The Archbishop of Wales:

Any kind of fundamentalism, be it Biblical, atheistic or Islamic, is dangerous.

I think we can agree that fundamentalism, suitably defined, is indeed horrible. I’m not sure what atheistic fundamentalism is meant to refer to, but helpfully he spells it out. Here’s what we’re going to do: let’s pretend for a minute that it’s real. It’s not, of course, but we’ll give him a pass as he can’t be expected to research his Christmas messages and perform all his Archbishop-y duties. Here is his list of the things fundamentalist atheists are supposedly doing:

• Forcing councils to rename Christmas ‘Winterval’
• Making schools put on plays other than the nativity at Christmas
• Getting crosses removed from hospital chapels
• Advocating that religion in general and Christianity in particular have no substance
• Advocating that some view the faith as “superstitious nonsense”
• Making ‘virulent, almost irrational¹ attacks’ on Christianity
• Forcing schools to stop their children sending Christmas cards with a Christian message
• Making airlines refuse their staff permission to wear a cross around their necks

Holy shit. Those atheist fundamentalists are really pulling out the big guns. Councils are renaming Christmas? The humanity! Just for fun, here’s a list of the things Biblical and Islamic fundamentalists do:

• Kill people for not worshipping their deity
• Kill people for performing abortions
• Kill people for trying to convert to another religion
• Kill women for…pretty much anything
• etc.

Not a disgusting comparison at all, then. What a revolting thing to do.

1. Freudian slip [↩]

Meant to be Christmas shopping, but instead getting annoyed by the radio. The Jeremy Vine show is incredulous that Richard Dawkins, avowed atheist, enjoys singing Christmas carols. They interview him. He explains that singing is nice and means nothing. Vicar retaliates that singing is inherently an act of worship. Which is stupid.

Penn Jillette put it well: I’m not in your club, so I don’t have to follow your rules. Rumour has it that senior Freemasons wear special rings - junior members are not permitted such jewellery. But I’m not a Freemason, so I can do what the hell I like. Any senior Freemason objecting to my wearing their special ring is going to get laughed at. You don’t get to impose your own club rules on the rest of society. Christians think singing carols is an act of worship, and that’s fine - go ahead. But don’t tell me what I can and can’t think, thanks.

A Guardian cartoonist stood up for good sense, but briefly took a wrong turn, imho, when he started to argue historically. It’s used frequently, but I don’t much care for the argument that Christmas was a pagan tradition so it’s ok for atheists to celebrate it, or the debates over whether the Christmas tree is a traditional Christian thing. Doesn’t matter, for two reasons:

1. The meaning of any particular tradition is entirely relative - if I like the tradition, I can appropriate it without dragging along all the historical baggage. The Guardian columnist pointed out that his favourite ink was used to stamp people in concentration camps - should he boycott it for this reason? No, that’s silly. It’s ink. Culture is a great big amalgam of unpatentable ideas from throughout history. Christmas trees look good - I like decorating my home with them. I don’t care whether some Christian came up with the idea, or what it means to religious people. I just like having a pretty tree, it’s nice! Some would raise politeness at this point - if Christians get offended by my having a tree, isn’t it polite to avoid it? No! People can declare offence at anything; bending over backwards to accommodate beliefs that make no sense never a) works b) leads to anything good.
2. Religion appropriates nice things to attract people¹. It’s a trick. A toffee-sprout. “Look, we sing nice songs, decorate our homes and all meet up once a week - these are all unequivocally nice things! Also by the way guy-came-back-from-the dead-angels-demons-witchcraft-magic-crackers-floods-smiting-gay-people-bad-also-snakes-don’t-ever-have-sex-unless-we-give-you-permission, and you only get to do all the nice things if you believe all that. This applies to everyone”. No. Get lost with your manipulative crap. I’ll take the yummy toffee, which is nothing to do with you, and leave the sprout for anyone who wants it.  This isn’t all that different from #1, actually - free-floating ideas can be netted by anyone, and nobody gets to claim copyright.

I like carols too. Don’t care that Christians consider carols an act of worship. Tell you what: if you can do that, I’m going to declare doing the vacuuming a rejection of god. From now on any Christian who hoovers the hall is a hypocrite.

1. not necessarily maliciously, but probably just through cultural natural selection - memetic, if you will [↩]

Exciting news!

Pope Benedict XVI has authorised special indulgences to mark the 150th anniversary of the Virgin Mary’s reputed appearance at Lourdes.

What are indulgences? Have a guess. Go on. Bear in mind it is the 21st century. Give in?

Catholics visiting the site within a year of 8 December will be able to receive an indulgence, which the Church teaches can reduce time in purgatory.

