Wait a cotton-picking minute: about marriage

The religious and religiously inspired are obsessed with telling us who we shouldn’t be allowed to marry.  Most of this is homophobic invective as you’d expect: their plan is to use the law to institutionalise their particular idea of morality. 

We atheists and secular humanists often (and rightly) talk about how religions shouldn’t interfere with marriage.  Marriage is no longer a religious institution in many parts of the world.  We have secular wedding services and can get married with very little ceremony.  Moreover, in many places, Marriage has nothing to do with sexual behaviour: marriage is no longer a de facto license to have sex and few people (in Britain at least) frown very much on sex outside marriage these days.

I’m all for keeping religion out of marriage, but what we don’t seem to talk about so much is keeping government out of our marriages too.  What possible valid role does government have in deciding who can marry whom other than insisting that the partners all consent?

Marriage is a contract administered by government, according to government terms,  We don’t get to negotiate those terms.  It’s only a marriage if we agree to those terms (and in the UK those terms include heterosexuality).  Since people can live together in any way they wish without actual marriage, what is its purpose?  Well, in the UK there’s stuff about who inherits when one partner dies.  In the US, there’s insurance related stuff.  These are important things, denied to some people because the government doesn’t recognise their commitment to each other as marriage.

Taking the administration of that contract away from government would serve two purposes. 

First, it would turn the contract into what it is: a declaration of rights and responsibilities that you take on and give up when you get married.  The marriage would be defined in terms of those rights rather than in terms of things like sexuality or the number of people in the marriage.  Everyone agreeing to a marriage contract would have the same protection regardless of circumstances. 

Second, it would make it impossible for the religious to interfere with marriages.  They couldn’t appeal to any institutionalised idea of morality other than simple fairness for all parties entering into the marriage.  They couldn’t hold governments to ransom and governments (as I suspect our current government in the UK might be trying to do) couldn’t leverage religious views to gain votes regardless of actual policies.

I think we atheists and secular humanists should challenge our governments’ role in marriage rather than those silly religionists’.

I wonder why we don’t talk about this more.

Inexplicable thing

What is this?  I mean, what IS it?

You want to ban men from wolf-whistling? That's a cute idea, sweetheart

OK.  I’ve taken seven or eight hundred deep breaths.

Behold this.

A group of militant feminists want to ban all men from wolf-whistling and calling women 'darling'.

What group is this?  Rick Dewsbury doesn’t elaborate because it’s an American group and therefore nothing at all to do with EU regulations, which he later tries to conflate it with. Let’s look at what this group cares about:

Hollaback! is a movement dedicated to ending street harassment using mobile technology. Street harassment is one of the most pervasive forms of gender-based violence and one of the least legislated against. Comments from “You’d look good on me” to groping, flashing and assault are a daily, global reality for women and LGBTQ individuals. But it is rarely reported, and it’s culturally accepted as ‘the price you pay’ for being a woman or for being gay. At Hollaback!, we don’t buy it.

I don’t buy it either. But Rick Dewsbury thinks that women who feel like they’ve been attacked are “a band of bony-fingered killjoys” who would “happily have all men carted off to a hell-hole prison in the Mexican desert to be tortured until they accept their hellish sins.”

Rick Dewsbury thinks that women who don’t like to be objectified are not the sort of women he’d like:

One can only imagine that they sit around in WI style meetings sticking pins into voodoo dolls of men as they plot their bitter quest to create a dull and overly-regulated world.

The idea that people of all sexes deserve the same respect is the exact opposite of making the world dull.  It is buying into the fact that the world and its people are interesting.

Dewsbury on wolf-whistling: 

Just because a few sensitive little sweeties have taken offence they want to ban everybody from enjoying themselves.

Everybody, eh?  The point here is that women generally say they don’t enjoy it and look what happens: ‘men’ like Rick Dewsbury say that women who don’t enjoy being sexually objectified are spoiling mens’ fun.  What’s wrong with those bitches?

The rest of the article goes on in the same way.

With police numbers already stretched to the limit, we don't need them bogged down even more with pathetic complaints from pushy women.

Yep, it’s the women being pushy.

We're in grave danger or creating a police state full of Clockwork Orange style robots.

Yeah, that’s the 'danger’ of treating women with respect.

The Daily Mail has somehow outdone itself

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2112142/International-Womens-Day-Plans-ban-wolf-whistling-men-saying-darling.html

I honestly can’t think of anything to say.  If you need me to say anything, you shouldn’t be reading this blog.  Holy fuck.  And the comments.  Jesus Christ Almighty, the comments.

*Jumped* the shark? O’Brien *is* the shark

Mainstream religion never doesn’t want it both ways.  Its proponents want everyone to think ordinary mainstream religion is moderate and compassionate and not at all associated with the barbarism of old holy books. But at the exact same time they want to force everyone to do what they say.

This is why clergy from archbishops down admit in private that miracles are silly, then insist from the pulpit the very next Sunday that they are literally true.

Those of us outside the religious community call this Lying For Jesus.  The theological gents justify it in various tedious ways.

Cardinal Keith O’Brien has a solid gold hat.  He seems pretty pleased about it. He’s not very pleased about gay marriage, however.

