The Nature of the Monarchy

This story caught my eye on the front page of the Guardian yesterday. A Labour backbencher has filed a report proposing to make changes to the nature of the monarchy which will allow a non-anglican monarch, and put an end to male precendence in the royal heirarchy.

Of course I welcome such changes. The law as it stands is clearly a long way away from public opinion on equality. SNP Leader and First Minister of the Scottish Parliament Alex Salmond reportedly gave this comment.

“I welcome these moves. The Act of Settlement is an 18th-century anachronism that has no place in a modern 21st-century constitution. The SNP first raised the issue over a decade ago, the Scottish parliament united in 1999 to call for this long overdue reform, and I hope the prime minister follows through in early course.”

What very few people seem to be recognising is that the monarchy itself is an antiquated anachronism that has no place in a modern 21st-century constitution. We shouldn’t be looking at reforming the monarchy to fit in marginally better with the values and principles of a liberal democracy, when the principle it’s based on (that of being born into such institutional power and wealth) is totally at odds with them! It reeks of hypocrisy. We should be working on getting rid of the monarchy altogether. My two penneth, anyway.

Is Faith in God a Delusion?

Just a quick one today because I have a lecture soon. Last night I attended a debate between Alistair McBay from the NSS and David Robertson, author of The Dawkins Letters, entitled ‘Is Faith in God a Delusion?’ Frustratingly, neither party seemed intent on answering the question at hand. Basically, Alistair pointed out a few of the strange things that religious people believe, and outlined the position of the NSS in its fight against the “religious demand for inequality”. David replied by repeatedly calling atheism a “faith” and a “religion”, saying that to a certain extent you have to take everything on faith. His main point, however, was that when you’re talking about this kind of thing, you can’t take in your own preconceptions about what you can count as evidence. This is what I want to discuss.

His inclusion of the word ‘preconceptions’ of course makes atheists sound closed-minded. But I’d like to meet the Christian who approached the subject totally open-mindedly, examining all the evidence not only from science but also from all religions and cultures around the world, and rationally came to the conclusion not only that God exists, but specifically the personal Christian God who intervenes in our lives on a day to day basis. I doubt it would ever happen.

The fact is that although there is no definitive boundary between what we can class as evidence and what we can’t, there is a spectrum as to what we can count as good evidence and what we can count as bad evidence. Here are the 10 evidences for the existence of God as Robertson lays out in The Dawkins Letters, as taken from the blog “Why Believe“

1. Creation
2. The human mind and spirit
3. Our inbuilt moral law
4. The existence of evil
5. Human desire to find God through ‘religion’
6. Personal experience
7. History
8. The true Church
9. The Bible
10. Jesus as revealed through the Gospels

Now, let’s be honest, a lot of this isn’t what we would call good evidence. Some of them are the same idea repeated, some of them are just as good evidence for God as against, some of them don’t really make sense at all. It just so happens, apparently, that all the good, hard, tangible evidence is on the side of science, whereas the soft, mushy, bad evidence is on the side of religion. And Robertson seemingly expects us to give them each equal weighting. I disagree. Maybe later when I have more time I’ll go through each of these evidences one by one.

Scientology… again

I was out and about in Edinburgh today and I got a text telling me there was a big Scientology thing going on in the city centre, so I made my way down there and saw a massive yellow tent with, to my surprise, “Scientology Volunteer Ministers” written on a very professional looking sign with the big crucifix-style symbol they use. There were lots of people there in yellow teeshirts who were obviously these volunteer ministers, so I went over, looked interested and asked what it was all about. A girl about my age (I don’t know why these organisations try hooking me in with people my own age. So far it’s been the CU, the Bahais, Destiny Church, the Christadelphians, and the Scientologists. It doesn’t work! Usually) came and said “well we’re the scientology volunteer ministers, and we have this technology to help you improve your life!”

“Wow, that sounds amazing, what kind of technology is this?”

“Technology to help you every day.”

“Ok, are we talking metaphorical technology?”

“No.”

“Right, so… what does it use, electric shocks or something?”

“Oh, well, no, it’s not like tools or anything like that.”

“Well, technology isn’t really the right word then, is it? Maybe ‘advice’ would be better?”

“It is technology because you apply it to your life.”

“… ok. Why don’t you give me an example?”

“Well what do you want to improve in your life?”

“[struggling to think of something] What if I wanted to improve my grades?”

*vacuous smile, doesn’t reply*

[me] “But scientology’s a cult, isn’t it?”

“What’s a cult?”

“Like a sect that takes over your life and brainwashes you.”

