Tackling superstition

Apologies it’s been so long, but I’m crazy busy working every day and don’t  have a lot of time. I spend a lot of my space on this blog bashing religion, but I should specify that I don’t think religion is the main problem. Religion is in turn fed by irrationality and superstition, I think weeding out this root cause could solve a lot of the problems we have today.

I spend a lot of time talking with the people at my new job, not least because a large proportion of them speak Spanish and I like to practice. One of my colleagues provided an example of such irrationality at work. She said that she took her flatmate to the bank machine to take out rent money, and after he withdrew the money, he folded the notes over, and a number handwritten on the outside note was the exact same number as the amount of money he’d withdrawn. “How do you explain that?” she said smugly.

My response was to ask her how many times she’d taken money out, folded it up and there was a different number written on the outside note, or how many times there hadn’t been any number written on the note. A statistically unlikely event will still happen if you repeat the situation an excessive number of times, and that doesn’t make it a coincidence, much less a supernatural event.

Dawkins goes through a similar idea in one or other of his books, which I’ll paraphrase here. A TV psychic looks into the camera and tells the audience to look at their watches and clocks, proudly declaring that someone’s will stop right at that second, and that they should call in. 5 minutes later, a few people are calling in, amazed that he was correct. I mean, what are the odds that my watch would just happen to stop right when he told me it would, that’s amazing!

Except that it’s not. If millions of people are watching and they’re each looking at several timepieces, the odds of one of them stopping aren’t all that huge. Next we have people saying “my watch didn’t stop just then, but I was speaking to my aunt in Canada and hers did stop just then, she’s across on the other side of the world and wasn’t even watching, that’s amazing!” Except it’s not. If we’re now including not only the millions of people who are watching but all their friends and relatives that aren’t, then the Population of Events That Would Have Appeared Coincidental (PETWHAC) just grew significantly, but conversely it seems more amazing that a watch belonging to someone who wasn’t even watching had stopped.

So, how do we tackle such basic superstition? Fortunately I think the education system can do a lot of the work for us.

I suggest we start with a basic education in statistics and probability. I’m not hot at all on statistics but I have the basics and it helps a lot. There’s a lot of logic that goes along with it too which often isn’t emphasised. For example, just because there are two possibilities, doesn’t mean that they are equally likely. Most mathematical problems used to teach probability involve 10 different coloured balls in a bag pulled at random, but this is only useful for illustrating equally likely outcomes. There isn’t, as some apologists seem to think, a 50/50 chance that God exists, just because he either does or he doesn’t. A building either stays up or falls down, that does not mean that there’s a 50/50 chance that it’ll fall down at any given moment.

A knowledge of the scientific method would also go down well. My friend wouldn’t have made her silly mistake if she’d known about recall and confirmation bias (she only remembered the time there was a number, and not the hundreds of times there wasn’t), both of which need to be accounted for when we’re practicing science. Put Philosophy of Science on the school science syllabus! This will also make sure everyone knows why clinically controlled trials are essential in proving the efficacy of a treatment, why randomization, blinding and placebo controls are important, and hopefully get rid of people’s faith in unproven alternative medicines. Win/win.

Last but not least, we need to foster an environment of critical thinking. I took a Critical Thinking class at school. It was terrible. We got a history teacher who barely knew the first thing about the subject for a single session a week for 40 minutes, and all he did was teach us what a non-sequitor was (which I could’ve figured out from my Latin class) every week, and we’d mess around for the rest of it. If that was taught properly, that would’ve been the most valuble class I could have taken. But then I suppose Catholic schools aren’t too keen on having rational critically thinking students, are they? Fortunately I’m happy to hear that Critical Thinking will be going on the GCSE syllabus.

As a final thought, remember that dwindling church attendance numbers are not in themselves good news, since lots of these people are losing faith in organised religion simply to go into New Age bollocks or become superstitious and just believe in ’something’. We need to tackle the root cause, not just one of it’s branching weeds.

Fraternising with the enemy

The latest edition of Humanitie is out. This is my contribution, which as always should be read alongside Tim’s contribution from The Friendly Humanist.