He likened the legalisation of gay marriage to the legalisation of slavery:

Imagine for a moment that the Government had decided to legalise slavery but assured us that ‘no one will be forced to keep a slave’.

“Would such worthless assurances calm our fury? Would they justify dismantling a fundamental human right? Or would they simply amount to weasel words masking a great wrong?”

Let’s see.  Let’s actually tease this apart, shall we? 

We’d be outraged if slavery were legalised because it is an astonishing offence against the people enslaved. The victims are those whose rights are denied. For reasons hardly anyone would ever argue with (even though, of course, the Bible shows that Yahweh clearly expects the faithful to keep slaves). 

O’Brien’s analogy suggests a similar outrage about gay marriage. But who is the victim? Well, we know the answer by now.  It’s O’Brien and his cohorts who feel they are being oppressed if homosexuals are allowed to marry.  If homosexuals are allowed to marry, O’Brien and his cohorts are being treated no better than slaves.

He says a whole lot of unbelievably idiotic, hateful shit from the safety of his solid golden hat.  I don’t have time to go into it in as much detail as I’d like, so let me just cite this excellent article by Nelson Jones.

I disagree with one thing in particular: mainstream religion is the shark. It’s outraged when people do things it doesn’t approve of, while all the time pretending something about universal love.  We seem conditioned to think of mainstream religion as not extreme.  Fuck you, O’Brien. It’s extreme to say hateful things about a bunch of people. It’s extreme to arrogantly decide that there’s one way people should behave and that they are reprehensible if they behave otherwise.

Nelson Jones’ article is good, but O’Brien hasn’t jumped the shark, he’s just revealed where he wants to bite people.

Guess who said this in 1984

"We in the United States, above all, must remember that lesson [of the Holocaust], for we were founded as a nation of openness to people of all beliefs. And so we must remain. Our very unity has been strengthened by our pluralism. We establish no religion in this country, we command no worship, we mandate no belief, nor will we ever. Church and state are, and must remain, separate. All are free to believe or not believe, all are free to practice a faith or not, and those who believe are free, and should be free, to speak of and act on their belief."

It was RONALD REAGAN. I shit you not at all.

The man was batshit insane, but you wouldn't get a republican saying anything like this these days. You wouldn’t get a democrat saying it either. It's the sort of thing we all hoped Obama would say, waste of time that that hope was. I even had a naïve hope that the atheist Nick Clegg would have a crack at secularism since he promised he would before the election. Well done, Nick, you were out-secularised by RONALD FUCKING REAGAN NEARLY 30 YEARS AGO.

Who could possibly have imagined that we'd be looking back at *Reagan* as an example of moderate, sensible, constitutional speechmaking?

Kudos to the scriptwriter who managed to get this through the stupidwall, I guess.

Quite good, quite good…

See it all here.

I can’t quite agree with the last panel.  Not that everyone on the Internet is a Jerk, that’s pretty clear, but my last word on the matter would be different.

The problem is not that the pastor doesn’t understand why we’re jerks about it, it’s that he doesn’t understand that for the most part, we’re not being jerks at all. 

The offense he takes at our antics are due mostly to loss of privilege.  They’re used to unearned politeness so when we refuse to capitulate, they see it as a scurrilous attack by contrast. 

They’ve had a pretty good run of it and can’t really complain now the gig is up.  So my final reply would probably be quite a lot more childish.

NO, NOT BLACK LEAF, NO, NO! I’M GOING TO DIE!

Marcie, get out of here, YOU’RE DEAD! You don’t exist any more.

I know I’ve written about this before and so has virtually everyone else, but there’s a vicarious joy in seeing other people discover it which is almost irresistible. Recently, new people have been caused to witness it in all its glory for the first time and their blank incomprehension and ridicule cheered me up.  I’m talking about a Chick Tract, of  course, and while I could have picked virtually any one to ridicule, this is one of my favourites:

http://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/0046/0046_01.ASP

Fantasy role-playing games lead to occult worship and actual real magical powers!  If only I’d known that when I played those games. THINGS WOULD HAVE BEEN DIFFERENT.

If I’d know that D&D was INTENSE OCCULT TRAINING, I’d probably have put more hours in.

My excuse from now on whenever anyone asks me to do anything is definitely going to be “I can’t, I’m fighting the zombie.”

I love the suicide note too: I love the way Marcie signs it to avoid confusion over which suicide in the vicinity it referred to.  Maybe people who leave suicide notes do that, I don’t know, but I always expect to see some kisses after the signature.  And who is holding the note, anyway?  Nobody in the story has sleeves like that.

I also find it interesting that Debbie’s first spell is one to control her father.  Do you think the real terror is showing here?  And of course it’s a male who saves Debbie from her destructive life by ordering her to go to a meeting and then another male who saves her very soul.

The final scene is fantastic.  Where did they get all that D&D stuff? It’s huge bonfire! There must be a tonne of stuff in there!  And the preacher bloke seems to be worshipping the fire. Confusing.

Fantastic.  Here’s another brilliant one.

The dark forces of skepticism: president of the BCA talks about the Simon Singh case

In 2009 the British Chiropractic Association (BCA) sued Simon Singh for libel.  Simon wrote a piece in the Guardian which included the following passage:

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

He then went on to explain exactly why he was confident in calling these treatments “bogus”.

