My internet’s down, so I’m back hopping between free wifi cafe’s like I was in September. Hopefully when I’m back in the UK on Sunday I’ll have more regular access, and in the meantime I’m going to make the most of not having facebook as a distraction by getting some work done. But there’s some very important stuff going on. Check out the Quackometer for a great summary of what James Randi has foolishly done and a discussion of the same. Basically he’s admitted that he’s not qualified to know whether climate change is happening or not, but at the same time he’s thrown his lot in with a fringe group of denialists rather than with the scientists who’ve been working on this for decades.

Now this is both good and bad. It’s bad because he’s just given a big tasty bone to the denialists and he’s sullied the name of good skepticism by aligning us with climate change skeptics, who generally operate by quite different standards to the rest of us. We’ve been getting enough of that in the media simply because we’re skeptics commenting on climate change, they seem to assume that we’re skeptical of climate change.

But it’s also a good thing. The majority of skeptics do actually use an argument from authority on climate change. We quite happily defer to the scientists who know what they’re talking about on this issue, unlike most other issues, simply because most of us aren’t scientifically literate enough to form an opinion of our own. This is a good opportunity for skeptics to go off and do the research. It’s a good motive to do something which ordinarily might take a lot of time and effort for something which might not bear any fruit anyway. When I’m back online properly I’ll definitely be reading up a bit more and I’ll be sure to get a post up here about it.

No, not as in actually good evidence that it works, we’re still waiting for that and I daresay we will be until someone throws an alabaster model of a water molecule at the statue of Hahnemann in Berlin and makes him bleed. No, instead there’s been interesting things happening in the evidence-based medicine movement with regards to homeopathy in the last few weeks and I thought I should write something on it for those readers who are perhaps more involved in atheism and humanism than skepticism.

So I was prompted to write this by a video I just caught wind of over Facebook. It’s a very basic introduction to homeopathy by Ben Goldacre (but more importantly his incredible eyebrow waggling) for the Bristol Science Festival in October (I think). I’ve found a few of these basic introductions, and I urge you all to go and watch Here Be Dragons if you haven’t already, and spread it around to people who perhaps aren’t all that involved in skepticism. Anyway here’s the video:

Now it’s a good introduction, but he makes a point right at the very end that I’m not all that keen on. He says, “is it alright to deceive patients in order to help them get better? And that’s something that only you can decide on.” I wholeheartedly disagree with that last part. The whole medical establishment has been moving towards greater openness between doctor and patient for many years now, and it would be a travesty to go back on that in order to preserve patient choice. After all, what’s the point in choice if it’s not an informed one? It sounds all democratic but this isn’t like a preference in a political candidate. There is a very good way to determine which treatment is the best, and that’s the very simple question: does it work? The evidence doesn’t show homeopathy to be any better than placebo, so we shouldn’t be helping people get better through it purely by ignorance. We would have a problem if a doctor allowed a patient to choose meatballs as a cure for cancer purely because they didn’t know any better, and the same should be true with other treatments.

Now I’m sure Ben Goldacre doesn’t really disagree with me here (although maybe not, more on that later), and that he was probably trying to keep it short and didn’t want to go into the more boring arguments, hoping that anyone who thought about it would come to the conclusion that dishonesty in healthcare is a bad thing. But if anyone is thinking about this in a bit more depth, I have a post on this blog about why we shouldn’t allow homeopathy to claim efficacy, even if we know it’s a placebo (and I’d also like to add the point that it’s a bit arrogant to say “we know it’s a placebo, but we’ll let these ignorant people take it anyway because it’ll do them good to keep them in the dark.”). You may remember that I originally didn’t have a problem with homeopathy but changed my mind completely in the space of a few days after reading around the subject. You can read all about that by following this link and starting at the bottom.

The main thing that’s been happening in the last few weeks is the Evidence Check on Homeopathy that is being carried out in the Parliamentary Committee for Science and Technology. There were two sessions, the first one is on YouTube starting here (I’m linking to YouTube because I understand they take videos off the Commons website after a while), and the second one can be found here. I can’t find it on YouTube so that’s on the Commons site, it works best in Internet Explorer because Firefox plugins are a faff.

Ben Goldacre was a witness at the first evidence check as well as Edzard Ernst of Trick or Treatment, Tracey Brown from Sense About Science, Jayne Lawrence, James Thallon, and on the side of the homeopaths Robert Wilson, Peter Fisher, Robert Mathie, as well as Paul Bennett from Boots.

