The Archbishop's new clothes

Former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey and other church leaders are set to urge senior judges to stand down from Court of Appeal hearings involving religious discrimination, claiming they should be replaced with a panel of judges who have a proven understanding of religious issues.
The move has been prompted by recent cases where Christians have been dismissed from their employment for refusing to offer services to same sex couples, and appeals to the courts have failed.
I have no sympathy with this position whatsoever. In the first place people engaging professionally with the general population, particularly when they are paid by the public purse, should not be able to withhold services from anyone on the basis of their personal prejudice and secondly, the degree of understanding of religious issues by the presiding judge is totally irrelevant.
Lord Carey is indulging in what P.Z Myers has dubbed the The Courtier’s Reply. In a hypothetical argument following the Hans Anderson tale of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” the Courtier maintains that the young boy* cannot accuse the Emperor of being naked because

He has apparently not read the detailed discourses of Count Roderigo of Seville on the exquisite and exotic leathers of the Emperor's boots, nor does he give a moment's consideration to Bellini's masterwork, On the Luminescence of the Emperor's Feathered Hat.

However regardless of the minutia of royal fashion, the Emperor is still butt naked. Similarly, regardless of which bits of obscure Christian doctorine lead people to deny services to same sex couples, it is still discriminatory.
The church must not be allowed to reframe this as discrimination against religion. Nobody is saying these people cannot hold to their belief, but if they want to work in an area of public service to which same sex couples need access, they must work within the law and not discriminate on gender grounds. If they take their dismissals to appeal, as they have every right to do, they must accept that a judge will rule in accordance with the law, not in accordance with some interpretation of scripture in which the judge requires no expertise whatsoever.

*actually used satirically to defend Richard Dawkins against the accusation that he is not an accomplished theologian

Cameron's "Big Idea". Fine but there are risks!

David Cameron and the Conservatives have today unveiled their manifesto and their “big idea” for social engagement that will change Britain for better.
Now as someone who grew up in the Thatcherite era I’m not a natural Tory supporter and for other reasons I will not be a Tory voter. But I have some empathy with the idea that a government would actively promote the involvement of local communities in running the important aspects of their lives. With one caveat: but an important one. If as Cameron suggests this will “include allowing people to set up their own schools” there needs to be some serious oversight involved.
In the first place there is a duty on government to provide a good standard of state education for all citizens of this country to access. If your local school is failing, it is an abdication of that responsibility if the government gives you carte blanche to set up an alternative without first trying to correct the failing. Secondly, there needs to be rational guidelines on what is taught in privately run schools.
Of course you know where this is going, the first people to take advantage of a free for all in education will be the religious; the fundie Xians, the Muslims, the Jehovahs and the Mormons et al. It will be the perfect opportunity for these people to isolate their offspring from divergent theologies and ideologies. Worse it will be a cover for them to deny an accurate scientific education and access to critical thinking skills.
Unfortunately the Conservative party is not sensitive to these risks any more than Labour’s Ed Balls is and if (as seems very possible) they get to be the next government and if they actually make their manifesto manifest, this is a pitfall that all sceptics, humanists and atheists need to make plain to them. I am expecting activists at the door shortly and it is a point I will making strongly when they do.
Don’t get me wrong, community power and individualism is in my view a good thing to promote, but we have to be mindful that not every community is benign. In the U.S where home education and private colleges have a long provenance, religious wing-nuttery finds refuge. We don’t want it here.

New Scientist interviews Francisco Ayala

Geneticist and evolutionary biologist Francisco Ayala has recently been awarded the $1,000,000 Templeton prize bribe for scientists willing to find accommodation for religion within science.
He has an interview in New Scientist this week that reveals a serious lack of critical thought where his theology meets his science.

