EUSA AGM – the other motions

So my last post was about the Bibles in Pollock Halls motion going through the EUSA AGM tomorrow night (again, if you’re at Edinburgh Uni – GO AND VOTE!), but in this one I’m going to take a briefer look at the other motions of interest that are going before the meeting.

First up, and this’ll be the one I concentrate on, is the No Platform Policy motion. Basically the proposers of this motion want it so that anyone belonging to an organisation deemed racist, homophobic, sexist etc should be banned from giving talks or holding debates on campus. I’ll just pull out a select quote:

“EUSA believes:
4. That there is a difference between supporting freedom of speech and promoting or inviting speakers who are very likely to incite hatred on the specified grounds;
5. That therefore, freedom of speech can be respected and maintained whilst actively not giving a high-profile platform to an individual or group who is very likely to incite hatred and has been known to have incited hatred on the specified grounds;”

This is kind of true if it means what I think it does, but irrelevant. It’s true that although organisations have freedom of speech, that doesn’t mean that EUSA has to provide them with a platform, and freedom of speech is perfectly respected if EUSA doesn’t offer that platform. However, that is quite different from banning a group on campus from providing a platform. Yes, the societies we’re talking about do form part of EUSA, but they have their own regulatory systems, and they’re not bound to represent the majority of students on campus, like the elected bodies of EUSA are. In my opinion banning a student society from hosting a controversial speaker is an infringement on freedom of speech, it would be banning someone from giving a platform who actually wants to, quite different from what is stated in this quote I’ve taken out.

I also think this is something of a bad idea. Banning a speaker merely drives the group underground and stifles debate, when the best thing we could hope for is to have the debate and have them well and truly trounced by people with better arguments. It’s very much an idea of Mill’s, but we should encourage opposing ideas to go against each other, it’s the best way to arrive at the truth. Stifling debate in this way could actually make the problem worse.

So, does this make me a hypocrite for opposing allowing Bibles, but also opposing banning fascists? Absolutely not. You’ll remember my argument about the Bibles centred around the religious texts being imposed on people who didn’t want them. I had nothing against the CU or anyone else distributing Bibles on campus to people who wanted them. On campus, ideas should be able to flow freely, that’s what university’s about, but putting them into people’s homes is a different matter. It’s not inconsistent to say that people who want to go to these talks can go, and it’s not being imposed on anyone who’s not interested, and in the same way anyone who wants to protest it can go.

The next motion is Boycotting Israel. I’m afraid the motion is extremely long. I appreciate that there’s a lot to get in, but they’re going have to read this out to be able to vote on it and people are going to get bored and vote against it just for that reason. The motion basically says that Israel is acting illegally through the occupation of Palestine (that much is indeniable), and that EUSA should boycott, disinvest and sanction Israel and its produce, as well as any Israeli institutions. I can’t say I disagree. What’s happening in Israel is nothing less than modern-day apartheid, they’re explicitly treating the Palestinian people differently (most recently there was a report on how Palestinians don’t have enough water for their basic needs, whereas Israelis in the settlements are still able to water their lawns – most of which comes from reservoirs on Palestinian land), getting money from the natural resources of occupied territories including the Golan Heights, and bombing civilian infrastructure. We know that international pressure from NGO’s can make a difference, as we saw in South Africa, so we should be doing everything we can to turn Israel into a pariah state so that it stops what it’s doing. Unfortunately I don’t see this motion going through, there was quite a big backlash against the occupation in George Square.

The Smoking Kills motion is an effort to ban the sale of cigarettes at EUSA outlets. I think students aren’t children and they can decide whether they want to smoke or not. Meanwhile EUSA could use the revenue. They do have a couple of good points about how tobacco companies act in the third world, but tobacco products aren’t like Nestle products, there aren’t any alternatives like there are other chocolate brands. If the proposers of this motion were to ban specific tobacco companies that are known to act badly in the third world, rather than just a blanket ban on cigarettes altogether, I think they’d have a better argument. I also don’t see this going through, there are too many smokers in the student population.

Finally, and most importantly, is the Enabling motion. This one carries a weird amendment with it, some of which doesn’t seem to have an awful lot to do with the motion itself. It basically means that future issues can be decided either at a general meeting as usual, or in a referendum (most likely to be held online). This will prevent problems with the meetings not being quorate, and will enable more students to take part in the democratic process, which can only be a good thing. I only have one problem. It is not clear what will happen if we have the general meeting voting for a motion, and the referendum voting against it. But I’d still vote for it.

I spoke too soon

Just when I thought this year would be humanism-free, guess who showed up at my door but the Mormons! They were apparently harrassing some guy who lived in my flat before me (so cleverly he decided to move out so they couldn’t find him), and rather than inviting them to come back to the flat, I took the address of the temple and when they’ll be there, and it’s tonight about 8, so stay tuned.

