Agora

This weekend I went to visit a friend in Madrid, and whilst we were there we went to see Agora, the film with Rachel Weisch that I’d seen adverts for, but I didn’t have any idea what it was about (it’s weird when you don’t watch TV, you see all these billboards and adverts on buses, but all they have is their name and who’s in it. Without the trailer you have no idea what it’s about and most of the time they looks ridiculously crap). Anyway it turns out it’s about the library at Alexandria. Cool!

**Spoilers will be throughout this post alongside my thoughts, if you want to go see it, go and do so before reading this**

Anyway so the film opens by explaining that in the fourth century the Library wasn’t only a great store of knowledge, but that it was also surrounded by religious debate, and the opening scene marks a debate between a Christian and what they refer to as pagans, by which it means believers in the Roman gods. The Christian proves that he’s correct with a ‘miracle’ when he walks across the fiery coals without being hurt, and then his mates throw the pagan into the coals and of course he is burnt. Several characters see this as proof of Christianity. I don’t think I need to debunk that, but I was struck by how petty this god seems to be, to intervene to help a man cross some coals, but not intervening to prevent all kinds of suffering that no doubt were happening at this point in history. People were still dying in huge numbers during childbirth!

Anyway so one day the Christians start mocking the pagan gods, throwing rotten fruit at the statues. As a response to this insult, the pagans, so famous for their rational thought, decide to go on a killing spree, and quite a pathetic one at that. They surround the group of unarmed Christians with swords, but managed to get turned away and take many injuries. The Christians force them back into the Library, and they close the gates and are trapped inside.

I was very much reminded of a verse from the Bible, funnily enough. In Judges 6, Gideon breaks the altar of Baal and when the citizens of the town call for his head for doing it, his father says, “Are you going to plead Baal’s cause? Are you trying to save him? Whoever fights for him shall be put to death by morning! If Baal really is a god, he can defend himself when someone breaks down his altar.” Indeed. Why gods need people to defend them is beyond me.

So this pathetic, but tragically deadly religious bickering reaches a stalemate, both sides wanting blood. The Christian Emperor Theodosius decrees that the pagans will be pardoned, but that the library is to be given to the Christians to do whatever they want. So the Christians come in, destroy all the statues and burn all the ‘pagan’ works in the Library. This page seems to agree with the story, but with a small addition, the pagans had already been kicked out of their temples by the Romans, and then the Christians put up the statues in a church by way of mocking them, and that’s when the riot started. So the pagans aren’t a problem anymore, we now have the Jews and the Christians living side by side.

Not for long. In the film, the Christians go to the theatre on the Sabbath and throw stones at the Jews there. There’s a line where one of the Jews says that they couldn’t defend themselves because it was the Sabbath and that would be work. I suspect the director’s taking a bit of a poke at the idea of the Sabbath here. The Jews retaliate, and we’re in the same situation, with the Roman prefect trying to keep the peace between the two groups. It’s just so petty, and it’s still happening now, with religious fundamentalists still waging wars against each other.

Anyway the interesting thing is that throughout all of this we have the philosopher Hypatia, nominally a pagan, but she doesn’t really refer to ‘the gods’ at all. She’s been pondering whether the sun orbits the earth or vice versa, discovers that both are possible, but comes to the problem that we’re further away from the sun in the winter. She’s a friend of the prefect, who becomes unpopular because he takes advice from this woman (albeit probably the most intelligent woman of her time), which is against the teachings of Paul as we know. Perhaps yet another dig at modern-day religious beliefs on the part of the director? So Hypatia’s literally just discovered the shape of the ellipse in the orbit, by some strange method involving dividing the sun into two parts, and seeing that the sum distance between them doesn’t change, which seems really strange considering she knows there’s only one sun. But I digress. Hypatia gets kidnapped by the Christians, taken to a church where they want to skin her alive. But one of the Christians, a former slave of Hypatia, says to stone her instead, and when they go to gather stones, he suffocates her out of mercy, while she stares at the ellipse shape made by the shadow of the sun through a hole in the ceiling. Nice feel-good ending.

