Monday 2 November 2009

Professor Nutt and why politics has such a bad name

You may have heard that the government has just sacked a Professor David Nutt over his views on drugs. He was their leading scientific advisor on drugs and gave a lecture and wrote some articles where he put forward the view that the laws needing amending.

He pointed out some facts and gave his educated opinion, saying things that many people agree with, like cannabis is not as dangerous as alcohol or tobacco. However you look at it, the hard numbers or the percentages, this is clearly true - more people die of alcohol related illnesses and accidents than they do of cannabis, and we all now that tobacco is a killer. Yet these are both not only legal, but huge sources of income for the government. Surely that warrants some kind of public debate?

Of course giving lectures and writing papers, and having an opinion is what eminent professors do all the time, so it shouldn't have come as a surprise to the government, but they've decided to have a hissy fit that he spoke against them.

I don't think they expected such a huge backlash as this, with scientists from many other branches of science speaking out. It's not just Professor Nutt that they're angry about, it's the governments position on all sorts of science, which over the years they've had a very dubious view of. They seem to see the truth and hard fact of science as something that they can be used to support their position if they agree and which they can ignore if it doesn't support them.

They have, on several occasions chosen public opinion over the hard facts of science. They've allowed alternative medicines to be given a veneer of respectibility by setting up 'regulatory bodies' for magic water and sugar pills as well as the National Homeopathic Hospital, they've been spending our National Insurance contributions on quacks and charlatans of every hue not because it could be proved to make people better, but because public opinion supported it.

In the drugs debate, having set up a panel of experts to advise them, they ignored their advice and decided to reclassify cannabis as a class 'B' drug - because public opinion was against it.

You'd hope that the government would once in a while NOT give way to public opinion, because let's face it 'public opinion' is actually newspaper opinion, and the public's opinion is only worth having if they're sufficiently well-informed about an issue. I'd much rather have the opinion of intelligent, educated and experienced academic experts about issues of a scientific nature than whatever the Daily Mail says, thanks all the same.

But then governments aren't about policies any more, they don't even have a theme as such. Basically they'll do whatever you want them to do, and be whatever you want them to be. Labour used to have a really good manifesto, but the guts of it were taken out with 'clause 4' which promised to secure for the workers the means of production, but they dropped that, because the press didn't like it.

I'd like to see, for a change, a politician in power stand and up and say that he doesn't care what people think, the evidence-based policy is the only sensible choice and so that's what he's going to do. Have some principles in other words.

Thursday 29 October 2009

the truth about vaccines - no, the real truth

The MMR vaccine hoax, which is still having repercussions in the UK and other countries, is now just the tip of the iceberg. The most disreputable papers, of whom the Daily Mail is clearly the vanguard, recently went to DefCon one when a teenage girl died on the same day she had the cervical cancer vaccine. Leaping to a conclusion faster than an Olympic athlete villager with a pitchfork, they immediately started blaming the vaccine, the government, 'Big Pharma' and demanding the programme be immediately stopped.

Of course, they've been against it all the time, so at least they're consistent.

....Well, except that in their Irish edition they were for it, because the Irish government weren't and their readership seems to be people who don't really care what they're complaining about as long as it's irrational.

Now it's one thing to believe that 'Big Pharma' - i.e. the pharmaceutical companies - are corrupt and sociopathic. In fact, this is probably true of just about every big company. I personally would think you'd be quite mad to believe any big money-making operation had the world's best interest at heart. They don't exist to make the world a better place, they exist to make shareholders rich.

But that doesn't make everything they do evil, or the people who work for them. There is an adage for that: 'Throwing the baby out with the bathwater'. I for one rely daily on a couple of the products of Big Pharma to keep me alive.

The worst of the vehemence towards governments and Big Pharma seems to revolve around vaccinations. Partly, I'm sure, because of the very nature of having a needle stuck into you, or your tiny little vulnerable baby. I'm sure there wouldn't be anything like the opposition to vaccination if they were administered in some less invasive way, like the Polio vaccine on a sugar cube that was the preferred method of delivery when I had it some 40 years ago.