Take this for example. At the top of the interview he says

I feel that science is compatible with religious faith in a personal, omnipotent and benevolent God.

but then later adds…

Creationism and intelligent design are not compatible with religion because they imply the designer is a bad designer, allowing cruelty and misery. Evolution explains these as a result of natural processes, in the same way we explain earthquakes, tsunamis or volcanic eruptions. We don't have to attribute them to an action of God.

If not an action of an “omnipotent and benevolent God” then what? At best natural disasters become a gross error of omission, which still makes God culpable by any logic. If the universe is godless and careless, cruelty and misery make sense. If God exists he is either malevolent or stupid and definitely not benevolent.

Then there’s this obvious strawman.

At the same time, some scientists claim they can use science to prove God does not exist. Science can do nothing of the kind.

Notice the some scientists. I’d like to see the funding body that would bankroll research to prove the non-existence of God, (or fairies or lepracauns). Science 101 people! You cannot empirically prove such a negative and all scientists know this. Even the strongest of atheist materialists would not absolutely categorically rule out the existence of God. They merely proceed under the assumption that there isn’t one.

Finally here’s another cop out in the context of the accepted fact that homosexuality is genetically determined.

One has to distinguish what belongs to the realm of morality.

It may have been a point of moral debate among people who believed homosexuality to be a lifestyle choice. If your scripture of choice says it’s a sin you can with some justification hold that view all the time people are choosing their sexuality (as a liberal I would not agree, but it’s at least arguable). However we now know, and Ayala agrees that people do not choose to be gay, they just are gay. They are gay in the same way that some of us are black or are women or are differently-abled. Would Ayala have a problem distinguishing the morality of discriminating against these groups? What realm does he put white supremacists in I wonder?

His whole shtick is a postmodern “different ways of knowing” fudge of an argument that is not worthy of any scientist, least of all one of his standing. He coyly refuses to reveal his personal faith (although he clearly “believes in belief” as Daniel Dennett would say) and he seems to have bagged his million bucks with hackneyed apologetics and unquestioning accomodationism.

Tory M.P endorses gay discrimination.

Chris Grayling MP seems to think it’s acceptable for B&B owners to refuse rooms to same sex couples.
This is an outrageous and immoral view. His argument as stated in a secret recording is:

"I took the view that if it's a question of somebody who's doing a B&B in their own home, that individual should have the right to decide who does and who doesn't come into their own home.
"If they are running a hotel on the High Street, I really don't think that it is right in this day and age that a gay couple should walk into a hotel and be turned away because they are a gay couple, and I think that is where the dividing line comes."

Which has all that “isn’t it reasonable” sound about it that actually doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. It is no more acceptable to refuse B&B to gay couples than it is to refuse rooms to a Muslim or a Jew or a person of colour. It rests on the discredited assumption that homosexuality is some kind of debauched lifestyle choice, rather than a natural expression of sexuality for a sizeable minority of people. Christians and Muslims may sincerely believe that homosexuality is immoral, but they are wrong, and should not be allowed to discriminate on that errant belief. If they don’t want gay people in their homes they should be in another business.

How could Rowan Williams get this more wrong?

Rowan Williams the current Archbishop of Canterbury voiced on a radio discussion the sentiment that all rational thinking people have felt since the Catholic Church’s cover up of paedophile priests has been exposed. He said:

"I was speaking to an Irish friend recently who was saying that it's quite difficult in some parts of Ireland to go down the street wearing a clerical collar now.
"And an institution so deeply bound into the life of a society, suddenly becoming, suddenly losing all credibility - that's not just a problem for the Church, it is a problem for everybody in Ireland."

Well, maybe not everybody, because, even in a religious backwater like Ireland there exists a healthy community of atheists. But that aside his instinct is correct. The Catholic Church has lost all credibility, all right to moral authority (if it ever had it) and although it probably wasn’t the most diplomatic thing for the head of another Church to say, it was indisputably empirically correct.
But guess what? The wimp has now apologised. “Oops sorry, didn’t mean to offend” (shouldn’t have put that in quotes really, ‘cos that’s not actually what he said but he might as well have).
So where do the Anglicans stand now then? Maybe it is O.K with them that the biggest Christian faction in the world is a child abuser's refuge. Maybe it is more important that the peddlers of superstition stick together to defend these edifices of unreason lest their sick institutions finally fail.
To my mind the conspiracy just got wider. Sod the facts! Let religion prevail.

