Accommodating Religious Practice

The Joint Council for Qualifications, which represents UK exam boards has recently announced that heavily subscribed GCSE and A level exams will be held a week earlier this year to accommodate Muslim children who may be observing Ramadan and fasting during the main exam period.

This strikes me as a correct and humanistic thing to do primarily because the children and young people affected are at an age when personal, peer and parental pressure to conform will be very strong and their capacity to make well informed pragmatic choices about religion and religious practice may not be fully developed. The system should protect children from their own and their parent’s follies at this critical stage in their education so far as is practicable given fasting is a known and obvious risk factor for reduced performance in this growing minority.

This is not, to my way of thinking, about “creeping sharia” or religious privilege but about maximising the potential of a future generation of productive individuals. But…

…as a society we should be wary about giving the signal that religious practice, that’s any religious practice of any faith tradition, is an inevitable consequence of belonging to a religion. Religion and the practice of it is always a choice in a secular democracy and should not be unquestioningly pandered to in the same way we should accommodate race, gender or disability. Adult believers ought to be expected to accept the consequences of their decisions to impair their performance, career choices, health and opportunities by practicing their religion if that is the result.

It could be argued that as a formerly Christian country, British Christians are privileged in that national holidays are arranged around their festivals and this is true at least to the extent that the pagan and agricultural cycles they usurped still mark the rhythms of this country’s life. But it would make no difference to minority faiths if those holiday seasons were based on any arbitrary calendar that ignored their own traditions and just as Hindu or Muslim countries would not alter their calendars to accommodate Christians there is no reason for the UK to do so.

So, good on the exam boards for helping Muslim children maximise their potential with this small concession that will not adversely impact other children as long as they plan their revision to the timetable given (which they should be doing anyway). But let’s beware of making this a wider principle by privileging religious beliefs with a status they do not merit.

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An Imam a Christian and a Humanist walk into a school...

No, it’s not the start of a cheesy joke, rather the way quite an interesting day began…
Just to give a bit of background, a few months ago I attended a course run by the British Humanist Association (BHA) designed to train humanists to assist schools with a revised religious education curriculum that requires teachers to include secular points of view as well as those of the mainstream religions. There are about a hundred of us registered so far and R.E teachers can request assistance via the Humanism for Schools website from BHA volunteers who will help by supplying classroom materials, participating in classrooms directly or speaking at assemblies. We have a range of year group appropriate resources we can draw on.
Anyway, recently I received an email from the Humanism for Schools coordinator asking if I was able to be the humanist representative on a diversity panel for a year 9 group (13 to 14 yrs) alongside a Muslim Imam and an Anglican Vicar. Of course I was happy to oblige.
The event involved half a dozen or so forty-five minute sessions as a series of classes rotated between us and other cultural diversity events. The pupils had an interesting range of questions which each of us answered in turn according to our particular worldview.
The Imam was a particularly interesting person; an affable retired G.P originally from India and without a rational notion in his head. He fielded a question on evolution by insisting “nobody ever saw a human hand appear on a monkey’s arm” and was very insistent that it was impossible to be a moral person without Allah. However in a conversation I had with him during a break he made a very interesting point about the radicalisation of British Asian Muslims which he illustrated by referring to his own “embracing” of Islam. He had been brought up in a traditional Muslim family while in India and learned the Qur’an by rote in Arabic which is apparently the norm despite being unable to speak or understand the language. Consequently until the age of forty, when he finally read it in translation, he had no idea what the Qur’an actually said other than what was told to him. If this is typical of Asian Muslims it becomes easy to see how a hard line interpretation of Islam could be imposed on them without having any other frame of reference. By the time any of them read a translation they can understand (if they ever do as some Imams teach that all translations are corrupt) their minds are already primed for Jihad.
The Vicar was of the “trendy” variety, one of your followers of Jesus types with a naïve pick and mix liberal theology. He had the utmost conviction in the historicity of Jesus claiming it was “better documented than any event in history” (me pointing out that one primary source doesn’t count fell on deaf ears) and, to his credit, insisted in every session that Christianity was the one true religion which is far more honest in my opinion than mealy-mouthed ecumenicalism.
He fielded the first of the “do you believe in evolution” questions with, wait for it… “It’s only a theory” and… “It’s like a whirlwind in a junkyard accidentally making a Jumbo Jet”…Yep! He actually went there. After I was forced to make a small diversion into the actual predictions made by Darwinian natural selection he confined subsequent answers to saying it must still be “God guided”. But, I suppose that’s the best you can expect.
Throughout the day we fielded perceptive questions on; the existence of God, miracles, evolution, contraception, homosexuality and abortion. We all gave answers from our own perspective and for the most part did not pursue the arguments between us but left the different worldviews to hang there for the pupils to absorb.
It’s difficult to know whether any converts were made by anyone that day, which really was not the objective from my point of view (the Imam however came loaded with Islamic literature so maybe he had a different agenda), but several of the classes said they had never knowingly met a humanist or even heard of humanism before so for that alone I considered the day fully worthwhile.

