grahambinns.com

Graham Binns posted a photo:

Three hundred and sixty-odd days of 2008, day 187

I may be an atheist, but I love this image; not for the cross, but for what it ought to represent, even though it is misused the world over.

It won't have escaped your notice that I started to write a comment piece on this news story but my blog client (which I really do need to write something about in the not-too-distant future since it's something that I've written and could possibly turn out to be quite useful to a fairly small subset of the Open Source community) fell over. Before it retired to that great stack trace in the sky, however, it managed to vomit up the beginnings of my post onto the internets (a fact about which I have filed a bug) and as a result managed to make me look like both a bit of an idiot and a bit of a bigot. I'm used to the idiot part. I don't like looking like a bigot.

Anyway, since it had made it onto my blog (and I never bothered to check that it hadn't, it also ended up propagating across the interwubs to LiveJournal, where a good friend of mine commented:

Interesting case. If they were only leafleting, though, I can't see the harm, and even if they were preaching in the street, I think asking them to leave was a bit severe. People can quite easily walk past and seal up their ears (as we do every day to resist free newspapers being thrust into our hands) - and Jehova's Witnesses have been door-knocking for years without being asked to leave certain streets. The "Be a winner, not a sinner" man who yells his (Christian) faith down a megaphone in the middle of Oxford Circus every single day is seen as a local landmark, if a slightly irritating one once he starts going on about how buying stuff on a Sunday is a highway to hell.

I don't believe in thrusting religion down people's necks, but we accept the marketing of coffee, newspapers and shampoo samples readily enough on the basis that people can take it or leave it, so why ban people expounding on their religion in the same way, as long as they're not being aggressive or harrassing people?

On a similar theme, I got handed a flyer today about a man who's riding a horse from Texas to Jerusalem (the tricky bit with the ocean wasn't explained) in the name of Jesus, to spread the Gospel. Fair dos, I thought, before turning my thoughts to how he was going to get the horse across continents.

All of which, plus the fact that it was late and I was tired and lacking in the brain power necessary to sling a sentence together, let alone make a point about religion, left me thinking that I should probably re-write the post, or at least some of the post, and actually make clear my thoughts on the matter, which, exploding blog clients aside, I'd hitherto failed to do.

Read more...

So, it turns out that the story that I blogged about the other day has even more to it than I thought.

Rather than try and summarise the matter here - for I don't fully understand it at the moment; it's late, I'm tired and I'm busy watching the fantastic An Inconvenient Truth. Instead, I'll let Terry Sanderson of the Grauniad explain pretty much my feelings on the matter here.

More over, I learned this evening via the ever-wonderful Pharyngula that on Friday morning's Today Programme Richard Dawkins managed, in three minutes, to not only rip holes in Murphy O'Connor's comments but to also slam John Humphrys for his attitude when interviewing religious figures.

Now, I personally dislike the way that John Humphrys interviews people. I find him arrogant and irritating and particularly dislike the way he interrupts people when they're actually trying to answer the question (I have no objection to him interrupting people who are trying not to answer the question). So it did give me a little tingle to hear Dawkins tying him up in knots. But more important than that was that Murphy O'Connor said this of reason leading to terrorism and oppression, which Dawkins pointed out:

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.

Which is so eye-crossingly stupid I can't even find it in myself to be seething mad about such a statement. Still, I'm sure that plenty of people will be mad on my behalf.

richarddawkins.net has clips of Dawkins' interview with Humphrys, the BBC Radio News item about the Cardinal's speech and an interview by Humphrys of the Cardinal himself (in which, to be fair to Humphrys, he does give the Cardinal a harder time than one would usually expect). You can find them all here. Enjoy.

The headline sounded promising: "'Respect atheists', says Cardinal." Unfortunately, and somewhat predictably, the story itself is a little different from what the headline suggests:

"I want to encourage people of faith to regard those without faith with deep esteem because the hidden God is active in their lives as well as in the lives of those who believe."

Which sounds less like what I'd hoped for (though I don't truly know what I really hoped for) and more like what I should really have expected, which is "love thy neighbour." You wouldn't think that was bad, and to be fair I don't, entirely, but I dislike the way it's framed.

There was also this:

God is not a "fact in the world" as though God could be treated as "one thing among other things to be empirically investigated" and affirmed or denied on the "basis of observation", said Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor.

Which, well, is one of those pieces of reasoning that I find to be more than a bit ridiculous, especially when said out loud. The problem is, of course, that it amounts to an argument from personal credulity, which is also know as an argument from ignorance.

The thing that really rankled me, though, for I'm hardly surprised to hear any of the above from dear old Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor, is the way the headline was written.

And to tell the truth, I'd much rather that he'd said "You should treat atheists and agnostics with respect. Because, like you, they're human beings."

I am, as you'll be aware, many things. Slayer of Dragons, baker of muffins, programmer, occasional scribbler, amateur photographer, cynic, lover of the weird and wonderful. I'm also, I'd like to think, a reasonably good scientist (Physics was my mistress before Computer Science; we still keep in close contact and send each other nostalgic letters from time to time), a logical thinker, an atheist and, possibly most importantly of all, an advocate of freedom of speech.

So it makes me immensely glad to see that the readers of New Humanist are also, by and large, free speech advocates. This observation is the result of a poll on the New Humanist blog about whether creationists should be allowed to speak on the subject of creationism at universities (the subtext being that universities in question are obviously going to be locations of high scientific integrity; it's a basic assumption here that religious colleges need not be considered) or whether said universities should ban people who advocate what some would bluntly call arrant nonsense.

At the time of writing the poll stands with 90 out of 106 voters think that creationists should be allowed to speak in university buildings whilst the other 16 think that they shouldn't. That's 85% for and 15% against, to save you some maths.

Personally I think that's a bloody marvellous, albeit not necessarily terribly useful, statistic. 85% of those polled think that regardless of the scientific viability of whatever stance you're putting forward, you should still be allowed to have your say. One assumes that there's a certain contingent that would end the previous sentence with "at least people get the chance to throw fruit at you that way" or something similar, but ignoring that fact for the sake of making a point, isn't that something that can be used in an argument against the religious naysayers who claim that all atheists and evolutionists are intolerant, bigoted fools?

Of course, the fact that we think that people should be allow to tout even the most nonsensical set of views in university buildings doesn't mean to say that said views should be allowed to be taught as fact in those buildings. That's a different argument. But that's the beauty of universities over schools: The students are there by choice, able to take in lectures by choice. Even the crazy ones.