I was invited by a friend of mine in the Christian Union (yes, I do have friends) to an Alpha Course group. For the first few weeks we followed the structure of the course guide, but we increasingly noticed that Nicky Gumbel, the incredibly well-spoken man behind the course, assumes he’s managed to turn everyone into a Christian after week three. Unsurprisingly, he’ll have to try again with me. So we did away with the course guides and instead we’d just have a discussion about some aspect of Christianity like the power of prayer, final judgement or the unlikelihood of life or something. Then after a few weeks of that we watched some short films as a stimulus and have a discussion afterwards, and we kind of fizzled out from there. All in all we met for about 10 weeks.

There were several points when I realised some differences between many theists and many atheists. For me and most other people, the reason for debate and discussion is a healthy respect for the truth. But that didn’t always seem to be the case there. Sometimes it seemed that the only reason they were engaging in the discussion was in the hope that I’d change my mind, with no possibility that they might too. Often I would make a point that they couldn’t answer (like for example that you could never justify eternal punishment), but instead of taking it on board, they just changed tack and used another argument to try and convince me. I didn’t expect that from relatively liberal Christians at university (although I’m still shocked that several members of the CU don’t believe in evolution).

So is it worth doing? Definitely! Interactions of this type between humanists and faith groups mean that next time someone at church refers to the demon atheist wallowing in sin and obstinate hatred of the innocent baby Jesus, the believer knows at least one example where that isn’t true, and similarly we don’t fall into the lazy trap of generalising religionists as idiots (we should only call them idiots if they ARE idiots). Humanists should constantly be challenging their own positions, and discussion with a group of people who don’t share those positions is the perfect opportunity to do so! I found that I came out of such encounters more sceptical of religious belief than when I went in, with my arguments and opinions honed (and my patience more durable). I have an appreciation for evidence that I didn’t have before. But most importantly of all, these interactions with faith groups mean that now, everyone at the Chaplaincy includes non-believers in their thoughts and actions from the offset. They no longer speak of ‘faith groups’ but of ‘beliefs and traditions’ or ‘backgrounds’. The humanists at the university have become part of a wider community based at the Chaplaincy. Of course many might see that as an excellent reason not to interact, but I think those people are missing out.

Sunday and the Sabbath

Here’s another ridiculous story about religious people putting their rights and beliefs before everyone else’s. An Orthodox Jewish couple are claiming that a light which turns on automatically when you walk past means that they can’t leave their holiday flat on the Sabbath, which, they claim, constitutes a violation of their human rights. As much as I think this case could have been solved with a short conversation and a little compromise, I’m fed up of people using human rights legislation to help them get over mild inconveniences. The Human Rights Act 1998 has to be the most abused piece of legislation in British history.

I’m fed up of the world giving unwarranted prestige and respect to beliefs that don’t deserve it, just because people call them religious. Here we have people who “can’t” walk out of the door because doing so will make a light turn on, and that would constitute work, even though they have done nothing more than they would be doing within their flat on the other side of the door. But they can open the door to go out of the flat, that’s not work, even though they’re moving an object. How can we take this belief seriously? Why do we treat this belief with anything but the ridicule it deserves? Yes, there are people who hold them, I’m not suggesting we should ridicule the people, but when it comes to a choice between a legitimate view with a practical aim (saving energy) and a looney fringe belief that’s based on a text that’s thousands of years old, there’s only one way the decision should go. Of course as we’ve seen with the Simon Singh case, courts don’t care about establishing the truth or a reasonable outcome, they only care about making a case and fitting it around the law. Nevertheless I hope a judge along the way throws this case right out the window.

A friend of mine was recently in Tel Aviv, and he was telling me about all the devices they have to get around not working on the Sabbath. Most electrical devices will be used with timers so that although the work is still getting done, it was initiated the day before, so that’s ok. Elevators would either have a gentile pushing the buttons on the Sabbath, or they would simply go up and down and call at every floor on the way. I think it’s pretty obvious that both the timers and this elevator system actually mean more energy is being used, more work is being done. There are also lots of rules which allow Jews to do certain things on the Sabbath, essentially just made up by rabbi’s using really tenuous interpretations of the Talmud. Here’s a list of things you can’t do even within an eruv (a community area set up purely to get around the rule that says you can’t carry things across a property line), just to demonstrate the kind of thinking that goes towards these kinds of beliefs.