Now skeptics have been all over this like a rash. A glorious, skeptical rash. Paul Bennett’s admission that Boots doesn’t really know whether or not homeopathy works, but they’ll sell it anyway as long as they can make money, was picked up in the mainstream media too, and prompted this open letter from the Merseyside Skeptics Society, which I reproduced a couple of weeks ago. There were some absolutely startling claims made during the proceedings, such as (paraphrasing) ‘a trial with less than 500 participants cannot be statistically significant’, followed by citing a study which only had 25 participants. The other studies cited by Robert Wilson have been most elegantly ripped limb from limb, also by the MSS, so go and read that if you like, it’s well worth reading.

On the whole I thought the committee did fairly well. As usual, Britain’s best MP, Dr Evan Harris, was an absolute star and if you live in the Oxford area, make sure you vote for him, but there was another member who asked ‘is there any evidence that homeopathy does not work?’, evidently not realising what a daft and irrelevant question that was, and IIRC none other than the chair of the committee kept asking repeatedly ‘Can you show one specific example of a peer-reviewed trial which proves the effectiveness of homeopathy?’, even though throughout the hearings there had repeatedly been testimonies saying that even if there was one that showed the effectiveness, it wouldn’t prove it because every now and again you will get an anomalous result. Picking one that showed it worked would be cherrypicking.

In the second hearing there were representatives from the Department of Health and the MHRA. It all fell down on Mike O’Brien, one of the ministers for health, who basically said there were two justifications for homeopathy, the fact that it had the placebo effect (like… any treatment you could possible conceive of), and the fact that there is a significant lobby of people who believe that homeopathy works. He also said that he didn’t need evidence to justify the NHS spending and institutional support for homeopathy, he needed justification to change the policy from its current situation. I really don’t understand that, surely you need to justify spending, not justify stopping it. I was really waiting for someone to ask him what would be sufficient justification for changing the policy. Would he need the whole homeopathy lobby to disappear? Would he like another few meta-analyses showing it doesn’t work? The second part was best ripped apart by Martin over at the Lay Scientist, who I’m sure will have more to say about the head of the MHRA as soon as he recovers from his broken hand.

So I mentioned that I wasn’t sure about where Ben Goldacre stands on some things about homeopathy. The MSS had as their question of the week a few weeks ago:

Should alternative medicine be viewed as a tax on scientific illiteracy?  Do those who know have a responsibility to educate those who don’t?  Should educators make special efforts for people who wear scientific illiteracy as a badge of honour?  Or should medical interventions, legitimate and pseudoscientific, be subject to state regulation and required to back up claims of efficacy with robust scientific data?

It was in response to something written in Bad Science by Goldacre, which I still haven’t read. Now I am certainly not of the opinion, as Goldacre seems to be, that we should let people spend their money on rubbish just because they haven’t read up on what exactly homeopathy is and the latest meta-analyses on whether it works or not. Sorry but it would be like letting people go on a dodgy aeroplane because they weren’t smart enough to get an engineering degree and know that it wasn’t up to scratch. But it’s not that simple, of course, just like any other moral question, so I went with a thought experiment. If I went to a shop and bought bleach and decided to drink it, then that’s my own fault, I suppose that’s a tax on the fatally stupid. But the bottle of bleach would have ‘harmful’ and ‘toxic’ written on the side of the bottle in big letters, and probably tell you not to drink it. The same should be true of homeopathic remedies. Whilst I wouldn’t ban their sale, they shouldn’t be able to claim effectiveness for something that they can’t prove, just like any other product. It’s false advertising if nothing else. As Evan Harris said in the evidence hearing to illustrate a slightly different point, you couldn’t say that paracetamol is effective for heart conditions.

Anyway so this has turned into another mammoth post (sorry), and mainly about things that have been covered elsewhere (sorry again), but well worth putting together for anyone who hasn’t heard about these things. Till next time.

10:23

This coming Saturday, 12th December, there will a protest against Swine Flu vaccines in Edinburgh, organised by the Vaccine Awareness Network (VAN). It’ll start at midday at St Giles Cathedral (well, High Kirk actually, it was only a Cathedral for 33 years in total back in the 17th Century, but that’s not related) on the Royal Mile and march down to the Parliament, finishing about 2pm.

Why am I telling you this? Because I disagree with it, obviously, and since I’m not in the country, I want you to go and ask awkward questions. You can get a more vaccination/science based commentary at ‘…and your electron microscope!‘ and at the Edinburgh Skeptics Blog, the rest of my post is just going to be a rant about the website. Read on if you like that sort of thing.

