Humanists in Education

One thing that a lot of humanists like to get worked up about is education. I don’t know if it’s the terrifying thought of all those little kiddies being brainwashed in faith schools or what, but something about it makes our blood boil. But as one of the key functions of the state, the education system is something secularists of all types like to concentrate on.

This year education has become a big feature of Scottish humanism. The Humanist Academy has been slogging at the issue for a while under the enthusiastic June Maxwell, and has a humanism course available for the national curriculum for 16 year olds in the Scottish education system.

Seeing her getting things done, the HSS have doubled their efforts to outdo her (for some reason I don’t fully understand the HSS and the HA don’t get along too well) and are making education their prime target, launching their education programme this weekend at Our Dynamic Earth (what a venue) which, as an officer of the Student Humanist Society, I’ve been invited to.

And whilst these two heavyweights battle it out, the rest of the humanists in Scotland sit back and reap the benefits. Magic!

Hopefully the BHA will get moving on it so these benefits can be nationwide. What they need is an arch-rival counter organisation right on their patch to motivate them. Maybe we should start a fake one just to annoy them. We’ll call it… the People’s Front of Judea! Even better, the Judean People’s Front! Maybe not.

Humanist Society AGM

This time of year appears to be AGM season. The Edinburgh HSS had theirs on Monday, the National HSS is having theirs on the 26th, and the student Humanist Society had ours last night. First of all I’m proud to announce that I’ve been voted in as the Secretary of the society, stepping into Stuart’s shoes, who is now Society President. This means I’ll be doing such things as the Monday newsletter (which may well change day depending on my timetable next year). If anyone reading here would like to be added to the mailing list, drop me a line and I’ll see what I can do. Lucy will be continuing as Treasurer, and we also announced the creation of several new officer positions, namely the Publicity officer which has been temporarily filled by Jo and Daniel, the Webmaster taken by Nick, and the Library officer which Gareth has kindly agreed to take on, as well as Ordinary Member positions (aka Minions), taken up by Roger, Dave and Amy (IIRC).

One of the things we wanted to do at the meeting was inform everyone about the activities at secularportal.com, and the upcoming conference which will be taking place in Edinburgh over the summer, and to formulate a makeshift programme for the event, which is shaping up to look pretty good. We also had a plethora (I’m using that word too often) of ideas for events next term, which is fantastic, and I’m sure we’ll be able to get a lot of them off the ground.

Anywho, a very fulfilling evening for the society, methinks.

Dawkins and Holloway

Last night some of us at the Humanist Society went to an event at the Edinburgh Science Festival, where Richard Dawkins and Richard Holloway sat and had a conversation with each other about God, Religion and Spirituality, at George Square Lecture Theatre here at Edinburgh University. It was a great event, and afterwards Richard Dawkins signed my copy of Unweaving the Rainbow.

Anyway it was really interesting because they didn’t really disagree on anything. The event was all filmed, so I’m sure you’ll be able to see it soon enough, either on YouTube, RichardDawkins.net, or at the Edinburgh Science Festival website.

What I want to discuss mostly here is Richard Holloway’s views about God and religion. If you don’t know much about him, he was formerly the Bishop of Edinburgh in the Scottish Episcopal Church, but he must be the most liberal Christian you’ll ever meet. The funny thing is, he doesn’t actually believe what the Bible says, he doesn’t believe God exists, or in the virgin birth, or that Jesus of Nazareth was Christ, the Son of God. What he does believe is that Jesus was “an extraordinary man”, by which I assume he means a great teacher, with huge moral authority, and that the Church does a lot of good. Indeed Richard Dawkins then compared Jesus with other moral figures of our day such as Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, and Mahatma Gandhi, but we don’t claim there is anything supernatural about these people. In short, as much as I don’t like labelling people, in this case it is useful, and I would describe Richard Holloway as an agnostic/pantheist.

The two men spent some time discussing the Bible stories as “beautiful myths” that can teach us a lot, whether or not they are true. Dawkins correctly noted that you could say exactly the same about the aboriginal myths about the Dreamtime, or Polynesian myths, or any other set of myths in the world, and yet Holloway specifically chooses the Christian myths, what’s that about? And furthermore, he picks and chooses which parts of the myth are useful for teaching morals, it’s not the myth itself which tells us what is moral, we put our own subjective judgement on it and decide for ourselves. So why bother with the myth?! Why not just jump straight to the morals?