Though a valid eruv enables people to carry or move most items outdoors on Shabbat (in the absence of other restrictions), a variety of other prohibitions still apply. These prohibitions, by Rabbinic decree, include:

• since writing and lighting fires are prohibited on Shabbat, writing utensils and matches cannot be carried (muktza).
• similarly, opening an umbrella is considered by some to be analogous to erecting a tent, a kind of building activity ^[4], within one of the activities prohibited on Shabbat (namely: building). Since umbrellas cannot be opened, they are considered muktzah and cannot be carried.
• to protect the sanctity of Shabbat, one cannot perform typical weekday activities (uvdin d’chol).
• to protect the sanctity of Shabbat, one cannot carry or move items in preparation for a post-Shabbat activity (hakhana).
• playing ball or other similar sports, considered a weekday activity, is prohibited within a community eruv. Many authorities prohibit ball-playing on Shabbat even indoors.

So I struggle to see why we give these beliefs credibility when they don’t even take them seriously themselves. They undermine the rules every time they make use of one these rules to get around it, or they use a timer. They’re clearly just abusing the wording of the rule rather than following it’s spirit.

But this isn’t limited to just the Orthodox Jewish people, oh no. I’ve got a few friends who live up inthe Hebrides, and they’ve got religious fuddy duddies telling them what they can and can’t do. The whole place shuts down on a Sunday, they can’t do anything, they can’t even hang their washing out on the line in case they get the scorn of the community. You hear stories from old people about how in the old days the shops would all be closed on a Sunday and the pubs would have to take a break for a few hours in the middle of the day and close early, and you’d think ‘wow, things were so daft back then, how outdated and antwacky can you get?’ They still have that there! They still live under that regime of nonsense!

I’ve brought this subject up with a few Christian friends of mine and most of them have agreed with me. But one of them in particular came back with the sarcastic retort “yeah, because it’s great to work all the time and have no day of rest”. I hope this argument doesn’t hold any sway with you because it’s a huge straw man. Noone is arguing in favour of working 24/7, but why should everyone take the same day off, and why on a Sunday? Enforcing a rule like that just restricts choice, noone can work and noone can do anything, even if they don’t want to rest. Religious groups will often make it seems like the rest of the world is persecuting them, even humanists do it sometimes. But in reality it’s usually just that they’re losing a privilege and a prominent position that they’ve enjoyed without good reason for a long time. Hopefully that’ll continue on into places like Lewis and Harris, and this ridiculous case will be thrown out.

Simon Singh fights on

Just in case you’ve had your head buried in a book or something and didn’t hear, Simon Singh has decided to appeal Judge Eady’s decision, and is prepared to take it to the European Court of Human Rights if necessary. There’s a giant campaign over on Sense About Science (a website I urge you to take a look around) with a petition that already has over 7,000 signatories, and as before, there’s the Facebook group, now with over 6,000 members. Take a look at the officer’s list there. If I could meet half of those people I’d be a happy man.

There’s also a lot of blog coverage so keep your scrolling fingers peeled.

The Abortion Issue

No doubt you’ll all have heard about the killing of George Tiller, a Kansas abortion doctor, by an anti-abortion nutcase who’d targetted his clinic several times. The death was entirely preventable, it seems, and left right and centre, anti-abortion movements have been trying to distance themselves from the killer, even though it seems Operation Rescue had a significant part to play, albeit unwittingly.

So I’ve been thinking about abortion a little more since it happened, and reconsidering my position on the subject. I do this regularly on various issues, I see it as an important part of an evolving humanist ethic. For a long time I’ve said that although given the choice, I hope I wouldn’t choose an abortion, I recognise that I’ll never be in that position, and I could only hope that such a decision would be made jointly between my partner and I.