I am not making this up.

The pontiff also said believers who prayed at places of worship dedicated to Our Lady of Lourdes from 2-11 February next year - or who were unable to make the journey - would also be able to receive indulgences.

I am not making this up. 

Note: “would also be able to receive’. You don’t think they’ll cost anything, do you? Because that would be what’s colloquially known as ‘a racket’. They wouldn’t dare, would they?

Hey, I’ve just remembered: I’ve a voucher offering 10% off at Tesco. It’s only valid this weekend, though. Not sure why I thought of that.

While some might consider indulgences an outdated concept, great spiritual importance have been assigned to them by Benedict XVI and his predecessor, Pope John Paul II.

I am not making this up.

Going to head to Tesco right now, actually - for some reason I fancy a carrot. Also, a stick.

Stephen Law is having an interesting discussion with the head of a UK Islamic school. Prof. Law quoted the head as saying “[t]he essential purpose of the Islamia school as with all Islamic schools is to inculcate profound religious belief in the children.” and suggested this was an intolerable system of education. The head’s response includes:

It is slightly absurd to imagine what approach we should have taken to teaching about Islam to these Muslim children if the objection is to us telling them that Islam is true. The reason we offer to Muslim children for accepting the truth of Islam is that this is what Allah wants us to believe, what he has written in the Qur’an, and also what the prophet Muhammad wants us to believe – him being the messenger of Allah. Are we really supposed to then say, “But you shouldn’t believe that just because we say so; you should make your own minds up”? That is not what Islam teaches. In Islam, there is no question about the existence of god, the validity of the Qur’an or the veracity of the prophet. Nor, given that, is there a sensible choice about being Muslim. It would be self-contradictory to teach Islam to children as a matter of choice based on personal opinion.

Isn’t that interesting? None of the slippery avoidances you find in Christian responses, it’s just straight out: our Holy Whatever says we are not to question it, so we won’t. Aside from the obvious objections, I wonder if he finds it coincidental that what he’d consider the most important concept in history just so happens to demand unquestioning acceptance. Why would the most important concept in history need to declare itself above the marketplace of ideas? It’s a ridiculous, desperate strategy, but one that unfortunately seems to be psychologically effective. The objections to The Golden Compass show the same lack of perspective, and I like the way this columnist puts it (via Pharyngula):

If your ancient, authoritarian, immutable belief system is threatened by a handful of popular novels, if your ostensibly all-powerful, unyielding creed is rendered meek and defenseless when faced with the story of a fiery, rebellious young girl who effortlessly rejects your stiff misogynistic religiosity in favor of adventure, love, sex, the ability to discover and define her soul on her own terms, well, it might be time for you to roll it all up and shut it all down and crawl back home, and let the divine breathe and move and dance as she sees fit.

Exactly. I’ve said it before, but it’s always worth repeating: The War for Children’s Minds is a bloody brilliant book. It doesn’t bash religion, it bashes teaching what to think instead of how to think. This problem seems to go hand-in-hand with religious education, but needn’t.

I’m increasingly of the opinion that Critical Thinking classes for secondary (junior?) school students would be the best education initiative in decades.

A teacher in Sudan is facing prison, or 40 lashes, for a terrible event she allowed to take place in her classroom. I can hardly believe it myself. I can’t bring myself to type the words, so will simply have to quote:

she allowed her pupils to name a teddy bear Muhammad.

Isn’t that disgusting? What’s the problem, you ask? Clearly, it’s insulting to Islam. Here are the horrific details:

Ms Gibbons, who joined the school in August, asked a seven-year-old girl to bring in her teddy bear and asked the class to pick names for it, he said.

“They came up with eight names including Abdullah, Hassan and Muhammad,” Mr Boulos said, adding that she then had the children vote on a name.

Twenty out of the 23 children chose Muhammad as their favourite name.

Mr Boulos said each child was then allowed to take the bear home at weekends and told to write a diary about what they did with it.

He said the children’s entries were collected in a book with a picture of the bear on the cover and a message which read, “My name is Muhammad.”

Nothing about this is funny. The school has been closed until January. There are reports of men gathering outside the police station where she’s being held. The woman could get lashed. It’s completely obscene. Even the BBC don’t seem to know which particular bit of scripture she’s supposedly breached. Let’s look more closely at this.

• It can’t be the name itself, as literally millions of people, all clearly not the original Muhammed, are named Muhammed.
• Islam doesn’t permit images of their holy dude - it doesn’t seem like this was an image, just a name given to a bear. To say that the bear was meant to actually represent Muhammed is something of a stretch.
• Most religions seem to have their own arbitrary animals that are great / awful. Cows, pigs, magical flying horses, dogs, whatever¹. But bears? Afaik, Islam has no problem with bears.
• The children aren’t being punished. This is odd. They chose the name! They have insulted the prophet.

