Category Archives: Secularism

Muslims have hacked the Richard Dawkins Web Site

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On opening the Richard Dawkins website today (9th April 2013), which I do every morning, you will be quickly taken to the following screen (click on picture to enlarge):

Muslim Hackers have Hacked Richard Dawkins' site

And now Comodo is warning that the site is unsafe, and the following screen is displayed:

Capture

So much for their commitment to free speech, a fundamental principle for democractic governance. In that connexion it is worth remarking that the female Prime Minister of Bangladesh has said the laws against insulting a religion are already strong enough that a new anti-blasphemy law was not necessary. According to the BBC:

Bangladeshi PM Sheikh Hasina has firmly rejected demands by Islamists for a new anti-blasphemy law to punish those who defame Islam and Prophet Muhammad.

In a BBC interview, she said existing laws were sufficient to punish anyone who attempted to insult religion.

Well, so much for democracy then. Indeed, inconsistently, she says:

This country is a secular democracy. So each and every religion has the right  to practice their religion freely and fair. But it is not fair to hurt anybody’s  religious feeling. Always we try to protect every religious sentiment. [my emphasis]

So, not a secular democracy after all!

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Drip Drip Drip – Fundamentalist Tory MPs in Canada Continue their Backdoor “Pro-Life” Campaign

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Canadians should be very concerned about the continuing intrusion of fundamentalist MPs in life and death issues. Not long ago Mark Warawa (Member for Langley, BC) introduced a motion to “condemn discrimination against females occurring through sex-selective pregnancy termination.” While there is some justification for his concern, the purpose of the motion is to reintroduce control over women’s reproductivity into the law, which was ended in 1988. Warawa wants us to think that he introduced the motion as a support for the rights and dignity of women, portraying his Motion 408 as a move to end violence against women and girls. But this is a smoke screen. If this apparently woman-friendly motion were to be passed, it would open the door to much more control over women’s right to abortion. As I have stated before, it is important to change the attitude of immigrants so that women come to be valued. Primitive ideas of women’s subordinate position should be erased from the ethnic memory of those who have chosen to make a life in Canada, where women’s rights are equal to those of men. In this we are clearly failing, since we refuse to address the issue at the level of individual communities and practices which continue to disadvantage women. But women in general, including immigrant women, cannot be equal if they have no control over reproductive decisions, which means that abortion must not be reintroduced into Canada’s Criminal Code as it had been before 1988 merely on the pretext of dealing with misguided immigrants.

There have been other motions from backbench Tory MPs attempting to limit the abortion rights of Canadians (for example, Stephen Woodworth’s Motion 312, for which he was thanked by the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada – these guys are not subtle!), and now backbench Tories have added to these intrusions by requesting the RCMP to investigate some abortions as murders! They call them “post abortion killings,” but there is no evidence that there is a conspiracy to kill children who have been born. In fact, according to Statistics Canada, there have been 491 such cases, but a statement from Statistics Canada shows clearly that these are not cases of murder or post abortion killings. According to the account in the Globe and Mail, Statistics Canada made a statement about these cases as follows:

Statistics Canada said the 491 cases that it counted during the 10-year period referred to matters where “the cause of death or stillbirth is an abortion.”

“These are included in national cause-of-death statistics because when the aborted fetus is born alive and subsequently dies, each event must be registered,” the federal agency said in a statement.

Statistics Canada added it also included stillbirths when “the aborted fetus is born dead but meets the provincial requirements [birth weight and/or gestational age].”

Again we are faced with a Tory smoke screen, trying to hide fundamentalist Christian dogma behind something that they think will arouse the concern of Canadians. This continuous drip drip drip of Christian intervention in Canada’s secular law is to be deplored, and it is time for Canadians to let these antediluvian religious hacks know that their attempts to import Christian (and doubtless other religious) prejudices into the law is unwelcome, and contrary to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

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What is the real threat, individualism or collectivism?

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This post is now available in Polish translation at Racjonalista. Thanks to Malgorzata yet again!

If I seem to have been very silent over the last couple of days, that’s because I haven’t been feeling very well, and while I’m not feeling a lot better, I thought it might be worthwhile to discuss the question I ask in my title. I am thinking in particular of Margaret Somerville’s claim that the reason it is difficult to argue against assisted dying is what she calls an “intense individualism” that in her view pervades modern society. This raises a fairly important question, for it suggests that some sort of collectivism would be preferable to individualism, and this is something, I think, that we have reason to doubt.

