(video link)

This time Cardinal Keith O'Brien, the representative of the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland decides to come out with the same BS that we've seen in the past. He says that Christians are being persecuted for wearing crosses in public.

0:31 Beginning of relevant report.
2:24 Interview with Andrew Copson on the issue.

Andrew Copson from the British Humanist Association strikes again. Once again he explains very clearly and diplomatically why the latest "Christians are being marginalised" story is BS. (His phrasing: "their claims have very little basis in fact" rather than "they are making s**t up".)

Also liking the new beard. :)

Cardinal O'Brien has previously claimed that when the New Labour government were in power there was "a systematic and unrelenting attack on family values". Why's this? The introduction of civil partnerships, allowing adoption by same-sex couples, allowing embryo research and not passing a law to lower the legal time limit in which an abortion may be carried out. He also referred to the Equality Bill as "legislation which would completely and permanently undermine religious freedom". And now he has the audacity to push the lie that Christians' rights to wear crosses are under attack. Ugh!

(cross posted to atheism )

The following is a clip from a tv programme about near-death experiences. A major focus is an atheist woman who is a secular officiant. (She performs non-religious weddings and other non-religious ceremonies. In the video they strangely call her an atheist minister.)

The way she describes her brush with death in purely non-religious terms is really uplifting and quite beautiful. Even her interviewer, who understood their own NDE from a religious perspective, seems to be somewhat moved by the way she expresses her interpretation of the experience.



(video link)

(Some little details are cleared up at Friendly Atheist)

(Cross-posted to atheism )

Well the big news is that Stephen Hawking has finally refuted all those religious apologists who were fond of quoting his final line from "A Brief History of Time": "For then we would know the mind of God".

"It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the Universe going," added the wheelchair-bound expert.
...
"Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist," he writes in "The Grand Design", which is being serialised by The Times newspaper.

In response to this The Times decided it was a good idea to invite Richard Dawkins to debate this. They decided to put Dawkins up against their religion correspondent Ruth Gledhill. Richard Dawkins can feel like a bit of a broken record at the best of times, but putting him against Ruth Gledhill was particularly pointless.

I have posted about Ruth Gledhill before when I noted a couple of previous articles of hers:

1 - "Catholic Church No Longer Swears By Truth Of The Bible" - In the older of the two, she reports on a reminder by the Vatican that they have no problem with the theory of evolution and are able to accept certain passages in the Bible as symbolic. Her response? The Vatican is now clarifying which bits of the Bible are right and which bits are wrong.

I feel the need to place the important bits of this article under the cut because, what with The Times now making the public pay for access to their site, there may come a time when you cannot use the link to the article anymore:

THE hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church has published a teaching document instructing the faithful that some parts of the Bible are not actually true.

( Read more... )
2 - Children Who Front Richard Dawkins' Atheist Ads Are Evangelicals Rather handily, in this case pretty much all the problems can be seen in the title. The advert under discussion is the following one from the BHA:

"Please Don't Label Me. Let Me Grow Up And Choose For Myself."

Just to confuse things there are two major atheist/agnostic lobbying groups in the UK. There's "The Secular Society" and "The British Humanist Society". The former is only intested in atheism, whereas the latter is concerned with the wider issues of "secularism" (e.g. issues like ensuring fair hiring practices for people of all faiths and none). No, I did not just get those mixed up.

So perhaps unsurprisingly, the BHA organised a campaign noting that children should not be used for the promotion of a particular belief system because they are too young to make such decisions. Gledhill's response? Well you've already seen it. She claims that these children are being used to promote atheism (um, no they aren't), but actually they are "Christian Evangelical children" (oh my goodness, you couldn't have missed the point more if you tried).

Their father, Brad Mason, is something of a celebrity within evangelical circles as the drummer for the popular Christian musician Noel Richards. ... He said that the children’s Christianity had shone through. “Obviously there is something in their faces which is different. So they judged that they were happy and free without knowing that they are Christians. That is quite a compliment. I reckon it shows we have brought up our children in a good way and that they are happy.”
...
The British Humanist Association said that it did not matter whether the children were Christians. “That’s one of the points of our campaign,” said Andrew Copson, the association’s education director. “People who criticise us for saying that children raised in religious families won’t be happy, or that no child should have any contact with religion, should take the time to read the adverts.

Perhaps before choosing your article heading, Ms. Gledhill!