There has now built up a kind of very amorphous conspiracy theory about vaccines, the basic thrust of which is that the government (whichever country you are in) has colluded with the big pharmaceutical companies to throw a lot of poisonous chemicals together into a vaccine which we don't really need as the diseases they prevent aren't that bad or aren't a threat. Almost any kind of symptom can and has been attributed to side-effects of these vaccines if you just take anecdotal stories (such as "My son had the vaccine and 2 weeks later had symptom X")

As a result of this, the diseases which had almost died out are now making a comeback: Measles, Mumps, Polio and Pertussis are all occuring at huge rates compared to a few decades ago and children are dying and being mentally and physically disabled because of it. Meanwhile the problems alleged to be caused by the vaccines are remaining at the same levels they always have been.

The 'big' problem with the MMR vaccine was supposedly autism, yet the rates of this don't differ between countries where the triple vaccine was used and where the single vaccines where used, nor within countries before and after the triple vaccine was introduced. The evidence just isn't there for these theories, yet still they persist, multiply and continue to convince people.

It's hardly shocking that so many people can end up believing in what is actually utter nonsense. Here in the UK we have a programme on TV called 'QI' and every week, the show highlights how much perceived knowledge in the public domain is just plain wrong. Lemmings don't commit suicide en-masse, Tomatoes were 'known' for a long time to be deadly poisonous, Richard Gere had nothing to do with Gerbils ....ad nauseum.

Partly, I think the problem is that we prefer simple answers and scientists can't always explain things in a few sentences. Some things just are very complicated. The idea that a girl gets a vaccine and a few hours later, dies is a coincidence seems wrong to us - "surely there must be a connection?", we think.

In fact, all across Britain people died that day after doing something completely unrelated: eating Kitkats, kissing someone, reading the Daily Mail - yet we don't jump to the conclusion that one caused the other. It's because of this conspiracy theory, that uninformed members of the public and irresponsible media continue to spread, that we single out vaccinations as the smoking gun of medical problems.

In fact the press are the real villians of the piece. Though some 'alternative' therapy peddlars stand to gain by spreading this conspiracy theory, and several celebrities are building their career on it, the gutter press always seem to take the lazy approach and, perhaps through a lack of scientific understanding, not check the facts.

So it's fantastic to see an article about vaccination which is rational, sticks to the facts and bucks the trend:

Wired recently published this article about how bad the anti-vax movement is getting in the US and it's a scary (if edifying) read.

Tuesday 20 October 2009

Daily Mail - scum, scum, scum

I'm part of an orchestrated campaign (apparently), because that's what Jan Moir of the disgusting rag the Daily Mail says is behind the record number of complaints to the Press Complaints Commission about her sick article about the death of Stephen Gately, the former Boyzone member.

In the article, which is basically a homophobic rant and a chance for her to have a pop at gay marriage, she darkly hints at all manner of things, and basically accuses the Spanish coroner who pronounced the death to be due to pneumonia of covering up something, choosing instead to blame it on him being gay.

Let's hope that more advertisers pull out their campaigns in the Daily Mail. Marks and Spencers have insisted their ad is pulled off that page where it was showing as a rotating banner. I'm just about to write to them congratulating them on that decision and suggesting they take it further.

Then I'm going to take it further, by writing to every advertiser that I see on the Daily Mail's site, suggesting they might want to disassociate themselves from this paper.

Not that this article is unique, the Daily Mail have been willing to publish just about any old trash if they think that's what their readers want. In this they're no different from the obviously trashy papers like The Sun. You won't get far not giving the readers what they want - "Yes CJ" (sorry, Reggie Perrin reference - oh look it up!).