“And how do they brainwash?”

“I don’t know”

“Right well we wash our brains on a Tuesday night. Have a nice day.” – walks away.

It’s so hypocritical that they pretend to want to help when you look like you don’t know who they are, but the second you show any sign of independent thought, they cut off communication. They’re also deliberately preying on traumatised people; their slogan was “no matter how bad it gets, something can be done.” So all they’re doing is targetting non-skeptical, emotionally vulnerable people. Why else would they do that, unless what they’re peddling wouldn’t make sense to an independently thinking person? (We accused the Student Alpha Course of doing the same thing with their slogan “Is This It?”, because that appeals to people who might have a lot of problems in their life and think it’s not that good. Incidentally my response to that question would be to draw attention to all the amazing things in the world like other cultures, all the literature, amazing technology, not to mention the beauties of the natural world, science, human emotion, and that’s only scratching the surface because we don’t even know anything about the majority of things in the universe. Isn’t this enough?). I know to them I look like the closed-minded one, but as with most things, until they can show me a bit of evidence I don’t really have a lot of time. It all looked very professional and expensive though, especially the identical Mercedes Benz minibuses they had across the street. I wanted to ask them where they get their money from but I forgot. Next time I’ll make a point of it.

I was generally quite surprised that they explicitly used the word ‘Scientology’, though. Usually they hide behind a less-well known phrase like ‘Dianetics’ or ‘Personality Test’ or something. Perhaps this reflects a more outgoing trend emerging within Scientology. I hope not.

Faith

Faith is a strange thing, something we as humanists are generally opposed to. That sounds sad to a lot of people on the street, because ‘faith’ is so often used as a synonym for ‘trust’. But let’s be clear here, faith is a specific type of belief which goes beyond what the evidence says.

The reason I bring this up is because we had a conversation at the Chaplaincy Fayre today with Jack from the Christian Union. He started off by plugging one of their joint events with the Philosophy Society (which I’d also like to mention), which is called “Is Faith in God a Delusion?” It’s a debate on the subject between 2 fairly big names; Alistair McBay from the National Secular Society and David Robertson, author of ‘The Dawkins Letters’. It should be good, I’ll be there, it’s THIS TUESDAY 23rd September at 6.15pm in the George Square Lecture Theatre at Edinburgh University. Be there if you can.

Anyway so he was talking about the discussion they had deciding whether to use the word ‘faith’ or ‘belief’ in the title. It was interesting because he said the discussion was about whether to define belief in God as a belief or a faith position, but in my mind it doesn’t matter, that’s the subject matter of the debate. I would say that any faith is delusional by definition (after all, faith has been described as “an illogical belief in the improbable”), and so ‘belief’ would be the correct word to use, with the debate itself dealing with whether belief in God is logical or specifically a faith position. That in turn will determine whether it is delusional or not.

In any case that was merely the first sentence of our discussion. Jack denied that belief in God is a faith position because there’s plenty of evidence for the existence of God. We of course enquired what that was and he told us that the “rational information” of the universe was evidence enough to imply an intelligent designer. By that I presume he means that the universe is so complex it couldn’t have come about by ‘chance’. So then we realised we were talking to a creationist and gave other examples of rational information coming from an intelligent force, such as peanuts in a jar sorting themselves out through gravity with the smallest at the bottom, pebbles on the beach having the smallest ones furthest up the beach, craters on the moon as well as clouds that look like things. But he was having none of it. We also gave examples of how things are badly designed, such as the human eye, but he said he wasn’t commenting on the level of intelligence involved (even though he’s saying his perfect God did it :/).

We then got onto the problem of evil, and he said that it’s a punishment from God from the Fall. I said that there are a lot of innocent people who suffer, and the amount that people suffer isn’t proportionate to their sin, so what kind of judicial system does God run? Jack said it’s an imperfect system because the world has been corrupted by sin, and God’s waiting for everyone to repent before he fixes it. In the meantime he judges after death.

Now see, the problem is that a lot of people think that as long as the existence of God is possible, it’s perfectly rational to believe, regardless of whether things can be explained naturalistically. In fact, Occam’s Razor says that we should go with the option that presupposes the least, so even though the naturalistic option may seem against the odds, it’s better odds than presupposing the existence of an invisible, all powerful entity, for which we have no evidence whatsoever. Anyway, a bit of a ramble today. I apologize.

The Journey of Life and Death

I haven’t mentioned this so far, but Tim over at the Friendly Humanist and I were approached some time ago to write a column for Humanitie, the quarterly magazine of the Humanist Society of Scotland. The columns are supposed to complement each other, so take a gander at his and judge for yourself. The magazine is out now so keep an eye out for it.

