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.

I can’t help feeling that the Lothians NHS system is out to get me. My whole week has been like a pantomime. This is a long story and if anyone’s bored, of a delicate disposition or suicide-prone, they shouldn’t read it.

Last Friday, I woke up to find that my ear was blocked, and after trying to unblock it I came to the fairly logical conclusion that something must be stuck in there. So I thought I’d play it safe went to the university doctors that afternoon instead of having a go myself, and she peered inside to see something white (probably a cotton bud). Still no idea how it got there, it’s pretty strange and one of the stupidest “injuries” I’ve ever had before - although I did once break my toe ‘fixing’ an arcade game machine. So the doctor tried to take it out with a pair of tweezers and failed, pushing it back in. She then referred me to the ENT ward at St Johns, which is about a 2 hour bus journey away, because she didn’t feel so confident doing it herself, not being a specialist.

I got on the bus, and in true pantomime style the driver was going about a million miles an hour, and the old lady sitting next to me kept clinging on to me for dear life as we went round the corners. I arrived at St Johns, thinking I’d be there for an hour at most and then I’d be on my way back home to enjoy my weekend revising. No, there I was, alone in the waiting room for over an hour, when I got called in and a very junior doctor straight out of med school tried to get it out with a sucker tube thingy. That didn’t work either and it hurt like hell. I’ve been there for almost 2 hours now and it’s not budging, so the doctor says “I think it would be a good idea if you stayed overnight so a more senior doctor can look at you in the morning.”

I’ll be damned if I’m spending a night in hospital on a throat ward with spluttering old men keeping me awake all night when I’ve got work to do, so I said “I’d rather go home, I’ll come back here first thing in the morning”. In hindsight I should have just stayed on the bloody ward, but I failed to see how a doctor with an extra letter after his name would be more qualified to get something out of my ear, surely a mechanic would do a better job. 2 hours on the bus later I got back home and got on the internet, to see if there was anyone in Edinburgh who might be able to help me, not 2 hours away, and to my horror I discovered that Lauriston Place, not 5 minutes from my flat, has an ENT clinic. So I thought I’d ring them in the morning and go there instead of St Johns.

So I rang the next morning and the person on the other end told me that the appointments office is only open weekdays. I looked at my watch and it was 9.30am, too late to get myself down to St Johns in time to catch the senior doctor. No matter, I can wait till Monday, I’ll call Lauriston then and get an appointment.

So Monday comes around and I call Lauriston first thing hoping I’ll be able to get an appointment that day. No. The jobsbody on the other end says “oh you can’t book an appointment here, you’ll have to go and get your GP to ring St Johns and get an appointment at the clinic here…”. So with a funny feeling I was going around in circles, I went back to the university doctor during open access that morning, and they got me an appointment at Lauriston for this morning, Thursday. So after another 3 days of not being able to hear anything that goes on on my left side (not ideal for a barman), I went there this morning.

Would you believe it, I got the same junior doctor at the clinic who couldn’t help me at St Johns. I’m banging my head against a wall here and she still can’t get it out, but luckily there’s another doctor next door who she thinks can help. So she goes and gets him and he’s one of those old school patronising bastards who treats both me and her like 4-year old schoolchildren, but at least he’ll be able to help, I’m thinking. Again, no. He takes a look and after noting that I’ve got very strong cerumen glands, haven’t I (why yes doctor, I suppose I have), he puts some weird jelly stuff in my ear that will supposedly reduce the swelling, and gives me an appointment on Monday when hopefully someone’s going to do something about my friggin ear! Meanwhile I’ve got an oral exam tomorrow morning, which won’t be fun because I can’t hear half of what people are saying to me in English, never mind Chinese.

Just a bit of a rant.

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.

The more observant among you may have noticed that I’ve added Planet Humanism to my blogroll. It appears to be basically a humanist feed reader. I’ve also been added there, so any time I post here, it should come up on there. Cool!