The BCA really didn’t like that word “bogus” and much of the trial centred on what it means.  Simon could have backed down.  The UK libel laws are such that even winning a case could incur very large costs to be paid by the defendant!  It was at considerable risk and with a great deal of bravery, then, that Simon chose to defend himself rather than retracting the “bogus” and apologising.

Simon eventually won the case and along the way generated a huge amount of global attention to the fact that UK libel laws are in such need of reform.  The Libel Reform Campaign has achieved significant success and reform seems to be underway.

Now the president of the BCA, Richard Brown, has spoken about the affair which is reported here.  He says some….astonishing things. For example, there’s this:

In a move largely unexpected by many, rather than sue the newspaper, the BCA sued Simon Singh personally for libel.In doing so, the BCA began one of the darkest periods in its history; one that was ultimately to cost it financially,reputationally and politically.

At first glance, this looks as though Brown is admitting that suing Simon rather than the Guardian was cowardly, hostile and a blatant attempt to silence a critic rather than writing a wrong.  It looks as though he regrets the decision and feels that the BCA is poorer for having made it.  But read on and it’s clear he’s not saying that at all.  The ‘dark period’ refers to the fact that they lost and the hullabaloo that surrounded the case.

The action galvanised the UK and world media. Never before had the
media focused its attention so much on the profession, nor had been given the opportunity to subject it to so much vitriol.

See how he considers himself and his profession the victims here? He’s barely getting started along that route.

With what they saw as one of their own being hauled over the legal coals amidst claims of an assault on free speech, an army of scientists, sceptics and comedians was mobilised to disgrace, degrade and demolish the chiropractic profession. Cabinet ministers, BB C journalists and erstwhile Members of Parliament also joined the fray, determined to pitch in and use the case to reform what they claimed were Britain’s draconian libel laws.

It’s curious, isn’t it, that believers always think that criticism is necessarily orchestrated and coordinated?  I have an alternative explanation: people were interested in it. Everyone suddenly realised how insane UK libel laws are, which is an interesting and outrageous thing to learn.  At the centre of the kerfuffle were medical claims which might be false, which is also interesting and outrageous. If the Daily Mail has taught us anything, it’s that people are interested in medical stories, Plus, of course, there was a freedom of speech issue: the reason the BCA sued Simon instead of the Guardian was that they (wrongly) thought they could scare him into capitulation, because they thought he wouldn’t have the resources to fight the case, even if he thought he’d win.  So the BCA was using the law strategically to shut down criticism of Chiropractic. If they’d won, would it mean that nobody could criticise bogus claims again? People are interested in that kind of stuff.  It really wasn’t a concerted attack on Chiropractic which, frankly, nobody really cares very much about.

In using the case as a powerful vehicle to promote his Sense About Science campaign, Singh’s crusade mobilised a dark force of UK sceptics who suddenly found their raison d’etre, shifting their
attention from the fairy tales of homeopathy to the cure-all claims of chiropractors.

We’re a dark force?  AWESOME.  We’d already found our raison d’etre, of course.  We’re skeptics.  We’re against bogus claims because we’re for reason and because we’re against people getting hurt by fantastical medical claims. I won’t say it wasn’t fun rattling Chiropractor’s cages, but it was a drop in the ocean of what we do every day.

Following a call to action, an army of PC pilots and laptop lizards began a war which was to lead to one in three UK chiropractors facing formal disciplinary proceedings from its regulator, the General Chiropractic Council.

It’s interesting that Brown seems to think a ‘call to action’ is a bad thing.  Is he blaming Simon specifically?  Simon certainly became the centre of a movement for libel reform and a lot of us wanted to help with his case.  He spoke at events like TAM London (standing ovation) and wrote about his case in various places.  I suppose this could be considered a call to action, although I don’t recall him actually asking anyone to take any specific action. It’s also interesting that he thinks we started the ‘war’.  But more distasteful to Brown seems to be the fact that those new-fangled computers were involved.  As well he might: someone (unfortunately I don’t remember who) wrote some software which searched Chiropractic websites for claims they are not allowed to make and reported violations to the General Chiropractic Council.

Brown seems to take particular outrage in this.  He sees those Chiropractors who were making illegal claims as somehow being the victims and appeals for sympathy toward those Chiropractors because of the stress they faced.

The GCC faced fitness to practice hearings on a scale previously unknown in the healthcare regulatory world.

Yes, because there were genuine complaints!

Chiropractors were under assault. As the process rumbled on, and Singh crowed from the rooftops following a favourable judgment in the Court of Appeal, one in three chiropractors was facing the misery of prolonged formal regulatory proceedings.

Brown really doesn’t seem to get the point that it is the purpose of a regulatory board to rule on complaints.  The complaints made were not (at least for the most part) trivial.  They were genuine complaints against illegal claims.

Following a robust legal defence mounted by the BCA on behalf of its
members, over 91% of the allegations against chiropractors were dismissed as being not proven.

Brown is being somewhat disingenuous here.  As the complaints began to arrive, the BCA sent out warning emails to its members, which were leaked.  They warned members to take down their sites immediately, remove the dodgy claims and any leaflets in their waiting rooms that might make sure claims.  So I’m sure that by the time the GCC came to rule on the matter, the sites would be clean.