The anti-vax movement has a lot of people’s lives on its conscience, or at least it should, but this protest seems to be less about the vaccine itself, and more about compulsory vaccinations. When I read that, I was a bit taken aback. I support the vaccine, but I wasn’t so sure about compulsory vaccinations and I thought this post would reluctantly have to support the protest despite it’s probably anti-science agenda. As far as I was aware, there were no plans to introduce a mandatory vaccine. So I looked at the protest’s page (which is quite a mess, they really should have links to the different parts or something) to have a peek at their arguments. It’s a big straw man!

AFAIA there are absolutely no plans to implement mandatory vaccination. The page cites legislation (namely the Civil Contingencies Act 2004)  that allows the government to implement it during a national state of medical emergency. So, in the case of something like the Black Death coming back to haunt us, the government could implement mandatory vaccination against it. This is not going to happen this time, it is nothing to do with swine flu. So far swine flu has had a relatively small number of cases, and the death rate is also fairly low, something like 1% if I remember correctly. It appears to pose less of a risk than normal seasonal flu. They are not going to implement it in this case (and AFAIA they never have done, ever).

They seem to oppose this legislation being used in any case, and I also disagree with that. In the case of a serious epidemic, refusing to get vaccinated puts not only your own life, but the lives of others around you, at risk. Mandatory vaccination should be an option for the government in extreme circumstances.

It’s quite ironic though. They seem to have got themselves all whipped up into a frenzy over swine flu, and still somehow oppose the best known way of preventing it. Meanwhile towards the bottom of the page, there’s a section on what you can do, and the first point is:

DON’T PANIC -THAT’S EXACTLY WHAT THEY WANT. HERE’S WHAT YOU CAN DO TO SAFEGUARD YOUR RIGHT TO CHOOSE.

1. Firstly, stay calm. The vaccination business is run on fear (see swine flu page, recipe for selling flu vaccines, written by the CDC as an example). They want you to feel backed into a corner and as if you don’t have any choice.

What? You’re the ones taken in by the tabloid fear-mongering, the government have been playing down the risks about swine flu! So what is the source of this information about the government implementing vaccines? Well about halfway down the page in big bold capital letters it says:

FOR THOSE OF YOU WHO THINK THAT VAN IS OVER-REACTING, GET A LOOK AT THIS NEWSPAPER ARTICLE!

- followed by an undated clipping, which doesn’t even fully agree with what they’re saying, from the Sunday Star. Yes, the SUNDAY FUCKING STAR!! That bastion of good journalism that has pictures of tits on most of its pages, and which insists on giving almost every sentence its own paragraph! I suppose sentence structure is hard enough, they don’t want to even consider structuring their paragraphs too. According to the website, it’s actually called the Daily Star Sunday, but if it only comes out on Sunday then it’s not daily is it? AntiVax websites tend to be full of this, scaremongering stories from any rag going, as long as it has an anti-vax spin.

Fuck it, I’m wound up now, I’m going to have a look at the rest of the page. This might take a while.

But this kind of mandatory innoculation has a precedent, right? They haven’t just pulled it out of the air. Oh right, it seems that Greece has already introduced it. So the owner of this website wrote to the Greek health minister (same page but just so you don’t have to scroll to the top of the post. It’s about 2 thirds down) to complain and to get more information. She asked among other things why the mandatory vaccination had been implemented. The minister replied saying it hadn’t, and citizens had the right to refuse it as soon as they’d been given the information on it. Her reply contained, “however, why did a 31 July Reuters article say that Greece was mandating the vaccination?” Wow, a news report wasn’t accurate. That never happens. She also asks why the police will be present at the vaccination centres if it’s not to be compulsory. Maybe to prevent disturbances because of the scaremongering that’s been going on? Yet she’s still perplexed as to why they haven’t replied a second time. Maybe they have better things to do.

So then there’s a story entitled “WHO Launches Global Mandatory Vaccination Programme” Here it is:

The World Health Organization has issued a binding ‘recommendation’ to all member countries requiring them to institute mandatory vaccination programs. Under an existing multilateral agreement this formally invokes each state’s pandemic plan and puts coordination under control of WHO. For some European states the pandemic plan includes setting aside government as normal and ruling the country by a special council under control of the EU and WHO. France has already announced that it will effect a move to military rule beginning in September.

The global pandemic vaccination program will begin somewhere around the end of September and last about two months. Many countries are in the process of acquiring from Baxter, Novartis, GlaxoSmithKline and other pharmaceutical companies enough doses of vaccine to vaccinate their entire population twice. They remain quiet about mandatory vaccination, simply saying they will make vaccination ‘available’ to all on a priority basis. But Greece and Switzerland have already announced that their programs will be mandatory and enforced by the military. There are unconfirmed reports that Norway and Israel have done the same. The United States is preparing for military ‘assisted’ mandatory vaccination but has not explicitly declared its intentions to the public.

