Back to the ECG!

Last night saw my return to the Edinburgh Creation Group meetings. They started last Tuesday but I was unfortunately at work so I couldn’t go. In any case this week’s talk was by Phil Holden, the group’s secretary, entitled “A Letter to a Pagan City”. At first I thought it would be a response to Sam Harris’ book “Letter to a Christian Nation”, but in fact it was quite unrelated.

The whole talk was based around Romans: 1, particularly verse 18 onwards. Basically St. Paul writes that when people reject God, they become pagans, which leads them to sexual immorality, homosexuality in particular, and the total moral collapse of society. Now Phil went looking for examples of paganism in Edinburgh, and examples of what’s written in Romans in our society. So there were videos of Beltane and the festival, of big parades down the streets with people dressed up as spirits and taking part in a pagan ceremony.

Now I have to say that this was taken right out of context, which was brought up in the Q&A section at the end. This isn’t an example of Paganism rife in Edinburgh, this is a cultural event. Now I’m not saying that there are no pagans around, but the vast majority of people go along to such events just because it’s entertaining, it’s out of the ordinary, and it’s fun.

Next Phil showed us some pictures of “Our Dynamic Earth“, an Edinburgh exhibition which I regret to say I’ve still not visited, and pointed out the “pagan symbolism” such as a circle of stones, and a “pagan female fertility symbol”, as well as the words “Mother Earth” on the outside (also taken out of context. In full it is “the Mother Earth of all adventures”, a play on the term “the mother of all adventures”, so that’s why it’s there, not some sinister paganistic symbolism).

Next there were lots of pictures of various witchcraft shops and occult suppliers around the city, and a supernatural event organised by the Freemasons, as if this proves that Edinburgh’s become a pagan city. But it’s all irrelevant. Paganism is a cultural and tourist thing rather than religious. Celtic paganism is a big part of Scottish history, and of course that is reflected in what we see around us, and the tourism board is going to promote it actively. So even if it is quite widespread, it’s not genuine.

In any case the point was that this rise in atheism/paganism (I still don’t understand how atheism leads to paganism) is leading to a breakdown of society, with higher levels of paedophilia and divorce rates through the roof, leading to unstable family life and the “total moral collapse” of society, as well as the usual stuff about homosexuality and abortion which I’ve seen in some talks before.

Stuart, a fellow member of the Humanist Society, made a good point, saying that anecdotal evidence is no way to make a hypothesis, and if there was a correlation in a rise in paganism in more atheistic countries like the Czech Republic or Sweden, that would at least be a good start, and meanwhile on the other hand there are studies that suggest that atheists are less likely to get divorced than Christians, particularly fundamentalists, which would throw a spanner in the works for anyone suggesting that atheism is linked to the breakdown in society.

Throughout all of this, there was a suggestion that noone has any excuse for not knowing that God exists, just as it’s written in Romans 1: 19, “since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them.”, and everyone should just know intuitively somehow that God exists. But a big point was also made that God often punished on a societal level rather than personal, and where in Romans it says “Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts”, this is also typical of God’s kind of punishment on earth, that he lets the consequences of people’s actions be their own punishment. I can’t believe people still think divine punishment exists when they freely admit that who gets punished isn’t necessarily who does the evil deed, and that the punishment takes the form of something that would have happened anyway! What kind of judicial procedure is that? Once again, this is an example of God doing absolutely nothing, and yet we’re still supposed to ‘just know’ that he exists! It just doesn’t make sense.

I like Phil. I think he’s a good man, but if he truly believes what he was saying, then he’s also very naive and deluded. He doesn’t appear to have any idea about what paganism really is. I’ve mentioned the talk to a few people and they immediately threw up the objection that generally speaking, pagans are the nicest people in the world, and that in reality they don’t go around having drunken orgies all the time, so they can’t be held responsible for the downfall of society.  I also think it’s slightly ironic that he’ll happily dismiss paganism out of hand as being a load of rubbish, but doesn’t see that the same logic can be applied to Christianity.