Legal Vs. illegal highs

Here’s a subject that keeps coming up. It has nothing to do with atheism, but a lot to do with rationality and the wisdom of relying on scientific evidence instead of gut instinct.
We have got our knickers in a complete twist over drug laws in this country (the same is true for others, particularly the U.S). We have made all the drugs we disapprove of illegal (as opposed to the ones that attract taxes, like tobacco and alcohol) and even gone to the lengths of classifying them in terms of perceived (note perceived) harm done and assign legal penalties accordingly.
The result of all this, one might suppose, would be to curtail the sale and use of these substances. But actually, no! There is no evidence that a drugs illegality has any bearing on whether people choose to take it or not. As for curtailing sales, it has the opposite effect as its very illegality has a direct bearing on the market price of a drug and hence the attractiveness to criminals to import/manufacture and distribute (a trade, which incidentally, directly funds terrorism).
The particular event that has spurred this post is the recent interest in Mephedrone which the government wants to ban following a spate of deaths linked to its use. Mephedrone is a “legal high”, marketed rather cynically as plant food but is in fact synthesised and intended to be used as a drug. It is functionally similar to Methamphetamine and is psychoactive. It has become a recreational drug of choice amongst young people, partly as a direct result of its legality. The government may be temporarily thwarted in its attempt to ban it due to the resignation a member of the Drugs Advisory Panel whose former director Professor David Nutt was sacked last year for briefing against government policy. This may be a good thing, for it will spur a debate about the wisdom of rushing to make new substances illegal.
The first question that has to be asked is, has Mephedrone become popular because it is legal, or because the usual alternatives are illegal? The assumption of many seems to be the former, but I’m not so sure. The second question is, once made illegal will that a) curtail its use, b) make it more attractive to users and sellers alike or c) stimulate the lab to invent something else to market legally? The third question needs to be, what would be the effect of legalising and regulating all drugs rather than trying to ban each new substance as it appears?
One opinion that has been trotted out a lot over the last couple of days is that Mephodrones legality implies to many drug users that it is safe, which maybe true of a naïve few. But in my experience most drug users do not equate legality or illegality with the relative safety of drugs. In fact due to the government’s insistence on classifying commonly used drugs like Marihuana in category B “to send signals” and contrary to the advice of its own advisors there is zero confidence in drug classification as a guide to risk.
The effect of criminalising the current users of this drug will be to increase the price, make it attractive to drug traffickers and encourage its trade through an un-regulated black market. Prof Nutt, who has set up his own rival expert body, has warned that banning Mephedrone could be self-defeating and that the evidence supporting a ban was not clear.
On the other hand, taking the radical step of legalising, taxing and regulating all drugs would remove the initiative from the criminal element, ensure that drugs on the market were pure and contained what they purported to contain, give revenue to governments to educate users and treat addictions and disincentivise labs from inventing new recreational highs. The drugs advisory panel could then classify drugs in a politically unbiased way that would gain the public’s confidence and help society to manage the problems that undoubtedly come from the reckless abuse of all substances. We have a good track record with alcohol, a drug that the majority of users treat responsibly. We have the mechanisms and the model in place.
Time to change the dogma? I think so.

Petition to keep Ratzinger out of the U.K

Now here's something worth putting your name to. I've alluded to this before but this petition to the U.K government is to prevent them hosting an official visit from Ratzinger. Given the crimes commited all over the world in his church's name, his inability to take personal responsibility and his promotion of anti-human rights legislation in many countries, this is not a man to be feted by a liberal democracy.