Brown then reflects on the case’s impact on the profession.  He blames a schism between the ‘good’ Chiropractors who use science and evidence (who are they, exactly?) and the old-school woo-based ones.

It is no longer good enough in 2011 for us to expect chiropractic to survive on outdated dogma.

But it was good enough before?

The resurrection did too happen

Ah Easter-time. Never mind the business with the pancakes and chocolate, we all know the true story of Easter, don’t we? Jesus died for our sins, of course.  Or rather, the vicarious sins of Adam and Eve which God foisted on every human since in a fit of childish pique. And Jesus died to wash those sins away. I don’t know how that’s supposed to work or why it was needed. If God wanted to cancel original sin, couldn’t he just go ahead and do it? 

And then Jesus cheated by coming back to life after 3 days. Or was it 2 days and 2 nights (John 20:1)?  Or 3 days and 2 nights (Luke 24:1, Mark 16:2, Matthew 28:1)?  All of which, by the way, contradict Jesus’ own statement in (Matthew 12:40) that he’d be dead for 3 days and 3 nights.

Then Mary and Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and an angel rolled away the stone (Matthew 28:1-2).  Unless it was Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Salome and the stone had already been rolled away (Mark 16:1-4). Or perhaps it was Joanna and an unnamed woman rather than Salome (Luke 24:10).  Or then again, perhaps it was just Mary Magdalene by herself (John 20:1).

Mary both touches Jesus (Matthew 28:9) and is simultaneously not permitted to touch him (John 20:17). Once Mary has finished at the tomb, she runs to tell the disciples the good news (Matthew 28:8, Luke 24:9, John 20:18) although to be fair she also said nothing to anyone because she was afraid (Mark 16:8).

When the disciples arrive at the tomb, there’s an angel there, having a nice sit down outside (Matthew 28:2) who tells them to hurry to Galilee (Matthew 28:6-7). However, there was also no angel, just a young man sitting inside the tomb (Mark 16:5). At the same time, there were actually two men, who were standing up and who specifically tell the disciples not to leave Jerusalem (Luke 24:49). Of course, what really happened was that the first time Mary visited the tomb, it was empty, but then she came back and there were two seated angels who only told her not to cry.  Then Jesus himself – not the angel/s or young men – told her about the resurrection and nobody gets told to go anywhere (John 20:13-17).

Jesus then appears to a widely differing cast of characters in a bewildering range of locations either 2, 3 or 5 times including either the 11 surviving disciples or 12 disciples (even though Judas was already dead). Or, according to John, 10 disciples, since of course Thomas wasn’t there.

So now you know the story of the resurrection, by far the most important event in the New Testament.  We know it’s true because of all the detailed accounts in the Bible.  And we know all the accounts are simultaneously true despite being entirely contradictory because (II Timothy 3:16) says that the Gospels are the revealed world of God and therefore absolutely correct in every detail.

This happened: The sins of the Fathers

On 18th February, Richard Dawkins reported a curious conversation with Adam Lusher of the Sunday Telegraph, who called him to ask some questions.

At the end of a week of successfully rattling cages, I was ready for yet another smear or diversionary tactic of some kind, but in my wildest dreams I couldn’t have imagined the surreal form this one was to take.

Richard had good reason to suspect a diversionary tactic: critics had been at it all week.  The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Science and Reason released the results of an Ipsos/MORI poll into the attitudes of members of the UK public who call themselves Christians. The poll showed that these attitudes tend to differ greatly from those of the lobbyists who claim to speak for them.  This upset a lot of Christians who – unable to argue with the figures, launched ad-hominem attacks against Richard himself.  For example, one of the questions in the poll asked Christians to name the first book of the New Testament (Matthew) from a selection of four.  39% of Christian polled didn’t know. 

The response to this of former canon chancellor of St, Paul’s in London, Giles Fraser, was to ask Richard on Radio 4 whether he could name the full title of Origin. He said he could, then:

“‘On The Origin Of Species’ … Uh. With, Oh God. ‘On The Origin Of Species.’ There is a subtitle with respect to the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life.”

Which is pretty close.  However, it was leaped on by various idiots as ‘deeply embarrassing that he couldn’t remember the exact title and he invoked the name of a deity!

For example, here, here and here.

So Richard was expecting something along these lines.  But instead Adam Lusher had researched Richard’s family background and discovered that his great, great, great, great, great grandfather had owned slaves and he wanted to know ig Richard felt guilty about it. He replied:

“Your ancestors probably did too. It’s just that we happen to know who my ancestors were and perhaps we don’t know yours.”

He also quoted from Numbers 14:18 about the sins of the father being visited upon the children to the third and fourth generation before ending the call to get back to work. 

Almost immediately, Lusher interrupted him again with another call, during which he suggested that since natural selection has a lot to do with genes, Richard might have inherited a slavery-supporting gene from his ancestor

I’m sure there’s no need to go into the patent stupidity of this idea except to say it amounts to a defamatory suggestion that Richard might support slavery with evolution to blame, naturally).  But Lusher wasn’t finished: his next suggestion was that Richard should pay reparation for the actions of his ancestors.