Source: Columbia Valley News, 14 August 2009.

See the end of that first paragraph? “For some European states the pandemic plan includes setting aside government as normal and ruling the country by a special council under control of the EU and WHO. France has already announced that it will effect a move to military rule beginning in September.” Err… what? I think someone’s having a laugh here… but it’s ok because it was in that well respected international source, the Columbia Valley News, the local community newspaper of Invermere, British Columbia. Funnily enough I googled “columbia valley news” today (December 9th) and this story, from August, was the second result. You may not know how Google works, basically it puts the pages in order according to how many links it has on other pages, that’s what allowed a googlebomb to work in the past. What that means is that people have been linking to this story left right and centre. Say, you don’t suppose that this story hasn’t been covered anywhere else, do you? I mean it’s implausible that something as important as this would be left to the Columbia Valley News to take all the credit. I suppose the BBC didn’t deem it important. Or maybe they’re in on the conspiracy too? Whaddya say, folks?

There are other stories on that website, most of them totally unrelated and dealing with how much money pharmaceutical companies make or when one time some out of date vaccines were given to people but noone was hurt, as well as an advert for alternatives to pet vaccines. Really relevant to what the protest is about, you know? But there’s another section I’ve already mentioned about what you can do. Most of it is just letter writing and things, but point number 5 reads:

Consider home schooling your child. Proposed mandates appear to be around school entry, and under 16’s can be pressured in school to consent to a vaccine in spite of parental objection.
School is not a legal requirement, only education is.

There would be a limit to what the state can do in the case of a home educated child, since he is out of the state system – particularly if he has always been home educated and never gone to school, as then there is no legal requirement to notify the education authority.

Wow, that’s extreme, especially since school vaccinations are optional. Here’s number 6, watch out for the really dodgy stats work.

9% of parents in England choose not to vaccinate at all, that’s 5 children in every 100. Another 15% refuse MMR. That’s approximately 20-25% of the population who refuse some or all vaccines. There are far too many parents with this objection for the JCVI to sue, and too many of us willing to fight, for them to be successful.

At the very least, we would be entitled to exemptions like parents get in other countries that mandate, namely philosophical, medical or religious exemptions.

Erm, I’m not sure what their source for this is, but I’m pretty sure that the 15% who refuse MMR would include the 9% who refuse all vaccines. Plus the MMR link to autism has been well and truly put to bed by a wealth of studies. Unfortunately this hasn’t made the news headlines the way the original story did so people still don’t realise they’re talking rubbish. Additionally, the piece claims 20-25% of the population. It’s only talking about parents, not the rest of the population, and I’m willing to bet that the original stats only included parents of children entering primary school. It’s nothing like 20-25% of the population!

This is turning into yet another ridiculously long piece so I think I’m going to cut it short here. I hope you can get along to the protest, and if you can, why not address some of the points I’ve raised here to the people there? See if the ordinary person going along knows why they’re there, and most importantly, if they bring up something and you’re not sure about it, google it, get the source, and think about it for a bit! Don’t take it at face value, read around the subject. The Bad Science Blogs aggregator is usually a good place to start.

Warning: this blog post will be quite very long. A Christian friend of mine sent me this. I’ve seen things like it before, lots of emails get sent around Christian circles and I’m privy to precious few. I suppose they help with the persecution complex. Anyway so it’s a piece written by Ben “science leads you to killing people” Stein in 2005, with a bit added on by someone else, apparently. I’m going to see if I can take it apart.

I am a Jew, and every single one of my ancestors was Jewish.  And it does not bother me even a little bit when people call those beautiful lit up, bejeweled trees, Christmas trees.  I don’t feel threatened.  I don’t feel discriminated against. That’s what they are:  Christmas trees. It doesn’t bother me a bit when people say, ‘Merry Christmas’ to me.  I don’t think they are slighting me or getting ready to put me in a ghetto.  In fact, I kind of like it. It shows that we are all brothers and sisters celebrating this happy time of year.

That’s fine, I agree with him completely here, I have no problem with people saying Merry Christmas to me. Even if I did consider Christmas an explicitly Christian holiday (and I don’t), it’s the sentiment that counts. Similarly I have a friend who almost always says “goodnight and God bless” when he leaves, and most of the time he corrects himself and apologises to me. I don’t mind it at all and he doesn’t have to apologise, it’s the sentiment that counts.