So in what sense is Richard Holloway a Christian? I would say he’s not at all because he doesn’t believe in God or what I call “the mythical Jesus” (as opposed to the historical Jesus), but he defends his position saying that he still calls himself a Christian because he still associates himself with the community that has had such an influence on his life, and because he still sees the good work that the church does and the good moral teachings of the church. But then if I was living at home, I could say that as well, and it doesn’t make me a Christian. A question I wanted to ask would have gone like this: Just as there are good points about the Christian religion, so there are also very negative points. How can you justify to yourself continuing to associate yourself with a religion which is misgynistic, homophobic, and continues to condemn people to death in AIDS-ridden Africa through its condemnation of contraceptive use? Admittedly most of that is the work of the Catholics, but it gives Christianity as a whole a bad name.

I suspect the answer would have incorporated the facts that he thinks religion does more good than it does bad, and that the church is gradually changing. But I can’t help thinking that there is no good act that a Christian can do that an atheist cannot also do, but someone’s religious beliefs can make them cause a lot of damage, which an atheist would not do.

Anyway, a great event, look out for the video.

Scientology Protest 2: Operation Party Hard

As this Saturday was L Ron Hubbard’s birthday, Anonymous decided to celebrate it in style with a full blown protest party near the Church of Scientology in Hunter Square. Admittedly I forgot about it completely, but luckily I happened to be crossing the road at the exact same second that Stuart was driving past (he didn’t run me over), and I was duly reminded. The protest itself was pretty much the same as last time. Plenty of signs, about the same amount of people but we were a bit more spread out in the square so it didn’t look as many, but I thought it was much better organised. People had learned their lessons from the last one and brought extra cardboard for signs, as well as tape, and we had balloons, party bags and stickers rather than just flyers. I’ll spare you the details.

In any case from the last protest there’s been a few issues brought up. The student media saw it as pointless, or even discriminatory, and various comments were made such as “what are they trying to do?” and “what will an attack on the people they claim to be victims of the organisation actually achieve?”

It’s a fair question, but it’s totally missed the point of the protest. This isn’t an attack on the ‘church’ members, the protest isn’t about them at all! The whole point of protesting is to raise awareness to the general public that the building we were outside is a church of Scientology (misleadingly called “The Hubbard Academy for Personal Independence”) and that the ‘free personality tests’ and ‘free stress tests’ that they’re offering are actually ways of getting you into their cult and robbing you of their money. It is a public awareness campaign.

Before I wasn’t so sure it was necessary, but since the protests I’ve spoken to several people who have briefly fallen victim to it, or who have taken a test and not gone any further, and it’s entirely necessary and appropriate to make people aware of what they’re getting themselves into. They take advantage of people who are vulnerable or gullible and take their money away and it’s not remotely fair. That’s why Anonymous is protesting.
Captain Shamrock

Quality sign

Protestors

Our Sign

Humanist Society Update

A plug first . Today and tomorrow are the EUSA election days. If you’re a student at the University of Edinburgh, I don’t care who you vote for but it’s very important that you vote. Don’t leave the decision in the hands of the politically-minded cronies in the various party headquarters, pull your finger out and go and vote. It’s a shame that, yet again, the elections are so male-dominated and that there isn’t such a diversity of choice, but there’s bound to be someone who says something you agree with.

I haven’t got a lot to say today seeing as I’ve mostly been writing essays or working for the past few weeks, so I’m just going to try and update the outside world on what we at the Edinburgh University Humanist Society are up to. I should be doing another essay so I really am just procrastinating.

This coming Friday is the last in our series of “God’s Warriors” video showings in Appleton Tower. Starting at 6 sharp, this week will concentrate on ‘God’s Christian Warriors’, perhaps tacking the sticky issue of Christian fundamentalism in the US. I urge you to come and see for yourself. It’ll be followed by a discussion, and in the past 2 showings these have proven to be refreshingly open-minded.

Talk at the moment is about the upcoming AGM (date TBC but at the moment we’re thinking late March/early April) and nominations for officer positions next year. It’s a little awkward because out of our active membership, several people are leaving the university, and so won’t be able to take positions. I think one of the main aims next year will be to attract some new blood, as I know we’re going to have similar problems this time next year. I for one will be going on my year abroad and other people will be either graduating or finishing off post-grad courses.

Recently we’ve been trying to get an honorary humanist chaplain at the Chaplaincy, with our preferred candidate being Tim Maguire from the HSS. This would be someone that any person at the university with humanist tendencies could go to for advice or counselling, rather than the Advice Place or any of the religious chaplains that exist already. In particular, we were keen to get more of a voice on issues relating to inter-belief events at the university and in the wider community, and although not in an evangelical sense, we thought Tim would be particularly useful when someone is considering leaving their faith, as some of us have found it quite distressing in the past.