Hmmm, let me think. What about this female teacher could possibly have annoyed so many people? What about her could have annoyed so many misogynistic young men? I just can’t think what it could be.

Googling has found a few Muslim bloggers who think this is stupid. Good. It’s easy to get the the impression that Islam is millions and millions of people buying into arcane bigotry, and I really don’t want that to be true. Fewer women saying how great their burqa is and more saying how dumb Islamic states are would be, you know, nice.

It’ll never happen in a million years, but wouldn’t it be great if the UK government said “we fundamentally disagree with your law. Lay one finger on her and we will impose sanctions. Let her go, right now, or we’ll do it ourselves”. Sigh.

1. no exotic creatures in there. How curious [↩]

The BBC have an interesting article on Tony Blair’s religious convictions, but it’s this quote from Menzies Campbell that particularly catches my eye:

The public might have been less willing to give him the triumph of three consecutive general election victories if they’d known the extent to which ethical values would overshadow pragmatism,” Sir Menzies said.

Weird thing to say. Aside from the underlying assumption that it’s only the religious who have strong ethical values, is he suggesting that doing the right thing should always come second to doing the practical/easy thing? Possibly not, but that’s the way it’s presented.

It’s odd that this is perceived as something the public would see as a bad trait - I’d have thought a politican who says he’ll always do what he thinks is ethically right would actually be more popular¹. Tony Blair’s suggestion that the public would have labelled him a ‘nutter’ if they’d known he never went away without a Bible is far more likely to be true.

1. not trying to specifically defend Tony Blair here, I just mean in general [↩]

Religion = cult + followers + time. This is particularly obvious in the case of the Mormon church, which has enough of a profile to be considered ‘reasonable’, until you start actually reading about it¹, and also Jehovah’s Witnesses, in the news today for the usual reason:

A young mother has died after giving birth to twins, amid claims that she had refused a blood transfusion because of her faith.

I heard tell of claims she would have died anyway, but it’s immaterial - the issue comes up often enough for it to be a problem in non-secular societies.

Jehovah’s Witnesses, along with avoiding any notion of Christmas, evangelising non-stop, and awaiting the imminent armageddon after which they, Jesus and 144,000 friends will be all that remains of the human race, take certain parts of the Bible literally. One such sentence comes from Acts 15:29:

You are to abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, from the meat of strangled animals and from sexual immorality.

God, as ever, considers this kind of arbitrary thing very important for reasons never elaborated. Meat of strangled animals? Yep, I can see that’s not so nice. Food sacrificed to idols? Standard divine jealousy. Sexual immorality? Begging the question: what’s moral? But blood? How the hell can you abstain from blood? Given that this was obviously written by some unknown person, it’s hard to see what this could be about. Is it just to sound dramatic? Or some primitive fear of vampires? Whatever the origins, the phrase is taken seriously by Jehovah’s Witnesses, who will regularly refuse blood transfusions in hospital operations.

Obviously, this is completely demented. But it’s too stupid, and just makes me sad - no rational brain comes to this conclusion without years of brainwashing, and it’s hard to feel anything but compassion for people who are taken in by it.

Of course, parents who demand their children not receive blood transfusions can go to hell. I may feel sorry for the parents, but it’s unquestionable child abuse: there is no other option than to take the decision away from them, and thankfully the state can and does override parents in life or death situations. Compassionately unwavering rationality is the only solution in such cases.

I don’t know what, if anything, should be done about adults who make a decision to die rather than receive blood. I’m all for adults being able to make their own decisions - if you want to believe the world’s going to end soon and tell me about it at every opportunity, sure, whatever - but when it’s a life or death situation I waver. There are possibly grounds for intervention on the basis of a lack of sanity: none of us would see any problem with forcibly pulling someone back from jumping off a bridge - why should claiming ‘religious privilege’ make any difference? I suppose the argument is the slippery slope, but I don’t see the issue with intervening in life or death situations. But, in a situation like this, what of the rights of the children? The BBC reports that:

a young woman in Dublin lost a lot of blood after giving birth to a healthy baby a year ago. A Jehovah’s Witness, she too refused a transfusion.

But an emergency ruling permitted the hospital to carry out the procedure, arguing that the right of the newborn baby to have a family life overruled the mother’s right to refuse treatment.

It’s a messy precedent, but I don’t have a problem with that.

