Feeding The Fish

Thanks to Oz Athiest for this one. This really is becoming a recurring theme, the Catholic Church being kind and virtuous in running public services…until they disagree with the government, in which case said services fast become political assets to be deployed.

In Australia there’s every sign the law regarding abortion is about to relaxed, naturally the Catholic Church (and no doubt others) are up in arms about this. Their reponse looks very familar:

1) Lying: The law won’t require all doctors to perform abortions like the church is insisting it does - it simply obliges them to refer a patient seeking one to a doctor that will.
2) Misdirection: It is a violation of religious freedom to give women rights! This is a varariation on the ‘bigots have a right to be bigots!’ line we get whenever treating gay people as anything other than second-class citizens comes up.
3) Taking Hostages: The church is threatening to close emergency departments if the law passes. It’s not that they want to drag sick people into this you understand, it’s that they’ve decided to lie about what the bill entails in a way that means they’ll naturally have to stop providing vital services out of sheer moral conviction.

We’ve seen this before in the UK, with the outright lying over the embryology bill and with the Catholic Church threatening to close adoption services rather than consider giving children to gay couples. While I’m picking on the Catholics today, they’re not the only church to try the trick of taking money to run public services out of the goodness of their heart - until they find the government doesn’t consider the right to discriminate part of religious freedom and they’ll threaten to close them. I can’t take the idea that these public services attest to the moral willing of the church when they are continuously used as threats against the government. They seem to be considered as much political assets as public services.

Naturally this applies to one of my main problems with religious accommodation - faith schools. Take how the Church reacted when Amnesty took a side on abortion - they didn’t sideline Catholics schools into only taking part in campaigns that are unrelated to potentially funding abortions: they banned them outright. It seems all the church has to do is replace ‘political’ with ‘moral’ and any action they take is justifiable. The Catholic Church is undeniably a political body that’s antiquated and downright immoral moral sense will bring it into conflict with the government more and more in the future – schools should not be a football in this fight. If they want to protest they have to do it the same way as everyone else protests what’s done with public money - through the democratic process.

What happens when the government starts requiring schools step up and provide outstanding sex education? Considering that some people at the top have this kind of opinion on exactly how regressive and useless sex education should be, is it that outrageous an idea that some bishop might just let it slip that good Catholics couldn’t possibly abide with such a law and the government is forcing them because of their strong moral backbone to close schools?

I think it’ll happen, I think it’ll be a shortlived idea because it will directly effect thousands of ordinary Catholics who aren’t quite as regressive as their leadership, but can we really afford to leave schools out there as a political football given the church’s history with similar public services it’s running?

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to call ‘inter-faith’ projects the largest tents in history - Inside it we have all these faiths that hold completely conflicting views on the way reality is but are willing to put that aside. Sure they may disagree with each other on every conceivable point, the nature of god, the name of god, the number of gods, which impressive hats impress god most, but everyone thinks something strange is going on right? And that means….something. That means they can work together and fix all that is wrong with the world. Inside this large tent they learn about each other, learn how they can live in peace with each other, learn what they have in common and pool their resources to accomplish good in the world. How can anything so inclusive be bad?

The one snag is that I had to keep using ‘they’ there rather than ‘we’, this ecumenicism leaves out one the largest single groups in the world: The non-believers. We are consistently left outside the largest tent in history.

The problem isn’t the idea that we can put differences aside and learn from each other and work together to accomplish great deeds - It’s that the very notion of inter-faith projects is phrased in ways like “faith has special qualities”, “faith makes us better people”, “faith inspires us in ways that nothing else can”, which are all nice, fluffy ecumenical stuff for the religious but directly offensive to those who thought they were doing well enough as human beings without faith. The inter-faith movement is rooted in something that is fundamentally demeaning to the morals and achievements of a growing (but already sizable) portion of the human race. It’s not that we lack language capable of drawing together every kind of person, the humanist tradition has a lot of it, it’s that those running this show either still labour under the misconception they’re still the only game in town or don’t seem to care that they’d come closer to achieving their goals by including non-believers.