Richard was left feeling it was highly likely that this nonsense would be killed by any vaguely decent editor.  But the Telegraph did indeed print it.  Then the Daily Mail printed the same story with, naturally, some of the detail cut out.  The article also includes this charming image:

with the caption:

Ancestors of Richard Dawkins are believed to have been linked to slavery

It’s worth noting that these articles have been widely condemned, even in the comments on the Daily Mail article and even by people who don’t like Richard Dawkins.  Just about everyone seems to see the decision to publish this smear was a bizarre and ill-advised one.  Personally, I suspect the editors knew what they were doing.

The idea that Richard should be held accountable for the actions of his ancestors is of course ludicrous.  He didn’t choose his ancestors and since they died in the 17th and 18th centuries, there was hardly anything he could have done about it. As for paying reparation, to whom, exactly? And what purpose would it serve?  And what’s next? Do we investigate everyone’s family tree to see if their ancestors owned slaves?  Why limit it to slavery?  It’s hard to imagine anything more ridiculous.

But the point, of course, was two-fold.  First, to distract attention from the results of the poll. They don’t like the answers and can’t rationally deny them so they want to cover them up instead. And second, they want to fling some mud at Richard, knowing that some of it will stick.  Even in the minds of many who see the articles as unfair, an association between Richard and slavery will have been made.  The articles have encouraged a false view of Richard as living in luxury on the profits of slavery. This is going to occur to a lot of people when he’s mentioned in the future. They won’ remember that they thought the article was unfair, they’ll remember the association with slavery.

And that’s why the articles are so deplorable. It’s not the stupidest thing that’s been said about Richard. It’s not the most hateful.  It’s not even the biggest lie. What’s so bad is that the ‘journalists’ and editors knew perfectly well that the articles were nonsensical and completely unfair.  They knew they’d be widely condemned. But they ran them as tactical pieces to cover up the results of a poll because they didn’t like the results, and to smear Richard.  It’s so depressing because we know it will work.

The UK government is above the law because it says so, allows mandatory prayers in council sessions

We thought we’d won.  A High Court judge ruled that Bideford Town Council couldn’t insist that (Christian) prayers be part of their regular meetings. And quite right too: what does religion have to do with meetings about….roads…and…allotments….and….whatever else it is that town councils occupy themselves with?  What is prayer supposed to achieve?

It’s supposed to intimidate people, that’s what.  It’s intended to make it more difficult for people who aren’t Christians to participate in public administration.  Do you think it might be more difficult for a councillor to gain support for an initiative judged traditionally non-Christian directly after a Christian prayer?  Do you think councils are above including words in their prayers that would bias decisions?

That’s why religion has no business in government, including local government and that’s why Justice Ouseley ruled that the council shouldn’t hold prayers as part of its meetings.

Council members can pray as much as they want, of course.  The Christian ones could easily have a pre-meeting to pray if they wanted to. Everyone could pray silently to whatever god they wished before during or after the meeting..  But the ruling said that prayers shouldn’t be part of the meeting.

Our Communities Secretary Eric Pickles has simply cancelled this ruling.  He, personally, has decided that it’s perfectly fine for Christians to dominate the agenda at council meetings.  He thinks that Christians’ views are more important than anyone else’s and has made sure councils can discriminate against non-Christian views.

"By effectively reversing that illiberal ruling, we are striking a blow for localism over central interference, for freedom to worship over intolerant secularism, for Parliamentary sovereignty over judicial activism, and for long-standing British liberties over modern-day political correctness."

How many times do I have to say this?  It is not illiberal to complain about government forcing us to do things we don’t agree with. Its democracy. It is not right for government ministers to to invoke hat they call religious views to trump other people’s viiews.  That is simply the ultimate corruption.

My country had the chance to do something amazing and instead it fucked it up so badly that it made things far worse. I am so ashamed.

Religion’s place in government

Robert Winnet writes in the Telegraph:

In an historic visit to the Vatican, Baroness Warsi will express her “fear” about the marginalisation of religion throughout Britain and Europe, saying that faith needs “a seat at the table in public life”.

That. Right there.

Bringing religion into public life can only possibly mean trying to impose your beliefs on other people and force them to behave how you want. These beliefs, of course, have nothing to do with what’s actually objectively good for people; it’s all about unsupported nonsensical myth, usually very antagonistic toward large numbers of people.  When governments get involved in religion, the result is always the same: conflict, discrimination, suffering, all because of some footling differences between sets of nonsensical rules based on things that aren’t true anyway.

The minister, who is also chairman of the Conservative Party, says: “My fear today is that a militant secularisation is taking hold of our societies. We see it in any number of things: when signs of religion cannot be displayed or worn in government buildings; and where religion is sidelined, marginalised and downgraded in the public sphere.

It is not militant to demand that one’s government treat everyone fairly. All we want is for government to stop taking people’s idiotic beliefs seriously and treat everyone the same.  That’s militant? 

I hate how apologists always try to turn the argument back on us: every one of the incidents I’ve seen where religious jewellery has supposedly been banned from the workplace has turned out to be….quite the reverse.  It hasn’t been about intolerance of religious iconography, but a blanket ban on jewellery which includes crucifixes and Stars of David and so on.  It’s the religious who are demanding special treatment, not atheists. 

