Good to learn of the launch of the Accord Coalition (www.accordcoalition.org.uk) which describes itself as "a new broad-based coalition calling for inclusive schools and an end to special arrangements for state funded religious schools".
At last we have something that demonstrates that opposition to state-funded church- or mosque-schools comes as much from people with religious affiliation as from those without.
My own opposition to religious organisations running state schools is rooted in a number of theological issues :
1) Reformed theology insists on separation of powers of Church and State.
2) Segregationist schools are a denial of an incarnational approach
3) Segregational schools undermine true catholicity / ecumenicity
4) Segregationist schools promote a privatised / sectarian image of religion which is a denial of its true nature.
Friday, 5 September 2008
Thursday, 31 July 2008
"Everyone's entitled to their opinion . ."
Recent internet dialogues have produced the inevitable crop of anti-religionists professing that they would die for my right to believe in what they consider a dangerous and irrational superstition. This has led me to conclude that people who say "everyone's entitled to their opinion" are likely to either
(a) not really care much about anyone else's opinion, because they can't see that mere opinions actually make any difference to anything,
(b) are wanting to avoid the unpleasantness of serious discussion, in case they find their own opinions challenged : it's the 'get-out clause', or
(c) despise other people's opinions, but don't want to sound bigoted or intolerant.
Sometimes, a mixture of all three.
The truth, however, (whether religious or secular) is not handed down to us on a plate. It has to be negotiated the hard way, every inch of the way. Toleration simply means that we don't win arguments by using coercion; it doesn't mean you have to respect the beliefs of someone who has not earned that respect through serious engagement.
(a) not really care much about anyone else's opinion, because they can't see that mere opinions actually make any difference to anything,
(b) are wanting to avoid the unpleasantness of serious discussion, in case they find their own opinions challenged : it's the 'get-out clause', or
(c) despise other people's opinions, but don't want to sound bigoted or intolerant.
Sometimes, a mixture of all three.
The truth, however, (whether religious or secular) is not handed down to us on a plate. It has to be negotiated the hard way, every inch of the way. Toleration simply means that we don't win arguments by using coercion; it doesn't mean you have to respect the beliefs of someone who has not earned that respect through serious engagement.
Friday, 11 July 2008
the Registrar who won't
Bit of stuff going around the blogosphere about the Registrar who is asking to be excused conducting Civil Partnerships on grounds that it's against her religion.
Some argue that it isn't against her religion - she's wrong. Others (the anti-religionists) saying 'why should appeals to religious conviction be granted special favours'. Both of these are red herrings, really.
Quakers appeals against conscripted military service were accepted because to be a Quaker is to be a pacifist - but most national religious organisations don't require the signing of a pacifist pledge. The issue is not whether same-sex partnerships are acceptable to Christianity as a religion, but whether opposition to same-sex partnerships is a fundamental aspect of her particular church. Actually, I think that would be hard to prove.
There are presumably many atheists who cannot accept same-sex partnerships, but are there any national secular membership organisations that require members to sign their opposition to them? The question of 'special favours for religion' can only be demonstrated here if there are such organisations, and their members are overruled.
On the conscription issue, the membership of the Quakers was relevant not (I think) because it's a religious society, but because long-term membership of the Quakers was acceptable as evidence that the person claiming exemption wasn't just looking for an excuse to evade their responsibility but was appealing genuinely to conscience. It's the question of evidence that is crucial.
The United Reformed Church enshrines rights of conscience in its constitution. It put that into practice when, in 1981, it merged with the Churches of Christ who had never accepted the practice of baptising infants. Former Churches of Christ ministers were not obliged (after the merger) to baptise infants if it was against their conscience. But if they personally couldn't, they did have to arrange for another minister to do it.
Therefore, provided a court can be convinced that the lady's objection is a genuine conscience issue for her (and actually that might be quite difficult to prove) she should be similiarly granted exemption from her responsibility.
Some argue that it isn't against her religion - she's wrong. Others (the anti-religionists) saying 'why should appeals to religious conviction be granted special favours'. Both of these are red herrings, really.
