My tale of me - Chris Jenkinson

Interesting debate on the place of non-believers in modern society in the House of Lords (hat tip and interesting review). John Sentamu comes out with the new religious tactic of trying to define atheism as a religion, but this is my favourite bit:

Twenty-seven years ago I was chaplain to a young offenders remand centre, Latchmere House. Every inmate was asked to declare his religious affiliation, and four young men were registered as having no religion. One Sunday, all the inmates were offered the chance to go to worship. The four young men with no religion declined the offer, while their fellow inmates on the A wing took up the offer. The prison officer, not wanting the four men to remain locked up in their cells, asked them to clean the toilets on the wing. The following Sunday, our four non-religious young men took up the offer to go to worship. The prison officer was puzzled why they had opted in this week. “Why are you going to chapel?” he asked. The four replied, “Sir, we didn’t like the ‘No Religion’ place of worship”. Crudely as they put it, those four young men were saying in their naivety that we are all essentially religious.

No they weren’t, they didn’t like cleaning toilets. What a shocker.

Did you know that there are 5 hospitals in the UK run by the NHS exclusively dedicated to homoeopathic “treatment”? What is worse is that a significant proportion of the UK’s population (championed by the anachronism which is Charles Windsor) which believe that homoeopathy actually works, despite any supporting evidence. It, along with so-called alternative medicine courses at some universities, are diverting money away from already cash-strapped hospitals and colleges.

Sign the petition to end taxpayer’s money going towards this dangerous distraction from medicine that actually works.

“There is no alternative medicine. There is only medicine that works and medicine that doesn’t work.” — Richard Dawkins.

Saturday’s Guardian carries an opinion piece from Nicholas Buxton entitled “Face to faith” where he touts out the now-frequent line from organised religions about how atheism is also a religious movement with a dogmatic approach to everything from science to social justice. He starts his piece with this rather extraordinary sentence: “Post-Enlightment critiques of religion have sought to reduce it to a tool of social oppression (Marxism), bad science (Darwinism) or neurosis (Freudianism).”

Yes, there is bad science in the Bible and other religious texts, but if Buxton thinks that biology is the study of how religion is wrong it sounds like he didn’t pay attention at school. Biology is the study of life. It is about uncovering the truth about our origins and the way we and other organisms are formed. Scientists report what they find, not what they want to find. If the findings contradict (or support!) the Bible, then that is just the way it is. The point of science is to uncover the truth not to “prove” preconceived notions. Similarly, Marxism is a critique of oppression of workers. Whether it comes from religion or elsewhere is irrelevant to the theory. Say that religious texts contained support the tectonic plate theory, the theory of universal common descent, or proletariat empowerment - and some perhaps do. Would this have any bearing on the general theory of Marxism or that of evolution?

It is not long until the next extraordinary sentence: “A ‘religion’ is a story we inhabit that makes sense of what would otherwise be nonsense.” He also claims that Marxists, Darwinists and Freudians are in this game too. Why do these people who the organised religions put out to attack secularism and atheism always come up with these ridiculous definitions? What dictionary was that definition pulled out of? Enough of the straw men.

He carries on in this vein, but worth mentioning is his claim that “dogmatic - taken for granted and unprovable - assumptions underlie non-religious world views as well”. World views like desiring “progress” are apparently dogmatic. On the other hand, perhaps people desire progress because they see where we were 500 years ago with rampant disease, high child mortality rates and a highly restrictive lifestyle, and see where we are now, and believe things can get better? He questions why there will be a better future if we increase our scientific knowledge. Well, it worked for getting rid of rampant disease and high child mortality rates, and it liberated people’s lifestyles.

Buxton’s argument is centred around a fundamental misunderstanding of faith. Not all faith is the same. We all have faith that our doctor will be able to help us. We believe this because we are aware of the training doctors go through and the regulation by the government to ensure that they are qualified. We don’t have to take it on faith - we could ask to see certification of their licence to practice. But we do, because it’s so likely they have those qualifications. Confusing this faith with the faith that the world was created by a all-powerful being who has existed forever and knows everything, which is a far more questionable claim, leads to an completely fallacious conclusion that everything we take on faith is equally likely.

Atheism is not a form of religion. It is opposition to accepting ideas at face value, to unquestioning support for authority. It requires extraordinary evidence for extraordinary claims. It is based on scepticism and rationality.

The ending is worth quoting for entertainment value:

To be a Christian in such circumstances is to be unconventional and nonconformist: it is to be something of a freethinker, espousing a radical vision of human flourishing that shows us how we can be more than what we are, rather than reducing us to less than what we should be.

Just thought a certain comment our Dear Leader made about education just about sums up how disastrously wrong New Labour’s focus is on this matter. So much for education, education, education. Schools are not meant to be “popular with parents”, they have a duty to the children. But on the other hand, children can’t vote, so what’s the point in making schools work?