Not only am I unconvinced that atheism is linked to paganism at all, but I don’t think if it were, then that would be linked to the downfall of society, which may or may not be happening anyway. It’s all very dubious and circumstantial.

Holocaust Memorial Day

I’m a bit annoyed with myself. This year is the first year I’ve missed a Holocaust Memorial Day service, which took place last night at the Chaplaincy at the University. It wasn’t my fault; I had to work. But at the same time if I’d thought ahead I could have made sure I wasn’t working. What’s worse is that I also missed the Remembrance Sunday service because my alarm didn’t go off and I slept straight through. Back at home I normally mark this occasion with a big parade through my local village with my scout district and it was a shame to not be there this time. So this is my way of commemorating the event

I think it’s imperative that we continue to mark events such as Holocaust Memorial Day. Only by remembering the mistakes in humanity’s history can we ensure that something similar doesn’t happen again. It is for this reason that Holocaust Denial is a crime in some countries; if we don’t remember it, it could end up happening again.

The problem is, though, that similar things have happened again. Saddam Hussein’s extermination of the Kurds and Marsh Arabs, the Rwandan genocide of the Tutsis by the Hutu, the Bosnian genocide in Srebrenica, and the Darfur conflict, which Colin Powell declared genocide in 2004, and which still continues today.

So is humanity learning from its mistakes? I don’t think so, in spite of the efforts of the organisers of Holocaust Memorial Day. It seems to me that the only time this remembrance is ever put into practice is when the government brings in a particularly adventurous piece of legislation, or an example of the “nanny state” is brought up, then people refer to it as “Nazi” in order to garner up opposition to it.

This is an insult to the memory of the millions of people who died in the Holocaust and in the Second World War.

Labels

I’m reading ‘Farewell to God’ by Charles Templeton (don’t buy it, it’s rubbish), and one of the first things he does is point out that he is an agnostic, and then describes his position, that he’s not sitting on the fence, it’s just that he cannot prove there is no god, so he cannot be absolutely sure there is no god, therefore he cannot be an atheist.

This got me thinking. His is very similar to my own perspective (and I think the majority of non-religious people would put themselves there too), but when people ask, I call myself an atheist, not an agnostic. It’s not that I’m absolutely certain there is no god, but I have no reason whatsoever to believe there is a god, so I live my life assuming that there isn’t.

The reason I don’t call myself an agnostic is because to many people it implies that I’m 50/50, sitting on the fence, with no idea whether there is a god or not. This is not the case. In my own mind I’m fairly sure that there’s no god, I just can’t prove it.

Of course, as widely pointed out, ‘atheist’ is a term that should not exist. All it means is that you don’t believe in a god. We don’t have terms like ‘non-socialist’ or ‘non-racist’, or ‘non-postman’. It’s a negative term that doesn’t really mean very much at all.

When people ask me to define humanism, one thing that I invariably bring up is that, in a way, it is ‘positive atheism’, in that saying you’re an atheist is saying what you don’t believe, whereas saying you’re a humanist is saying what you do believe (skeptical inquiry, rationalism, objective morality etc). I think this illustrates that humanism is not just another word for atheism to escape the stereotyping often associated with the term. In fact in the strictest sense you don’t even have to be an atheist to be a humanist. I’ve yet to meet a single religious humanist, but I imagine there are some.

Blog for Choice Day 2008

Today is widely dubbed “Blog for Choice Day” in the blogosphere. A quick google search will show you just how widely. In 1973 (35 years ago today), the famous Roe vs Wade case struck down Texan anti-abortion laws in the US Supreme Court. But it is merely what we would call in the UK “common law”. That is, law by courtroom precedent, and many believe it happened by a mere technicality rather than a fairly won case. So abortion law in the US is extremely fragile, which is why people choose the anniversary of this date to blog for a pro-choice agenda. It could be overturned at any moment by a rejection in the courtroom, or by new legislation.