I happen to be reading, just now, one of Elizabeth’s books, which we had discussed, but which I had not read before. The book is The First World War, by Sir Hew Strachan, who was a Brigadier in the British Army (Brigadier General in the US), and is now a Scottish military historian. The book has an interesting take on the First World War, and the reasons for fighting it, that is not often expressed. World War I is very often assumed to have been a pointless and avoidable conflict, which settled nothing of importance, when it might well be seen, instead, as the first round in a war to settle a very important question having to do with individualism and collectivism. Strachan says that

the Anglo-German antagonism became the pivot of the conflict. The polarity was best expressed in competing ideologies: liberalism and individualism against militarism and collectivism, the pursuit of mammon against the spirit of heroism. [201]

At the time the war broke out, Strachan suggests, this was much more clearly understood than it has been by later generations. But if it is seen in relation to the Second World War, the reasons for the outbreak of war in 1914 comes into sharper focus. For the Second World War may be seen (and has been long recognised by some historians to have been) an extension of the First. In fact, some historians have seen the two wars as the beginning and the end of a second Thirty Years War.

If we look at the great wars of the twentieth century in this way, we can see how the issues that were fought out on the battlefield largely underlie contemporary conflicts and competition amongst ideologies, though, this time, the antagonism is being played out between religion, on the one hand, standing for a kind of collectivism, and secularism, on the other, standing for liberalism and individualism. According to the pope, and many other religious leaders, the problem with modern society is that its focus is on the individual, and individual rights, and, according to Margaret Somerville, this makes it all but impossible to argue successfully for some of the fundamental religious values, such as the sanctity of life, because people simply cannot understand the alternative. However, what she does not seem to recognise is that, in order to argue successfully for these values, which are in essence religious and collective, she must also try to convince us that some sort of collectivism is in general more important than and preferable to liberalism and individualism. She makes no effort to do this.

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Religion and Democracy really are incompatible

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In a mad dash the other day, just before I had to go out for Thanksgiving Dinner — we do things differently in Canada — I quickly put up a post about the compatibility of religion and politics. Some people have pointed out that the incompatibility here, if there even is one, is very different to the incompatibility between religion and science, which really do conflict. One commentator on that post put it this way:

Eric, your premise rests on this: “The point is this. Governance, just like science, should be based on reason and evidence, and not just on one’s personal prejudices, because one’s personal prejudices have no place in the making of laws, which should be blind to religious belief.”

And it fails because of one word: “should”.   Science is so based. But politics is not based on that ideal. Democracy, politics and governance all are based as much on lies, distortions, half-truths, spin, greed, hero worship, concentrations of power, manipulating people, false advertising, character assassination, etc., etc., etc.

In this sense, there is not a definite outcome, as in science, for religion to be compatible or incompatible with.

And, of course, in this sense, I agree, but I would ask you to notice that science also suffers to a considerable degree from distortions, half-truths, spin, greed, hero-worship and concentrations of power. There’s a considerable dose of false accusation and character assassination around as well. Science is not all bright and shiny compared to the tawdriness and lack-lustre world of politics. Many people still think that Rosalind Franklin, for example, was unfairly treated, since her contribution to the discovery of the structure and function of DNA was considerable. Her work was shown to Watson without her knowledge or approval, and without it, Watson and Crick may not have had the evidence they needed to confirm their theory. The biological world was abuzz at the time with the race to discover the building blocks of life, and Franklin’s contribution has never been adequately or appropriately recognised. Science is a far messier world than is often acknowledged, and religion can find a resting place there too, as a number of accommodationists have shown. Certainly, the straight denial that religion and science are somehow compatible is difficult to establish, and probably has only a minority following amongst scientists (though not amongst senior scientists, perhaps). Of course, I don’t think religion has a place in science either, but it’s not a slam dunk when it comes to showing why not.

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Further progress in the “right-to-die” movement

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A lot of things have been happening lately in the right-to-die movement, and they are worth recording here. Perhaps the most powerful statement so far made was made by Tony Nicklinson, who, after losing his High Court case for the right to die, lost hear, refused to eat, and died a few days later, finally free of the burden of a life which was becoming increasingly intolerable for him. That the courts would not set a precedent — and there is no obvious reason why they could not — because this is a matter for a Parliament which has shown scant interest in the issue for years, was a great disappointment, not only to Tony, but to many other people who are seeking relief from intolerable conditions of life.

A lot of commentators have remarked that the court could not have acted, for to have acceded to Tony Nicklinson’s request would have been, effectively, to legalise euthanasia, and there seem to be a lot of people who are unwilling to take that extra step, including many in the right-to-die movement. That they are completely wrong about this doesn’t seem to dawn on them. It may be that the preferred way is to provide the means for assisted suicide, so that the person who is suffering is the one who actually has to do the deed, but this excludes, by definition, all those who cannot do the deed, like Tony Nicklinson, and others who have lost the use of their bodies. Many people with MS and ALS end up in this state, and the limitation of assisted dying to assisted suicide means that these people will be forced to make the decision to die earlier than they otherwise might have done, because they would know that, once trapped in their bodies, they are trapped forever, unless they wish to starve themselves to death. But what people who was assistance in dying want is to be in full possession of their faculties when they die, and those who starve themselves to death eventually pass into a comatose state, and then they die. Why they cannot be helped simply makes no sense. It is significant that those who have fought this in court are those who are or who were likely to be in a state where assisted suicide would have been of no use to them. Tony Nicklinson, Diane Purdy, and Diane Pretty: all except Ms. Purdy were unable, at the time of their court challenges, were unable to die by receiving assistance in suicide. And still, unfortunately, the right-to-die organisation in Britain, Dignity in Dying, has not got the point.