I also have to give a presentation to my class in Spanish, so I’ve decided to do a shorter version of the one I gave to the Skeptics on homoeopathy. Many of my class are French and German, and since it’s so popular there I’m hoping we can get a fiery discussion going. Of course we’ll all be speaking in a foreign language so it won’t get quite so heated, but maybe something’ll happen.

Briefly…

Sorry for not posting for the last couple of weeks. I’m currently in a hostel in Malaga starting my Erasmus year, and I’m very busy starting classes and looking for a flat, so I don’t have time to post. To be honest I’m not sure how much I’ll be posting this year, there doesn’t seem to be any humanist-related stimuli here, at least, although I move to Coimbra in February so maybe there’ll be more there. I’ll keep looking for a local humanist group.

In the meantime there are discussions continuing on my last 2 posts, “Problem of Evil” and “God: Arsehole” so check them out and contribute if you have a point of view either way. I’ll also be posting on the Edinburgh Exchanges Blog periodically, so have a look.

New addition to the blogroll

Stuart, former president of the Humanist Society at the University of Edinburgh, now has his own blog which is sure to include thoughts on psychology, plenty of film and book reviews, and rants on religious arguments. Check it out, it’s called Time out of Mind.

Very quickly

Simon Singh has apparently been denied permission to appeal against Justice Eady’s ridiculous ruling. More over at Jack of Kent, and I’m a little busy now so go there for more information.

An act of God?

The regime of nonsense up in the Hebrides are demonstrating their fundamentalist side once again. The first Sunday ferry from Stornoway to Ullapool is scheduled to take place tomorrow, not due to aggressive new atheist reformists as the nutters would probably have you believe (or maybe they’re so backwards they refuse to believe that the new atheists exist), but due to popular demand instead. However, the ferry that was originally going to carry out the crossing, called The Isle of Lewis, yesterday broke down with exhaust problems, and now of course they’re all saying that it’s an act of God. One warned that bad things will happen, saying that God has the power to sink a ferry (really? I’ve never seen him do anything). Personally I put this at about the same level of fundamentalism as the Bishop of Carlisle who said the flooding a few years ago was a punishment from God for our moral decadence, or the Westboro Baptists who claim the deaths of American soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq are God’s punishment for the “fag-enablers” amongst the American people. Pretty much the same thing on a different scale of offensiveness.

But let’s take a closer look, shall we? If God really wanted to show us puny humans and stop the Sunday ferry service, why didn’t he sink the bugger? Why didn’t he burn the ferry station to the ground like he did with Sodom and Gomorrah? Why didn’t he cause a massive storm every Sunday so the ferry would have to be cancelled? Something a bit more obvious than, you know, something that could’ve happened anyway. More importantly, why couldn’t he get the day right?  If it broke down on Sunday itself, maybe they might have some kind of basis for claiming that God is angry, but two days earlier? That’s just sloppy workmanship! What’s the point in serving a God who doesn’t even know what day of the week it is? As it is, another ferry is just going to do the crossing. Mistakes like these do not belong on the resume of a supreme being. I’m actually not surprised he got the day wrong, Christians can’t even get which day the Sabbath is right (hint: their stupid book says it’s Saturday).

If it was the work of God, well he’s certainly fucked up, hasn’t he? As one of the commenters on that story said, why didn’t he make one of the Somalian pirate ships break down? Why didn’t he do something useful? If he’s so concerned about keeping Sunday holy, why haven’t all the shops that are open on Sunday burnt down, or at least (seeing as he’s insistent on taking the lazy route and not doing much at all) come across a series of complications on Sunday that they don’t encounter for the rest of the week? (What happened to you God? You used to be cool. You used to be all about the fire.) It’s so stupid that these nutcases think they can interpret the mind of a nonexistent entity through the malfunctions of seabound public transport systems.

But I do find this line of reasoning a bit weird. It’s a perverse version of the kind of logic people try to use to justify their belief in God, similar to in this video. You’ve probably heard it before, something like “oh I believe in God because I prayed that I would get a new job/get better again and I did.”  But usually this is only used if good things happen, because otherwise bad things happening would be evidence that God didn’t exist, or that God was evil. They don’t normally mention the bad things because it works against their argument.  It’s kind of like a conscious recall bias. But here the bad things are evidence that God does exist and that he’s angry. Whatever happened to this all loving God who’s waiting to take me into his arms if I just say the word? When did this God turn to doing bad things to prove (or rather not prove) his existence? How does an omnibenevolent being even do bad things?

But like I say, the ferry’s going ahead, and a small amount of normality will return to people’s Sunday lives. Hey, here’s an idea? Why don’t we let people sign a contract saying they want to observe the Sabbath on Sunday, and then if their house burns down, or they need an air ambulance, we can just say no because that’s work. Or, even better, why don’t we charge the Sabbatarians with false imprisonment. They’ve been keeping people cooped up on their island one day a week for how long now? Hmm… food for thought.

Simon Singh fights on

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

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

Postmodern parading

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

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

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

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

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

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

Weddings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New links

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