Tony Blair and the schools minister Lord Adonis believe strongly that faith schools are popular with parents and want faith groups to be more involved in state education to provide a “distinctive ethos”, through privately sponsoring city academies or backing the new breed of “trust schools”.

With all this controversy about the supermosque proposal in London (which I don’t really care about, though I am slightly concerned about the source of funding), it might be easy to forget the increasing influence Christian creationist groups have in the US. They are fighting hard to open a “museum” detailing the literal Genesis creation story. Should this be allowed to exist under free speech grounds, even though Ken Ham and his ilk at Answers in Genesis are just complete liars?

The Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) have an interesting article titled “Whatever happened to student radicalism?“, written by Ben Lewis and Dave Isaacson. While it suffers from the usual “everyone who disagrees with us is right-wing” disease common among socialists and communists, it is worth reading for its analysis of the fractures between the various socialist groups. However, I think their opposition to means-tested grants and the reasons for it are misplaced. Their suggested replacement with universal grants are the wrong solution to the wrong problem, and it is this I wish to mention.

I am opposed to means-tested grants in principle on the basis that education is a right, not a privilege, and that tuition fees and top-up fees are a barrier to that right. However, I find their logic for opposing means-testing to be confusing. If I understand it correctly, it is that means-testing is discriminatory against minority students such as LGBT or black students. I find this a strange argument as means-testing for students is based on the income and assets of one’s parents rather than whether the prospective student is gay or black (and if we are to have means-testing, so it should be). Whether someone is gay or black should have nothing to do with how much money they receive. Being black or gay does not make you inherently more or less deserving of a grant than being white or straight. The article claims that means-tested grants also do nothing to address the gap between rich and poor. This is contradictory to discrimination based on being part of a minority.

In fact, addressing the gap between rich and poor is a much higher priority - and more work actually needs to be done addressing educational standards for children from deprived white families than for other ethnic minority groupings, according to a 2006 report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (page 21). At 16, as a percentage more white children are not in school or training than any other minority (page 57). Being worried about discrimination against minority groups with means-tested grants is missing the elephant in the room - which is the failure of deprived white children to remain in education. Ending the 10p rate of income tax as the Liberal Democrats propose is one way to help these families - not raising it to 20p as Gordon Brown has proposed in the budget (causing many lower-income families to pay a large increase in tax, unless they will benefit from the working tax credit increase). Making education work might not be a panacea, but it is close.

The socialists’ opposition to means-tested grants is flawed. They argue that it discriminates against minorities (which is irrelevant, and in any case, ethnic minorities do not need the support as much). They also argue that it does nothing to address the gap between rich and poor. It does help, but means-tested grants are not supposed to solve the massive problem of failed educational practices in this country, but to help poorer students who want to study get into university. They would be better supporting campaigns to add another tax rate for the highest earners and increasing taxes on large corporations, remove the poorest people from paying income tax altogether, and opposing tax increases for small businesses (and of course to support a fair system of local income tax, rather than the regressive council tax). Means-testing is not an ideal solution, but to replace means-testing with a universal grant without addressing the more serious problem of the failing education system would hit students coming from deprived families the hardest, despite what the CPGB and the other socialist/communist groups claim.

The new Animal Welfare Act is coming into force in England as of Friday. Basically, owners of animals are now legally required to ensure their basic welfare. It’s amazing to think that up until now there was no obligation in law to care for one’s pets, but congratulations to the government for doing the right thing.

The government now needs to take steps to heavily reform or ban battery farming (and to work with the EU to ensure there is a consistent policy on this so cheap battery-farmed eggs from other EU countries can’t flood our markets), and make sure regulations on circuses and zoos are putting the welfare of the animal before the entertainment of the crowds.

At the other end of the spectrum, more needs to be done by the government to protect scientists involved in animal research. What they are doing is legal and very closely regulated. There is reform needed within this field (notably the ending of cosmetic testing), but the government takes any foul play by researchers very seriously as some ex-employees of Huntingdon Life Sciences found out. Abuse of animals is wrong, but so too is abuse of the families of scientists involved in this field by extremists.

The slippery slope of content classification has been avoided for the next few years, at least. It’s not just free speech which has won here, young people with strict parents who would otherwise deny them access to information categorised into the XXX domain by well-meaning “think of the family” and “abstinence only” conservative politicians - information like sexual health and pregnancy.

The comments by the CEO of ICM Registry are shameful. The reason a registry supports extra domain names is blindingly obvious it is a wonder they even bother to hide it - they want to flog hundreds of domains to companies forced to buy alternatives to stop impersonation, and not for any sense of duty towards allegedly protecting children.