There are two sayings that my mum can’t stand. One of them is ‘a rollercoaster of emotions’ and the other is ‘I’ve been on a journey’, both very common on the TV makeover shows she often insists on watching (personally I’d also add ‘a catalogue of errors’ and the infuriating ‘Error 404. Page cannot be found’). But this image of a track or some kind of journey is most prevalent when we’re talking about death. I’ve been to funerals where there’s been talk of ships passing over the horizon or water flies passing through the surface of a pond. Even Hamlet (and a certain Klingon in Star Trek VI) described death as “the undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveller returns.”

But why do we use this journey imagery to talk about the unknown, when really it’s lots more likely to be the end of anything we might call ‘life’? It’s a metaphor that doesn’t really strike me as particularly factual or illuminating, and one that many believe to be literally true. You could say it is to alleviate our own fear of death, but upon further thought that doesn’t make sense to me. I would much rather have my life end after a contented existence and leave it at that, than have it carry on and take a gamble which might (probably will) leave me in eternal torment. I’m sure by the time I’m 90 years old and well into my second childhood, unable to walk up the stairs or remember my own name, I’ll be gagging for it all to end! Let’s not forget that we’ve all spent billions of years in ‘oblivion’ before we were born; it’s not nearly as scary as it sounds!

This idea of a journey or another life after death would be harmless if it didn’t influence people whilst they lived. The Romans believed that the body must be intact and hold a coin in its mouth for the soul to take its ferry ride across the River Styx. Similar beliefs about an afterlife in the Romany community, as well as the beliefs of some Christian denominations about the rapture, prevent organ donation or the donation of bodies to science after death. This in turn is a contributing factor to people dying unnecessarily on transplant lists and to a lack of bodies available for medical study and research. Furthermore, a belief in some kind of judgement to come after death is often cited in favour of the death penalty. Martyrdom and thoughts of the afterlife help suicide bombers go through with their threats. There are many other examples.

Anthropologists like Malinowski, as well as general clever-sods Bertrand Russell and Einstein, suggested that our fear of death could be a major reason for the existence of religious belief about an afterlife in the first place. Until we can conquer this fear, it’s likely that religious superstition will be sticking with us for some time to come.

Agnosticism

I think I should clear up my position somewhat. This train of thought started on a Liverpool-based forum I frequent, where two members decided to have an online debate spanning several days on evolution vs creationism, and they would each try and prove the other wrong. I was pleasantly surprised because normally they discuss things like the city council’s latest gaffe and nothing of much interest is said. At the start of the thread there was a poll asking people’s opinions on how they thought life had come about, with the options “Creationist”, “Intelligent Design”, “Evolutionist” and “Unsure”.

Maybe about ten posts into the thread, one member said “I’d like to meet anyone who votes anything other than ‘unsure’”, implying of course that everyone should be unsure about it because if we knew that there would be no controversy on the issue. Now of course literally speaking none of us can be completely sure about anything, you can’t prove anything to the absolute level, but it reminded me of several conversations I’ve had in the past about the terms ‘atheist’ and ‘agnostic’.

In this situation we should all be unsure about it in the strictest sense of the word, but saying that is completely unhelpful for the purposes of the poll, it says nothing. Now there are people like Sam Harris who have campaigned against the use of the word ‘atheist’ because we don’t use other words like “non-racist”, it’s just assumed we’re not, so saying we’re atheists doesn’t really say anything. That may be true but I think calling yourself an agnostic is even more useless. It literally doesn’t say anything other than “I don’t know”.

The thing is there’s such a wide spectrum of agnosticism. There’s people who claim they don’t know but believe in God anyway as a sort of safety net, and then at the other end there’s those who call themselves agnostics purely because they can’t be absolutely sure there’s no God, but in practice they live their lives as though they do. Let’s face it, nobody except full-on fundamentalists at either end of the spectrum can say definitively that they are not agnostics, so calling yourself agnostic means next to nothing, and it’s only useful to say it if you are literally in the middle of the fence and don’t know one way or the other. Such people tend to be the kind of people who don’t really care (which is fair enough), so it’s a term that doesn’t often get used.

Anyway, that’s my two-pennies worth on agnosticism. Bit of a ramble but whatever.

Evolution vs Intelligent Design

Last night I attended a talk at the Edinburgh Zoo given by Stuart Ritchie, President of the Humanist Society at the University of Edinburgh, as part of the Darwin 200 celebrations. Stuart is a good friend of mine and I looked forward to the talk a lot, as I know he’s very enthusiastic on the subject of creationism.