I am for some reason on the mailing list of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation. They recently started an initiative called Faiths Act, working with Malaria groups to fund getting a million mosquito nets. What can I possibly find fault with here?

As many as three million people die of malaria each year, most of them pregnant women and children under five living in Sub-Saharan Africa. One child dies every 30 seconds. Their deaths are preventable.

Across much of Asia and the rest of the world, malaria continues to strike, and doesn’t discriminate between religions.

No that’s right, it doesn’t discriminate. It doesn’t discriminate between religious and non-religious either. This is an issue for all (and would be even if it was only Muslims dying). What is the point of being so ecumenical that anyone who believes anything is inside under the tent, without bringing non-believers into the action? We have money and consciences too. We can save more people together than alone.

Unfortunately it’s not just poor wording in the emails, the Faith Foundation’s mission statement is fundamentally opposed to the ultimate ecumenicism of bringing atheists into the fold.

The Tony Blair Faith Foundation aims to promote respect and understanding about the world’s major religions and show how faith is a powerful force for good in the modern world.

Faith is vitally important to hundreds of millions of people. It underpins systems of thought and of behaviour. It underpins many of the world’s great movements for change or reform, including many charities. And the values of respect, justice and compassion that our great religions share have never been more relevant or important to bring people together to build a better world.

But religious faith can also be used to divide. We have seen throughout history and today we still see how it can be distorted to fan the flames of hatred and extremism.

The Tony Blair Faith Foundation is a response to these opportunities and challenges. We will use the full power of modern communications to support and step up efforts at every level to educate, inform and develop understanding about the different faiths and between them.

At the same time, the Foundation will use its profile and resources to encourage people of faith to work together more closely to tackle global poverty and conflict. By supporting such inter-faith initiatives, the Foundation will help underline the religion’s relevance and positive contribution.

The very language of the mission statement is designed to make the religious feel better about them, but again, is directly exclusionary to non-believers. Do I not share a similar sense of respect, justice and compassion? The next line is a tad ironic, because the foundation has moved past divisions between faiths to find the one division that’s apparently truly important and worth keeping: the division between the faithful and the nonbelievers.

This seems to be the problem with the Faith Foundation in its present form: it encourages selfless acts for its own selfish ends. Its primary goal isn’t to help people, but to show that faith can help people – that is the first line of the mission statement. This is frustrating because there is a real role for an organization that can pick an important issue and mobilize communities and people (both religious and non-religious) world-wide around it. I didn’t know about the Malaria No More project, now I do and there are a few more bed nets in circulation (here’s a link for anyone who feels like giving). More can be helped if we reach out to all than try to prove petty and self-serving points.

If the Foundation’s role is to be an inter-faith talking shop, then hey, atheists and humanists should be at that table too. I am often annoyed (to put it extremely mildly) when world religious leaders go out of their way to insinuate that people who don’t believe in God are inferior moral beings and responsible for the evils of history (despite any inconvenient facts to the contrary) - It’s quite clear they don’t understand us and need to be educated. Or again, if the Faith Foundation’s role is to coordinate large scale campaigns, then again, there are enough non-religious communities springing up that it’s worth reaching out. For the love of all unholy, use us.

So the question for Tony Blair would be: Is it more important that we ‘underline the religion’s relevance and positive contribution’ or make a tent just a little bit larger and bring a bit more understanding to the world and a few more hands to healing it’s scars? I can’t see how any ‘inter-faith’ project couldn’t accomplish it’s goals better if it scrapped it’s ‘inter-faith’ credo and brought everyone into the tent.

In the midst of the Anglican confudal about how much they really feel like appeasing the bigots amongst them the Catholic church lept in to demonstrate that their position was very clear: “Homosexuality is a disordered behaviour. The activity must be condemned”.