Nicola Dandridge attempts to justify gender apartheid

Nicola Dandridge is the chief executive of Universities UK the organisation that has issued the appalling advice to colleges hosting religious speakers who require their audiences to be segregated by gender, and she appeared on this morning’s BBC Radio 4 Today Program where she attempted to defend, to presenter Justin Webb, the assertion that gender segregation was justified under certain circumstances.

Nicola Dandridge

Her argument was framed as a human rights and freedom of speech issue limited to occasions when the audience or participants of a particular meeting or lecture had agreed that gender segregated seating was appropriate or desirable. She was adamant that this was entirely different to segregation by race (which in any event would be “illegal”) and that UUK were prepared to publish legal advice that stated that refusing such a gender segregated meeting would be a violation of free speech. Interestingly, the only politician prepared to comment on the issue was former Home Secretary Jack Straw who very much doubted that a challenge in the high court to such a refusal would have a chance of succeeding. He also confessed to being “shocked and appalled by the decision of Universities UK”.
The first thing to say is that the original case study does not make any reference to the wishes of the participants in a meeting but only supposes that the visiting speaker is insisting on a segregated audience. That Nicola Dandridge reframed the advice in this way suggests that UUK are less sure of their ground but are not prepared to backtrack. But whatever, the argument still does not fly. There is no universal human right to non-association and nor should there be. If you are the kind of person who does not want the company of a certain gender, creed or race, your only right is to avoid places where those individuals go. Universities are open publicly funded spaces and whether or not the speaker is a Muslim or Haredi Jew, or even if most of the audience are, the fundamental principle should be one of equal and open access to all parts of the auditorium.
Dandridge also insisted that universities were not being advised to “enforce” gender segregation, but this is disingenuous. Social norms will always compel people to follow the stated protocols and if you happen to be, for example, a Muslim woman in that situation there is zero chance that you will risk the disapprobation of your peers by bucking the system. The very act of offering segregated seating, even if mixed areas are also available, will mean that at least a proportion of the audience will be compelled to segregate whether they really want to or not.
In no other secular public space would this be considered an option. Try and imagine a cinema, a café, a train or a waiting room where the sexes were banished to opposite sides and you’ll get the point. It is not enough to claim that no-one is being disadvantaged. O.K women are not being sent to the back of the bus here but in the week when we are honouring the life and achievements of Nelson Mandela it is apposite to recall that “separate but equal” was the apologetics of apartheid and should have no place in 21st century society.

The Father the Son and Holy Ghost walk into a (chocolate) bar

My ex-wife, for her sins, has recently entered the teaching profession and as an aside to her main subject is teaching classes in religious education. Recently she has been discussing the concept of The Trinity, the doctrine confirmed at the councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon which states that God the Father, God the Son and The Holy Spirit are one entity, individually coexistent, omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent. It’s a bizarre and illogical concept that even theologians have difficulty explaining, even if they think they understand it.
As an exercise in illustrating the idea her class are asked to come up with an example of “three things in one” that go to make up a whole which, as I have contemplated the task, is a lot harder than it sounds. Coming up with a gestalt of three things is relatively easy and my best effort is a song; which comprises rhythm, melody and lyric as distinct elements that combine to make for one coherent auditory experience yet can also be experienced and understood separately. I am told the example often given to the pupils is a Mars bar (chocolate, nougat and caramel in one), but neither really addresses the concept of the Trinity satisfactorily, because for that each individual element must also be complete in its own right and not only represent, but be the whole.

The point is that God is God, Jesus is God, The Holy Spirit is God while all simultaneously being seperate individuals equal in all respects. In particular Jesus does not come ‘after’ God the Father as in the normal parent child scheme of things.