I don’t have any theoretical problem with the NHS making minor concessions for religious believers, but in practice it simply won’t work: there’s no logical difference between the small stuff and the life/death decisions, and it will only cause problems. Medicine has to be secular if state-approved death-by-cult is to be avoided.

1. the story of the Book of Abraham is entertaining, and Julia Sweeney has a great introduction to the Church’s overtly racist overtones in ‘Letting Go of God’ [↩]

I’ve been away from the news today so haven’t seen the coverage of the cervical cancer vaccine. I remember that similar proposals caused something of a fuss in the US, and I’m wondering whether the UK media gave the nutters any airtime. The main BBC News article doesn’t even mention them, which is cool. The health Q&A mentions them briefly, but it’s only a dumb Have Your Say question that really raises the issue. Quite glad I didn’t listen to Jeremy Vine today, though.

There are probably some anti-vaccination nutters out there, but I’m specifically thinking of the extreme religious variety:

Some Christian groups have expressed unease, concerned that the jab may encourage promiscuity.

Colin Hart, Director of The Christian Institute, said the way to tackle the problem was not to offer injections, but to tell girls not to have under-age sex.

Because cervical cancer is god’s way of punishing women for having under-age sex. Or over-age sex, for that matter. I’m sure they could pick up an STD from their husband, if he’d had extra-marital sex, but presumably it’s still up to the women to suffer, as ever. What a vile little shit these people worship.

Obviously it’s not all Christians and is limited to an extreme fringe. But it’s still astonishing to me that anybody could fall for a belief system which requires them to publicly suggest they would prefer to see women have underage sex and get cancer than them have underage sex and not get cancer. How do you break your brain that much?

Srsly.

29. An Ceiling Cat sayed, Yo, Beholdt, the Urfs, I has it, An I has not eated it. 30 For evry createded stufs tehre are the fuudz, to the burdies, teh creepiez, An teh mooes, so tehre. an Ceiling Cat sayz u mus hav da moneyz 2 git da milkz. 50$ plez
31. An Ceiling Cat sayed, Beholdt, teh good enouf for releaze as version 0.8a. kthx bai.

It’s not surprising this project works so well, given that the Bible was the Wikipedia of the first millennium. Genesis 2:

11 An he said, hoo told u dat u was nakd? I was enjoying watching you. hast thou eaten ov teh tree, dat I told u dat iz not ok u eatz?
12 An teh man said, teh woman u gave me saw teh tree An told me ’bout it. At first I was liek “Noes!” but then, I was layk NOM NOM NOM.
13 An Ceiling Cat said unto teh woman, wat did u dun? An teh woman said, teh serpent playd dirty trick on me, An i eated it.
(…)
16 Unto teh woman he said,
“im gun make babies hurt alot An cause pain An stuff;
in pain u gun brin forth childrenz.
An ur desire shall b 2 ur husband,
An he gun rool ovar u and ask for beers and sammiches.”
17 An unto adam he said, because u hast listend to her An hast eated teh tree wut i tellz u U NO EATZ!
“cursd iz teh grawnd cuz of u
An u is b wrkin ur ass off ur hol life
An makin cheezburgers will be vry hard now
srsly.

Numbers 22 is always worth a look:

28. And Ceiling Cat maeks teh donkey talk and stuff, and teh donkey wuz all liek “Oh hai, me is talkin’ donkey”.
29. And Balaam wuz all liek “LOL stupid donkey, me kicks ur butt now, me kicks ur butt real good”.
30. And teh donkey sez “Oh but WAI? Me is just talkin’ donkey.”

Genesis 19 is lovely as ever, with ‘Cot’ realising the prospect of imminent man-on-man action and making the rational decision:

8. Lol taek my hot daughterz whu r virginz. Let me get em ann we kan bang them. But don’t do theze doodz, they iz in mah house.

I suspect this is actually quite linguistically interesting - there’s a surprisingly coherent grammar to ”kitty pidgin”. I love that people are spending time doing this.

Spotted by my parents in Ireland:

I see a niche for Volvic.

In God is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens invites the reader to “close your eyes and try to picture what you might say if you had the authority to inflict the greatest possible differing in the least number of words”. I’d suggest ‘the sins of the father are passed onto the child’, while Hitch goes with something similar to the words of the head of the Catholic church in Mozambique:

Condoms are not sure because I know that there are two countries in Europe, they are making condoms with [HIV] on purpose

This is why it’s vital to deny authority to organisations founded on falsehoods and incapable of change. This man did not start out ambivalent and come to the conclusion that condoms are being deliberately laced with HIV, he’s clearly looking for a way to justify Catholic teachings. The belief comes first, all thought second - that the hatred of condoms could be morally vacuous and exist only to induce guilt and thereby create more devotees is not a possibility.