But the message of this film seems clear, and I’m surprised that Christians in the US haven’t announced a boycott on this one as well (I suppose their pastors didn’t notice it so they had noone to think for them). We have religious groups fighting amongst each other, each essentially looking no less pathetic than the others. They claim to have these deep, very important beliefs, but actually in practice these beliefs don’t achieve anything but destruction. The main victims of this destruction are Hypatia as a woman and as someone accused of godlessness, and also science and the progress of the human race. It’s just such a pity that the world has changed so little between now and then. Still now we have the threat of armageddon with nuclear weapons in the hands of religious fanatics, we have religious groups holding back the progress of research into potentially life-saving science, and we still have women and atheists being oppressed in many parts of the world by religious groups. Religionists take note, many of your views seem as pathetic to me as the views of the characters will to you.

Bibles in Pollock Halls? You’ve got to be joking…

Edit: Since writing this, it has come to my attention that the Christian Union actually have nothing to do with the motion (see comment dated 11/11/09). It was proposed by two of their long standing committee members, which is what led to the confusion on my part. I can only apologise for that assumption. Please note, however, that although much of the argument here is misdirected towards the CU, it loses none of its validity.

Unfortunately not. The Christian Union at the University of Edinburgh have put forward a motion for the student association’s AGM to allow themselves or another organisation to put Bibles in each of the bedrooms in Pollock Halls. If you’re a student at Edinburgh University, I urge you to read this post, although it’s likely to be quite long, and if you have a comment, if you disagree or whatever, post it here in the comments thread. I’d like to get a discussion on this motion going and hopefully get a bit of interest so that the necessary 300 students turn up to the AGM and it’s not a complete waste of time for everyone involved.

But first, a bit of history. A few years ago the Student Representatives Council passed a motion banning Gideon or any other religious organisation from putting Bibles in the rooms at Pollock Halls, the student halls. Following that, the CU proposed a motion to the general meeting lifting this ban, which got a majority of the vote, but not enough votes for it to pass (the EUSA system requires that at least 300 people vote for a motion for it to pass, they got 200 and something). This all happened before I was at uni and before the Humanist Society existed, but there are legends that when Gideon were allowed to place their Bibles in the rooms, it resulted in them being thrown out the window, torn to pieces or even in some cases burnt. I’m not exactly in favour of that but it demonstrates how a lot of students feel about evangelising on campus.

Anyway here’s a copy of the motion as it is now. As far as I can tell it hasn’t been amended so this is what will go before the general meeting. Seeing as I’m not in Edinburgh and won’t be able to attend the meeting, all I can really do about it is post a point-by-point rebuttal of what is says. This is more or less the argument I would give if I were to speak, and if I were given more time than you’re allowed at that meeting.

So, first up

The association notes: Article 9 (Freedom of thought, conscious and religion and freedom to manifest such beliefs in public and private) and Article 10 (Freedom of expression which includes the freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers) of the European Convention of Human Rights which is incorporated into UK law by the Human Rights Act 1998.

That’s absolutely true, it does say that. This is no doubt an inclusion of one of the proposers of this motion, law student David Nixon, who even managed to use the right to freedom of assembly to justify denying non-Christians access to the Christian Union earlier this year. That was bizarre, twisted logic and so’s this. He’s trying to use the right to freedom of conscience and expression to justify leaving a Christian text within the privacy of someone’s room. You have the right to express your opinion, you don’t have the right to come into my living room and do it. Interestingly, the motion doesn’t mention the second point to each of these articles, which states that these rights may be subject to conditions or restrictions in order to preserve the rights of others, among other things.

Next:

The association believes: That the Bible has had a powerful impact on Scottish Culture and is useful to the study of many disciplines including literature, history, law, social anthropology, classics, divinity and philosophy.

That’s true as well (although I’m not sure how it’s useful for the study of law – it is, of course, a perfect example of how not to do philosophy), but so what? Would you use it to justify putting the complete works of Robert Burns in every room in Pollock? The Bible is available online (this point will come up repeatedly, just to warn you), as well as in the library. Anyone needing access to it has it right there at their fingertips.

That many religions, philosophies and spiritualities respect the contents of the Bible.

Most of them consider it blasphemy, actually. Regardless, this is a popularity argument and has no place in a motion of this type.

That many students have taken comfort in a Bible passage in times of distress and this is important given that the University Chaplaincy Centre is only open 9am – 9pm weekdays and is only staffed 9am-5pm.