But this is interesting. Here we have a Jew saying he doesn’t mind the season being called Christmas, a tolerant image. Presumably, since he then goes on to wonder when America became an atheist nation, he’s accusing atheists of being intolerant and waging a war on Christmas. The kind of people who do this usually have an issue with Christmas trees being referred to as ‘Holiday Trees’ and people saying ‘Happy Holidays’. There are countless videos of Bill O’Rly? bemoaning the fact that Christmas has now become secular in name as well as in substance. So it’s almost like Stein is saying he doesn’t mind it when it’s called something from a different religion, whilst presumably at the same time he’s siding with the Christians who do mind when it’s called something from a different religion.

But what is it that’s intolerant about the term holiday as opposed to Christmas? It’s not like atheists are going around forcing other people to replace the term Christmas with ‘holiday’. In reality all they’re doing is recognising that there are other holidays, religious and non-religious, happening at the same time, and that Christmas is no more important than any other. That’s no more offensive to Christians than recognising that Muslims exist. They really do whinge a lot more than they should when you think about it.

It doesn’t bother me at all that there is a manger scene on display at a key intersection near my beach house in Malibu   If people want a crèche, it’s just as fine with me as is the Menorah a few hundred yards away.

I don’t like getting pushed around for being a Jew, and I don’t think Christians like getting pushed around for being Christians.  I think people who believe in God are sick and tired of getting pushed around, period.  I have no idea where the concept came from that America is an explicitly atheist country.  I can’t find it in the Constitution and I don’t like it being shoved down my throat.

Erm, big straw man… noone claims that American is an explicitly atheist country. What they do say is that it is a secular country, where people are free to express their religious beliefs or lack thereof, without the government advocating any one of them. I also have no problem with people having a nativity scene or a Menorah, that’s their choice and it’s an expression of their beliefs, go ahead. I know very few atheists who would have a problem with such a private display.

I do know some atheists who have a problem with public nativity scenes (as in nativity scenes put up by the government), and I think they’re perfectly within their rights! The government is spending their money on explicitly religious displays. That is a clear violation of the separation of church and state, so they definitely have a case, especially in the States. Personally I’m not all that arsed about that either, they’re going to spend the money on some kind of decoration, I don’t care what it’s like, and I’d rather concentrate on infringements that actually matter, but I certainly understand why these people care.

Or maybe I can put it another way: where did the idea come from that we should worship celebrities and we aren’t allowed to worship God as we understand Him?  I guess that’s a sign that I’m getting old, too..   But there are a lot of us who are wondering where these celebrities came from and where the America we knew went to.

Woah woah, who said you’re not allowed to worship God? Noone who advocates a secular state (which includes many religious people) says that. Stop making stuff up to get offended about! And noone really says you should worship celebrities (if you’re wondering where the idea of celebrities came from, it’s at the start of the original version broadcast on CBS, which got edited out of this emailed version). I also think the celebrity culture that exists now is terrible. People get admired for things that aren’t all that admirable at all, and earn millions in the process, purely by luck of the draw rather than anything you could call work.

So, bear in mind that from here on, this isn’t Ben Stein writing as the piece that gets emailed around claims it to be, someone’s added it in. But I’ll treat it as it was when it was sent to me. I’m also going to miss a few bits out that aren’t at all that relevant or interesting, you can read the full version here (the part at the top and the part at the bottom together).

Billy Graham’s daughter was interviewed on the Early Show and Jane Clayson asked her ‘How could God let something like this happen?’ (regarding Katrina) Anne Graham gave an extremely profound and insightful response.  She said, ‘I believe God is deeply saddened by this, just as we are, but for years we’ve been telling God to get out of our schools, to get out of our government and to get out of our lives.  And being the gentleman He is, I believe He has calmly backed out.  How can we expect God to give us His blessing and His protection if we demand He leave us alone?’

First of all, if the Bible is anything to go by, God is not a gent. If  you believe that God created everything, then you can’t say that he just ‘let’ this happen, as if Katrina was somehow an act of negligence. People certainly didn’t do it, he did, if he is responsible for the creation of the world. It was a natural disaster. I also question whether an all-loving God would leave the Katrina victims to the hurricane, even by their own wish. If someone told me they wanted me to leave them alone, and then I saw a car coming their way, there’s no way I’d just turn away and leave them to it. So it’s hardly ‘extremely profound’, seems to me like she’s barely thought about this at all.

In light of recent events… terrorists attack, school shootings, etc..  I think it started when Madeleine Murray O’Hare [sic] (she was murdered, her body found a few years ago) complained she didn’t want prayer in our schools, and we said OK.  Then someone said you better not read the Bible in school.  The Bible says thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, and love your neighbor as yourself.  And we said OK.