I've always suspected that a lot of Sun readers don't actually expect to get news in that particular organ though. They know it's a 'bit of fun' and don't expect much enlightenment, and actually it's surprising rational about science and health stories. At least compared to the Mail, which has a long inglorious history of reporting cranks and panicking its readers. This was never more so than the recent case of the teenage girl who coincidentally died on the day she had a 'cervical cancer' vaccination.

The Daily Mail was against this vaccine from the start - claiming it would encourage promiscuity. Except for in its Irish edition, strangely enough, where it was just as rabidly FOR the vaccine, presumably because the government there was against it.

This time, they've really outdone themselves though, managing to piss off not only Boyzone fans, but gays, the Irish, Twitterers and well, me.

I'm going to compile a list of DM advertisers tonight and see if I can't persuade some other people to complain to them too. It's not a very well orchestrated campaign, but I imagine 1000s of people all over the country are doing some small thing to get back at the Mail for this filth. It all adds up.

Friday 16 October 2009

Medicine and religion

There have been a number of stories lately about people putting their faith in prayer as an alternative therapy. As the line goes in the Tim Minhchin beat poem 'Storm' "You know what they call alternative medicine that's proven to work? - 'Medicine'".

The cult-like movement, "The Body of Christ" has been in trouble recently for a series of posters claiming that prayer alone can heal a whole variety of ailments, but there is a specific act, called "The Cancer Act" which specifically prohibits these kind of claims when it comes to cancer. Complaints are in with just about every authority so these posters will change, but there's nothing to stop them claiming anything about other illnesses.

The saddest case of all was a little girl of 11, Madeline Neumann, who died on the floor surrounded by members of her parents prayer group.

The disease she had needn't have been terminal. It's a disease millions of people all over the world cope with and live long and fairly normal lives despite of. Including me in fact. Diabetes has, thanks to science, been very effectively treatable for over 80 years. These parents though were very religious, and believed that getting her medical help would be against what they understood of the bible and believed. When their prayers didn't seem to be working, they decided that they just needed more people praying. Meanwhile she became steadily worse and suffered incredibly until she died.

Of course, those of us who think rationally don't believe for a minute that prayer will work. Even most people of a spiritual bent don't realy believe it will work. Sure, they might pray they or someone else will get better - but they'll almost certainly back that up, like a lightning rod on a church steeple, with proper actual proven-to-work medicine.

The reason they don't rely on faith entirely is that they ignore most of the bible as the outdated and muddled nonsense which it is. They certainly don't believe in an all powerful god who will, if you have enough faith, give you what you want as the bible states. Believing in such a god and relying on him to change what nature does is mostly unthinkable in this day and age. When medicine was in its infancy that was actually a reasonable way to deal with illnesses, because there were periods when being treated by a doctor gave you a far worse chance than doing nothing for many medical problems. If you got better, which of course many people do quite well on their own, then you would thank god for intervening and if you didn't - well you didn't pray hard enough.

Nowadays if we need water for our crops, we use irrigation, if we need help, we call the fire brigade, and if we are ill, we go to the doctors. Over the years, science has eroded away at religion: Darwin explained to a large degree how we got here, Astronomers made it clear we're an insignificant speck in a mind-boggling massive universe that is governed by rules and psychology has even given us several possible reasons why so many people are religious.

If you do come across someone who believes in healing through the power of prayer, or faith-healing or in some supernatural way in which a 'higher power' has healed someone, cured cancer or whatever, you might want to ask them about amputees. People have claimed all sorts of medical problems have been cured by the power of the lord over the years (sometimes the lord performed this miracle while doctors were treating the patient too, but clearly it was the lord's input that did the trick).

The lord is especially good at treating things in an invisible way, especially illnesses which are somewhat nebulous. However, not one single instance is ever offered up as proof of his power of someone regrowing a limb. Or even a digit, ear nose, eyelid or tooth.

He can, apparently make the dead come back to life even, as well as the more mundane stuff like curing cancers, making the lame walk, making spots disappear etc. But he's mysteriously ineffective, no matter how hard you pray when it comes to regenerating limbs. Except for starfish. There must be a special place in his heart for them, because they do it all the time, apparently without anyone even praying for them. Unless there are special echinoderm masses held in secret in the Vatican - (Dan Brown, there's surely a book in this, I want a mention in the foreword).