On a selfish level, I’ll confess to a little satisfaction when a religion takes an unambiguously stupid and harmful stance because it makes the argument that they’re an anachronism far easier, but that is a profoundly selfish take because it ignores the fact that the flat out evil policies and doctrine of the church make real people’s lives worse (and often shorter). Ignoring for a second the whole “condoms will kill you” thing; the Catholic Church has an official position that Homosexuality is wrong and should be condemned - They also run schools with gay children in them. Why on earth is this tolerated?

There is a problem pretty much everywhere in the British school system with homophobic bullying (I’ve always felt that terms a little misleading, it’s not so much fear as it is hate) with 2/3 of gay students reporting problem but it can’t be coincidence that in faith schools this goes up to 3/4. Whilst a leap from one high figure to another may not be that impressive an indictment it’s more worryingly that significantly fewer pupils (23%) feel able to report abuse in faith schools and it’s hard to see how doctrine like this is in any way conductive to an environment where pupils feel comfortable trusting schools to react and deal appropriately. The issue isn’t that it’s the staff are doing the bullying (although this does happen) but that they won’t step in in the same way they would with other kinds of bullying and don’t address the issue with their students. Think: Is this kind of stance more or less likely when the heads of your religion say you should be condemning these young freaks?

The Stonewall report on the matter has some examples of how this plays out outside the magical world of percentages:

“It’s a Catholic school…and we are told ‘gay people will go to hell because the Bible condemns it’… It’s horrid, you just want to go and cry at some of the remarks made by the teachers. It’s just not fair.” - Matthew, 18, single sex Catholic school (South East)

“PSHE was about AIDS – the teacher didn’t contradict that it was a ‘gay disease’ and implied what gay men did in bed was disgusting.” - Rachel, 18,independent secondary school (Greater London)

“The response from friends was supportive, but the school teachers did absolutely nothing about it.” - Paul, 16, Catholic secondary school (North West)

“As I was in a Catholic school, part of my R.E. GCSE, we had a topic about homosexuality and the Catholic church. We were basically told that being gay or bisexual isn’t a sin, but the sexual act is. Thankfully our teacher was young and pretty much only saying what she was told to say. She allowed us some debate on the subject because it seemed that she didn’t agree with the Vatican’s view even though she was a devout Catholic herself.” - Ruth, 18, Catholic Secondary School (West Midlands)

There’s some hope in that last one (and there are other quotes that show good handling of the issue by schools in the report) but it’s a tad depressing the official party line seems to be a variation on ‘Love the sinner, hate the sin” - the idea that being gay is fine, but gay acts are bad seems to pass for enlightened and kind thinking in some circles - “Well, they’re not doomed from the get-go per se, they just have to resist their sinful urges because…um…they’re sinful and our loving god will punish them for it.” And they call us the immoral ones. A theme recurring in religion is to create imaginary crimes which it can then forgive and fix (I can’t help but feel because it’s answers to real problems tend to be so deeply unsatisfiying) and that’s all this is: An imaginary crime we let our ‘moral guardians’ punish children for.

Nigeria: Rapists Lack Sound Religious Background - Study

Perpetrators of rape have been discovered not to have sound religious background, a study conducted by the International Centre for the Advancement of Reproductive Health( CIFARH) has shown.

Executive Director of CIFARH, Professor Innocent Ujah, who disclosed this at an orientation workshop by the Student Union Government of the University of Jos, said majority of the people that responded to the research questionnaire distributed by the agency on sexual violence in the country, agreed that most rapists do not have sound religious backgrounds while only 11 percent said otherwise.

Must be true, surveys prove it. Wait, truth isn’t democratic you say? But have a questionnaire here that clearly says most people say it is! Also the article tells us that rape can be prevented avoiding ‘indecent dressing’, so it’s all ok because the victims are almost as much to blame as the atheists.