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Is modern (secular) morality the fragmentary detritus of a once functioning objective morality? And is the only way back a religious one?

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I have just finished reading, for the first time (and without taking any notes), Philip Kitcher’s new book The Ethical Project. Kitcher’s take on ethics is practical and naturalistic. He calls his kind of ethics pragmatic naturalism, and links it closely to the pragmatism of Dewey and James. He assumes that ethics started out in tribal conditions where altruism failures were a problem. According to Kitcher, the ethical project got its start by establishing roles and rules designed to correct altruism failures. Furthermore, he suggests, with considerable reason, it seems to me, that contemporary ethics is a developmental extension of those first rough attempts to produce, first, a form of behavioural altruism, which was then, by necessity, extended to a truly psychological altruism. (Careful definitions of behavioural and psychological altruism are provided.) When I have reread the book more closely I will get back to what he is proposing in more detail, for what he does propose, it seems to me, might help to break the logjam caused by the many metaethical proposals that are still in play, from the intuitionism of Moore to the emotivism of the logical positivists.

Alongside Kitcher I am also rereading (after many years) Alisdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, which starts from the very odd premise that modernity was a mistake, and that to reestablish ethics on sound foundations we have to return to Aristotle and Aquinas. An interesting sidelight on the publication of After Virtue is that the first edition of the book was published shortly after MacIntyre’s conversion to Roman Catholicism. And an interesting comment on that is that the woman who was his wife at the time of his conversion was his third! Since the Roman Catholic Church holds that divorce is impossible, and that the marriage bond is essentially indissoluble by anything but death, it was an odd choice of religious allegiance, except that, in After Virtue, he more or less takes the position of Pope Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti (otherwise known as  Pius IX) with respect to modernity, and assumes that it is largely a logical and cultural mistake. (At least that’s the way MacIntyre’s argument seems to me. If only we had retained the virtue ethics of Aristotle as perfected by Aquinas, transitions to the scientific world view would have moved more smoothly, as well as being more intellectually respectable.)

In the first chapter of After Virtue, “A Disquieting Suggestion,” MacIntyre suggests a thought experiment. It is not clear to me that the thought experiment is even entertainable, since it does not explain clearly enough on what basis governance is to be continued in the conditions supposed. He asks us to imagine a time in the future when people have got fed up with science, have removed science from the curricula of schools and universities, killed or imprisoned all the scientists, and then government is carried out — well, how, exactly? Since science is not only physics and math and chemistry and biology, but a fairly strict methodological approach to information, how would a government function where fact checking was ruled out, and decisions were based on pure whim? MacIntyre seems to forget that science is not only composed of lists of facts, but is tied together by theory and based on experience, and that that process can scarcely simply disappear when we stop teaching the sciences. However, imagine it done for the purposes of argument. Now, says MacIntyre, we are to suppose that a generation comes along which is opposed to this science-destructive world outlook. However, during the anti-science period the scientific tradition had been virtually destroyed. There are fragments left, a book here or a page there, and a few memories of phrases and scientific terms, like the periodic table without any sense of what it was once about. But now we are to imagine people trying to reconstruct science in the absence of any understanding of what science was once really about, so they begin using scientific language without really understanding what the language was for, or what it really signified. Science, for this new generation, is a bunch of disjointed technical terms thrown out more or less at random, and repeated pointlessly in a form much like some postmodernist free association.

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The Politics of Religion

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Editorial | Published: May 27, 2012

Opinion Twitter Logo.

Thirteen Roman Catholic dioceses and some Catholic-related groups scattered lawsuits across a dozen federal courts last week claiming that President Obama was violating their religious freedom by including contraceptives in basic health care coverage for female employees. It was a dramatic stunt, full of indignation but built on air.

Mr. Obama’s contraception-coverage mandate specifically exempts houses of worship. If he had ordered all other organizations affiliated with a religion to pay for their employees’ contraception coverage, that policy could probably be justified under Supreme Court precedent, including a 1990 opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia.But that argument does not have to be made in court, because Mr. Obama very publicly backed down from his original position and gave those groups a way around the contraception-coverage requirement.