Liberals of all kinds seem to the come to a similar (pro-choice) conclusion from very different directions. Many feminists, for example, argue that abortion should be legal and protected because a woman has a right to choose, and noone else should be involved in that decision, but I disagree, that begs the question completely by asserting that women have a right to choose in an argument for giving women the right to choose. Not only that but I’m not so sure that women have an inalienable right to choose, I can choose to go and kill a guy on the street but I wouldn’t expect the state to respect such a decision. The answer to whether women have that right lies in the science of where life begins, when an embryo stops being part of a woman and when it has a life of its own.

Richard Dawkins also approaches the argument by saying (amongst other things) that God is the greatest abortionist because so many pregnancies are terminated naturally before the mother even knows about it. I know he’s specifically targetting a religious argument, but again I reject it, it would be like me saying “plenty of people die of AIDS so it’s ok to infect lots of people with AIDS.” Again, a better argument needs constructing.

Here’s a little thought experiment which does it for me. Say I woke up one morning and a guy was attached via a load of tubes to my blood supply. In effect I was acting as a life support machine for him, he was using my kidneys, my liver etc etc. Would I not be perfectly within my rights to cut the tubes and let him die? I think so. The same is true during a pregnancy. Whilst the embryo is fully dependent on the mother, the mother should be able to withdraw such support.

There are a couple of complications with this view. First of all, there is the issue that the mother has done something to incur the pregnancy (had sex). If I’d signed a contract with this guy I wouldn’t be within my rights to cut the tubes, I’d have made a prior commitment that I’d be morally obliged to maintain. But the mother hasn’t agreed to a pregnancy. She’s had sex, which only sometimes leads to pregnancy, particularly if they’ve used contraception and there’s been a complication. This is difficult to put into my thought experiment but obviously I don’t endorse the use of abortions as a form of contraception, and I’m sure noone in their right mind would either. If a couple decided to have a baby, and then decided to have an abortion, then I would consider that inappropriate, but it’s difficult to police that issue.

Sec0ndly, what about late term abortions, which is what Tiller specialised in, where the baby can survive outside the womb? I’m not too hot on the science at this point, but if there’s a way they can end the pregnancy and have both the mother and baby survive the process, obviously I would be in favour of it. As far as I know late term abortions are only carried out when the life of the mother is in danger. It’s dangerous to start prioritising lives and I’m not in the habit of doing it, but in those circumstances I think it is necessary to put the life of the mother ahead of that of the baby.

Postmodern parading

Postmodern in the sense that it’s annoying for the sake of being annoying. Like Joyce’s Ulysses .

I can only apologise that I’ve not been blogging for a while (this one’ll only be short) but I’ve got a new job as a bilingual ticket seller for a company that runs walking tours on the Royal Mile and I’m working all the hours Chronos sends, which involves getting sunburnt a lot in this amazing weather. But I digress.

Today shortly before one of the tours, there was a gigantic parade by the Orange Lodge. I’ve since found out that it was to celebrate the foundation of the Ladies Orange Order or something. Really relevant to the general population, you know. Well worth the massive disruption.

So hopefully you all know what the Orange Order is. If not, well, they’re basically the IRA for Protestants, but with less bombs and things, although I’m sure if Northern Ireland ever did cross over to Republican control they’d be just as eager to use violence as the IRA are. Or were, I’m not sure how the Peace Process is getting along at the moment. Their members will probably tell you that’s not true, that they’re just a political group for Loyalists and they do a lot of charity work, but that’s irrelevant, they’re pretty explicitly sectarian, in that you can’t join if you’re a Catholic, regardless of where you stand on the question of Unionism vs Republicanism. Certainly they exacerbate the situation much more than they help it. They live in the past, going on about William of Orange and the Battle of the Boyne and a load of bollocks like that – that was hundreds of years ago btw – and noone gives a flying fuck if they exist or not. The parade today was clearly just their way of saying “Hey, we’re still here!”