Sure, this is some nutter in Mozambique. A UK priest wouldn’t say such a thing, it’s true, but why not? It’s obvious: they’re probably better educated. But all the UK priest does is find another, less obviously nonsensical, reason to think condoms are evil. If the Mozambique guy were in the UK, he’d be coming out with the regular nonsense about the social problems caused by casual, read: protected, sex. The error is exactly the same: belief, then justification.

This isn’t a unique flaw, of course. Most people, including me, instinctively migrate towards information that supports their point of view, and will ignore competing evidence up to a point. It takes an effort of will to avoid this inclination. But the nature of religious institutions is that they cannot change their core beliefs - if condoms were shown to directly cause world peace, the Catholic church would still hate them. A priest who saw reason and acknowledged that condoms are a force for good would be rejecting his entire belief system, and it’s (not surprisingly) incredibly difficult to do such a thing.

It’s tempting to make comparisons with political beliefs. What’s the difference between the Catholic church and a political party, if both have core beliefs? It’s that the latter should (and, I think, do) base this upon evidence, and would, on average, be prepared to change its ideas should they not pan out in practice.

Any system which has core beliefs set in stone (not to mention based on particular historical events that may or may not have actually happened) shouldn’t have any say over public affairs. Differentiating between the systems is another reason the most important education goal should be teaching children how to think.

By the way, I look forward to the Pope stepping in to put the matter straight.

A Tyneside headmaster’s attempts to reduce the role of religion in his school have turned up some interesting insights into the process of educational lawmaking:

‘We wanted a fundamental change in the relationship with the school and the established religion of the country,’ said Kelley, talking about the proposals he put forward towards the end of Tony Blair’s premiership. ‘They accepted it would be popular but said it was politically impossible.’

Why impossible?

One senior figure at the then Department for Education and Skills, told Kelley that bishops in the House of Lords and ministers would block the plans.

Easy solution to that.

Religion, they added, was ‘technically embedded’ in many aspects of education.

Not sure what that means. Which areas? I don’t personally remember religion (read: Christianity) turning up much in my education, other than assemblies and incredibly-biased RE and PSE (’personal social education’) lessons.

‘I feel that children have a right to not having a particular point of view,’ said Kelley. ‘They should not be promoted to a political party, nor should they to a religion. The daily act of worship is, I think, inappropriate at school.’ [...] The schools, says Kelley, ‘directly or indirectly influence children into a belief that a particular faith is preferable either to other faiths or to a lack of faith’. He adds: ‘That is not, in my view, fair to a child and it is not offering them the opportunity to choose freely. The problem we are left with is a 19th-century architecture of education in a 21st-century environment.

Quite. I don’t understand why the comparison with hypothetical political schools isn’t a killer argument.

The CoE aren’t happy with the suggestion of reducing religion’s role in education. However, their argument doesn’t prove the point they think it does:

A spokesman for the Church of England said: ‘If he is arguing for a way for individual schools to opt out of those bits of the act he does not like that is not something we would support. Either overtly or by default, this country is still a Christian one.’

This has always been, and remains, a mind-bogglingly stupid argument. The possibility that religious education produces better behaviour, although probably not true and morally eviscerated by Stephen Law in The War for Children’s Minds, is at least mildly grown-up, but “things shouldn’t change because they just shouldn’t” is begging the question and doesn’t count as arguing at all.

This attitude, combined with the continued expansion of faith schools, is disappointing, but I’m optimistic in the long-term because the historical, moral and political arguments against them are so strong. An atheist and a Christian should come to exactly the same conclusion when it comes to teaching children: teach them how to think, and let them make up their own minds¹. An education system weighed in any particular direction is clearly, unambiguously, wrong.

I have suspicions about the motives of informed people who suggest anything but a secular framework. It’s a plausible hypothesis that teaching kids to think critically leads to more atheist/agnostic/freethinkers than if you surround them with religious teachers and symbols. Hence the Pope and his laughable rejections of logic and reason as just other forms of indoctrination - clearly desperate and clutching at straws, but this sounds less mental than ”do what I say or you’ll go to hell”.

There are, of course, plenty of very nice people, both religious and not, who will disagree. I may think they’re wrong, but convincing them often isn’t the real problem - it’s a common issue in arguments involving religion that you come across very pleasant people who get genuinely upset when their beliefs are criticised. But, to be unashamedly melodramatic, education is too important to the future of humanity for people’s feelings to get in the way of progress. I’m optimistic, but I don’t think it’ll be easy.