There have also been recent cases of public sector workers being banned from displaying Christian symbols at work.

Oh really?  What are those cases? Are there any cases or is this just something that ‘everyone knows’?  I suspect very strongly that these ‘cases’ will entirely evaporate under the slightest scrutiny,

“For me, one of the most worrying aspects about this militant secularisation is that at its core and in its instincts it is deeply intolerant. It demonstrates similar traits to totalitarian regimes – denying people the right to a religious identity because they were frightened of the concept of multiple identities.”

Warsi paints a pretty horrible picture of atheists while at the same time preaching tolerance.  She doesn’t seem to understand the contradiction.  I don’t know a single atheist who’s intolerant of religion. We tolerate it all time time.  We don’t care at all if people want to worship imaginary gods. We just don’t want those beliefs to dictate how we live our lives. And we’re the intolerant ones?  We’re the ones advocating totalitarian regimes?  We’re the ones who are frightened? By “religious identity”, Warsi seems to mean the ability to impose views, not the ability to possess them.

David Cameron welcomed the visit. He said: “Our relationship with the Holy See is an important one.”

Why?  What would we lose if the relationship were to suddenly end? I can’t see how even Catholics would be affected in the slightest and the rest of us would probably benefit. We wouldn’t have to pay for any more popes to visit, for one thing.

“You cannot extract Christian foundations from the evolution of our nations any more than you can erase the spires from our landscape,” she will say in her speech.

And nobody wants to.  Nobody denies that there’s a tradition of Christianity in the UK. It doesn’t mean we have to take it seriously now.

“Where, in the words of the Archbishop of Canterbury, faith is looked down as the hobby of 'oddities, foreigners and minorities’. Where religion is dismissed as an eccentricity because it’s infused with tradition.”

Not because it is infused with tradition.  Because it is stupid.

John’s Cole and Sentamu

John Cole writes:

In fact, everywhere you look these days, if Christianity or religion is getting a mention, it means something ugly is happening and someone somewhere is being victimized, marginalized, or otherwise abused.

He’s right.  He’s talking about people like the execrable Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, who claims that he and his god (how does he know?) both value homosexuals, but just think they shouldn’t have the same rights as heterosexuals.  This is a man who thinks that a government’s attempts to remove restrictions on marriage is a dictatorial act; an absolutely unfathomable position, since dictating what other people are allowed to do with their private lives is exactly what he wants to do.

Sentamu might have argued against gay marriage on the grounds that his bible regards gay sex as an abomination. But he didn’t do that for two reasons:

• He’d have to consistent. He’d have to condemn the eating of pork and shellfish.  He’d have to campaign against people who trim their beards or wear synthetic fibre.  He knows that all this stuff is palpably nonsense and that he’s engaging in special pleading because he just doesn’t like the idea of gay people having sex.
• He’s well aware of the shit-storm that would rightly cause.  He’d no doubt try to nuance it, but the message to take home would be that homosexuals are abominations.  He knows that’s an untenable political position.

So instead he speaks cowardly about ‘history’ and ‘tradition’ in a brazen attempt at justification rather than valid argument.  Let’s be clear: John Sentamu wants to deny rights to homosexuals on the grounds that we’ve always done it.  There’s a history and tradition of slavery too (which, by the way, his god is totally fine with). But Sentamu does not support slavery, which clearly suggests that history and tradition are not really what Sentamu is concerned with.  When an argument from history comes up against an argument from justice, it’s revealed for what it is.  It’s not about history and tradition.  It’s not about the Bible. It’s about the fact that John Sentamu doesn’t like the thought of gay sex.

His argument that legalising gay marriage is a dictatorial act is just plain confounding.  It would be an act of liberation and empowerment.  The government would be giving up some its authority to determine who can and can’t get married.  By contrast, doesn’t banning a whole section of the country from marrying seem rather more dictatorial?  The government is changing laws to reflect majority view, which is what democracies do. Sentamu and his church want to impose their views on everyone, whether they believe in the god that’s supposed to motivate this nonsense or not.  Sentamu goes on to justify his statement by apparently claiming that legalising gay marriage is what dictators do,  I’d be very interested to see some examples, I can’t think of a single one.

More from John Cole:

But from where I stand these days, the only thing I see religion doing in the public sector is gay bashing and telling women, mostly poor and desperate and in deplorable financial and personal situations, what to do with their bodies. I see busybodies deciding what drugs they can dispense to which customers, or deciding that they don’t have to issue a marriage license because of some petty deity that I don’t believe in told them to hate their fellow citizens and ignore the law. In a country in dire financial straits but still spending billions and billions of dollars on education, I see religious folks actively and openly working to make our schoolkids dumber. I see them shooting people who provided a medical procedure, and I see others rummaging through people’s personal lives to find out who hasn’t lived up the word of God. I see glassy-eyed fools running for President claiming that vaccines that save lives actually cause cancer, or that if you get raped and are pregnant, you should just lie back and think of Jeebus and make the best of a bad situation.