Let’s take a look at that claim, shall we? Nightline is also open throughout the night, but let’s leave that aside for a minute. What are common causes of distress? Maybe being a member of a disadvantaged or minority group? Say there’s a student who’s gay, but having only just moved to university, noone there knows. Quite a difficult situation, I’d say. Now say that student opens the Bible and discovers that according to that philosophy, they deserve to be put to death. Not exactly ideal. The same kind of discrimination found in the Bible refers to women, pagans, and anyone who’s not a Christian. This isn’t exactly the kind of thing that should be allowed to be placed in people’s rooms. Those who do want to consult the Bible can do so online, or in the library.

That by providing the Bible and other Scriptures the University is not necessarily promoting the contents of such texts but merely making a service available to students. There is nothing to prevent the university or EUSA attaching stickers to any books placed in Pollock making clear that the University does not endorse the views contained within such books.

Yes, it would be making a service available. A service that is already widely available on the internet, or in the library. Hardly one that is lacking at the moment.

5. That it is in the interests of promoting religious diversity and promoting freedom of expression and religion that EUSA do not prevent Bibles being placed in rooms in Pollock.
6. That the University should be a free market place of ideas and as such no view should be suppressed or censored. True tolerance would allow all views a chance to be fairly represented and would not ban the distribution of any books.

Erm, starting with number 5, no it’s not. It’s in the interest of freedom of expression and conscience to allow people to believe and express themselves as they wish in public or private. This is completely contrary to allowing people to impose the Bible onto people who aren’t interested or who hold different beliefs.

As for number 6, the Bible is not being censored. As I’ve said several times now, the Bible is available online and in the library; the University is in fact actively making it available. To claim, therefore, that it is being censored, is nothing short of ludicrous. In addition, the distribution of the Bible has not been banned. The CU is free to, and regularly do, distribute copies of their religious texts. I have 7 copies of John’s gospel given to me by members of the CU. Unless they’ve been taken away since I was last there, there’s a big box of them underneath the stairs in George Square Lecture Theatre, the very building where the AGM will take place! The only difference between them distributing them on campus, and putting them in people’s rooms, is that when they’re distributing them, people can say no. This motion just allows religious groups to push the Bible or other religious texts onto people who otherwise wouldn’t want it.

That any group or society representing any particular point of view who wish to provide literature to be placed in every room in Pollock should be allowed to do so providing the books are made available freely at their own expense.

Oh so we’re not just talking about religious groups? So why don’t we allow the Socialist Society to put a copy of the Communist Manifesto in each room? Of course in response, the Conservative and Unionist Society will want a copy of their literature in the rooms too, and so will any other organised group out there. The University already has this kind of resource available, it’s right next door to George Square and it’s called the Main Library! But that last part, about the books being made available freely “at their own expense” is an interesting addition, I wonder why they put that in? Could it be that they know the CU, with its large membership and funded by the UCCF, is the only group on campus that would be able to afford such a project? Methinks so. More on that later.

The Association resolves: To mandate the President of EUSA to represent these views to Accommodation Services so that the situation can be returned to what it used to be prior to the SRC deciding Bibles
should be removed from Pollock.

You mean returned to what it was before progress was made, right?

Secularists tend to have two responses to this kind of problem. The first, very prominent in the States, would be to allow every group, religious or not, to put their book in the rooms. This is how ludicrous situations like the Washington State nativity scene come about. The second would be to not allow any groups to do it. I favour that option, and here’s why. It doesn’t matter if you give access to all groups, the big fish will always be able to dominate, in this case the CU will be able to put the Bible in the rooms and other groups will struggle. Then we’re back to the situation, where one group is favoured over another, that we were trying to avoid in the first place!

So that is why we shouldn’t pass this motion. Agree? Disagree? Put your comments here!

There are also a number of other motions going through the AGM which are of interest. One is about taking action against Israel, and another is about not giving a platform to discriminatory groups on campus. Maybe I’ll put a similar post up about that one. But regardless of where you stand on any of these issues, go to the AGM and vote! It’s on the 17th November 7pm in George Square Lecture Theatre.

We gets email!