I urge you to take a look around on there, it’s got loads of articles and links which any humanist would find useful.

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.

You may recently have heard of the film called Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Google it, it’s about Intelligent Design. The usual bollocks, but somehow this one’s made it mainstream, I won’t bore you.

Anyway this website was recently brought to my attention by The Friendly Humanist and Skepchicks. It’s basically a collection of responses to the issues brought up in the movie, many from respectable sources such as the New York Times and www.richarddawkins.net.

I’d urge anyone with a blog or website to link to it, let’s get it higher on Google so anyone who searches for it’ll find the truth.

It’s so important that it’s often given the title “The Fourth Institution of Government”, and yet sometimes the media is so frustrating, I’ve decided to have a rant at it. As you may know I’m at home at the moment, there isn’t an awful lot to post about and I’m just slightly bored so we’ll see how this goes. The keyboard’s also playing up so excuse any typos.

So what started this? My parents read the Daily Express, and when it arrived on Saturday morning, there was the usual sensationalist headline: “MILLIONS FACE ARCTIC EASTER” (well… seeing as there’s about 60 million people in Britain, you’d expect it to be about that many). Yes the Daily Express would have you believe that we all had to batton down the hatches and prepare for the worst. Each one of us may lose several family members and Britain will never be the same again. And yet here I am on the other side of a 4 day weekend and the weather’s actually quite nice, I only noticed about… 10 minutes of rain tops, all weekend, although admittedly it was quite cold.

Reading into the article, “…Britons will face the worst Easter weather in 25 years…” That’s hardly surprising since it’s the earliest Easter in 95 years. The weather isn’t any worse than usual, it’s just because Easter’s come earlier. Duh! And for the last… as long as I can remember, this “news”paper has had a picture/headline of either Madeleine McCann, Princess Diana or a member of the Royal Family on the front page. It’s as if there’s nothing more newsworthy.

Now of course none of this would matter except that the media is the only way most people know what’s going on, and of course so many people have somehow lost the ability to think for themselves that editorials in such rags are now public opinion. You can tell just by looking at the opinion polls each of these papers run every now and again. The Sun would have us believe that 99% of the population want to bring back the death penalty. My arse to that.

Take last night. I was having a conversation over the dinner table and someone mentioned Australia. My over-opinionated, overweight, over-drinking hypochondriac dad came out with the remark “well, it’s the only place to go!” I asked him what he meant and he said “well they’ve got it all right with immigration, not letting the bastards in.”

I replied “oh right yeah, because immigrants are the source of all this country’s problems…” I was being sarcastic, but before I knew it, everyone else at the table was agreeing with me as though I was serious. I wouldn’t mind, but none of them have ever met an asylum seeker, they know several immigrants but have nothing but praise for them, and yet they’re still complaining that “they’re stealing our jobs!” “They’re stealing our benefits!” (at the same time? They must be cleverer than I gave them credit for). All their opinions about anything vaguely political is drawn from what they’ve read in the tabloids, with no consideration given to it.

Don’t people realise that blaming immigrants for everything is downright dangerous? It’s what the Nazi’s did with the Jews before WW2! And why don’t we take into account the irony that if my dad actually did move to Australia, he’d be an immigrant himself! Of course he doesn’t see himself that way, so really, this is nothing but thinly veiled racism. He doesn’t want to keep immigrants out, he wants to keep the paki’s out.

I hope Richard Murdoch’s happy when he starts World War 3.

Today’s humanist society meeting was very interesting. We had a man with us who’d never been before, and he soon told us that he’d had a pretty bad time and that he’d been diagnosed with a terminal illness, and he’d been going to all different religious organisations, and now he was looking at humanism for answers. He asked some really good questions and brought up some issues that I want to discuss here a little. It’s going to be a brief one because I’m due in work fairly soon.