“The message is that the labelling of children by their parents’ religion fails to respect the rights of the child and their autonomy. We are saying that religions and philosophies — and ‘humanist’ is one of the labels we use on our poster — should not be foisted on or assumed of young children.”

So yeah, Gledhill isn't really someone you should expect a high level of debate from. In fact Hannah Devlin, who chairs the discussion, seems to do a better job of getting some clear answers out of Dawkins than Ruth Gledhill manages later:

14:34 Hannah Devlin:
To kick things off, I'd like to ask Richard what he makes of Hawking's thesis. Is this the new Darwinism?
14:35 Richard Dawkins:
Only the new Darwinism in the sense that it finishes off God. Darwin kicked him out of biology, but physics remained more uncertain. Hawking is now administering the coup de grace
14:36 Richard Dawkins:
It is not like Darwinism in any other very strong sense.

( Read more... )I get the impression that Devlin was deciding what comments would be displayed, so Tim H was being specifically put forward as a question from the floor. Sure, not much that's terribly challenging here and Devlin clearly (and mistakenly I feel) expects more interesting ideas to be raised by Gledhill later on.

Anyway, this is where Gledhill arrives and makes the statement which Pharyngula quotes and ridicules. These statements actually originate from an interview with David Wilkinson. Thanks to "Rupert Murdoch's Greed" (TM) you will need to subscribe to The Times if you want to read that. Fortunately, there is a site with some videos where David Wilkinson sets out his view on the "fine-tuning argument", not as an argument, but as a "pointer" to the truth of Jesus and Christianity (I'm not fantastic with google searches, so it took me a while to find that link btw) The basic gist of his position is that the set of events which took place in order for life to come about make us want to make shit up to explain it and making shit up is a sensible decision. Anyway, moving on...:

14:43 Ruth Gledhill:
Tim, I just interviewed David Wilkinson, principal of St John's Durham and astrophysicist, and this is what he said (full interview at my Times blog Articles of Faith):
The science Stephen Hawking uses raises a number of questions which for many opens the door to the possibility of an existence of a creator and for many points to the existence of a creator.

'One would be the the purpose of the universe. Although science might discover the mechanism, we are still left with the question of what is the purpose.

'Second is where the laws of physics come from. Science subsumes the laws but we are still left with the question of where the laws come from.

'Third is the intelligibility of the universe. It strikes me as interesting that Stephen Hawking can make it intelligible. Albert Einstein once said that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible. For many of us who are struck by the intelligibility of the physical laws, the explanation is that the creator is the force of rationality both for the universe and for our minds.

Dawkins' Response To Statement One:
Why on Earth should anyone assume that there IS a purpose?

( Read more... )

Dawkins' Response To Statement Two:
Even if we are left with that question, it is not going to be answered by a God, who raises more questions than he answers.

( Read more... )

Dawkins' Response To Statement Three:
What would an unintelligible universe even look like? Why SHOULDN't the universe be intelligible?

Hannah Devlin taking questions she's selected from the floor: Ruth, Richard, I'd be interested in your views on philc's point - is religious belief irrational? If not, why?

( Read more... )

The debate goes on longer than this, but then again this re-organising thing is a bit too much of a time-waster, so I'm going to stop there. I kinda feel sorry for Gledhill on this point. It's irritating for me seeing Dawkins pulling "my belief that I am Napoleon" out of his old bag of tricks again, so it must be even worse for someone who disagrees with the point behind it. That said, her response is quite vacuous to the point where I'd actually have been more impressed with "oh don't be so daft Richard" as a response. If the only thing you know about God is that you are not it, you aren't really in a good position to be a religion correspondent (not that this comes as any surprise).

Still, one last thing that could do with a quotation is the following point where Dawkins' decides to betray Islamophobic sentiment (and annoyingly Gledhill isn't interested in responding to it, never mind tackling it).

Comment From Jerry Coyne: Question to Ruth: If faith helps you, then does it make any difference to you whether what you believe about God, Jesus, the Resurrection, and the like is true? Devout Muslims, for example, are also consoled by their faith, but their beliefs about Jesus, Mohamed, etc. are completely contradictory to those of Christianity. Both can't be true.

Richard Dawkins: Quite right, Jerry. And even if there is some similarity between the Abrahamic religions, the Greeks believed just as sincerely in their pantheon. I agree with Dan Dennett that universal education in comparative religion would be a hammer blow to religious faith.

Ruth Gledhill: Jerry, in some liberal theological circles, it is not regarded as impossible that there is truth in both Islam and Christianity.