Link originally via B&W.

1. sounds like an intelligent design argument. Isn’t. [↩]

Yesterday I had no immediate plans to fly on Nepal Airlines. Today I have no plans to fly with them, ever:

Nepal’s state-run airline has confirmed that it sacrificed two goats to appease a Hindu god, following technical problems with one of its aircraft.

What, no chickens? The radio news ran this as an amusing ‘and finally’, but it’s not particularly funny for a) the goats b) the passengers.

I’d planned the post in my head. I was going to talk about Richard Dawkins’ new Channel 4 show: The Enemies of Reason. The Telegraph describes it with:

The 66-year-old scientist has investigated a range of gurus and therapists, including faith healers, psychic mediums, angel therapists, “aura photographers”, astrologers, Tarot card readers and water diviners, and concluded that Britain is gripped by “an epidemic of superstitious thinking”.

I was going to predict responses to the show. I reckoned there’d be a couple of types. Comment Is Free might have a few “science is a faith and doesn’t have all the answers and there’s actually something to all this stuff”, and the Guardian itself would have “yes of course it’s all nonsense, but don’t you see that it makes people happy and it’s a bit mean to attack it. Also Richard Dawkins is a fundamentalist and the show would be better presented by someone else”. But I wasn’t quick enough: Melanie Phillips got in there first¹.

I know she’s usually a bit, um, extreme, but this is just nuttery of the highest order. And it starts off so well:

In a TV programme to be shown later this month, Dawkins looks at a range of ludicrous therapies and gurus, including faith healers, psychic mediums, ‘angel therapists’, ‘aura photographers’, astrologers and others. Not surprisingly, he is horrified by such widespread irrationality, not to mention an exploitative industry that fleeces people while encouraging them to run away from reality.

He is right to be alarmed. What previously belonged to the province of the quack and the charlatan has become mainstream. The NHS provides funding for shamans, while the NHS Directory for Alternative and Complementary Medicine promotes ‘dowsers’, ‘flower therapists’ and ‘crystal healers’.

She agrees! Wow. I was expecting the first type of response.

Disturbing indeed. But where Dawkins goes wrong[...]

Right, here we go.

But where Dawkins goes wrong is to assume this is all as irrational as believing in God. The truth is that it is the collapse of religious faith that has prompted the rise of such irrationality.

What? Seems like a non-sequitur, but whatever. The collapse of religious faith is to blame for the rise in irrationality? This seems immediately unlikely as much of the irrationality has been around for a long, long time. The murder of Abraham Lincoln prompted massive conspiracy theories. Astrology has been around for centuries. Alternative medicine could only really be seen for what it is once evidence-based medical science came into being, but would seem to be far more in response to that than anything religious. In Britain religious faith is down, but it’s had a massive resurgence in the US, which is also a major stronghold for all types of the irrationality being discussed. So I’m not sure the timeline really works. But let’s see how she backs this up…

We are living in a scientific, largely postreligious age in which faith is presented as unscientific superstition. Yet paradoxically, we have replaced such faith by belief in demonstrable nonsense. It was GK Chesterton who famously quipped that ‘when people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing — they believe in anything.’ So it has proved. But how did it happen?

Proof by repeating yourself, apparently. All right then, how did it happen?

The big mistake is to see religion and reason as polar opposites. They are not. In fact, reason is intrinsic to the Judeo-Christian tradition.

The Bible provides a picture of a rational Creator and an orderly universe — which, accordingly, provided the template for the exercise of reason and the development of science.

So, let’s get this straight. The whole world has stopped believing in god, apparently. Everybody sees religion and reason as opposites, so they’ve taken up irrational things in its stead, despite having rejected religion for rational reasons. I’m not really following this. But, anyway, it’s not even true because religion and reason aren’t opposites. We know this because it says so in a magic book, and we should believe anything written in magic books.

Dawkins pours particular scorn on the Biblical miracles which don’t correspond to scientific reality. But religious believers have different ways of regarding those events, with many seeing them as either metaphors or as natural occurrences which were invested with a greater significance.

I wonder if she’s been reading Alister McGrath - he’s always going on about ’significance’. Still not sure what her point is. Magic book says things happened. Dawkins says they probably didn’t. Melanie Phillips says they didn’t and are of course metaphors. So? Presumably she doesn’t deny all the miracles - virgin births, a child of a god, resurrection etc. etc.? If she denies it all, she has little in common with most Christians I’ve read. She’s using the initially-persuasive idea that the Bible can be interpreted in such a way as to make logical sense. Which still doesn’t mean it’s true, but would be a start. Sam Harris and others would argue that the Bible is such a mess of contradictions that there’s no way to interpret it without simply ignoring the parts you don’t like. But I digress.