So like I say I’m not having much luck finding humanisty stuff around here in Malaga. I did find a(nother) cool video by QualiaSoup which I think I’ll be blogging at some point, but here’s something a little closer to home. The Humanist Society at UoE regularly hold a prayer contest, which goes like this. The morning of the contest, a member of the society randomly generates a number, which goes into a sealed envelope. Noone else knows the number. Two other members of the society run the contest, getting people to choose a ‘god’ which could be anyone, and pray to this god for intervention whilst they roll the dice, trying to get as close as possible to the randomly generated, and unknown, number. Whoever wins, well then their God is obviously the one to pray to for divine intervention! Last year we also ran a parallel experiment using the wisdom of crowds phenomenon, where people had to guess the weight of a candle, the object being that none of the Gods were right, but the general guess of humanity was more or less on the money. Harmless, you might say.

Anyway so someone’s complained and I’m going to take their complaint apart piece by piece. I should mention that I haven’t actually sent this email back. You may call this two-faced but a response has already been sent from the society and I think it would be inappropriate to send another which probably says more or less the same thing but a bit more diplomatically. But if this person decides to read it here I’ll be happy to address any other complaints.

“okay.. this Wednesday at your freshers fair one of members decided to taunt the other religions at the fair by requesting four digit numbers and names of gods, then rolling a series of dice to prove that the peoples gods did not care.”

That’s not actually true, we don’t do this to taunt (in fact I don’t believe the members of the religious societies I know would even be bothered by it), there are indeed many other reasons why we do it. It demonstrates that the supernatural is difficult to quantify and measure, it makes people realise that there is more than one god out there on the market, it encourages people to question the world around them, it shows that if you’re going to make a claim about divine intervention, you should back it up with evidence. Perhaps most importantly, it demonstrates a sense of humour.

“This was a vague and frankly stupid attempt to taunt people of faith and to demonstrate your own faith as superior (and yes I mean faith in the same way that Richard Dawkins, the confessed atheist, has faith). It was
purely a random attempt to insult and aggravate and proved only that you were little, and did not understand your own cause.”

As I’ve said, we didn’t do this to taunt anyone. Humanists do not have faith. Please try to understand this, because it’s an argument that comes up time and time again. Faith is believing something without evidence. Humanism and atheism are not faith, they are simply a lack of belief in God (or that and more, in the case of humanism) since there is no evidence to demonstrate that there is one. There is no leap of faith involved. If we were to say “there definitely is no God”, then yes, that would be a faith position, because we couldn’t back that up with evidence, because you can’t prove the non-existence of an invisible being that seems determined not to be detected. But in the absense of evidence we maintain the neutral position of not believing until sufficient evidence is supplied. Google “Russell’s teapot” or “the invisible pink unicorn” for more information.

Yes, many of us are passionate about our lack of belief, but that is because we see the harm that religion often does to society and the way it affects the rational thinking of the population, as well as in some cases the public understanding of science, but this does not make it a faith position. Some even lean to the side that the evidence (such as the Problem of Evil), points to there not being a god, certainly not in the sense that the Abrahamic faiths tend to see it. But again, this is only going where the evidence takes us, there is no faith involved.

“As you claim to be humanist, a belief/devotion to the respect of humankind as a whole and one that accepts that people, even those of faith, should be approached with compassion, I would like to hear a public apology from your society for its members actions.”

I wonder if you actually heard any of our members directly insulting anyone else in the room? I was not present but it would be very out of character of any member of the society. What this experiment did was challenge an idea, the power of prayer, not an individual. Religion is an idea just like any other, it is not protected from criticism. We do not hold respect for any idea, not even our own, because if you can’t defend your ideas from criticism, then what’s the point in holding them in the first place? The only apology you will get is that we’re sorry you think independently-minded students need to be protected from our gentle questioning of an extraordinary claim such as the power of prayer.
“Should this not be forth-coming I shall label your society as obviously only intended to offend and shall report its actions to the student societies council (who ban societies based upon racist or discriminatory views) and the various humanist organisations across the UK and request that your society should be shut down.”

I fail to see how the experiment was discriminatory. Anyone who wished to take part was allowed to, and those who declined to (only 6 out of over a hundred) were not asked again. EUSA and the student societies council are well aware of our group and what we do, and I’m certain that any attempt to have the society shut down would result in failure. We comply with EUSA rules and enjoy the freedom of speech that being a member of a liberal democracy involves. The hypersensitivity of others is no reason to suppress freedom of speech.

Furthermore if you think this is sufficient justification to shut down a society, perhaps you should consider making a complaint about the majority of the religious societies, many of which explicitly state that anyone who doesn’t believe as they do will suffer for eternity. We do not take this seriously, although it is certainly much more offensive than what we were doing at the Fresher’s Fair.