Of course, those true believers will have an explanation for this, either one of the incredibly complex made-up ones, like the Wandering Jew, or they can always fall back on the good old 'God moves in mysterious ways' blanket explanation.

Thursday 8 October 2009

Tony Blair Rambling again

Tony Blair, never one of my favourite people, has been preaching again, he spoke recently at Georgetown University in Washington about faith.

In his speech he called on Christians and Muslims which he claims make up half the population of the world to unite against 'secularism'.

Now it could (and has) been argued that by supporting the Iraq and Afghanistan wars - and few leaders did more lying and dodging to support it - he has hardly been putting his money where his mouth is. Those wars have served as an immense recruiting exercise for Al Queda and radical muslim extremists everywhere, which in turn has fuelled anti-muslim feelings everywhere.

But telling you he's a hypocrite is I suspect (if you'll forgive the ecumenical reference) preaching to the choir. He's a politician after all, and a successful one at that, in that he's now worth quite a few million pounds.

No, what made me audibly scoff (so much so that the first aiders here where I work, all looked up hopefully) was the idea that religious-types should band together against a common enemy - secularism.

Just in case there's any confusion about what secularism means I'll go off on a tangent for a moment. Secularism isn't atheism, it's simply the disconnecting of church and state. I believe that in the christian mythology, 'Jesus' is supposed to have supported that - "give unto Caesar that which is Caesars".

Every religious type in the 'democratic west' hates religious states - where it's another religion. So we look on Saudi Arabia with its Sharia Law, stonings, beheadings, whipping of adulterers and are quite clear that it's a bad thing. While at the same time calling for our own state to bring in laws or otherwise act in accordance with the wishes of our own pet cult. The Catholic Church recently, by way of an example, wanted the law changed so that they could continue discriminating against homosexuals. Bishops in the Church of England even form part of the government, having an automatic seat in the house of lords.

Plus in a multi-cultural country, if you don't have secularism, which religion do you allow to dictate the laws? The majority religion? That's a recipe for persecution. Also, it's building-in intolerance in the society - religious believers haven't, generally, come by their opinion on many matters from a rational viewpoint, based on research, studies, expert-thinking etc. They just 'inherit' their opinions from their religion. If you believe your opinions are heaven-sent, then it's much harder to take someone else's viewpoint, because basically they're going against the word of god, and I mean, how wrong can someone be?

And of course, when I say the majority religion, you'd imagine that it was an homogenous organisation with clear objectives and beliefs, but of course, that's far from the case. Almost all religions have schisms, some of them, as in Iraq, between Sunni and Shia Muslims are deadly. So how do you get a consensus from them? By asking the hierarchy to decide? That's hardly democratic. Even if you asked the whole congregation of a certain religion to decide, that's simply excluding the other members of society who don't subscribe to that religion - again very undemocratic.

In fact, if you want to include everybody in society in the decisions about how society is run, then there's a tried and trusted way to do that - it's called the democratic process. Now alright it's not perfect, but it's better than giving a subsection an unfair advantage, which in the end, is what they want when they complain about 'secularism'.

Monday 5 October 2009

Keeping Christmas Christian

Came across a press-release from 'Theos' - a religious think tank, whose raison d'etre is, in so far as I can make out, denying the inevitable trend towards secularism. They do surveys which are brazenly biased and then issue press-releases, which the Daily Mail and Express just copy and paste, throwing in some bits about 'muslims', 'house prices' and 'immigrants'.

Their latest press release is entitled "The public vote to keep Christ in Christmas".

Which is stretching the truth more than a little. When you're creating a survey, there's always the chance that you introduce bias, so you have to be very careful about how you ask the questions. That is, if you want to be objective and don't have some kind of axe to grind. If, like Theos, you do have a very dull axe, then famously shown in an episode of 'Yes Minister', you can lead the person being surveyed right into the answer you want.