Things that can happen in elevators

I admire Richard Dawkins immensely, but like most of us, his privilege shows from time to time.  Richard felt that there were bigger fish to fry than elevatorgate, such as the treatment of women in places like Saudi Arabia.  He was right that awful things happen and continue to happen to women there and under similar regimes every day.  It isn’t just the violence that’s problematic, it’s that women’s rights are virtually non-existent and that attitudes toward women are widely and horrifically contemptuous in principle and harmful in practice.  Women are to a greater or lesser extent (often greater) considered the property of men.  This is not just a disgrace, it is a moral and intellectual emergency.

I know Richard recognises that this shameful attitude toward women is an important root of this problem so I was disappointed that he apparently doesn’t see that the same kind of disrespect is rife in the West. He later wrote this:

No escape? I am now really puzzled. Here’s how you escape from an elevator. You press any one of the buttons conveniently provided. The elevator will obligingly stop at a floor, the door will open and you will no longer be in a confined space but in a well-lit corridor in a crowded hotel

Well, there’s this as reported by Ophelia Benson.  Some of the details of this story as it has been reported in the media seem dubious, but the fact is that a woman was severely beaten in a lift, presumably while trying to calmly press buttons to escape.  She was found in a pool of her own blood and her family says every bone in her face was broken. She was in a medically induced coma for a while and now she’s awake, the bits of her face are wired together.

A suspect has been identified by security video footage and he’s confessed, but his story is dubious in places.  For example, he says he punched her four or five times.  I happen to know that it takes a hell of a punch to break a face bone, let alone all of them.  If the family is right, then I’d expect the injuries to be more consistent with beating someone’s head against something like a handrail.

The suspect denies kicking the victim, though the video evidence seems to show him doing that.  He says he was just pushing his victim’s hand back inside the lift with his foot so the doors could close.  Obviously that’s far better than kicking her.

He says he encountered Nabb, who he said wasn’t wearing any clothes, at the sixth floor. When Quintero tried to prevent her from leaving he said she screamed, and he panicked.

“I didn’t try to abuse her, or I didn’t … I didn’t try to kill her or anything like … or rob her or anything. I was just afraid and I wanted to leave.”

Quintero said he covered Nabb’s mouth and asked her not to yell.

“But she continued yelling,” he said. “She got more afraid when I covered her mouth. And then I hit her … four or five times in the face with my fist. And then I left.”

(from here)

He was afraid?  He wanted to leave (why didn’t he follow the Dawkins procedure)?

Preventing her from leaving was obviously abuse.  Quintero says it as though it was somehow a reasonable act to restrain someone against her will for reasons he doesn’t explain.  When she screamed, he tried to stop her screaming rather than – say – just leaving.  And when his attempt to shut her up failed, he beat her half to death, then casually kicked her limp hand back inside the lift so that the doors could close.

Come on, Richard. Your heart was in the right place but you didn’t think this one through. And more importantly, come on numerous elevatorgate-related wankers who are determined that women shouldn’t be frightened when you corner them in secluded places.  Yeah, we know you’re going to beat or rape anyone, but some people clearly are.

So let’s go back to Rebecca’s original point: don’t you do that.

The Pope thinks that gay marriage is a threat to the future of humanity

“Has anyone noticed that the head of the Catholic Church isn't very bright?”

-- Tim Minchin

Tim has a point, but as he pointed out a few minutes later:

“The pope is an intelligent man. Denying that absolves him from responsibility for his awful words.”

Either way, the Pope said on Monday that gay marriage “undermined the future of humanity itself”.  He said it to diplomats from nearly 180 countries.  I don’t understand why those diplomats were there to listen to the old horror.  Why do we insist on pretending that the Vatican is a proper nation or that it has any significance at all on the world stage?  But those diplomats were in for a festival of unsupported bigotry:

"The family unit is fundamental for the educational process and for the development both of individuals and states; hence there is a need for policies which promote the family and aid social cohesion and dialogue,"

Difficult to know where to begin, isn’t it?  In what way is ‘the family unit’ ‘fundamental’ to education?  And if it’s true, how does that differ if there’s only one parent or two parents of the same sex?  Or for that matter, more than two parents?  Benny didn’t say and didn’t offer any evidence to support his claims.  But we’re not done yet.  Apparently the same is true for the development of states. I’m not sure what that’s supposed to mean, but that’s OK because Benny doesn’t either.  He hasn’t thought it through, presumably because he doesn’t need to.  We get it, you think homosexual acts are wrong, therefore anything that helps it to become more acceptable to society is also wrong.

But the most horrible thing Ratzinger says here is the part about needing policies “which promote the family”.  By which – transparently – he means banning gay marriage.  He means forcing everyone to do what he, personally, thinks is proper. Based on a couple of sentences in a bronze age book.

"pride of place goes to the family, based on the marriage of a man and a woman."

Or to put it another way, he’s saying gay and unmarried parents – and their families - should be treated as second-class citizens.  Charming. He doesn’t say what sanctions he thinks ought to be applied to such parents or how he feels the children of those families should be discriminated against.

One more thing, and this is remarkably common behaviour for religious leaders.  He can’t resist a threat: “polices which promote the family and aid social cohesion and dialogue.”  Watch out, he’s saying, If you don’t do what we say… there’s going to be ‘trouble’. His friend, New York Bishop Timothy Dolan says – in the same article – that not banning gay marriage could "precipitate a national conflict between church and state of enormous proportions."

