevertheless, all that is truly valuable to us in terms of knowledge can be found on the plus side of the graph marked After Science, or AS (as a mnemonic, think “AS it really is”). Everything else, of course, is BS.

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.