Quakers appeals against conscripted military service were accepted because to be a Quaker is to be a pacifist - but most national religious organisations don't require the signing of a pacifist pledge. The issue is not whether same-sex partnerships are acceptable to Christianity as a religion, but whether opposition to same-sex partnerships is a fundamental aspect of her particular church. Actually, I think that would be hard to prove.
There are presumably many atheists who cannot accept same-sex partnerships, but are there any national secular membership organisations that require members to sign their opposition to them? The question of 'special favours for religion' can only be demonstrated here if there are such organisations, and their members are overruled.
On the conscription issue, the membership of the Quakers was relevant not (I think) because it's a religious society, but because long-term membership of the Quakers was acceptable as evidence that the person claiming exemption wasn't just looking for an excuse to evade their responsibility but was appealing genuinely to conscience. It's the question of evidence that is crucial.
The United Reformed Church enshrines rights of conscience in its constitution. It put that into practice when, in 1981, it merged with the Churches of Christ who had never accepted the practice of baptising infants. Former Churches of Christ ministers were not obliged (after the merger) to baptise infants if it was against their conscience. But if they personally couldn't, they did have to arrange for another minister to do it.
Therefore, provided a court can be convinced that the lady's objection is a genuine conscience issue for her (and actually that might be quite difficult to prove) she should be similiarly granted exemption from her responsibility.
Monday, 7 July 2008
There's a very revealing comment from 'Carniphage' on my 'little anti-religious martyrs' post. I wonder how typical it is of the anti-religion school. Carniphage clearly believes that the natural human condition is atheism - that religion is something loaded on to a child 'from outside' as it were, whereas left to its own devices it wouldn't be religious. Let's leave aside for the moment the question of the impossibility of any child being born outside a human culture (the only way that could be achieved would be by immediately putting the child in a darkened sound-proof box - but even that, clearly, would be imposing something).
Carniphage is coming from the exact opposite end of the spectrum from me. It seems evident to me that religion and religious behaviour is intrinsic to human nature. Only yesterday, down at the Cowley Carnival, a DJ (dressed as Doctor Death) was dispensing shots of Bourbon whisky to punters who came down the front - by pouring it straight down their throats! (Was this an *intentional* imitation of a Christian eucharist?) The struggle is not between religion and no-religion but between bad religion and good religion. Atheism has its value as a corrective to some forms of bad religion, to be sure, but it even defines itself in relation to religion, and it has no coherence, single focus or common language in itself. Christianity is probably a dynamic balance of at least five 'religious understandings' which are mutually contradictory at many points, but at least it maintains (though it's a struggle) a common theological language, and has a clear focus : Jesus of Nazareth.
Therefore the idea of treating religion as if it were a single thing, imposed upon naturally non-religious subjects is grossly mistaken. If public policy were shaped by people who think like this (and there are plenty of them in the media), the actual effect will be to exaggerate the more fundamentalist forms of religion. Certainly Richard Dawkins is at a loss to know how to deal with Christians like me. All he can do is define me as a 'sexed-up atheist'. The trouble is, to do that he must break one of his own scientific rules : 'don't ignore and twist the data to fit your theory'. If I worship God and follow Christ, and there's behavioural evidence to prove it, don't describe this as a form of atheism! I recognise that I impute religious behaviour to atheists - but that is quite acceptable, as the Cowley Carnival example above demonstrates.
In many senses, the most anti-religious figure in history was Jesus. In Mark 11 he describes how if you have enough 'faith' the entire Temple Mount has no more meaning for you, then goes on to say, effectively, that the Temple is replaced in his new community by the simple (but incredibly challenging) call to 'forgive one another'.