Nevertheless, Di at the Chaplaincy has suggested that Tim take the slightly different role of humanist contact, which half-suits us at the moment because we don’t know how well used a humanist chaplain would be, and until we know we can’t really demand a chaplain, but at the same time we’re out of the loop just slightly on Chaplaincy issues. We’ll see if Tim gets much use as a humanist contact and try and raise his profile a little if possible.

The next thing on the agenda to consider is what we’re going to do during Fresher’s Week. Gordon Aikman, the current EUSA Vice President Societies and Activities, has given us until Monday to decide on what we’re going to do and give him some details. Suggestions today involved some kind of debate or discussion about what to do if your friend is a nutcase, something else which would involve going out and informing people about humanism (something similar to the prayer contest was mentioned, during which we tried to use scientific experimentation to find out which deity was best to pray for for divine intervention - IIRC it turned out to be Emmeline Pankhurst, the women’s rights campaigner who famously threw herself in front of a horse), and my own suggestion was a walk up Arthur’s Seat, not an awful lot to do with humanism except for an appreciation of nature, but it’s a good way to get people together.

So that’s what we’re up to at the moment.

Science and Youth

A fairly short one today, but firstly I’d like to plug the God’s Warriors series that the Humanist Society is showing. Tonight’s episode takes a look at Judaism, I believe, and begins at 6pm TONIGHT in Appleton Tower, Edinburgh University. The next 2 weeks will examine Christianity and Islam.

I went to the Edinburgh Creation Group last night to watch Dr Marc Surtees make his talk on the age of the Earth. He started by establishing what the Bible says, that if we look at Genesis in the original Hebrew then it is obviously talking about 6 days of 24 hours each, approximately 6,000 years ago, so there’s no fudging the issue, that’s what it says. To claim it’s a metaphor would be to do it an injustice.

What followed for much of the talk was just theory. If humanity did start with 2 people, how long would it take for there to be 6 billion people? He calculates that with a 2% increase every year as it is now, it would take just 1100 years. I meant to ask him how he got to this conclusion, but even so, it’s well known that the human population has been increasing very rapidly over the last century or so, and I think the growth rate would have been much less than 2% per year in the past.

There were other things which would seem to suggest that the world is only thousands of years old. Long-period comets have an average ‘lifespan’ of thousands of years. If they were formed at the same time as the planets, then the planets must only be a few thousand years old, because otherwise the comets would have all burned up by now and we wouldn’t see any comets. The Oort Cloud has been suggested as a source of comets to get around this problem, but it’s never been observed.

One thing that did interest me was something called the Faint Sun Paradox. We know that through nuclear fusion, the sun is now 40% brighter (and hotter) than it would have been at more or less the start of it’s lifetime, which means the Earth would have been extremely cold. Not only would this not allow life to evolve, but it would also go against geological evidence which has flowing water making sedimentary rocks. Sagan, who first noticed the problem, explains it by the immense amounts of greenhouse gases that would have been in the atmosphere at that time.

There were other things that, although they disputed the age of the earth, didn’t really support the Biblical account either, such as levels of salt in the oceans and levels of helium in the atmosphere. Then he went on to hypothesise that dinosaurs and humans existed side-by-side as late as the Middle Ages, with the dragons slain by St George and Beowulf being the last of the dinosaurs.

Of course there’s one big issue that I’ve skirted around so far, and that is dating methods on rocks, which the scientists say show us the earth is millions and millions of years old. Dr Marc showed how inaccurate dating methods can be, saying that there are lots of assumptions involved, particularly since we don’t have a good way of measuring the half-lives of any material useful for telling the age of the earth, so we shouldn’t rely on them.

I’m going to stop storytelling now and give my opinion. The dating methods we use now, although they may well be inaccurate, give us a ball-park figure of millions of years. It’s nothing like the mere 6,000 years the 6-day creationists are talking about. If the dating methods have problems (and I’m not nearly specialised enough to tell you if they do), then I would fully support taking another look at the issue from another direction, in the interests of good science. But that doesn’t mean that we should ignore the data that we’re getting. If I counted and told you that there were a hundred sweets in a jar, and then someone else counted and said “no, I think there’s 110″, it would be like assuming that there are a pitifully small number like 2 sweets in there, because obviously the counting method is unreliable, so you should just guess. There’s going to be somewhere in the region of 90-120 sweets in the jar.