Thanks to Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor we have a new addition to the standard ‘Hitler and Stalin killed people because they were atheists’ line. As always I feel obliged to remind that Hitler wasn’t an atheist, but that’s far from the biggest crime against history here - it’s not just because of their atheism they killed millions of people, it’s because they ruled by REASON!

Danger because, if you go just by reason, I think, without faith, without belief in God, you can imagine, for instance in the last century, some of the faith(less), or supposedly faithless societies - people, whether it’s like Hitler or Stalin, bringing up - having a country in which, if you like, a God free zone, a dictatorship ruled by reason, and where does it lead? To terror and oppression.

Yes! Damn that reason they were so known for! It seems there are those out there who see it as ungracious for atheists to attack a religious figure after he asks people to ‘respect atheists’, but when his speech is laced with reminders that all atheists are just little Hitlers in waiting, I really see no need to be gracious or give the tiniest bit of respect. This statement confuses me a little:

Of claims that faith has no basis in reason, he replied: “To believe in God is not unreasonable.”

Wait, so to believe in God is reasonable… but societies ruled by reason lead to terror and oppression! Well now I don’t know what to think…

Micheal White:

Yet the same church leads the charge against abortion and contraception, gay marriage and gay adoption, campaigns which are often the cause of dreadful misery and unhappiness, especially among the world’s poor.

No one denies that Rome remains the market leader, the Tesco of Christianity, so lesser churches follow suit. Protestant fundamentalists and born-agains across the American south take a similar line. So do Muslims and the Methodist George W Bush.

It’s all part of the revival of faith and I’m not knocking it since secular fundamentalism managed to do even more harm in the 20th century.

There ya go, no sense bashing harmful religious practices because as we all know, atheism is far far worse. Well, maybe it was one atheist, but Stalin was so bad we can’t take the risk. Just like Hitler’s catholicism completely invalidates anything any other Catholic has said or done, right?  Right?

Bonus points for ’secular fundamentalism’, I’m not quite sure what it means (someone who takes it as a fundamental that mixing church and state is a bad idea?) but it sounds pretty scary.

I’m a fan of Damian Thompson’s counterknowledge concept (’misinformation packaged to look like fact’) and it’s blog- I’m less of a fan of his Holy Smoke blog, if only because it’s a tad depressing to watch him skim over abuses of facts by Catholics that he’d tear apart as counterknowledge if anyone else had made them.

Case in point: He had a post the other day on the unjust ‘heckling’ of Catholic Bishop Patrick O’Donoghue (who I mentioned last week) in a select committee. Now I have no idea if it was an unjustly harsh grilling, but personally I think that someone who can say that teaching safe sex is part of a “deluded theory that the condom can provide adequate protection against Aids” and writes policy for sex education in schools probably should be questioned harshly. Now, I’m not really expecting high-ranking church officials to come out against their insane approach to sex education; I do ask that they don’t lie about the facts. Telling people condoms are wrong is one thing, telling them that condoms don’t work or, this can’t be brought up enough, are actually infected with HIV is another thing altogether. Its counterknowledge, pure and simple, being used to scare people who don’t know better by people who have no excuse not to know better.

In the article he also venerates Tory MP Douglas Carswell for saying that the bishop had a harsh reception:

Mr Carswell told this week’s Catholic Herald: “I think the bishop was slightly taken aback, and I felt slightly embarrassed. I give people a hard time, but only if they are on the public payroll, a recipient of public money, in the civil service or quangos – they’re fair game. But otherwise, if they’re members of civic society, they’re kind of guests. He wouldn’t have got that sort of treatment if he were an imam.”

Now, I think all people are entitled to a basic amount of respect, but Mr Carswell misses the basic point here: We’re talking about Catholic tax-payer funded schools; he IS a recipient of public money! Why wasn’t Mr Carswell giving him a hard time? Why, because he happens to be a bishop, should he not get held to account?