What about this survey? Well, they state "84 per cent of those interviewed disagreed with the statement that 'Christmas should be re-named to reflect our multi-cultural society'. 85% agreed that 'Christmas should be called Christmas because we are still a Christian country'."

What we keen arguers will recognise there is, of course, a 'straw man' argument - you make up a target which everyone can and will shoot down, instead of the real argument. No-one is actually calling for 'Christmas to be renamed". Some Americans do now say "happy holidays" - but it's purely a politeness thing, because at around the same time, Jews celebrate Chanukah and someone's invented a 'Black Christmas' festival - presumably out of pure spitefulness.

Muslims generally aren't offended by Christmas in the same way that Christians aren't offended by Ramadan, EID, Chanuka, the midsummer solstice or the Feast of St Obi Wan Kenobi. In fact, religous types are extremely wary of criticising each other's festivals and more extreme religous practices. As Christopher Hitchens pointed out in 'God is not Great' When the Ayatollah Khomeini issued the fatwah against Salman Rushdie, the archbishop of Canterbury and the Chief Rabbi rushed to attack Rushdie for upsetting muslims, rather than doing the decent thing and roundly condemning the Ayatollah.

So if it's not other religions calling for Christmas to be renamed, then you have to assume that it's the 'Atheist and Secularist lobby'.

Athiests and secularists generally (and I can't speak for one single other atheist - we've not got a doctrine, that's kind of the point) enjoy Christmas - even, it has to be said, something of the "spiritual" side of it - in the sense of being with your family, showing love for other people and perhaps being a bit more charitable, rather than getting up early, going to draughty church and singing 'Away in a manger' (Actually I must say I quite like some hymns - but not that one, too much like a Pear's Soap commercial).

Not one single person I know, and certainly not the 'leading' secularist thinkers' - people like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins - are calling for Christmas to be renamed. The very idea is just plain stupid. Neither is anyone calling for Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday to be renamed, Churches to be pulled down and the word 'Goodbye' to be outlawed, in an attempt to remove all traces of religion from our daily lives.

Notice how loaded the statement 'Christmas should be called Christmas because we are still a Christian country' is - it sort of implies that someone is trying to make us into a Muslim country or a Buddhist country and so of course, people get defensive about it.

So they've made up a target and got people - understandably - to shoot at it. However, that's still no justification for their headline. "Keeping" Christ in christmas is something that Theos and their religious backers are concerned about, but they're really in a tiny minority.

If you asked those same people which christmas symbols were the most important, they'd probably mention in something like this order: Christmas Trees, Father Christmas, Snowmen, Holly/Ivy/Mistletoe, none of which are in any way Christian. OK, you could just about argue that our very pagan Father Christmas is now synonymous with Saint Nicholas - Sinterklaas - Santa Claus, who was originally a bishop, but who actually knows that?

Christmas is a good thing, it's about love, family life, appreciation, good food, a sense that the winter is half over - all very nice things to celebrate. There's a nice fairy story to go along with it, and that's fine too. As long as you don't expect people to believe it. Practically nothing about the nativity is true, and can easily be shown to have been fabricated.

He wasn't likely to have been born in a stable, nor in Bethlehem (what sort of crappy census has to have everyone go back to the town in which they were born - what would be the point? Well anyway, it never happened, the Romans kept quite good records).

Mrs Christ only became a virgin 100s of years after he was born. Most of these 'facts' are all to either fit in with the legend of Mithras, who was the god of a rival religion very popular with Roman soldiers (a great demographic to have on your side) or so that an earlier prophesy about the jewish messiah could be said to fit the story of Jesus.

Wednesday 30 September 2009

J K Rowling and the Religious Right

I sometimes think America is another country. I've just been reading that JK Rowling was denied the Presidential Medal of Freedom because of pressure from the religious right, who thought she promoted witchcraft in her books.