“Before you ask.. I’m an agnostic (In the words of Old Harry’s Game an Atheist without courage in their conviction). However I have more respect for a Christian evangelist who believes he is trying to save my soul that an atheist who preaches just to taunt me because they believe they are right.”

Atheists who argue against religion do not do so because they believe they are right. They do it because they see the bad effects that holding religious belief can cause, some of which I have already mentioned. They do it simply to search for the truth, just as a scientist would publish a paper refuting the ideas of a well-respected theory. Ideas, as I have said, are not immune to criticism, they should invite it! I have little respect for someone who makes the claim that my soul is in danger, and then uses that claim to convince me of that same claim’s truth, without consideration for the evidence. If it held any sway with me then I would simply believe the faith which has the greatest penalty for disbelief. I would expect anyone to respect more someone who strives for the truth via science and evidence, than someone who gets their truth from an Iron Age text or a nice feeling in their stomach, for example. I also presume you would respect such a person more than someone who denies women their rights, or who discriminates against gay, lesbian and transsexual people, or who preaches to children that they are going to burn in hell unless they adopt a certain lifestyle?

There’s nothing positive about positive discrimination

This is the latest column in Humanitie. This time, Tim at the Friendly Humanist and I tackle positive discrimination and come to fairly different conclusions. Be sure to read this side by side with Tim’s column.

When I was at school, one of the things we did in Spanish class was to take a newspaper article on a subject, split the class and debate over its content. One day, the article was on Zapatero appointing equal numbers of men and women to his Cabinet, and I was supposed to argue against it. “Bloody brilliant,” I remember thinking, “how the hell am I supposed to argue against equal representation for women in government? That’s like arguing in favour of apartheid!”

I was about to bite the bullet and falsely take the machista line, all too familiar in an all-boys Catholic school, when I looked at the accompanying photograph and suddenly it hit me. (An idea, not the photograph.) Why are they making such a big deal out of this? Why does it matter how many women are on the Cabinet? If we’re going to insist that the government represents the demographic from which it gains its legitimacy, then are we also going to select people based on religious belief? Race? Disability? Age?  Class? Left-handedness? I understand 1 in 18 people have a third nipple… The whole point of the equality movement is that race, sex, disability and all that shouldn’t matter, and yet this positive discrimination malarkey is shining a huge light on each feature and saying “Look! Women in government! Big deal! Big deal!”

Whatever happened to just hiring someone because they’re most suited to the job? Wouldn’t women (or any other disadvantaged person for that matter) rather get a job because they’re the best person for it, rather than because they fulfil a quota? I’d rather have a black, 50 year old blind woman who’s good at her job represent me in government than someone who shares some of my attributes but wouldn’t know a good law if it bit him on the arse. Now some affirmative action advocates are going to stop me here and explain that it’s not about passing over someone who is more suited, it’s only about discriminating when two candidates are equally suited. Equally suited? There’s no such thing! When you look at everything, attendance rates, references, qualifications, interview performance, experience, one candidate will always have the edge, and that’s who should get the job.

But the main reason I despise positive discrimination is that it’s the easy way out. Without it, we’d have a lot of work to do improving access to education, facilitating social mobility and changing hearts and minds so that earlier down the line negative discrimination won’t have had an effect, and there won’t be any need for positive discrimination to make things right at the end stage. As it is, positive discrimination just puts a blanket over all the background work that needs to be done, tweaking the numbers at the end to make it look like everything’s ok, because the alternative would take a lot of time and a bit of effort. I want equal opportunities, not just equal numbers.

The Problem of Evil

So following on from yesterday, I’m going to do a piece on the problem of evil. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s the argument that uneccesary and gratuitous evil exists, and therefore the idea of God held by theists cannot possibly exist, because if an omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent God did exist, then there would be no suffering, because he would want to, and would be able to, prevent it. Hopefully that makes sense.

Anyway there are various ways this is explained away by Christians (I say Christians only because that’s the religious group I’m most accustomed to, I daresay it applies equally well to many other religious groups), depending often on what kind of Christian they are.

Fairly traditional Christians may point to the Fall as an explanation. They say that God created the world perfectly without sin, without death and without suffering, but man turned away from God, and this brought sin into the world. The punishment for sin is death and suffering, so it’s all our fault (as usual in Christianity).