Carniphage is coming from the exact opposite end of the spectrum from me. It seems evident to me that religion and religious behaviour is intrinsic to human nature. Only yesterday, down at the Cowley Carnival, a DJ (dressed as Doctor Death) was dispensing shots of Bourbon whisky to punters who came down the front - by pouring it straight down their throats! (Was this an *intentional* imitation of a Christian eucharist?) The struggle is not between religion and no-religion but between bad religion and good religion. Atheism has its value as a corrective to some forms of bad religion, to be sure, but it even defines itself in relation to religion, and it has no coherence, single focus or common language in itself. Christianity is probably a dynamic balance of at least five 'religious understandings' which are mutually contradictory at many points, but at least it maintains (though it's a struggle) a common theological language, and has a clear focus : Jesus of Nazareth.
Therefore the idea of treating religion as if it were a single thing, imposed upon naturally non-religious subjects is grossly mistaken. If public policy were shaped by people who think like this (and there are plenty of them in the media), the actual effect will be to exaggerate the more fundamentalist forms of religion. Certainly Richard Dawkins is at a loss to know how to deal with Christians like me. All he can do is define me as a 'sexed-up atheist'. The trouble is, to do that he must break one of his own scientific rules : 'don't ignore and twist the data to fit your theory'. If I worship God and follow Christ, and there's behavioural evidence to prove it, don't describe this as a form of atheism! I recognise that I impute religious behaviour to atheists - but that is quite acceptable, as the Cowley Carnival example above demonstrates.
In many senses, the most anti-religious figure in history was Jesus. In Mark 11 he describes how if you have enough 'faith' the entire Temple Mount has no more meaning for you, then goes on to say, effectively, that the Temple is replaced in his new community by the simple (but incredibly challenging) call to 'forgive one another'.
Friday, 4 July 2008
Media disappears up own backside
Well, well. Five months on, the Lord Chief Justice reiterates and endorses what the Archbishop said.
The BBC Today programme insists on referring to the issue as controversial - more accurately as 'having caused controversy when it was aired by the archbishop'.
So effectively, the narcissistic media reports its *own coverage* as news, not the news item itself, which wasn't particularly controversial at all. Eventually it will disappear up its own backside.
On the other hand, I suppose the incipient religious hatred and bigotry in the media, revealed by their initial response, *was* quite newsworthy. Though somehow I don't suppose they'd see it that way.
The BBC Today programme insists on referring to the issue as controversial - more accurately as 'having caused controversy when it was aired by the archbishop'.
So effectively, the narcissistic media reports its *own coverage* as news, not the news item itself, which wasn't particularly controversial at all. Eventually it will disappear up its own backside.
On the other hand, I suppose the incipient religious hatred and bigotry in the media, revealed by their initial response, *was* quite newsworthy. Though somehow I don't suppose they'd see it that way.
Thursday, 22 May 2008
Jeremy Paxman by candlelight
Did anyone else see the Newsnight coverage of the first day's Parliamentary debates on human embryology? Presumably in order to portray the fact that there are deep underlying issues to do with the 'Meaning of Life' (the headline projected on the backdrop) the reporter was filmed sitting under statues of the Virgin Mary in the gloom of an old church behind flickering candles.
Er, what? It was difficult to tell whether the tell-tale Paxman raised eyebrow flickered when they cut back to studio.
As far as I recall, there was no specific reference to the Catholic moral position, or 'playing God' or anything - the incongruity just kind of hung there. What to make of it?
Er, what? It was difficult to tell whether the tell-tale Paxman raised eyebrow flickered when they cut back to studio.
As far as I recall, there was no specific reference to the Catholic moral position, or 'playing God' or anything - the incongruity just kind of hung there. What to make of it?
Friday, 16 May 2008
Creating little anti-religious martyrs?