Basically he outlined the difference between Creationism and Intelligent Design (ie. not much, according to the Wedge Document), then outlined the theory put forward by evolutionists. He then took arguments used by Creationists and Intelligent Design proponents in turn and demolished them as he knows how to do so well, incorporating the circular logic of the Bible, information theory, the bacterial flagellum, the Climbing Mount Improbable analogy, the scrabble analogy, and pretty much everything important that needed to be included, although I’m sure he could have continued for much longer afterwards if he’d had the time. He placed evolution side-by-side with both creationism and Intelligent Design to see which one stood up to scrutiny, and lo and behold evolution came out on top.

What interested me was the Q&A section towards the end. Several people who appeared to be from a religious background said that Stuart was simply bashing religion and its theories in the same way as ID proponents bash evolution. This is completely untrue! If ID theorists stood their own theories up to half as much scrutiny as Stuart did to evolution, I would be a happy man. In reality it is a blinkered, religiously motivated view which holds them back from seeing the truth and leads them to take others into their false beliefs. And if nothing is done, they will still be doing it when we’re celebrating Darwin 300.

Another man who confessed to being a Christian and a former RE teacher said to me afterwards that really both his position and that of Stuart were against fundamentalism. Whilst Stuart repeatedly said he had no qualm with religious people who kept their beliefs out of science (I happen to know otherwise ), my major problem with the so-called “religious moderates” is that they rarely, if ever, speak out against fundamentalists within their ranks. How often do we see the British Muslim Council speak out against lies told in the name of Islam? How often do Christians turn on creationists and say “hold on a sec, you’re talking rubbish, I’m not letting you represent me”? We only ever see religious people speaking out against fundamentalism after a serious terrorist attack, when they’re effecively forced to. Instead the debate is between different faiths, or between faith and science, and too seldom do religious people scrutinize themselves. I suspect there’s a reason for that; if they did, there wouldn’t be too many religious people left.

In any case, I fully support the Darwin 200 events, and urge anyone who’s remotely interested to get along to one of the many events happening nationwide. You won’t regret it. I think we’ll be getting Stuart to do the same talk again in the Humanist Society’s first semester programme, too.

Pride Glasgow 2008

Humanists and atheists alike are often accused of being a negative group, in that they don’t really do anything positive, just bouncing off religion in a negative way. This event is one way that I can show humanists being positive in their outlook, in contrast to the intolerance of some religious people towards other social groups.

The student humanist society decided to run a stall at Pride Glasgow mainly for three reasons: 1, to show that we as humanists support LGBT rights. 2, to promote humanism in the community. 3, to have a good time experiencing a less than ordinary event, and get to know better a section of society that perhaps normally we would not. It followed on from our attendance at Pride Scotia in Edinburgh last year, an event which we will likely be attending again next summer. This time Gareth and I went to run the stall as lots of the society were busy with one thing or another.

The parade itself was nothing like I’d ever seen. Aside from the usual revellry which I’d seen on TV, there were groups of people there that I didn’t expect. Generally I was quite surprised at the wide variety of people wandering through the stalls, from people I’d normally call neds or scallies all the way over the spectrum to metalheads covered in piercings, incorporating in between normal looking people who could’ve been strolling through the streets of Milton Keynes. I was happy to see the Buddhists there, but nobody from the University society BLOGS was represented, much to my surprise. That said, the Glasgow student union marched in the parade, and there were plenty of other groups that I knew nothing about. I was also surprised to see a Christian organisation there (the Metropolitan Community Church, I think they deserve a post of their own), and I was very surprised when I saw the Conservative Party with a stall.

All in all I enjoyed the day. There was a lot of variety, people seemed interested in humanism and we even got some people from the University interested in coming to some of our meetings. We were giving out materials from GALHA, the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association, but it was a shame that we didn’t have any materials about humanist partnerships from the HSS. Apparently the courier who was supposed to deliver them was involved in a road accident so I hope they’re not too badly hurt. I was particularly impressed when they got the rainbow flag hoisted up above the city chambers, which apparently is the first time that’s happened. Hopefully this reflects a greater degree of acceptance of LGBT people in the community.

The Christadelphians

Sorry about the lack of activity around here but I don’t have net access at home at the moment.

On my last night in sunny Wirral I decided to go to a meeting called “Jerusalem, the spark that will set the world on FIRE!!” by the Christadelphians. I’d got a leaflet through my door about it, it was only 5 minutes down the road and I had nothing better to do, so off I went.