What’s that if it isn’t a threat?

Well, we’re not scared.

Christopher Hitchens is dead

There was nobody like him.

PZ on free will

Like PZ, I can’t get very excited about the question of free will. I agree with him that for free will to be anything other than an illusion, our minds would have to be able to reach into our brains and change it’s behaviour.  Minds would have to be intangible things, independent of brains, and this is demonstrably (and trivially so) not the case.

I’ve never been able to understand why people find it so difficult to accept that we could be fooled by a sensation of free will. It certainly feels like we can make choices, but what reason do we have to assume that makes it true?

Scooby-doo is a morality tale for secular humanists. Unfortunately, it is shit.

A post here makes some good points. As Tim Minchin points out in the excellent Storm:

That show was so cool

Because every time there’s a church with a ghoul

Or a ghost in a school

They looked beneath the mask and what was inside?

The fucking janitor or the dude who runs the water slide.

Throughout history

Every mystery

Ever solved has turned out to be

Not Magic.

This article goes further:

Because that's the thing about Scooby-Doo: The bad guys in every episode aren't monsters, they're liars.

More than that, they’re liars who prey on superstitious people so they can fleece them.  Sound familiar? 

The article goes on to point out that the episodes are about children searching for truth in a world where adults are either liars or believe the liars because they’ve been fooled by stories of the supernatural. 

Some other good points are made.  For example: “curiosity and thinking always triumph over fear” and 

To paraphrase G.K. Chesterton, Scooby Doo has value not because it shows us that there are monsters, but because it shows us that those monsters are just the products of evil people who want to make us too afraid to see through their lies, and goes a step further by giving us a blueprint that shows exactly how to defeat them.

The article is a little over-enthusiastic and the show heavily romanticised.  I’ve always been dismayed that the main  heroes of the show are the two cowardly idiots. No matter how often they pull off the monster's mask and find it was old Mr Johnson all along, Shaggy and Scooby never learn. Well of course, all those other monsters turned out to be not monsters, but let’s automatically assume this one is legit, despite our vast experience.  They never acquire any critical faculties and this is not an admirable trait.

Velma should have been the hero, but the show’s makers seemed to do everything they possibly could to make sure she wasn’t. She’s portrayed as a frumpy nerd who can easily be defeated by simply taking her glasses away. In fact, as far as I can tell, the only reason for Daphne existing at all (other than being Fred’s beard) was to demonstrate how frumpy, nerdy and undesirable smart girls are supposed to be.  The show didn’t do a thing to make kids want to be more like Velma.

The principle of the show was great and something I’d like to see a lot more of in both children’s and adult TV. Shows like the awful X Files could have been great as an adult Scooby-Doo.  It could have explored the nature of evidence.  The friction between Mulder and Scully could have been been about what counts as proper evidence rather than ‘spooky shit does/doesn’t exist’.  I think it might even work if they never got to the bottom of the mystery in some episodes and had to leave it unexplained.  Mulder would take that as proof that the supernatural is real and Scully would roll her eyes at him and try to explain why it’s not.  Scully wouldn’t have to be right all the time.  She could even be closed-mided rather than appropriately skeptical sometimes.  And hopefully she’d learn her lesson, just so long as there’s never any real evidence of the supernatural.  That could have been a great show.  But it’s easier to pander to superstition, so we got drivel instead.

While I find some of the principles of Scooby-doo laudable, I could never stand the show.  Even pre-Scrappy.

Hemant has a good comment about all this here:

There’s a lot of truth to that. After all, what scares you more? Frankenstein or a Christian pastor who thinks the Bible ought to be the playbook for your life? The former might send a temporary chill up your spine, but the latter permanently ruins lives by convincing so many people that he’s right, hurting their ability to think rationally, manipulating them into giving up their money (even when they don’t have any give), convincing them that people who don’t fall in line with the faith are eternally condemned, and persuading them to put their lives in control of an imaginary being instead of taking full control of it themselves.

Yep.

Driving destroys virginity

According to the BBC:

A report in Saudi Arabia has warned that if Saudi women were given the right to drive, it would spell the end of virginity in the country.

Assuming that Kamal Subhi – who wrote the report – doesn’t think that women driving will cause babies to be born with sexual experience (not something I’m willing to put past him), the claim dissolves into the usual one.  He means that if women are allowed the beginnings of freedoms equal to those of men, then fewer of the women he might personally want to fuck would be virgins, which he seems to think is a national emergency.

The report contains graphic warnings that letting women drive would increase prostitution, pornography, homosexuality and divorce.

These are all extraordinary claims, but the homosexuality one is especially bewildering.  I wonder if he means female homosexuality (women will be allowed to visit each other unsupervised so won’t be able to resist jumping on top of each other) or male homosexuality (the women will be off driving around so men will all have to fuck each other until they get home).

Silly as the report apparently is, the problem that women have effectively no rights in Saudi Arabia is highlighted by this sentence in the BBC story:

Though there is no formal ban on women driving in Saudi Arabia, if they get behind the wheel, they can be arrested.

They can be arrested under the blanket acknowledgement that women don’t have the right to do anything at all.