The British Humanist Association has recently called for the law to allow children of 'sufficient maturity, intelligence and understanding' to be given the right to absent themselves from 'compulsory' acts of worship in schools regardless of their parents wishes :
(see http://www.humanism.org.uk/site/cms/newsarticleview.asp?article=2448
The implication is that people can be made to worship against their will, which is an infringement of their human rights. At first sight this is a ludicrous suggestion. No one can be 'forced' to think or feel (or not think and feel) things — what goes on in the private thoughts of people is inaccessible to outsiders and immutable. The suggestion that sitting passively in a school assembly whilst someone else says a prayer is tantamount to being 'forced to worship' is daft. At the most extreme it is 'forcing' the passive attender to tolerate other people saying prayers — or praying them. (A very good reason, I would have thought, for insisting that they attend, since toleration is in itself a valuable lesson.) Mere attendance at an act of worship implies no personal belief. If I attend (as I have done) gatherings sponsored by the British Humanist Association, should I absent myself if I want to have a prayerful thought? Should I avoid going into a mosque because I am not a Muslim? The BHA, not normally known for intolerance and divisiveness, has lost the plot, hasn't it, and needs to rethink?
On the other hand, I'm reminded that the early Christians were thrown to the lions — as 'atheists' — for refusing to burn a pinch of incense to the Roman Emperor as a god once a year. In all other respects they were model citizens (or so I like to believe) but this was the 'thin end of the wedge'. Other Christians, on the other hand — the so-called 'Gnostics' — took the view that what mattered was not external practice but deep inner knowledge. To the one who 'knows God', the pinch of incense to the emperor was meaningless, and therefore harmless. Needless to say, there was no love lost between the different Christian camps.
It seems to me that the dividing line comes somewhere where inner private thoughts are translated into outward actions — a pinch of incense, genuflection, a spoken prayer or sung hymn or whatever — the failure to perform which brings sanctions from those with power. (That equally includes the opposite situations in which atheist authority oppresses overt religious practice).
But if that is the case, the safest option is to insist on passive attendance in school assembly — attendance that doesn't require active statements of belief or whatever on the part of those present.
To refuse to attend such a gathering would an overt non-religious act. I'm far from convinced that many 'mature, intelligent and understanding' *Christian adults* really have much understanding the full *breadth* of what Christianity is, and most of the things many atheists tell me I believe in are often crude and simplistic cariacatures of what it's about, with a heavy emphasis on philosophical propositions (which are rarely the concern of religious believers anyway). Whenever you read a statement "(all) Christians believe x" you can be fairly sure the writer doesn't know many Christians.
There's an assumption here that the purpose of RE lessons is to help students decide whether henceforth they will have anything to do with the whole world/language that is Christianity, or whether they will boycott any activity with a religious dimension. The idea that a few exam-oriented lessons on all the world faiths, taught by someone who may well not be a practising member of any religious community, can begin to express the holistic breadth that constitutes a 'world faith' is completely laughable! No world faith can be described in a few propositional statements or peeks at the 'exotic' behaviour of religious people, as the BHA are implying here. I find it hard to accept that anyone, let alone under-15s who have had no opportunity, independently of their parents, to really explore religious worlds in any depth — let alone breadth — could be violated by sitting passively in an act of worship.
'Doing God' in school assemblies is, anyway, a risky enterprise for the would-be evangelist. Richard Dawkins learned what he learned about religion that way!
I'm not even convinced that inviting someone to (for instance) say the Lord's prayer out loud is 'making them express faith' — provided it is not coercive and failure to do it brings no sanctions. To recite traditional formulae doesn't imply personal faith, any more than me singing along with Jimi Hendrix makes me a 'Voodoo Chile'. On the other hand, for authority to insist on the 'pinch of incense' or the saying of a prayer on pain of sanctions is to have already passed from the realm of personal faith (or lack of it) and into the political realm. It's at that point that religion has become an instrument of political power, so it's at that point that the language of 'rights' starts making sense.
But which secular school is going to punish a child that keeps quiet when the Lord's Prayer is said? Perhaps the BHA demand is a back door way of undermining faith schools, where presumably the performing of religious ritual in various ways is supposedly part of the ethos. I disagree with state 'faith schools' as strongly as the BHA, albeit for different reasons. But there are much more direct and effective ways of secularising state schooling without trying to create little anti-religious martyrs.