Actually, you didn’t say OK, you bitched about it for years and continue to do so. But I don’t think bad things suddenly started happening the day Maddy Murray O’Hair won the case (yes, it was a court case according to the Constitution, not that you’d know it from the way it’s described here) to have obligatory prayers banned. The history of bad stuff happening goes a lot further back than that. I’m not sure why they mention her murder here. Maybe they’re implying that God did it to her. That’s not true, a crazed lunatic did. I also think the way they cherry-pick what the Bible says, and then awkwardly shoe-horn it into this paragraph, is a bit pathetic. There are very few good moral teachings in the Bible, and they represent a very small proportion of its total content.

Then Dr. Benjamin Spock said we shouldn’t spank our children when they misbehave because their little personalities would be warped and we might damage their self-esteem (Dr Spock’s son committed suicide).  We said an expert should know what he’s talking about.  And we said OK.

How the hell did we get onto corporal punishment? Is this just a collection of right-wing agenda issues? Are we going to turn to gun ownership and the death penalty next? Whoever added this bit needs to wipe their mouth, they’re foaming a bit. Oh and, by the way, Dr B Spock’s children are both alive. One of his grandchildren did commit suicide, but he was apparently schizofrenic. Ironically that same article mentions how a psychologist who advocated corporal punishment had a son, who actually did commit suicide, not that it matters.

Now we’re asking ourselves why our children have no conscience, why they don’t know right from wrong, and why it doesn’t bother them to kill strangers, their classmates, and themselves.

Bloody hell, scaremongering much? Does this guy (I’m presuming it’s a guy, I don’t think the feminists will mind considering who it is)  think nutters didn’t exist in the past or something? Get him a job at the Mail!

Funny how simple it is for people to trash God and then wonder why the world’s going to hell.  Funny how we believe what the newspapers say, but question what the Bible says.  Funny how you can send ‘jokes’ through e-mail and they spread like wildfire but when you start sending messages regarding the Lord, people think twice about sharing.  Funny how lewd, crude, vulgar and obscene articles pass freely through cyberspace, but public discussion of God is suppressed in the school and workplace.

I believe certain newspapers more than the Bible because those newspapers and its writers have a history of being factually correct. They are also scrutinised and we can check what they say for ourselves, unlike the Bible. And there are plenty of stories of people being suspended or fired for sending obscene material whilst at work. Back in the real world where Christians aren’t being persecuted, people are often afraid of pulling their employees up on evangelising, in case the Christian Institute get on their backs.

Funny how when you forward this message, you will not send it to many on your address list because you’re not sure what they believe, or what they will think of you for sending it.

Oh here we go, the defining feature of all spam email. “Send this to 59 people in your contacts list in 43 seconds or a creepy swamp monster will crawl into your bed at night and shit on your face before slitting your throat!!!one!!”

Pass it on if you think it has merit.  If not then just discard it… no one will know you did.  But, if you discard this thought process, don’t sit back and complain about what bad shape the world is in.

Right, that makes sense. Accept my batshit crazy argument that bad things happen because we told an invisible sky-fairy to fuck off, or you can’t comment on why bad things happen.

My Best Regards,  Honestly and respectfully,

Ben Stein

Honestly? Respectfully? Ben Stein? None of thats true!

So a bit of a mix on the fictional War on Christmas, the problem of evil and lying for Jesus. Not bad for one email.

You will probably have heard that this week the Swiss had a referendum on minarets, the towers often seen above mosques, and that the majority voted in favour of banning their construction. I understand from a conversation with a Swiss friend of mine that it all started when a minaret got planning permission, it went up through the appeals process and somehow made it to a national referendum.

I am absolutely shocked at this decision, but I’m even more shocked by the reactions of some people in the UK. People who are normally rational. It is a thoroughly illiberal and in my opinion discriminatory decision on the part of the Swiss voters.

One of the first arguments I heard was about the noise level of the call the prayer, which is often done from the minaret, and I have a multi-faceted response to this. Firstly in Switzerland the issue was not about the noise levels, I understand that barely came up at all. This is not why 57% of voters backed the ban.

Secondly, in Edinburgh I live and study close to the Central Mosque, which has a minaret, and I’ve never once heard a call to prayer. Either it’s so quiet that it doesn’t bother anyone, or they don’t do it. In any case it’s quite a nice addition to the architecture of the area, and reflects the mixture of culture in the area of the city, which has a fairly high proportion of muslims. There are also plenty of churches there, many more churches than I imagine would be proportional to the number of Christians. Meanwhile, where I live in Malaga, I’m quite close to the Cathedral which rings on the hour, and just before 6pm there’s a 5-minute long peal. I don’t mind it.