It’s an issue I’ve noticed in a lot of creationists. There are niggles and problems with any theory. We can’t pretend to know everything, but creationists tend to point at the cracks in a theory and say “look, this can’t be true, so therefore Goddiddit!!” It reminds me of this picture I saw recently:

Humanist Ethics

Last night, the Humanist Society held its Big Event of the Semester (BEotS), a panel discussion on Humanist Ethics in the 21st Century, with:

• Roger Redondo, a neuroscientist and president of the Humanist Society
• Sue England, a human rights lawyer and women’s rights expert
• Patrick Harvie MSP, a humanist member of the Scottish Greens Parliamentary Party
• June Maxwell, leader of the Humanist Academy, who stepped in at the eleventh hour to replace another speaker who fell ill

Each of the speakers made a 20 minute talk or so taking their own spin on the question, “why do we need evolving humanist ethics in the 21st Century?” Roger concentrated on how we know that morality is wired into each of our brains genetically. There is evidence of a sense of justice in chimpanzees, and the ‘Trolley Problems‘ show us that morals are to a large extent universal, regardless of social conditioning.

The other speakers spoke more about humanist ethics in action. Sue England’s talk was particularly interesting because she led with the statement that religious discrimination is nothing whatsoever like other types of discrimination, in that you can’t easily change your sex or your race or get rid of a disability, but you can very easily change your religion or get rid of it completely. She then went on to show how religious organisations are gaining ground and getting privileged consultation in the EU, exemption from taxation and widely in Europe in such places as Germany, the Church gets money directly from pay packets like a second “voluntary” income tax. She also claimed that the European Convention on Human Rights mentions nothing about religion, but the Human Rights Act 1998 had section 13 put into it by Blair, which means courts have to respect the rights of a person to freedom of thought and religion. I’ve since been and checked this out, and article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights does outline freedom of thought and religion, so I think she must have got her wires crossed there.

Patrick Harvie’s talk was also very interesting. He concentrated on his time as the shadow for the Communities Portfolio, during which he was lobbied by all kinds of religious groups, and how religious groups get privileged in all kinds of ways in politics as well as in law. It tied in quite well with what Sue was saying. He finished by saying emphatically that a fixed moral worldview can’t adapt to new ethical problems such as stem cell research, abortion and climate change. We can’t just look in the Bible and ask “what did Jesus say about nanotechnology?”

June Maxwell’s talk was understandably a little less well jointed, since she had no time to prepare it. She concentrated on education, and how an evolving humanist ethic taught in schools would encourage children to be more responsible, and to think more about their actions rather than just not doing something because they’ve been told to.

She also claimed that Abraham, Moses and even Jesus never existed, which was more than a little controversial with 2 of the members of the Edinburgh Creation Group who came along for the show, missing their own event which was happening at the same time. She justified this by saying that the pagan gods that were celebrated on the 25th of December bore startling resemblances with Jesus, citing Attis, Osiris, Dionysus and Mithras as examples. I’ve checked a few of these out and the theory doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny. Mithras was worshipped after Jesus died, so if anything he was a copy of Jesus, and I can only find very tenuous similarities between Jesus and Dionysus. Lots of people know the links between Osiris and Christianity, but since the legend of Osiris is so old (about 2400 BC), I think it’s more likely to have affected the Old Testament prophecies about the Messiah than the legends surrounding Jesus himself. I think it’s more likely that he did exist as a person, but that he was exaggerated and lied about by his followers in order to fulfil the OT prophecies. I’ve heard a theory on my local radio phone-in show that Jesus was a drug dealer (I am from Liverpool), but I’ll leave that for now.

There was also a lot of controversy during the Q&A session when someone raised the issue of faith schools. The question-asker said that she’d been to a faith secondary school and she was always taught to be open minded, and she was taught about other faiths as well. June then replied (very passionately, I might add, she was almost shouting by the time she finished) by taking the example of the story of Abraham, which teaches obedience, but says nothing about the right of his son to live. I don’t know when June was last in a faith school, but I spent 14 years in the faith school system and I only ever learned about that story when I read the Bible in my own time, it wasn’t taught as part of the curriculum. Generally speaking my school was very liberal, it taught evolution and everyone I know believed in it, and I came out with a good sense of morals and a good education. There were certain problems which I won’t go into, but it certainly wasn’t the brainwashing zombie-factory June seems to think they are.

This entry’s getting far too long and I’ve had nothing to eat yet today (in my Chinese oral exam this morning I apparently told the examiner that my dad’s a professional socialist, instead of a social worker), so I’ll wrap it up with a comment. I was a little disappointed. I was hoping this would be something I could point to in the future and say “look, humanism isn’t just about bashing religion”, but religion was a topic which came up far too much throughout the evening. Sue England’s talk was not much more than arguing against religious practices in Europe, and the only talk that didn’t have religion at its centre was Roger’s, who I’m pretty sure didn’t talk about it at all.

All in all though, it was a good event and I’m glad I went, even if it did mean I didn’t do enough revision for my Chinese exam.