I think when making highly controversial decisions about whether abortion should be allowed or not, it’s very important to look at it objectively. The pro-life camp (by the way, I object to them calling themselves that, it implies that everyone else is pro-death) has all too often made their arguments from a dubious religious perspective on what is ‘moral’ and what isn’t.

But of course many of these people take their morals purely from sources of authority, rather than thinking about it themselves. What I believe to be moral is the choice that gives least suffering to the least amount of people. A lot of scientific research is done to ensure that abortions are not carried out when the foetus is at an age where they can feel pain, except in cases to save the mother’s life, so there is no physical suffering. But aborting the foetus could potentially prevent a lot of the mother’s suffering, particularly if the child is a result of rape.  So on that count, abortion is not immoral.

There’s another argument that aborting a foetus is destroying the potential for life, but you could use the same argument to legislate against contraception or masturbation, and last time I checked, wasting potential is not a crime. Meanwhile, the foetus is unable to live outside the mother’s body. It is in effect a part of her body. Therefore she should be allowed to choose what happens to it.

So, although I don’t personally agree with abortion, and I don’t think I’d ever take the option of abortion given the choice, from an objective moral viewpoint I think it’s quite obvious that the choice should be there.

Individualism

I sound like a lecturer, but before I start I’d like to remind anyone reading in Edinburgh that THIS WEDNESDAY 23rd January, the Edinburgh University Humanist Society will be showing the Richard Dawkins “Dawkumentary”, ‘The Root of all Evil?’, at 6pm in Room 3 of Appleton Tower, George Square. It will be followed by a group discussion on topics raised in the documentary.

Today I had a politics lecture on ideology in the British political system. It was rubbish, but it’s got me thinking about things only tenuously related, so that’s always good. Anyway the vast majority of socially liberal people are concerned about people’s rights and liberties: the right to free speech, freedom of assembly and things like that being the main ones, (although today someone started harrassing me with leaflets and stuff while I was eating my lunch in Teviot. I’d like people to care more about my right to eat in peace).

Another of the more highly esteemed basic rights is the freedom of religion, ie:

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship, and observance.

Source: Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Now call me ultramodern, but I think this is a bit out of date. Ok, everyone generally accepts that this also includes the freedom to follow no religion (although it’d be nice to have it in writing one of these days), but I think that “everyone has the right to freedom of thought” and “to manifest his religion or belief in teaching” can sometimes be very slightly contradictory. Only a little bit, not completely.

How can you have freedom of thought if you’re not making informed choices? Anyone who doesn’t have the whole story will naturally believe what they’ve been told. I think you know where I’m going with this, bloggers. The right “to manifest his religion or belief in teaching”, which has been cemented into International Law, basically gives any religious nutcase (no offence) justification to set up a faith school and brainwash kids that are too young to know any different with nonsense. I’m fairly certain that anyone who knows that we can explain the world without resorting to a fairy tale would not choose to believe religion, not unless it had been instilled in them from a young age or it was a big part of their family’s culture or some other excuse which has nothing to do with what’s correct and what isn’t.

I now firmly oppose teaching religion to children in schools. Earlier I wasn’t so sure, but it’s sick. How can we encourage our children to be thinking for themselves, rather than just regurgitate facts in exams, when from such an early age they’re being brainwashed with some dodgy worldview which doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, but permeates much of their lifestyle? Especially in an environment where they’re otherwise being exposed to useful, factual information. It’s just plain confusing and it shouldn’t be allowed. I remember once when I was about 8, we’d just finished RE and were moving on to our science class. The teacher asked the question “how do we see?”, and one kid replied without hesitation, “because Jesus is the light of the world.” It’s not right to expect kids to separate facts from fiction for themselves at such an early age.

But what about if parents want to teach their kids about religion privately? Personally I’d probably charge them with child abuse, but it’s a subject of some controversy. As the child is under the age of consent, the parents make decisions in her name, so they decide whether they can teach her or not, even though they themselves are the ones teaching her. It’s the equivalent of telling them repeatedly in all seriousness that if they don’t do something pointless like clap their hands 30 times at midday, then a big scary man will come and torture them forever. It’s probably perfectly legal, but I’m sure you’ll all agree it’s wrong. Actually it’s not the equivalent at all, that’s exactly what it is, just replace the hand clapping with praying, believing nonsense and following the 10 Commandments.