Well, duh! But then again, these were works of fiction, because, and if you're reading this you complete morons, witchcraft itself is fictional, otherwise, you can be sure, I'd be disparating right now and appearing in your living room armed with my wand exclaiming
'Confundo!'
at you, oh no, wait, it looks like someone already did that.

I mean are they really really that stupid that they believe in witchcraft? I realise of course, that these people already - to quote the Queen of Hearts - believe 6 impossible things before breakfast being fundamentalist christians, but why pick on witchcraft? Are the Lord of the Rings books evil too, do they put the wind up Christians?

What I reckon, is that they are, of course, running scared. They've managed to delude themselves for a long time, and have brainwashed their own children to believe the same crap, even though it flies in the face of reality or the facts. Creationism, for instance, requires the most tortuous twisting of reality for it to work - it requires the entire scientific establishment, with all their high IQs to be wrong or deluded or actually conspiring against christianity. It requires that the speed of light to have been hundreds of times faster in the past, but at some point it stopped slowing down and has remained stable ever since - and that's just one of the laws of physics that would have to be wrong.

When you've gone to all that trouble of convincing yourself you're right against all the evidence, you must end up feeling hounded and surrounded on all sides by 'enemies' - but when fantasy books of the quality of the Harry Potter books are an enemy to your religion - then you really should be having a re-think.

Thursday 24 September 2009

The Vogelenzang Oppression

Sorry for the title, I was just going for a Robert Ludlum style title, in case this blog is ever printed and put on sale in airport bookshops.

I've just been reading about a Christian couple, who run, or rather, RAN, a hotel in Liverpool. They claim that they've lost the business because of the controversy, as a local hospital who referred about 80% of their guests now doesn't refer anyone.

The facts are they are being prosecuted for a "religiously aggravated" public order offence. What went on in their hotel is not clear, depending on whom you believe. It seems to have involved them getting into an argument with a muslim guest over her wearing a hijab. Feet were stamped, voices were raised and allegedly, insults to Jesus and Mohammed issued forth - "Jesus was only a prophet of Islam", "Mohammed was a warlord" and worse.

The police were called by the muslim guest (I imagine her shouting down the phone "Help! Help! I'm being oppressed!") and now the couple face a day in court, possibly a fine, though probably, if they hadn't made a fuss, they'd have got bound over and that would have been the end of it.

Charging someone for a public order offence when the police aren't there to witness it is odd. Usually public order offences are the police officer's duct tape - used as a catch-all if someone doesn't do as they're told by a copper and is generally too drunk or stupid to know when to shut-up. I wouldn't be surprised therefore if it wasn't the original argument which was the problem, but what happened when the police arrived - these "evangelical" christians wouldn't co-operate and repeated some of the things they said and got very angry and wouldn't calm down.

The police will threaten you with arrest if you don't calm down, and just like a good parent, will always make good that threat if you don't.

The fact that the couple are being represented by the Christian Institute is quite telling, they are a right-wing pressure group very much opposed to anything that challenges christianity. They've put the full weight of their legal team, deep pockets and PR skills to a number of cases which on the face of it, were trivial and blown them up into a completely invented vision of a "christian nation under attack by looney lefty politically-correct new atheists" (my phrase and quotes).

I'm just as suspicious of anything they're involved with as I am with the latest Katie Price shock headline.

However, let's not let the facts get in the way.

Whether they deserve to be prosecuted for causing a public order offence, I think would have to be down to the police officer arresting them. Certainly if someone doesn't shut up and continues to try to provoke someone else, that's what I would call a public order offence, and the copper was right to nick them.

My big problem is with making this a special case because of the religious nature of the argument. It's bad enough that all sorts of other exceptions are made for religion: - normally, you aren't allowed to chop bits off your baby boy, for instance; normally, if you get a bunch of people with a delusion together and they elect a spokesman, he's NOT given an automatic seat in the house of lords; People with a variety of unproven whacky ideas aren't given 10 minutes each morning on Radio 4.