This Fall doesn’t make sense unless you’re a creationist, for a fairly simple reason. If someone uses this as an explanation, all you have to do is ask when the Fall supposedly happened. If they say it happened in the Garden of Eden about 6,000 years ago, you can point to geology and evolution to prove them wrong as usual. But if they’re a theistic evolutionist, it doesn’t fly, because animals were killing each other and eating each other and dying from the word go, there was no time when there was no death, certainly not right the way up until anything resembling humans came around within the last 200,000 years. That’s how natural selection works. When you’re in the middle of a debate it’s quite useful, as Stuart demonstrated once, to ask something like “so when did the Fall happen, before or after the Precambrian?”, because this divides the creationists from the theistic evolutionists. I also used this with a street preacher and he was left saying “erm erm erm” because if he’d said “in the Garden of Eden 6,000 years ago”, then everyone listening would have laughed and walked away.

I did once hear a curious answer which took me by surprise and stopped me using this argument for a while because I thought he’d put a hole in it. A geologist said that it didn’t matter when the Fall happened because whenever it happened, it had ripples of effect both forwards and backwards in time and space. Think about that, he means that it could happen in the future… weird eh? That sounds pretty solid but actually it isn’t, that’s impossible too. If humans did it, and then it had effects corrupting the creation throughout history as well, then that means in some other now-corrupted reality humans must have evolved without death and suffering, and as I’ve said, that’s impossible with natural selection. So the Fall only works if you’re a full-blown creationist.

Another way the problem of evil may be explained away is through Free Will. As you may have read in my last post, God’s Free Will is on shaky ground anyway but let’s carry on regardless. The argument is that God created the world perfectly, but he gave us Free Will and some people have chosen to cause suffering, and that’s the source of evil.

Well, first of all, not all suffering is caused by people choosing to cause evil. What about diseases? What about natural disasters? What about accidents? At this point they may try and cover the gap with the Fall argument, but then you can just go back up to the last argument. One person did try and come back to that with the argument “well, a natural disaster isn’t evil in itself, people being close to it causes the suffering”, which threw me off for a second, but then a bullet isn’t evil in itself, but if I shoot you with it then it is. If people aren’t causing it, then in Christian thinking that leaves God. God is killing people using natural disasters. Brilliant.

Other Christians may explain evil away by saying that evil is caused by Satan, and goodness is caused by God. Well it’s kind of wishful thinking really to attribute all the good things to God but all the bad things to either people or to Satan, fairly arbitrarily. But this argument (and both the above) is fairly easily knocked down by pointing out that God is supposedly omnipotent and whatever is causing this evil, be it people, the Fall or Satan, God should be able to overcome it and prevent suffering. That’s what a loving, perfect God would do.

Wouldn’t it be amazing if someone did something evil, say, shot someone, but then the suffering caused by that evil didn’t happen. Say the victim got shot but was still alive and felt no pain and had no adverse affects. That way the suffering is being prevented but God isn’t affecting Free Will. What if disease and natural disasters happened but didn’t harm people. Then suffering would have been prevented, but the Fall will still have happened. Wouldn’t that be amazing? Wouldn’t that be a good reason to believe in an all-loving God?

I think this is fairly solid but if you can put a hole in any of what I’ve written, or you can think of another way of explaining evil away, go ahead and leave a comment.

God: arsehole

You may know these lines from Dawkins’ The God Delusion:

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

These are very famous words, and Christians etc will often point at them as an example of ‘fundamentalist atheism’, if there is such a thing. But it’s an easy statement to back up, all you have to do is read the Bible with a critical eye and you’ll see the terrible things he does and advocates. He destroys civilisations for next to no reason, he damns humanity for eating an apple, he turns a woman into a pillar of salt for turning her head around, he’d rather have 2 of Lot’s daughters raped by a mob than 1 man. There are all those crazy laws set in place (which aren’t limited to the Old Testament, btw). An example of good behaviour is Abraham preparing to kill his son for no good reason! First of all, surely an omniscient God would know whether Abraham would have done it or not, there was no need for the test. But more importantly, all this God wants is blind obedience, with no critical thinking whatsoever. How is this in our interest?

But that stuff’s easy to pick out, I want to look at the things that get assumed or taken for granted by Christians, things that are so engrained into our culture that we don’t often look at them for what they really are.