In my opinion, religion should not be taught. It’s spreading lies. Maybe teaching it to people who have already given consent by becoming a member of the church would be ok (and of course I don’t think baptising children counts, they can’t consent). But I don’t think many will turn to the church if it hasn’t been part of their lifestyle previously. It should be there if people want it, but it shouldn’t be taught as the norm, as is the situation now.

But what about teaching about religion? Censoring religion is no better than brainwashing kids in faith schools, so we shouldn’t do that. Religion has also been a big part of our culture, so it is definitely worthy of being taught about. BUT I think it should be made perfectly clear that it’s not necessarily true, and I think other non-religious worldviews should be taught alongside it, such as humanism. It should be in the history books by now anyway.

Maybe religion should be taught similarly to the way we teach about political or philosophical ideologies. Often religion, philosophy and politics are very closely linked, so it’s certainly appropriate.

Feminist frustration

There’s an article in this week’s Student, Edinburgh Uni’s weekly newspaper, entitled “Musings of a Closet Feminist”, by Claire Stancliffe. It’ll probably be on their website in a couple of days, but at time of going to web, it’s not yet.

I’ve got to say I agree with her on the vast majority of what she says. As a former A Level English Language student, I’m all too aware that feminist issues DO still exist, contrary to popular belief, not least in language (although it’s certainly not the most important manifestation of sexism). I’m always confused when I hear words like ‘actress’, ‘waitress’, ‘manageress’ etc. Why do we need a female alternative to the word ‘actor’ (ie. someone who acts), ‘waiter’ (someone who waits on people) or ‘manager’ (someone who manages things). And there’s still the issue arising of how we should avoid the ‘generic he’ in situations like “a police officer should not wear his uniform while off duty”. The majority of readers would not realise that the police officer in this sentence is not necessarily male, because in the English language, when the sex of the subject is not specified, the generic ‘he’ can be used to refer to either a male or a female, since we have no neuter pronoun to refer to people. In any case such a usage of the word contributes to what is commonly known as the ‘invisible female’. What people prefer instead is to use what is being called ‘the singular they’, ie. “a police officer should not wear their uniform while off duty”, which avoids the awkward “his/her”. But it’s grammatically incorrect to refer to a singular subject with a plural noun. Recently I’ve noticed that a small number of my lecturers are using a ‘generic she’, which could be an alternative, just use both terms equally. Just one of the many boring controversies in contemporary English Language studies.

In any case there were a couple of parts that I had very minor objections to. Firstly she appears to imply that men encourage women to objectify themselves as proof that they’re sexually liberated, when in my experience that’s not exactly true. Frequently when women are going out they themselves choose to wear an inch of makeup and less than an inch of clothing, as well as a pair of heels that would cripple even the most balanced of mountain goats. When you ask them why wear such impractical and over-revealing clothing, the usual response is that ‘they have to’. I’m not telling them to, and I’d prefer if they didn’t, so where’s this pressure coming from? I suspect it’s from other women, that if you’re not showing off loads of skin then you’re not dressed up enough.

Secondly, when she describes her discussion with her friends about her musings, she says “unsurprisingly the boys responded with the usual witticisms involving bra-burning lesbians”. I wonder whether this conversation actually took place, because I can’t think of many men who would actually do this. Maybe Claire should get some better friends. I know that if one of my female friends came to me and wanted to talk about a feminist issue, I’d be 100% behind her, particularly if she felt I’d done something to offend her.

But going along with all this is the misconception that feminism is all about women. It affects men almost as much. Sexual prejudice and discrimination tells me that I should be being macho all the time, wearing blue instead of pink, and changing car tyres in my spare time, just as much as it tells women to stay at home and do the housework. Maybe it’s not such a big deal for men as for women, but feminism isn’t just the fight for women’s liberation, it is a more general fight against sexual discrimination and prejudice, which affects men too. I feel this fact has been neglected in writers of feminist literature.