In addition, the noise level is no reason to prohibit the construction of minarets. You could just have a law about noise levels. If the problem is not the minaret but the noise level, then why have a law about minarets? Similarly there is nothing stopping a mosque still making the call to prayer without a minaret, so it doesn’t even solve the problem. I understand that Switzerland already has very strict noise control laws so noise really isn’t the issue.

One of my contentions with the decision is that it’s totally unneccesary. A blanket ban on the construction means that if someone wanted to build a minaret in a field, miles away from anyone, so that noone is affected by it except the people who want to be, they wouldn’t be able to, for no good reason. As it was, if someone was affected by the construction of a minaret, they could complain during the planning permission procedure, and chances are it wouldn’t be built. Indeed the BBC report linked to above says that the vast majority of minarets didn’t get planning permission as it was! This result just means that the minaret would also be banned in areas where the local residents don’t mind.

So after that I’ve seen some more worrisome objections to the construction of minarets. Suggestions have been made that an area where local residents don’t mind may be Saudi Arabia or Pakistan. I had a conversation on this issue with my brother who said that he didn’t feel comfortable around mosques, because they’re in there plotting how to blow us up. Others have said that mosques don’t fit in with European architecture. So we get to the real motives here, and although I don’t usually like the term, I will happily call it Islamophobia. People don’t want minarets because they don’t want muslims in Europe. Fuddy-duddies are afraid of change and they want to send muslims back to where they came from, even though many were born right here in Europe, and many will not agree with the theocratic regimes in those Islamic countries. I imagine one of the reasons many muslims do come to Europe is because we enjoy these kinds of freedoms.

Do we not want to live in a Europe where minorities are protected from discrimination? The big danger with democracy, as I’m sure we all know, is to avoid a tyranny of the majority. That is exactly what we have in this situation. I have no problem expecting religious groups to follow the same rules as everyone else, as I’m sure I’ve demonstrated on this blog on many occasions. But this law specifically targets muslim architecture, a special case is being made against muslims. It does not merely ban large towers that could potentially be used for making a lot of noise, which would also affect all kinds of bell-towers. That kind of law I could understand, although I think it would be unneccesary. As it is, this is nothing more than poorly-disguised xenophobia.

Just a brief one today, a little bit of pisstaking. I spent 5 days back at home for a funeral, but had to get some work done while I was there. To this end, I decided to go the Blackwell’s in Liverpool to find a book I needed. They didn’t have it because their foreign literature section is tiny. Anyway my mum said she’d pick me up so I waited outside (in the cold – won’t be heading back in a hurry) with a coffee, and whilst I was standing there, a guy came over and handed me a flyer. This is nothing unusual on university campuses.

Anyway so the flyer read “If you don’t believe in God, then you’re in for a shock!” Interesting, I thought, (not) expecting to find some irrefutable evidence inside the leaflet. Instead it was just repeating what the Bible says about Jesus’ “cross-work on Calvary” and that believing in him is all the proof you need.

So I said to this guy, “oh, the Bible, I’ve read that.”
“Do you believe it?” he said.
“No, I’m an atheist, a humanist actually.”
“Oh,” he replied sneerily, “I see you’ve hardened your heart like the Pharoah did, then.”

I was quite taken aback by his tone (and that he of all people was apparently accusing me of a lack of critical thinking), but luckily he brought forward an example that I knew quite well, so I replied “Well I’m glad you brought that up, because actually, the Pharoah didn’t harden his heart, the Bible says that God did it.”

“No he didn’t, not the first time.”
“Really? Because I have the Bible quote, you can look it up if you want. It’s in Exodus 4.”

So he pulled out a Bible from his bag and I went through Exodus 4 and picked out the quotation, well before Moses meets the Pharoah. God says to him, “When thou goest to return into Egypt, see that thou do all those wonders before Pharaoh, which I have put in thine hand: but I will harden his heart, that he shall not let the people go.”

And again, before the second meeting with the Pharoah, God says it again “And I will harden Pharaoh’s heart, and multiply my signs and my wonders in the land of Egypt. But Pharaoh shall not hearken unto you, that I may lay my hand upon Egypt, and bring forth mine armies, and my people the children of Israel, out of the land of Egypt by great judgments.” He’s essentially saying “I’m not going to let Pharoah agree, so that I can punish the Egyptians”. Nice guy, this god. Don’t know why he doesn’t just punish them anyway, doesn’t seem too far out of his character.