The heart of the Judeo-Christian tradition is the belief in the concept of truth, which gives rise to reason. But our postreligious age has proclaimed that there is no such thing as objective truth, only what is ‘true for me’.

Knew we’d get to relativism eventually. Note that Dawkins isn’t mentioned here. Not one of the ‘New Atheists’/'Fundamentalist Atheists’/whatever has any truck with relativism. Nor do the vast majority of scientists, as far as I’m aware. I never understand how people so willing to read Christian theology can be so ignorant of secular philosophy, which pretty much rejects relativism outright. I also strongly doubt that any sizeable percentage of the population think there’s no such thing as objective truth (outside of postmodernism students, anyway), but then I can’t really back that up.

That is because our society won’t put up with anything which gets in the way of ‘what I want’. How we feel about things has become all-important. So reason has been knocked off its perch by emotion, and thinking has been replaced by feelings.

This has meant our society can no longer distinguish between truth and lies by using evidence and logic. And this collapse of objective truth has, in turn, come to undermine science itself which is playing a role for which it is not fitted.

What? Scientists now don’t believe in objective truth, so science doesn’t work any more? What? I’m not a sociologist, but I’m pretty sure all her statements about society are complete nonsense.

When science first developed in the West, it thought of itself merely as a tool to explore the natural world. It did not pour scorn upon religion; indeed, scientists were overwhelmingly religious believers (as many still are).

Oh, for crying out loud. Yes, Newton was religious. With the information he had, it made sense. Before the theory of evolution came along it was pretty damned hard to see any other explanation. But now, with the evidence we have, religious belief is undoubtedly irrational. If Newton were around today, it’s reasonable to think he wouldn’t be religious.

In modern times, however, science has given rise to ’scientism’, the belief that science can answer all the questions of human existence. This is not so. Science cannot explain the origin of the universe. Yet it now presumes to do so and as a result it has descended into irrationality.

No it doesn’t. That’s just not true. There are plenty of questions on which science hands over to philosophy. There are incredibly speculative ideas as to how the universe started, sure, but nobody with scientific credibility claims to have actually explained it. I don’t think it’s necessarily a question outside of science, though. We just don’t know. Presumably she doesn’t mean ‘how the universe started’, she means ‘why there’s something rather than nothing’, but the same applies.

The most conspicuous example of this is provided by Dawkins himself, who breaks the rules of scientific evidence by seeking to claim that Darwin’s theory of evolution — which sought to explain how complex organisms evolved through random natural selection — also accounts for the origin of life itself.

No he doesn’t. This is also completely false. In fact he specifically says that evolution doesn’t account for that. Biochemistry is investigating that particular problem. It depends what she means by ‘the origin of life’, of course. Does she mean consciousness? Cells? Things that evolve?

There is no evidence for this whatever and no logic to it. After all, if people say God could not have created the universe because this gives rise to the question ‘Who created God?’, it follows that if scientists say the universe started with a big bang, this prompts the further question ‘What created the bang?’ Indeed, if the origin of life were truly spontaneous, this would constitute what religious people would call a miracle. Accordingly, this claim in itself resembles not so much science as the superstition that Dawkins derides.

I’m not sure she isn’t confusing the origin of the universe with the origin of life, but whatever. It might be that the origin of life is extremely unlikely - indeed, it seems that it took millions and millions of years for (presumably) one chance event to occur - but that’s not ’spontaneous’ any more than the weather is ’spontaneous’.

Moreover, since science essentially takes us wherever the evidence leads, the findings of more than 50 years of DNA research — which have revealed the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce life — have thrown into doubt the theory that life emerged spontaneously in a random universe.

Uh oh. She’s not going to…she wouldn’t, would she?

These findings have given rise to a school of scientists promoting the theory of Intelligent Design, which suggests that some force embodying purpose and foresight lay behind the origin of the universe.

She did. I don’t believe it.

While this theory is, of course, open to vigorous counter-argument, people such as Prof Dawkins and others have gone to great lengths to stop it being advanced at all, on the grounds that it denies scientific evidence such as the fossil record and is therefore worthless.

A bit, but not really. The problem with intelligent design is that it’s not science. It makes no predictions. It has no causal mechanisms. It hinges completely on the idea that if evolution is wrong, god must have done it. It occupies the infinite space of crap-I-made-up-ness. I could say that the process of evolution is actually controlled by an intelligent and incredibly tiny bumblebee named Gordon. It’s possible, but a) if evolutionary theory is wrong, it doesn’t mean Gordon is real, and b) until I can provide any kind of experiment that would provide a different outcome for evolution vs. Gordon’s Design, how can we know? There are an infinite number of things that could be true, and we believe what the evidence suggests and nothing more. The reason scientists and rational thinkers have tried to stop intelligent design progressing is that it has no substance.