Roman Catholicism is a threat to freedom

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The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops is making a play for limiting the freedom of non-Catholic Canadians in the name of religious freedom. In a Pastoral Letter issued yesterday (14th April 2012), the bishops tell us that religious freedom is, in the words of Pope Karol Józef Wojtyła, “the litmus test for the respect of all other human rights.” (§ 3) This is surely wrong. The freedom to think and to express one’s thoughts is far more important than freedom of religion. Indeed, without freedom of expression even freedom of religious belief and practice would be subverted. By making freedom of religion the litmus test, they are already skewing the notion of freedom in such a way as to ensure that, in the end, other freedoms will be able, in the name of all that is holy, to be abrogated in favour of religion and its priorities.

This becomes even more clear when, in the next section, the bishops state:

The right to freedom of conscience and religion derive from the unique dignity of the human person created in the image of God (cf. Gen 1: 26-27) and endowed with reason and free will. [§ 4]

This is totally wrong-headed. Our human rights cannot be dependent on the religious beliefs of a few, no matter how many. Rights must be morally prior to religious belief, and freedom of religion derives from such prior rights, rather than the other way about. Making the right to freedom of conscience depend on the idea of the dignity of the human person created in the image of God — even if, which I doubt, this makes any sense — is to put the whole regime of human rights into the thrall of religion, and subservient to it.  In fact, when the pastoral letter immediately goes on to say that human beings are the only creatures who can be in conscious relationship with God, and that to enter such a relationship freely “is essential to their dignity,” then we know that we have passed through the religious looking-glass, and everything is topsy-turvy.

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Religion “a wild beast that cannot be tamed”

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I have said for some time now that religion does not respect boundaries, that it is about power and control, and that the ideal of freedom of religion is deeply flawed. Imagine, then, my reading Shadia Drury’s Op-Ed piece in the current issue of Free Inquiry, entitled “Is freedom of religion a mistake?” This is first paragraph of her Op-Ed:

Freedom of religion is a hard-core American value that is rarely questioned. It was supposed to be the ultimate solution to the grisly wars of religion that ravaged Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But religion is rarely satisfied with liberty. It invariably seeks dominance. It is akin to a wild beast that cannot be tamed; the brute is always there and ready to turn on its benefactor. [19]

The pull-quote on the page is this:

… Religion is rarely satisfied with liberty. It invariably seeks dominance.”

Well, you can’t say truer than that. Religion does not respect boundaries. It is about power and control, and will not be content until it achieves it. Religious people are jealous of every sign that other religions are being more successful than theirs, and they will do everything possible to compete for dominance. The ultimate dominance, of course, is control over the springs of political power.

It is not for nothing that the Roman Catholic Church has had a hissy fit about the American Department of Health and Human Services announcement that all institutions funded by the federal government will be required to make contraception and other reproductive services a required part of health insurance for employees. The conference of bishops immediately issued their non placet, and had their obedient lackeys out in force to reinforce the bishops’ hold on political power, showing that, by fair means or foul, they were quite prepared to force the government to back down on something that was not only a just demand attached to federal funding of sectarian institutions, but to acknowledge the right of the church to govern itself by a law of its own, without appeal to the law of the state. This was, undoubtedly, the primary reason for a response which was completely out of proportion to any offence that could be thought to have been caused, and it was based, almost exclusively, on a supposed right to freedom of religion.

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Should we challenge Catholic politicians about their belief in transubstantiation?

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Let’s start with the video clip that prompted the question:

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When I first heard this I was convinced, as Chris Hayes suggests, that this way lies ruin. First of all, from the American point of view, it seems that this would be applying a religious test to a candidate for office, and this the American Constitution simply rules out. [This misunderstanding is corrected by Another Matt in the first comment below.] However, from another point of view — and one that may not in fact be a violation of constitutional rights to freedom of religion — asking such a question does make some sense. The assumption lying behind the idea of a religious test for office is that a person’s religious beliefs are private and have no public application — in the sense that they should have no bearing on public affairs. American experts on the constitution can correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems clear that the founders of the Republic realised that making religious profession a condition of office would in fact institutionalise religious differences that would prevent the establishment of a federation in the first place. The resolution of this problem was to expel religion from the public, and confine it to the private, sphere.

However, things have worked out differently than the founders of the Republic could have imagined. For they were enlightened men, and from their vantage point in history it seemed fairly clear that religion had no more public role to play. However intense people’s religious beliefs and feelings were, they had no public application. I suspect that they would be surprised at the robustness of religious belief in the United States today, and even more surprised at its insistent quality, its clamouring for public recognition in law and governance. And I think they would wonder where they had made the mistake that had enabled religion to capture such a huge public footprint, which they thought they had excluded. I daresay, had they known what was to come, they would have institutionalised some protection against the growth of such a forceful public expression of religious conviction, and the threat of its instantiation in law.

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