New humanist blog!

It appears another humanist has joined the blog scene! The more, the merrier, I say. So take a look at That humanist, who I’m sure will be making great contributions to the blogosphere.

Organ donation

As you may know, I enjoy taking part in discussions in online forums (fora?), and the dish of the day is organ donation, or more specifically recent suggestions for an ‘opt-out’ system. There are currently 14.9 million people on the organ donor’s register, out of a population of 60 million in the UK. The suggestion is that instead of choosing for your organs to be donated after you die, everyone is assumed to want to donate their organs to be donated, unless they fill in a form to say they don’t.

At first glance it seems like a great idea, more organs would still be donated despite the apparent laziness and apathy of the general public, but there’s still a way to opt out if you want to. But then it was illustrated in a different way.

I don’t think anyone would deny that your body and organs are your own property. But if it’s assumed that you want to give your organs once you die, then your organs are seen as the property of the state, unless you ask for them back. It shouldn’t be up to the state what happens to your organs once you die.

But I suppose you could look at that argument the other way around too. Just as someone who doesn’t want their organs donated could have them taken away because they’ve forgotten to fill in the form to opt out, there may be people now who want to donate their organs but haven’t got round to filling the form in, so their organs won’t be used in the way they wanted either. That would go against their wishes just as much as someone who doesn’t want to donate having their organs taken would.

To be perfectly honest though, I can’t think of a single justifiable reason why someone wouldn’t want to donate their organs after they die. It’s just plain selfish. You don’t need those organs after you die, but they could be life-saving to someone else suffering a painful condition. Even from most religious perspectives (which I obviously wouldn’t call ‘justifiable’ anyway), after you die the body is separate from the soul, so it doesn’t matter if your organs aren’t there. Some people say that they don’t like the idea of being chopped up, but you’ll be dead, so you won’t even be there! It is the height of selfishness to deny someone else life when it is practically no effort on your part.

So what’s the best way to approach the situation? Should we be making organ donation the norm, legally, despite claims that it’s eroding civil liberties, or should we focus on advertising so that people are more aware that they should be putting themselves on the register?

There’s a balance between the 2 situations. Either way there are lots of people in the middle who don’t care one way or the other about what happens to their organs after they die. Surely we should make it that if people don’t care, then their otherwise useless bodies are used for the greater good?

I’m for it.

Humanist Society Spring Program

Yesterday was the Refresher’s Fair, where each society sets up a stall, tells people what they do, and hope to attract new members. Thursdays are my stupid timetable days where I have classes at 9am, 11am, 1pm and 3pm, with one hour gaps between each of them, so I was darting in and out all day really. It was great to see so many societies in action; the tango soc gave a few demonstrations throughout the day, and there were quite a lot of societies there that I didn’t really know very much about, like Capoeira (a type of Brazilian martial art), and the Revelation Rock Gospel Choir, which we were sitting right opposite. The PhilSoc stall was also quite interesting, being made up of a woman knitting, a man drinking cans of Strongbow at midday, and a very scary teddy bear with a strange affinity for a bottle of Bitter and Twisted. They did have some flyers at some point as well, or so I’m told.

The fair was held in the Chaplaincy and Potterow, and all the societies were just placed in alphabetical order, rather than in categories like when it was at the Pleasance in September. This meant we weren’t very close to any of the religious societies, which is a shame because we didn’t have nearly as many ‘inter-faith’ (I use inverted commas there because Humanism really isn’t a faith, but a better term has yet to be coined) discussions as we did in September’s Fresher’s Fair and Chaplaincy Fair, which were very interesting.