Richard Dawkins:The Islamic penalty for converting to Christianity is what, Ruth, perhaps you know?

And the Jewish penalty for having anal sex with another man is? I mean seriously, what was he trying to prove?

When searching in vain for the actual interview from the Radio Times, I found this very sensible comment. Saves me the bother of writing it myself. Needless to say, not all claims of Islamophobia are correct and sensible. It's important to consider each case properly.

Don’t let the burka stifle free speech

Tuesday 10 August 2010
I’ve been arguing for ages that the burka is a ridiculous garment, but that it shouldn’t be banned. Now Richard Dawkins is saying pretty much the same: in an interview with Radio Times he says he feels ‘visceral revulsion’ when he sees the ‘full bin-liner thing’.

Fair enough. He’s entitled to his opinion and he’s not calling for it to be outlawed, as several European countries are proposing. Inevitably, though, he’s been accused of ignorance – a curious charge when I have Muslim friends who are just as scathing about the burka; they call women who wear it ‘ninjas’ – and Islamophobia.

I’m not surprised. Dawkins describes the burka as ‘a symbol of the oppression of women’ but I’d go further than that. It’s a symbol of an authoritarian ideology which seeks not just to hide women but to silence critics of religion. Like me, Dawkins is an atheist, a rationalist and a supporter of human rights. One of the most important is free speech, and that includes our right to say what we like about absurd forms of religious dress.
(Article from "Political Blonde")

Richard Dawkins website oddly links to the Daily Fail, so I've picked another, slightly more reliable, news website:

Richard Dawkins causes outcry after likening the burka to a bin liner

The 69-year-old author and Oxford academic said he is filled with “visceral revulsion” when he sees women wearing the traditional Islamic covering.

But he held back from advocating a ban on the all-enveloping cloak, insisting that such legislation would fly in the face of Britain’s liberal tradition.

( Read more... )

(Richard Dawkins Website)
(Telegraph Article) 

Like Richard Dawkins, I am not in favour of a ban and his description of the burkha is not Islamophobic. From his description it seems that he not referring to the nikab (which is more ninja-like) so the style of dress he refers to is the one from Afghanistan in particular which has a history of being used to oppress women. I think Political Blonde hits the nail on the head when they point out that we should be free to mock all religious clothing regardless of the religion. I've never been Dawkins' biggest fan, but his comments here are clearly not bigoted.

(cross-posted to atheism)

Presumably by now everyone's heard of this somewhat underwhelming advert from the BHA:



Some people have asked, "so how do you expect us to bring up our children without passing on our own beliefs" which naturally fails to note that the poster quite clearly includes HUMANIST CHILD. Andrew Copson is eloquent as ever in his explanation of how these people have missed the point:

"You have to wonder why these commentators can't just agree that there is an extreme of presumption which is coercive and should be avoided." said Andrew Copson. "People who criticise us as if we'd said that children raised in religious families couldn't be happy or that no child should have any contact with religion or learn anything about it at all should take the time to read the adverts and think about their message rather than rely on their own assumptions.

"The message of the posters is that the labelling of children by their parents' religion fails to respect the rights of the child and curtails their autonomy. We are saying that religions and philosophies (and 'Humanist' is one of the labels we use on our poster) should not be foisted on or assumed of young children and that young people have the right to choose for themselves in line with their developing capacities as they grow. That's very far from saying that any possible reference to religion should be prohibited in the home!"

I say underwhelming since it's not entirely clear from the advert what scenario might arise where a child is overly identified with their parents religion (rather than simply brought up being taught their parents' beliefs). That being said, a rather apt demonstration has been forthcoming anyway......

This advert has clearly confused a number of different people who were all expecting something self-serving from the BHA. Their decision to advocate strict secularism rather than priveledge for their own belief system (like religious groups prefer to do) has bowled many people for six. However, none have managed to make such an enormous gaffe in their criticisms than Ruth Gledhill from The Times:

With the slogan “Please don’t label me. Let me grow up and choose for myself”, the youngsters with broad grins seem to be the perfect advertisement for the new atheism being promoted by Professor Dawkins and the British Humanist Association.
Except that they are about as far from atheism as it is possible to be. The Times can reveal that Charlotte, 8, and Ollie, 7, are from one of the country’s most devout Christian families.

Their father, Brad Mason, is quoted as saying:

“It is quite funny, because obviously they were searching for images of children that looked happy and free. They happened to choose children who are Christian. It is ironic. The humanists obviously did not know the background of these children.”