Now I’ve done a few parades and I know more or less what makes a good one. This was not a good one. It took about half an hour to pass us, so it was far too big. A significant number of those on the parade were noticeably drunk, most weren’t marching in line, or even in time in many cases, and the bands were all playing different tunes, but weren’t far enough away from each other, so you could hear two rival tunes and beats at the same time and it was enough for a headache. A lot of them were clearly just thugs in uniforms, strutting along to their own beat like hardmen with missing teeth and skinheads (although this one lad, to his credit, was amazing with his big baton thing, launching it up in the air and spinning it around his head). The professional class were at the head of each lodge wearing orange vests with badges and medals attached to them which don’t really mean anything, and it was followed by the usual group of drunk Rangers fans singing sectarian football songs and throwing their cans of Tennents Super around, as well as a couple of paddywagons. Lots of police officers were on duty alongside the parade. A giant waste of time and resources.

You may think from this post that I just hate Protestants, but that’s not true, in most senses I hate Catholicism much more than Protestantism, it’s just that the Orange Order do parades much more often than any Catholic group does. Sectarianism is a load of bullshit and the sooner we do away with groups like this, the better.

Weddings

This weekend my cousin got married, so I went back home for just a couple of days for the ceremony and reception. I’d never been to a wedding before but it was brilliant! They hired out this beautiful hotel in Cheshire for the reception, not far at all from my house, whilst the ceremony itself was in their local parish church (CofE).

As I say I’d never been to a wedding before and quite a few times during the ceremony my right eyebrow was raised about as high as it would go. Time and time again the vicar would say something like “God brought this couple together and he will nurture their love”, or there’d be a reference to the Song of Solomon, or even Ephesians (just the nice parts though, they missed out all the bits about man being the head of his wife). Fortunately there was no mention of “love, honour and obey” in the vows but still they were done explicitly in the presence of God and there was a big elaborate blessing of the rings and lots of prayers offered up for the newlyweds, and they even went and knelt at the altar for a long time whilst a hymn was sung. I happen to know my cousin doesn’t really care much for religion, she’s not against it but AFAIK she doesn’t go to church and it’s not a big deal for her. I was really shocked that so much should be attributed to God on the one day that you’d hope everything would be about the couple involved and their dedication to each other. And this is in a CofE church, I shudder to think what a Catholic one must be like!

So I look forward to having a humanist wedding. There are a few complications though.

1) Having a nonreligious wedding in the first place. As I’m sure I’ve blogged before, my family is quite a big Catholic one. It broke my grandmother’s heart when my eldest uncle married out, and I think my mum would feel similarly.

2) Names. I’m not exactly the kind of person who does things for tradition’s sake, and I don’t really have any particular attachment to my surname, it’s only shared by my immediate family since my dad doesn’t really have any family on his side. So I would have no problem changing my name (or double barrelling it but I think it’s long enough) if my future wife really liked hers or if it were better than mine. I suspect this would meet with some resistance from the parentals.

3) On a similar vein, traditional things with little purpose or that we don’t agree with would also be out the window.

4) What if whoever I marry is religious? That would be very difficult.

But whatever, I suppose I’d better meet someone first, heh.

Simon Singh Support Meeting

On Monday there was a meeting in London in support of Simon Singh in his libel case. We were hoping that he’d reveal whether he’s appealing or not, but unfortunately he and his lawyers have not decided yet, but it looks like he might be leaning that way. Anyway I wasn’t there so I’ll just post up some coverage here.

HT Martin at the Lay Scientist for that.

This is an editorial piece from the New Scientist.

Dave Gorman (who was seen speaking on the video above) has a blog post on the meeting and surrounding issues.

New Humanist has also covered the meeting in some depth.

There’s now a lot of internet coverage of this case and the surrounding issues of the broken English libel laws. A particularly good roundup of the response can be found over at God Knows What. I urge you to go and read up around the issue and if it angers you as much as it does me, write to your MP about it.

Looks like my department’s getting cut

I’ve copy and pasted this from a post I made at secular portal.

I’m so pissed off. The modern languages budget has come out for this year and not only are they getting rid of hourly paid teaching (ie tutors and language assistants – they make up 5 of my 7 contact hours a week in those subjects), but it looks like Portuguese is getting slashed completely, as well as Russian which I don’t study. Leaving staff (which I suspect will be quite a few with this news) will not be getting replaced.