The reason why finding a meaningful metaphor for the Trinity is so hard is because it is, in reality, meaningless; an idea invented because the early church struggled to reconcile the necessary divinity of Christ with his status as a human being. Some of the earliest schisms in Christianity were over this exact issue with differing sects such as the Monophysites and the Arians which had Jesus as a fusion of mortal and divine in the first case and as subordinate to God in the second. The Nicene and Chalcedonian Councils were intended to put a stamp of orthodoxy on the nature of the relationship between God and Christ and this is the theological fix they came up with.
There is in fact very little biblical support for the idea of the Trinity. Genesis has references to God in the plural (Elohim), which some theologians claim as a Trinitarian reference but more likely reflects the polytheist nature of early Judaism. Later writings such as Isaiah portray God in firmly singular terms and the New Testament is similarly lacking in clear references.
What the early Church appears to have done is create a deity with multiple personality disorder purely for the expedient of avoiding accusations of polytheism (a charge which even so is laid by Muslims on Christianity) while allowing the simultaneous worship of Jesus and Yahweh.
Ultimately believers present the irrationality of the Trinity as a divine mystery that defies human understanding so we shouldn’t be surprised that explanations are hard to come by, but this of course is the hallmark of all religious apologetics; if it doesn’t appear to make sense it is just good old ineffable God and his funky mysterious ways bless him.
If a chocolate sweet can really represent the Trinity, it’s probably a Fudge.

More religious Free Schools approved

http://www.humanism.org.uk/home

My fears about  Michael Gove’s Free Schools initiative are proving to have been justified. In the recent round of approvals for 2013, thirty-three new ‘faith’ schools, one of which is openly creationist’, and a Steiner school have been included.
It was inevitable that given the opportunity to have access to young people and to appropriate state funding to proselytise, religions of all stripes would take advantage of the system. The breakdown according to the BHA is as follows:

Church of England (8) Greek Orthodox (1): Christian (12): Including one creationist. Sikh (5): Jewish (3): Muslim (3): Multi-faith/spiritual (1):

This constitutes a full third of the schools approved in this round and can only serve to increase divisiveness in a generation that will need more than ever to be free of religious and racial intolerance. As a trend I find it extremely worrying especially as there seems to be no clarity on the extent to which such schools can discriminate on religious grounds in respect of admissions or recruitment.
It is extremely unlikely that these schools will be as religiously benign as existing faith schools that have been under the auspices of the state and OFSTED can appear to be. The groups applying for Free School status are noticeably more evangelical in nature and are unlikely to confine their religious content to the appropriate places in the syllabus. This is especially true in the case of the proposed Exemplar Academy, a rehash of a bid originally made by the Everyday Champions Church that was, quite correctly, rejected by the DoE. So, why Michael Gove should think that a change of name and the removal of the explicit link with the chuch should have actually changed this group’s creationist agenda is beyond my comprehension.
I suspect that a certain blind respect for faith is a work here and the government is not seeing the potential for damaging worldviews to be inflicted on the pupils at these schools. It should be sufficient that the parents and faith communities of our country’s children are able to bring them up in whatever tradition they feel is appropriate, without the state reinforcing those beliefs via an education system that should be secular and inclusive.
Children have a right to be exposed to ideas that contradict and conflict with those they hear at home and school is exactly the environment where that should happen. Faith schools cannot be relied upon to deliver impartial information, particularly in respect of evolution and, perhaps more seriously, gender equality issues and even with OFSTED oversight we will never be sure what bigotry they are being fed.

U.K Sex Education Bill, U turn

The U.K government is due to debate a long awaited sex education bill today, which will make compulsory in all schools the teaching of sexual relationships as well as the biology.
The bill provides for issues such as same sex relationships, abortion and contraception to be taught in an unbiased way that promotes equality and diversity.

Predictably some faith groups have a problem with this, as they would rather be allowed to continue to spout their homophobic abstinence only drivel at impressionable children instead of giving them objective facts.
Education minister Ed Balls has sadly given in to this religious lobbying and added an amendment to allow faith schools to teach the curriculum in a way “consistent with the religious ethos of the school” which as far as I can see gives them carte blanche to continue indoctrinating their pupils with dangerous and antisocial dogma.

On a Today program interview, Ed Balls claimed that schools would be legally required to teach that alternative views existed so there was no “watering down of the bill”, but this is naïve. There is nothing to stop schools telling pupils that “yes, there are other views, but they’re wrong and you’ll go to hell if you use a condom”.

State funded schools should not be allowed to teach according to their faiths but according to objective facts and in accordance with the law. Children attending faith schools will already have had the biblical and qu’ranic view from their parents at home. School is where they should hear the truth; Homosexuality is about who you are, not a sinful lifestyle choice. Condoms do reduce the risk of disease and reduce unwanted pregnancies, and abortion is a woman’s right to choose if they so wish.
Next, faith schools will be insisting on teaching “both sides” of the “evolution controversy” by exactly the same reasoning that won them this amendment..
This amendment is wrong and I hope it will be defeated.