Yet distinguished scientists have been hounded and their careers jeopardised for arguing that the fossil record has got a giant hole in it. Some 570 million years ago, in a period known as the Cambrian Explosion, most forms of complex animal life emerged seemingly without any evolutionary trail. These scientists argue that only ‘rational agents’ could have possessed the ability to design and organise such complex systems.

Oh, man. There are any number of books which explain the Cambrian explosion. It’s actually really, really cool. I’m surprised she didn’t bring up punctuated equilibrium, but then she has just claimed all scientists are incapable of performing science. I like how she mentions the Cambrian problem, then tries to get out of it:

Whether or not they are right (and I don’t know), their scientific argument about the absence of evidence to support the claim that life spontaneously created itself is being stifled — on the totally perverse grounds that this argument does not conform to the rules of science which require evidence to support a theory.

There is no such claim, so their argument is bogus. You don’t need to be a scientist to understand this point.

As a result of such arrogance, the West — the crucible of reason — is turning the clock back to a pre-modern age of obscurantism, dogma and secular witch-hunts. Far from upholding reason, science itself has become unreasonable.

And thus, the whole of science is now ‘unreasonable’ because of, even from her viewpoint, a spat limited to evolutionary theory.

So when Prof Dawkins fulminates against ‘new age’ irrationality, it is the image of pots and kettles that comes irresistibly to mind.

Aha! I knew it!

So: the world went all rational and rejected religion. Religion, though, is secretly rational, and people are therefore rejecting rationality. So they now believe in all sorts of crap. This breaks science, because all scientists no longer believe in objective truth and think they can explain everything without using any kind of logic. This results in heroic evolution-deniers being silenced by conspiracies. Yes, looking at this evidence it does seem like religious belief lends itself to rational thinking. Also, Richard Dawkins is wrong about everything, and the program would better be presented by someone else.

I know it was fish in a barrel. I know I probably shouldn’t pay attention to such nonsense. But it was an incredibly annoying fish.

1. I wrote all the below before showing the article to my girlfriend, who said ‘yeah, it’s Melanie Phillips’. Which is a fair point. But as it’s written I might as well publish [↩]

The Bishop of Willesden thinks recent flooding was caused by society’s increasing acceptance of homosexuality. Being a) a bishop and b) clearly bonkers gets you coverage, and he was quite-rightly ripped to shreds and laughed at by anybody who reached the end of the article without throwing the newspaper across the room. Unless, that is, you’re the religious correspondent for The Times:

In our rational, spiritually sceptical world it is easy to laugh. Gratitude might be more in order.

For giving us yet another amusing tale of a bishop with the critical thinking powers of a nostril hair? Nope:

In any other walk of life, is there a scientist, a politician or even a media commentator with the courage to suggest that we might indeed be morally responsible for the chaotic weather systems disrupting our lives?

Well, no. Because it’s stupid. It’s nothing to do with courage. What a strange thing to say.

And if the bishops who believe in God don’t say it, who will?

Well, nobody. Because only somebody who believes that would say it, obviously. And nobody else thinks it. Because, as I mentioned, it’s stupid. I think giant lizards secretly rule the Earth. If I don’t say it, who will? Everything needs to be said!

All right, maybe she’s being sarcastic. Or making some confused point about global warming. Except, in the same article:

[The Bishop says:] “There is a view that both oral and anal sexual practice is liable to allow entry to spirits.” It is important to note here that the Bishop is not equating destructive spirits in everyday life with full demonic possession. Trained exorcists are, in fact, far more careful about diagnosing possession than most.

Obviously. What kind of muppet would think destructive spirits are the same as demons? Duh.

Part of his calling is to speak out, to “prophesy”, another of the “gifts of the Spirit”. Bishop Dow will know of prophets vilified in their own time and their own lands. But even only as myth, we ignore the lessons of the Bible at our peril. Much of what the prophets predicted came true.

That’s a good point. This also happened in Battlestar Galactica. We should not ignore the lessons of Battlestar Galactica. Prepare for the cylon rebellion now. They have a plan.

What started out as a misguided defence of raving gobbledygook under the banner of ‘it’s brave to say what you believe’ seems to end up hinting he might have a point. It must be really easy to get jobs at national newspapers.

(Sorry about the title. Couldn’t resist.)