I’m also quite disappointed at the lack of inter-faith events at the university. Although we only fairly recently had the Edinburgh Inter-Faith Week, very few of the events then were particularly suitable for a humanist audience, so most of us largely steered clear, and the Edinburgh University Student Festival has a grand total of zero religious events. The Jewish and Islamic Societies don’t seem to be doing anything anymore (indeed
the Islamic Society didn’t even have a stall at the Fair – they didn’t at the Chaplaincy Fair either but that was during Ramadan), and the Catholic Union’s events and meetings are separated away from everyone else in their own little Chaplaincy in George Square, which isn’t exactly very social, in my opinion.

Anyway I think I should probably get to the point. We had a decent number of ‘religious apologists’ as Dawkins would probably call them, who didn’t necessarily believe in any particular deity, but thought our society was just god bashing all the time. It’s simply not true. Although a lot of our own events do have religion as their focus, we’ve also been attempting to host talks on other topics of interest to humanists such as language separating us from other animals (we have a large number of linguists among us), with limited success, and we have our regular Humanist Blood Drive coming up on the 1st February (to which anyone is welcome), as well as a panel discussion on Humanist Ethics in the 21st Century. We’re also collaborating much more closely with the Humanist Society of Scotland and the Humanist Academy, as well as the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science.

But that aside, it should be noted that if any local religious church, association or society, inside or outside the university, attempts to spread their illogical and irrational doctrines to others, then we’ll be there to challenge it. We wouldn’t be very good humanists if we weren’t, and we encourage those same religious societies to do the same. We have a series of 3 documentaries coming up later in the semester entitled “God’s Warriors”, by CNN, each focusing on Christianity, Judaism and Islam, respectively. We intend to invite moderates from each of these three religions along for our discussion afterwards, to tell us where the documentaries have gone wrong, but seeing as the societies are so inactive, we may be forced to go outside the university and seek experts there.

Strange weekend

So I’ve been on my own in my flat pretty much all week. It’s been boring, so on Friday I went to my work for a few drinks, ended up going to my favourite bar, Nichol Edwards, had 5 tequila’s in a row and then someone I’m friendly with there invited me back to her flat, with a mate of mine. She turned out to be a massive cokehead and did about 20 lines, and at about 7am I’d had enough (of it all, I don’t mean I’d had enough cocaine, hehe), and went home.

As a consequence of not going home after Nichols on Friday, I then didn’t wake up until 3pm on Saturday. I was in work at 5, and I realised when I got up that my work uniform was still in the washing basket, horrible, minging and dirty. So I washed it quickly, but didn’t have time to dry it properly so I had a damp shirt for my uniform. Not good.

Then, as by now I was going to be late for work, I decided to ride down there on my pushbike. I got to the bike shed downstairs and it wasn’t there. Buggery. So I got the bus to work, found my bike in Hunter Square where I must have stupidly left it before Christmas, and it’s had the living crap kicked out of it. The back wheel was bent in half and the handlebars twisted all the way round, sprocket twisted, brakes bent. So I had to carry it home, because the wheels were broke. I took it to the repair place today and it’s gonna cost me about £40 to repair, which isn’t too bad considering. Most the damage is just superficial, it seems.

Anywho, while I was at work a girl asked me for my number and I gave it to her. Every cloud has a silver lining and all that. But then she spoke to me again later and it turned out she’s 31 (she looks about 25 max). I’m 18. That’s not so good, but I didn’t mind all that much. Then she texted me later and told me she’s also a mother of 2. Again, I’m 18. That’s not so good.

So all in all a pretty crappy weekend, full of disappointments. What have I learned from the experience?

1. Don’t take pretty girls at face value.

2. Don’t be such a muppet and take care of your belongings.

3. Know when you’ve had enough to drink and go the hell home.

4. Actions have consequences.

5. Be better prepared.

I think I have found a good part to all this though. If I hadn’t gone to the girl’s flat and I wasn’t late the next day, then I wouldn’t have gone to the bikeshed, and then I wouldn’t have known my bike was gone, and I wouldn’t have looked for it in Hunter Square. Then it would have been there longer, and the chances are it would have been damaged even more or worse still just robbed, and that would have cost me much more than just £40

Look on the bright side and all that.