(see http://www.humanism.org.uk/site/cms/newsarticleview.asp?article=2448
The implication is that people can be made to worship against their will, which is an infringement of their human rights. At first sight this is a ludicrous suggestion. No one can be 'forced' to think or feel (or not think and feel) things — what goes on in the private thoughts of people is inaccessible to outsiders and immutable. The suggestion that sitting passively in a school assembly whilst someone else says a prayer is tantamount to being 'forced to worship' is daft. At the most extreme it is 'forcing' the passive attender to tolerate other people saying prayers — or praying them. (A very good reason, I would have thought, for insisting that they attend, since toleration is in itself a valuable lesson.) Mere attendance at an act of worship implies no personal belief. If I attend (as I have done) gatherings sponsored by the British Humanist Association, should I absent myself if I want to have a prayerful thought? Should I avoid going into a mosque because I am not a Muslim? The BHA, not normally known for intolerance and divisiveness, has lost the plot, hasn't it, and needs to rethink?
On the other hand, I'm reminded that the early Christians were thrown to the lions — as 'atheists' — for refusing to burn a pinch of incense to the Roman Emperor as a god once a year. In all other respects they were model citizens (or so I like to believe) but this was the 'thin end of the wedge'. Other Christians, on the other hand — the so-called 'Gnostics' — took the view that what mattered was not external practice but deep inner knowledge. To the one who 'knows God', the pinch of incense to the emperor was meaningless, and therefore harmless. Needless to say, there was no love lost between the different Christian camps.
It seems to me that the dividing line comes somewhere where inner private thoughts are translated into outward actions — a pinch of incense, genuflection, a spoken prayer or sung hymn or whatever — the failure to perform which brings sanctions from those with power. (That equally includes the opposite situations in which atheist authority oppresses overt religious practice).
But if that is the case, the safest option is to insist on passive attendance in school assembly — attendance that doesn't require active statements of belief or whatever on the part of those present.
To refuse to attend such a gathering would an overt non-religious act. I'm far from convinced that many 'mature, intelligent and understanding' *Christian adults* really have much understanding the full *breadth* of what Christianity is, and most of the things many atheists tell me I believe in are often crude and simplistic cariacatures of what it's about, with a heavy emphasis on philosophical propositions (which are rarely the concern of religious believers anyway). Whenever you read a statement "(all) Christians believe x" you can be fairly sure the writer doesn't know many Christians.
There's an assumption here that the purpose of RE lessons is to help students decide whether henceforth they will have anything to do with the whole world/language that is Christianity, or whether they will boycott any activity with a religious dimension. The idea that a few exam-oriented lessons on all the world faiths, taught by someone who may well not be a practising member of any religious community, can begin to express the holistic breadth that constitutes a 'world faith' is completely laughable! No world faith can be described in a few propositional statements or peeks at the 'exotic' behaviour of religious people, as the BHA are implying here. I find it hard to accept that anyone, let alone under-15s who have had no opportunity, independently of their parents, to really explore religious worlds in any depth — let alone breadth — could be violated by sitting passively in an act of worship.
'Doing God' in school assemblies is, anyway, a risky enterprise for the would-be evangelist. Richard Dawkins learned what he learned about religion that way!
I'm not even convinced that inviting someone to (for instance) say the Lord's prayer out loud is 'making them express faith' — provided it is not coercive and failure to do it brings no sanctions. To recite traditional formulae doesn't imply personal faith, any more than me singing along with Jimi Hendrix makes me a 'Voodoo Chile'. On the other hand, for authority to insist on the 'pinch of incense' or the saying of a prayer on pain of sanctions is to have already passed from the realm of personal faith (or lack of it) and into the political realm. It's at that point that religion has become an instrument of political power, so it's at that point that the language of 'rights' starts making sense.
But which secular school is going to punish a child that keeps quiet when the Lord's Prayer is said? Perhaps the BHA demand is a back door way of undermining faith schools, where presumably the performing of religious ritual in various ways is supposedly part of the ethos. I disagree with state 'faith schools' as strongly as the BHA, albeit for different reasons. But there are much more direct and effective ways of secularising state schooling without trying to create little anti-religious martyrs.
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