Now the way Portuguese is at the moment is dire. The way the Edinburgh system works makes this very complicated but I’ll explain anyway, it’ll help me vent so maybe I can go back and revise again. I don’t expect anyone to actually read the next 5 paragraphs.

Portuguese is part of the Hispanic Studies Department. You can take Spanish as a single honours or with a lot of other subjects, but Portuguese is not a stand alone subject, you can only do it as a joint honours with Spanish (or with Spanish and EU Studies but I’ve never heard of anyone doing that).

Now at Edinburgh you take 3 subjects in your first two years (undergrad courses here are 4 years). Usually this would be whatever your degree is and the rest of the credits filled up with outside courses. So if I my degree were Politics and Chinese I would take those two and choose an outside, but if it were just Politics I would do politics and choose 2 outsides. Edinburgh is renowned for being very flexible, a large number of people end up doing a degree they didn’t apply to do.

The problem with Portuguese is that it doesn’t start until 2nd year. If Spanish and Portuguese is your degree, you do an hour a week in first year which doesn’t count for any credits. This is not at all made clear in the prospectus. So I did Spanish, Politics and Chinese, and this hour a week. At the start of 2nd year, I’d found out that Chinese clashed with Spanish in 2nd year and Politics was really badly taught, so I wanted to start Portuguese (getting rid of Chinese) and switch to first year Linguistics from Politics. Ordinarily this would not be a problem, but the smallprint on my degree programme meant that I had to carry on one of the courses I’d already started (the logic being that if I failed Spanish I’d have something to fall back on – personally I thought that should be my risk to take). Since Chinese clashed I was essentially forced to take Politics. So much for flexibility.

2nd year Portuguese takes the form of 2 half courses running simultaneously throughout the year, one in language, the other in history and literature (taught in English). There are people not on the degree doing each of these courses as their outside, but everyone on the degree does both. So just to recap, in terms of language you do 2 years full courses in Spanish on top of anything you’ve done before you get to uni, but in Portuguese you get 1 year’s half course, a quarter as much language. You then go on your year abroad.

Now I happen to be the class rep for Spanish and each of these Portuguese courses, and in staff/student liason meetings for the past 2 years they’ve been telling me that they have plans to improve Portuguese and make it into a stand alone course, but that the Head of Portuguese is on research leave, so they can’t do it yet. She’s been on leave since I started my degree, something we also weren’t told before applying, and I’ve since learned that this is contractually obligated by the University. The head of Russian is also on contractual research leave. This is extremely ironic since the reason their budgets are getting cut is because these departments aren’t doing enough research and aren’t making enough money. I fail to see how cutting tutors, forcing lecturers to do more teaching, is going to remedy that situation.

This is all part of a long-running situation where Edinburgh has been slipping down the league tables, particularly in terms of student satisfaction. The University have been focussing on research instead of teaching; it’s well known that promotions are given on research grounds rather than teaching competence, and the multi-million pound Informatics Forum which has been under construction for a long time and opened this year, is a research building. No teaching is allowed to take place there because otherwise they have to pay VAT on the building – surely that should be the other way around. The student association EUSA has been trying to improve this situation with the Teaching Awards starting this year and a long-running campaign to improve feedback, and the University was very vocally on-board, but now it seems they’ve just stabbed us all in the back.

The Students Representative Council is drumming up support but I don’t see what they can do. Money talks, at the end of the day. So I’ll be coming back from my year abroad with no idea whether my degree programme even exists. Of course they’ve brought the news out now because at the end of this week most language students will have gone home and the ones remaining will still be revising hard for their exams. Absolute bastards.

New links

As soon as I’m less busy (still learn-ding atm), I’ll be posting more. For example I was at a Skeptics talk by Simon Singh last night and on Monday we went to a spiritualist discussion. For now though, there are 2 new links on the blogroll. Zygoma is a blog by Paolo, a natural history expert at the Horniman Museum, whilst Skepticat is a blog by Maria, a humanist living in London. Both of these bloggers are regular posters on the Think Humanism Forum.