While Gerald Coates, the leader of the Pioneer network of churches, is quoted as saying:

“I think it is hilarious that the happy and liberated children on the atheist poster are in fact Christian.”

cyranothe2nd provides the perfect response to all this and I couldn't really improve on it if I wanted to:

Yes, yes it is ironic, you f*cking idiots! The whole point of the ads is that they aren't Christian children-they are children of Christian parents.

Well, this isn't the first time Ruth Gledhill has said something idiotic. One of the first articles I came across from her was in response to a statement from the Vatican re-asserting that Darwin's theory of evolution poses no problems for them. The headline for the article was: "Catholic Church No Longer Swears By Truth Of The Bible." *facepalm*

(via Exchristians)

This is my previous extra-long confused post, re-cut to make more sense and be FAR more readable:

Baroness Warsi and the National Secular Society

The BHA recently criticised comments by two prominent political figures: Tony Blair (for whom I feel no explanation is required) and Baroness Warsi (whose comments can be found here). Baroness Warsi is a Muslim politician in the Conservative party.

The National Secular Society quoted Baroness Warsi's description of "state multiculturalism" where she defines it as follows:

"Firstly, when we as Conservatives talk about multiculturalism we are not talking about the building of temples, or synagogues or mosques in any neighbourhood. For us that is religious pluralism and it is a defining British characteristic that began with the non-conformists.

"For me, state multiculturalism, as I like to define it is forcing Britain’s diverse communities to still define themselves as different, patronisingly special and tempting them to compete against each other for public funds."

The National Secular Society then respond by saying:

"We have been saying this for the past ten years. So far so good."

Sorry, but no it's not bloody good! Why the hell shouldn't religious groups compete for public funds just like everyone else? It's actually in this criticism of "state multiculturalism" that Baroness Warsi's criticism of secularism is most clear and obvious. She doesn't think that religious groups should compete against each other along with all the other stances vying for public attention. Instead she thinks religions should be granted priveledges by default.


Both are united against "state multiculturalism" - whatever the hell that is.

So where did the term 'state multiculturalism' come from?

( Read more... )

Problems with the Conservatives' critique of 'state multiculturalism'
( Read more... )

What should the National Secular Society have praised Baroness Warsi for saying?

( Read more... )

Baroness Warsi's absurd examples of persecution. (The bit the National Secular Society were absolutely right about.)

( Read more... )

Much as I would love to say that Secular Humanism didn't have its problems, this simply isn't true. This isn't really surprising as no organisation is without its flaws. 'Humanist' is meant to be easier to accept as a label than 'atheist' because, while 'atheist' has a history of stigma and taboo linking it with immoralism and nihilism, 'Humanist' is a term specifically highlighting a non-religious acceptance of values. (If such a combination were impossible the accusation would be that humanism was impossible, not that humanism was nihilistic.) Nevertheless, for some reason many people who perfectly fit the bill as 'Secular Humanists' seem reluctant to be labelled as such, even if they accept the labels 'atheist' or 'agnostic' without any trouble at all.


Update:  I posted this to Sluts4Choice a while back and I've realised I probably ought to re-post it here so I have a record of it:

Looking back at the response I got from my MP, I've discovered that that wasn't terribly comforting either. (I actually remember feeling a lot happier about it at the time and I think it's a sign of how my understanding of this issue has moved on that I now recognise how dodgy this reply is):

Dear ---------,

Many thanks for your email. I'd like to hear the debate on the issue before making up my mind on this, but will keep the points that you make in mind - I've also heard from a constituent who was directly affected herself and is against any significant reduction (as well as other constituents who want quite drastic reductions all the way down to 14 weeks).

I have two amendments myself - one is a technical one to help a constituent who is seeking to have frozen embryos kept for longer than the current 5 years (this isn't controversial) and the other is to make it mandatory to offer current, neutral, scientific guidance to anyone who is advised that the foetus is suffering from a disease or abnormality which would allow a late aboriton - the advice would give informaiton on life expectancy, chance of treatment, availability of help, etc. The idea is not to influence the choice but to help ensure that it's based on the best available information.

Yours sincerely,
------------------------

Oh how wonderful. He wants to give women mandatory counselling regarding abortions. That's not remotely condescending. And what kind of advice does he think the two doctors who are already required in order to sign off on any abortion are going to give? Out of date, biased or unscientific guidance?