So anyway, this guy kept flicking backwards and forwards in his Bible, trying to look for some time before Exodus 4 when Pharoah hardens his own heart. He couldn’t find it, so he slammed his Bible with a huff and walked off without a word. Sometimes I love it when I know the Bible better than they do.

A nd I will harden Pharaoh’s heart, and multiply my signs and my wonders in the land of Egypt.

(7:4, 13) “I will harden Pharaoh’s heart.” God hardens Pharaoh’s heart for the second time. Who hardened the Pharaoh’s heart? (7:4) “Pharaoh shall not hearken unto you, that I may lay my hand upon Egypt.” God will make sure that Pharaoh does not listen to Moses, so that he can kill Egyptians with his armies. (7:5, 17) “And the Egyptians shall know that I am the LORD.” (Who else could be so cruel and unjust?)

7:4 But Pharaoh shall not hearken unto you, that I may lay my hand upon Egypt, and bring forth mine armies, and my people the children of Israel, out of the land of Egypt by great judgments.

You may have heard recently that the Parliamentary Subcommittee on Science and Technology heard a panel of oral evidence about homeopathy. It’s a very good watch and I recommend it, even if just to see how subcommittees work (they ask some very good questions). You can watch it here on the House of Commons website, although it’s a bit fiddly with plugins and things, I had to try several times before it worked, and do bear in mind that the player takes a few seconds to load.

Anyway as a result of this, I understand that the Subcommittee will be recommending to the government that they stop funding homeopathy and that they do not make an exception for homeopathic products in terms of licencing.

One of the members of the panel was Paul Bennett from Boots, who stated basically that as long as people want the homeopathic remedies, Boots has no problem selling it. The Merseyside Skeptics Society has written an open letter to Boots which has already been picked up by Skepchicks and Richard Dawkins. I’m posting it here because I agree with it.

There is also more information about this case on the new blog A Glasgow Skeptic, which I’ll also be adding to my blogroll.

An Open Letter to Alliance Boots

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The Boots brand is synonymous with health care in the United Kingdom. Your website speaks proudly about your role as a health care provider and your commitment to deliver exceptional patient care. For many people, you are their first resource for medical advice; and their chosen dispensary for prescription and non-prescription medicines. The British public trusts Boots.

However, in evidence given recently to the Commons Science and Technology Committee, you admitted that you do not believe homeopathy to be efficacious. Despite this, homeopathic products are offered for sale in Boots pharmacies – many of them bearing the trusted Boots brand.

Not only is this two-hundred-year-old pseudo-therapy implausible, it is scientifically absurd. The purported mechanisms of action fly in the face of our understanding of chemistry, physics, pharmacology and physiology. As you are aware, the best and most rigorous scientific research concludes that homeopathy offers no therapeutic effect beyond placebo, but you continue to sell these products regardless because “customers believe they work”. Is this the standard you set for yourselves?

The majority of people do not have the time or inclination to check whether the scientific literature supports the claims of efficacy made by products such as homeopathy. We trust brands such as Boots to check the facts for us, to provide sound medical advice that is in our interest and supply only those products with a demonstrable medical benefit.

We don’t expect to find products on the shelf at our local pharmacy which do not work.

Not only are these products ineffective, they can also be dangerous. Patients may delay seeking proper medical assistance because they believe homeopathy can treat their condition. Until recently, the Boots website even went so far as to tell patients that “after taking a homeopathic medicine your symptoms may become slightly worse,” and that this is “a sign that the body’s natural energies have started to counteract the illness”. Advice such as this directly encourages patients to wait before seeking real medical attention, even when their condition deteriorates.

We call upon Boots to withdraw all homeopathic products from your shelves. You should not be involved in the sale of ineffective products, because your customers trust you to do what is right for their health. Surely you agree that your commitment to excellent patient care is better served by supplying only those products whose claims can be substantiated by rigorous scientific research? Or do you really believe that Boots should be in the business of selling placebos to the sick and the injured?

The support lent by Boots to this quack therapy contributes directly to its acceptance as a valid medical treatment by the British public, acceptance it does not warrant and support it does not deserve. Please do the right thing, and remove this bogus therapy from your shelves.

Yours sincerely,
Merseyside Skeptics Society

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.

Today is the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin’s best-known work, On the Origin of Species. Here’s a short piece called the Tree of Life, narrated by the inimitable David Attenborough, as some sort of celebration.

I apologise for the lack of action here, I’m getting a bit snowed under at uni and my grandmother died this week so I’m a bit under the weather. Of course being abroad and away from those I love doesn’t really help, but I’m doing ok.

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.