Anywho this man (let’s call him John for anonymity’s sake) was scared, quite frankly, by the humanist viewpoint that there’s nothing after death, it’s just oblivion. David, our rather blunt philosopher-in-residence, replied that there’s nothing you will experience that is oblivion because you won’t be there, so it’s not that bad.

Personally I gave my own slant on the issue, which I’ve probably mentioned somewhere on here before. For me, although there is nothing physical or “spiritual” after death (Tim at the Friendly Humanist would probably not like me using the word ’spiritual’ in this way, contributing to religion’s monopoly on it), you live on in people’s memories of you and the
legacy that you leave on the world and on people around you. You would hope that these memories and your influence would be a positive one, but maybe not.

The conversation took many twists and turns (including a hell of a lot about brain surgery, can’t imagine why), but somewhere along the way we got onto the topic of the meaning of life, or to quote exactly from John, “why am I here?” Again, humanists don’t agree on everything, but I’m sure a lot of them would agree with me that since there’s no creator, noone has sat down and made a purpose for each one of us to live, or given a reason for life more generally. So your reason for living can be whatever you think is important, and we agreed that “making people’s lives better”, as we put it, was a very good start. John was a healthcare worker so I’m sure he’s done this in many ways.

John asked if we thought it was necessary to have children in order to leave a positive legacy on the world, and each one of us replied with an emphatic ‘no’. Although in purely scientific circles the reason each one of us lives is because of a long line of predecessors, and so it could be argued that our purpose in life is to continue the species and to “live on” through them, personally I think it has less to do with the continuation of your DNA, and more to do with how you’ve influenced people, regardless of whether they’re of your bloodline or not (or to put it in Dennettite language, “less to do with genes and more with memes”).

I’m glad we had this discussion. It showed us that although the humanist worldview is perfectly capable of providing comfort and guidance to someone in quite a difficult position, so far organised humanism has found it difficult to replace the community feeling that religion benefits from. It’s my vision that in the future this will change.

To finish this off, I’d like to quote Richard Dawkins from the opening lines of his book Unweaving The Rainbow, which are very meaningful for me, and I’m sure a good number of other humanists feel the same way.

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could be here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, who are here.”

I think I’ll leave it at that for today.

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

The former attorney-general, Lord Goldsmith, has suggested that people (particularly school children) should be encouraged to take an oath of allegiance. Read the story here in The Times or on BBC online.

Now of course the discussion online has largely been to the line of “I’m not swearing allegiance to that bloody Queen”, and I agree 100%, how in a modern liberal democracy can we justify someone being born into such institutional wealth, power and influence?

But my objection goes further than that. If I’m going to swear something, it’ll be something that I believe in, and I’ll say it in my own way. Having millions of drones saying the same thing will reduce any “oath” to mere words without meaning. What happened to independent thinking? It’s dogma in its highest form.

There’s something a little more sinister as well. The BBC article mentions towards the end that:

“Young people who volunteer could receive a reduction in tuition fees, while others who work in the community could be given a small council tax rebate.”

I personally find this disgusting, and self-defeating. Not only do I think it’s wrong to effectively punish people just because they have an ounce of integrity and won’t recite something they don’t believe in, but I think this paves the way to differentiate between “truly” British people and the rest, which is a very bad idea, and will only lead to further division of society, possibly fuelling extremism and pseudo-apartheid states. Furthermore, bribing the public into taking an oath will make it meaningless. I’d swear an oath to Satan if it meant my student debt was reduced, because it doesn’t mean anything to me whatsoever!

I read up a little on the topic, and was very surprised to see that Canada, that bastion of common sense, already has one! It reads:

“I, ……………, do Solemnly swear (affirm) that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, Queen of Canada, Her Heirs and Successors according to law, forever. So help me God.”

I’m glad that the part at the end about God is optional, but at the same time, this oath must be made by some certain judges, the armed forces, mounted police, the Queen’s Privy council, and most importantly, by MP’s. Indeed MP’s who refuse to take it are not allowed to sit in the house! Disgusting!