People who deal in counterknowledge like the ineffectiveness of condoms in preventing STDs should be chased out of anything relating to education policy, and if it were anyone other than a Catholic bishop who’s using counterknowledge to advance a moral view that Thompson happens to agree with, I’m sure he’d be leading the charge.

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And so I can get all my Catholic Church related anger out in one post (and I blame rhetorically speaking for bringing this to my attention), here’s what Cardinal Keith O’Brien’s response was to the idea of meeting with scientists so they explain their work with hybrid embryos:

” have been approached by MPs and asked by others in the media to consider meeting with leading scientists who are currently involved in this area. I would be only too happy to agree to such a meeting and I am sure other Church representatives and leaders of other faiths would also agree…….In agreeing to such a meeting my only condition would be that the scientists were also willing to accept instruction from our Churches and peoples of faith on basic morality, on what human life really is, on the purpose of our life on earth”

These scientists want to come and meet with the church leaders in the perhaps naive hope that they’re simply ill-informed rather than actively shit-stirring, and their response? Ok, sure, I’d do that; I’m a reasonable man after all! My only condition, and it’s not really a biggie, is that they acknowledge that we’re really the most moralist people EVER and defer to us in all moral judgements from now on. Note the way it’s phrased, it’s these scientists who are willing to come and explain themselves rather than the cardinal, who’s been viciously lying about what their work involves, who lack basic morality!

And to round off with some Daily Mail moralising:

The orchestrated attacks on the Roman Catholic church by ministers, scientists and medical charities have done nothing to advance the debate over the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill.

In sneering language, they have portrayed the Church as rooted in the Dark Ages - wilfully blocking research which could help millions who suffer from such dreadful ailments as Alzheimer’s, muscular dystrophy and Parkinson’s. Bishops and cardinals have been accused by fertility expert Lord Winston of lying to the public, by health minister Ben Bradshaw of being intemperate, emotive and plain wrong, and by other Labour MPs of “scaremongering”.

What, an attack on the Church? Totally unprovoked I might add? And crude as well, pointing out the other side is lying (even if they are) is just unsporting!

Maybe all this talk of the actual science of what the Bill entails has distracted me from the issue at hand: Should MPs have a free vote or not?

Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, the leader of Roman Catholics in England and Wales, became the most senior church figure to call on Mr Brown to sanction a free “conscience” vote of MPs on the Bill.

“Certainly, there are some aspects of this Bill on which I believe there ought to be a free vote, because Catholics and others will want to vote according to their conscience. I don’t think it should be subject to the party whip.”

That seems reasonable. After all, punishing MPs for voting with their conscience would be unreasonable, right Cardinals? Wait, what’s that internet? We have a quote from an article last year where the church suggested rather heavily that they might deny communion to any Catholic MPs who stepped away from the party church line?

In his sermon the Cardinal, Scotland’s most senior Catholic, said politicians who support abortion should be aware of the “barrier such co-operation creates to receiving Holy Communion” but after the Mass he would not say whether he meant that Catholic politicians who back abortion should be cast out from the Church. “I’m not going to say whether or not those who are involved in any way in helping or aiding abortion can approach the altar to receive Holy Communion. It’s not up to me to judge them, I’ll leave that to God to judge them.”

Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, the leader of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, added his support to Cardinal O’Brien, urging all Catholics “especially those who hold positions of public responsibility” to educate themselves about the Church’s prohibition on abortion so that they could make decisions “with consistency and integrity”.

It seems to me that instead of being a triumph of the will of democracy over party politics, a free vote seems to mean that the party whips step back so the church whips can step forward. Or is that too cynical?

And in related news: James Graham draws my attention to an article by the good cardinal telling atheists they’re heartless meanies who are incapable of love, which is incidentally why our soulless secular solutions haven’t found the solution to the HIV problem in Africa: They need more love! I know, I know, I would have thought a constructive role for the church might be more telling people that using condoms doesn’t damn them for eternity or, at the very least, to stop telling people that condoms are deliberately infected with it, but I think we’ll have to defer to his wisdom on this one.