The talk was in a tiny little conference room with a screen at the front with a powerpoint presentation on it, so I thought it would be the same as the Edinburgh Creation Group (btw, hopefully they’ll be doing more talks this semester so stay tuned), but really it wasn’t much the same at all. It wasn’t very interesting or illuminating so I’m not going to discuss it much, there are other more interesting things. In any case the second I walked in 20 minutes early, a girl about my own age called Sarah came over and sat next to me, asking me questions (assuming I was a Christian, actually. I can see why these meetings only attract Christians though). She seemed genuinely surprised when I told her I believed in evolution, and asked me the ever-so-common question “so why are humanists moral if they don’t believe in God?” I retorted with the usual “so you’re only a good person because God’s watching you, you wouldn’t be so otherwise?” and when she replied that there wouldn’t be any point, I was flabbergasted. Normally that question puts Christians on the back foot, but her dedication to her position and all that it implies (however scary) was extraordinary.

We also spoke a lot about prophecies in the Bible (something which I gather the Christadelphians are very interested in), and I explained that the prophecies are always so very vague, that you can’t really call it a miracle when it’s fulfilled (particularly because there’s no timescale involved, it literally gives itself eternity for its own prophecies to be fulfilled), and she replied that it’s the way it has to be, otherwise it would be too easy to believe and everyone would do it. Why do Christians have this obsession with making things hard for themselves? Now I appreciate that she’s young and a more experienced Bible reader probably would have answered differently, but it’s still totally the wrong attitude to take. I asked her the question I always ask religious types, why she trusts the Bible as evidence, but not other books like the Q’uran? She replied that the Bible is full of proof and evidence, such as the fulfilled prophecies she’d already mention, and others aren’t. “So how much of the Q’uran have you read?” I asked. As I expected she’d never even opened it, excusing herself because she had so much Bible reading to do. Apparently the Christadelphians assign themselves certain reading schedules each day, so they read the Old Testament once and the New Testament twice each year, analysing it closely. I quickly saw the problem with taking all your authority with one source, as the whole talk was just “this is in the Bible, and it’s true”, with no kind of outside evidence.

Anyway Sarah glimpsed a page out of my ‘loony book’ that I take to all these kinds of meetings to take notes (for some reason I don’t have it with my right now but I’ll check it when I get home to make sure my memory’s reliable from last week), which mentioned the role of women. Ironically enough, in the next minute or so, all the women in the room started covering their heads with veils! I asked her what they were doing, and she said they had to cover their heads and sit in silence so as to not “usurp the authority” of the man! I quickly noticed all the veiled-covered heads were sitting at the back too, and as an explanation of sorts she pulled a passage out of Timothy (she’d referred to her Bible several times during our conversation) which said pretty much exactly what she’d just said. For some reason the version linked is slightly different but it has the same gist. I asked her how any woman could dedicate their life to a sexist organisation like that, and she replied that men and women weren’t being treated unequally, they just had different roles in worshipping God. Nevertheless she contradicted herself later when she spoke about something she’d learned in Bible study about the head of a woman being a man, and the head of a man being God. I was weirded out, to say the least. I hope one day she leaves the Christadelphians because she’s obviously been brainwashed into it.

Anyway, to at least brush on the topic of Israel I’ll mention the talk. Basically the speaker outlined the history of Israel, claimed that the Christadelphians weren’t a pro-Israeli group (just a group interested from a Biblical perspective), and showed how the prophecies had come true. He basically fit his interpretation of the Bible around current events. There was no question and answer session at the end, much to my surprise. At the end I went up to him and asked him in no uncertain terms why the Israelis had any more right to be in Israel than anyone else, and he replied “because the Bible says so. From the start God is very much concerned with the Iraeli people, the descendents of Jacob.” I said that it was kind of self-fulfilling that the Jewish God is going to be concerned with the Jewish people, so why do you believe that and not other self-fulfilling books like the Q’uran? He said the Bible is a book of prophecy (kind of what Sarah said, isn’t it?). I entertained the idea by asking, like what? He said, well, Israel itself is a miracle! “Excuse me? No it’s not. A miracle is something that cannot happen naturally, a supernatural event. Israel reformed because people wanted it to.” “Yes but it hasn’t happened anywhere else in the entire history of humankind!”

After debating that point with him and getting nowhere, I took some of their literature to read and went home, thoroughly deflated. As soon as I’ve read it (one of them is entitled “proof that God exists”, so that should be interesting), I’ll get something about it up here.