So, big number 1 on the reasons God is an arsehole is the problem of evil. I’ll dedicate a whole post to this soon, I think, as I haven’t really touched on it that much, but I think this is a justifiable reason not to believe in God. Christians blame it on the Fall or Free Will (we’ll get onto that soon enough), but neither of those explanations stand up to scrutiny. Maybe I’ll be writing about that tomorrow. If I was God, you wouldn’t have to pray to me to cure your child of leukemia, I’d just do it, or I wouldn’t have let the child get it in the first place.

Anyway, next up is this free will bollocks. Here’s a series of videos which do the job of explaining much better than I can. Be sure to watch all three parts.

God wants us to choose because he doesn’t want a bunch of mindless drones in heaven with him, and yet one of the choices results in a punishment imposed by him. Say I asked you if you wanted chicken or beef, but that if you chose chicken then I’d blow your brains out, would that be a free choice? Not really. Maybe I really want chicken but because of the punishment I choose beef. Is that what God wants? Surely that’s just the same as having mindless drones? I haven’t chosen God, I’ve just chosen not-hell. It’s blackmail.

It’s ridiculous, and just like in the Abraham story, it’s totally unneccesary. Why bother with Earth when he knows who’s going to choose him and who isn’t? Why not just only create people who he knows are going to choose him? Why create people who he knows are destined to burn in eternal hellfire, like me? It’s sadistic.

Related to this point is what’s required for salvation. Remember, God is making the rules here, he supposedly created everything! First of all he needs a blood sacrifice. He can’t just forgive. That doesn’t sound like an omnipotent God to me. In fact it sounds distinctly like the musings of some stone age barbarians influenced by paganism. Secondly according to Christians, the only way to be saved is by believing in Jesus Christ. Not just being good, not helping other people, just believing. If I were God, I wouldn’t have salvation based on belief in something ludicrous despite the lack of evidence, that would leave me in heaven with a bunch of gullible idiots with no critical thinking skills. No, my requirement would be something like “don’t be a prick”. I wouldn’t care if someone believed in me or not.

So God’s an arsehole. In fact, he’s such an arsehole that even if there were proof of his existence, I’d like to think I wouldn’t worship him. I’d sooner worship a complete stranger, the odds are they’re more moral than the God Christians claim to know and love.

Thoughts on science and not-science

PZ Myers posted this excellent video of a section of a standup routine by Dara O’Briain this week, and it covers a few points which I think are pretty pertinent. Here’s the clip:

So first of all, he says that lots of people have no idea about statistics and how they should be used, and subsequently incorrect information gets peddled out by the media. I mentioned this in a post a couple of weeks ago, that some basic skills in stats and probability wouldn’t go amiss and would probably allow some people to see past some superstitions. Next up, he criticises how the media tend to report both sides of a story in a totally uncritical way. The BBC are notorious for this! Every science story that goes up on their website has a few paragraphs at the end of it dedicated to a loony fringe belief with no substance, expecting the reader to make up their own mind with the limited information a 300 word article can provide! Take CERN, for example. The possibility that it could create a black hole which would destroy the planet was taken seriously by a large proportion of the public, even though nobody involved in CERN thought there was the slightest chance, simply because the media portrayed both sides of the story with no critical thought whatsoever.

But Dara hits some nails right on the head. “But there’s this notion that everyone’s opinion is equally valid. My arse! A bloke who’s been a professor of dentistry for 40 years does not have a debate with some eejit who removes his teeth with string and a door!” Damn right! I can’t count the number of times in a discussion with an alternative medicine advocate or a religionist or something, I’ve made a good point and they’ve come back with “well that’s just your opinion”. Well yeah, it is my opinion, but if my opinion is backed up by evidence, and yours is your intuition or a story from a book, then I’m sorry, but mine is just better than yours! Show me some evidence and maybe I’ll start taking you seriously, but not until then.

But at 1.48 onwards he comes out with this gem: “but just because science doesn’t know everything, doesn’t mean you can just fill in the gaps with whatever fairytale most appeals to you!” Damn right! We once had a Christian come to one of our meetings at the Student Humanist Society and say that we all needed to do some philosophy of science because what we know is always changing so we can’t be so sure about trusting in science, using this in some absurd sense to justify their belief in Christianity. How ridiculous! So was this person not only pinning their hopes on the things not yet explained by science as all gap-worshippers do, but also hoping that other things incompatible with Christianity like Darwinian evolution* would be proved wrong by future scientists?!