Theo Hobson’s annoying me; I’ve quoted him before and doubtless will again because he’s a useful source as a secularist Christian, but today I made the mistake of reading him whilst wearing my atheist hat, not my secularist one. In his Easter piece explaining the story of his faith and I was less than impressed.

An intense bout of undergraduate angst sent me to the father of “existentialist” theology: Kierkegaard. I accepted his idea that despair is the normal modern condition, from which only faith can rescue us.

Ah, so that’s why Christianity is attractive! Life is endless toil and despair, and only God can save you! I was hoping that the message of the article would be that after this self-admitted bout of undergraduate angst, he discovered a deeper reason to believe but sadly not:

So my attraction to Christianity is two-fold. It comes from the sense that without faith there is despair, that the highest form of psychology is faith-based. And it is rooted in the quasi-socialist ideal of the Kingdom of God. Christianity is the true idiom of social hope - and also of psychological realism.

You know, I don’t feel much like despairing - Life seems pretty good most of the time in my godless universe. Maybe I’m just deluding myself here and I only think I’m happy during those times I manage to get through a whole week without crying myself to sleep because of the cruel reality of a life without God. I don’t doubt that his faith genuinely makes him happier and I wish him well with that, but the idea that faith is required for anything other than despair to be possible is patently untrue. You have to suspect some of his bile towards atheists in his other pieces is influenced by this, don’t they know they’re supposed to be miserable?

At the end of the piece he suggests that I should be surprised by his version of Christianity as opposed to what I may learn from Dawkins, whilst I don’t doubt there are plenty of religious folk out there who have other reasons to believe, the idea of religion being something people turned to feel better about life rather than something that has any evidence is true sounds an awful lot like something Dawkins might say. I followed his links to articles where he discussed atheism in more depth and got fairly pissed off; far from being the reasonable Christian alternative to the atheist caricature of a person of faith, Hobson comes over as a bile-filled hypocrite. If we start off with this article:

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This GOVERMENT WANTS TO CREATE MONSTERS AND POSSIBLY EAT YOUR CHILDREN Bill really is causing a ruckus isn’t it? As usual, the church hasn’t bothered to check the facts (or is better advantaged by actively misleading people), the constant use of dishonest and emotive language is sadly predicable. Calling the procedure ‘monstrous’, comparing it to creating Frankenstein’s monster and claiming that if this bill passes “extension of abortion laws, legalised raiding of a dead person’s tissue, legalised creation of babies whose sole purpose is to provide spare parts” will shortly follow should be called mindless fear-mongering. The fact for some reason the opinions of people who use texts written by people who thought the sun orbited the earth and then apply them to the cutting edge of modern medicine are given free access to the press and, bizarrely, some say over public matters should be something we’re more concerned with than these experiments.

Besides being unimaginative, the connotations of monsters and immoral Mad Science™ inherent in bringing up Frankenstein are clear. Archbishop Cramner lightly questions the Cardinal for using language like ‘Monstrous’, he then goes on a diatribe about the evils of creating chimera-like monsters, mixes of humans and animals. If Cramner had read the BBC article, let alone done some more in-depth research, he’d know that chimeras are not a possibility here. Essentially all these scientists are doing is taking an animal egg, scooping out the genetic material, sticking some human DNA and letting it grow a little, then stopping that and harvesting the cells it’s produced to research fixes for serious conditions. We are talking about small balls of cells that lack neurones, lack alone anything resembling a brain. There’s no chimera here, even if it were to develop it’s not going to come out with paws or a trunk, there is no non-human DNA present (ignoring the fact that most human DNA is animal DNA anyway). In fact there is no evidence these embryos are even capable of developing (which is one reason why implantation is forbidden). But those facts are inconvenient, these are immoral and monstrous scientists and politicians who have turned away from God and abusing the power they stole from him to create a mockery of life. Science Is Bad.

Something Cramner said caught my eye:

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