But this goes even deeper than that, it shows an ignorance of what science is. Science is not just a bunch of stuff that we know about the universe around us, it is largely a method, an evidence-based process by which we can find things out about the universe and everything in it. If current scientific knowledge is proven wrong in the future, it will be through the scientific method itself, win/win! When was the last time the faith-based approach led to a significant advancement in human knowledge? The faith-based approach gave us leeching, witch trials and homophobia, I don’t think we need to hear about anything more from where they came from.

So anyway, a round of applause for Dara!

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.

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.

Chiroquacks vs Simon Singh

I’ve been raving about this since I got the news on Thursday night, and hopefully everyone will have already heard about it, but just in case not, I’ll give a very brief summary and point you off to further comment.

Basically, Simon Singh, co-author of Trick or Treatment, wrote an article last year (removed from the Guardian Website but still viewable here), about chiropractic treatment. Many people think a chiropractor is just a back doctor, but actually that’s not quite true, it’s a very confusing situation involving chiropractic, oestopathy (which I’m not even sure what it is, it seems somewhere between physiotherapy and ‘holistic’ treatment) and physiotherapy. Some spine manipulation can have a beneficial effect and since physiotherapy isn’t always all that effective, it’s much more difficult to draw the line here than in other types of alternative medicine. Chiropractic treatment has caused deaths in young people. What is certain is that the effects of spine manipulation are pretty much limited to the spine and back pain. It doesn’t cure things like asthma or sleeping problems, that’s quackery of the same ilk as reflexology. The following passage is from the article, and the British Chiropractor’s Association decided to sue Simon Singh.

The British Chiropractic Association claims that their members can help treat children with colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying, even though there is not a jot of evidence. This organisation is the respectable face of the chiropractic profession and yet it happily promotes bogus treatments.

And in the preliminary hearing which happened on Thursday, the judge decided (well, no, he decided before the hearing apparently, but I’ll leave that to eyewitnesses), that the use of the word ‘bogus’ here means that the BCA were selling these treatments with full knowledge that they didn’t work. Now the word bogus is attached to counterfeit money and things like that, which are obviously intended to deceive, I could see how he might have said it was easily interpreted like that, particularly combined with the use of the word ‘happily’. Neither on their own really imply deceit but together I could kind of understand that. That’s a linguistic nuance which I was shocked by but I could (sort of, not really) see where the judge was coming from.

Then I went and read the full article. Go ahead and do the same. The passage comes from the third paragraph, and if you read from that paragraph onwards, especially the following (fourth) paragraph, you’ll see that Singh specifically defines his use of the word bogus, clearly stating that he’s calling them bogus treatments because they have no evidence backing them up. Nowhere does he say that the BCA are aware of this. Now go back and try to put another word in there replacing the word ‘bogus’ which states that the treatments don’t work, but doesn’t imply that the BCA were deceitful. I’ve been trying for a while and I’ve yet to come up with one.

So I’m going to link just now to several other sources on the same case (the whole skeptical community is angered by it), most of which are better than this post so I urge you all to go and read some of them.

Jack of Kent has some expertise in English law and has been covering this case. He was present at the hearing, and has a number of other posts on the same case so if you want some more background, take a look around there.

Skepticat is a humanist living in London who was also present at the hearing.

Edit: Another eyewitness account from God Knows What.

Heresy Corner – I think the name indicates what kind of blog that is.

Bad Science Forum thread on the issue (very very long, I haven’t had time to read it yet).

A Facebook Group supporting Simon Singh on this issue. Feel free to join up.

Having read those (particularly the first two), I hope you’ll share my anger with David Eady. How the hell has he got a knighthood when he doesn’t even listen to the evidence in court and brings with him a preprepared statement which doesn’t change with the evidence? What kind of a judge are you? Aren’t you supposed to, you know, ‘judge’, not just ‘decide’?

The implications of this could be massive. How are we, the skeptical community, going to be able to comment skeptically and require evidence for claims, if we’re constantly looking over our shoulder and second guessing how some blinkered judge might possibly interpret what we’ve said. Should we define each word after we’ve used it? Maybe I’ll make a post doing just that to illustrate how ludicrous the whole situation is.

And there was me going to enjoy my post-exam-rush weekend. I’m too pissed off now.