Let's be clear, it's already an offence to offend someone - if you're trying to incite them to violence or you're shouting it and disturbing people. it's already an offence to incite racial hatred. The new law brings religion under the same protection, which is odd.

Religion is merely a belief or set of beliefs indoctrinated into you as a child (most of the time). What this law means on the face of it, is that challenging someone's beliefs can be a criminal act. I'm an Atheist, so I see religious belief as delusional belief, dangerous and wrong - as, let's face it, does practically everyone, though in the case of religious believers, they just believe everyone else is delusional, dangerous and wrong.

I can't help feeling more than a little schadenfreude about this couple. I'm sure, if they've got involved with the Christian Institute, they wouldn't be averse to calling on this law themselves if the opportunity for publicity arose in the future.

Let's not get on our high-horses and start pontificating about freedom of expression without the facts. We don't know the actual circumstances of the arrest. All we know is what the Christian Institute has managed to get printed and from experience, that's going to be about as far from the truth as the Bible.

Wednesday 23 September 2009

Evil Rock Music

A great place to start if you're looking for some good music has got to be this most ridiculous resource detailing what music is 'safe' to listen to for god-fearing folk. Ned Flanders would love it.

You can guess from their URL that have an agenda.

Some of their reasons are laughable and show that they've not been really listening or able to understand the lyrics. Eric Clapton is in there because he 'promotes drug-taking' because of his (anti-drug) song 'Cocaine', not because his nickname is 'god' though, which is bit of an omission you'd think.

Ozzy Osbourne is in there because, amongst other things, he's got a "scary face".

Friday 18 September 2009

Blatant Religious Discrimination

Just read This article, about a man claiming that Tesco discriminated against his belief (Jedi) by asking him to remove his hood while walking around a Tesco store.

To my mind, Tesco aren't taking him seriously at all, and why? Do they think his religious beliefs are completely stupid and made-up? Perhaps because the Jedi religion is relatively young, and comes from a non-traditional source?

I'd love to see someone come up with a checklist as to what constitutes a stupid religion and what doesn't.

The traditional source for many religions is, of course, private revelations to 'the chosen one'. You don't need any kind of background check to the chosen one, the only qualification seems to be that you get enough people to believe you. In fact, some of the chosen ones have decidely dodgy backgrounds.

I mean what the hell was the god of the Mormons doing choosing his prophet Joseph Smith? He couldn't read or write, was a wanted con-man, and huckster, yet was given some golden tablets with most of the Mormon gospels on them - which er, no-one else was allowed to see or they'd die.

Or what about the founder of Scientology? L Ron Hubbard. Scientologists actually get away with getting charitable status all over the world. With their belief system boiling down to: Don't use psychiatrists, give us all your money instead and we'll spout a load of crap at you. While psychiatrists are bad, they do seem to love lawyers though.

Not that these two examples are, to my mind as an atheist, particularly outrageous examples of ridiculous beliefs.

So given those hugely unlikely methods of bringing the word to the masses, you have to wonder if there's not a much more efficient way of reaching millions with your religious message. Maybe some kind of modern media would be good, a film say?

Maybe a whole series of them? you'd need to reinforce that message for each generation of course, so maybe you'd use your force to have 2 or 3 created then 20-odd years later another 3. That kind of thing.

Certainly also, in terms of oddness of belief, some religions are an incredibly tall order, ask a catholic about the holy trinity sometime, or the Mormons about, well anything.

The 'Jedi' religion is actually comparitively simple and therefore believable.

More people should be complaining about being offended because they believe in something stupid. It's quite a ludicrous thing to complain about anyway, but for some reason, when religious types complain, it's treated 100% seriously. If I start a religion which hates the number 7 - would we expect the right to have it covered up everywhere we go?

Thursday 17 September 2009

Choosing a high school

Well, as my son is in his final year at junior school, our thoughts are turning to high schools.

We'll probably be rational about it and let him go to his local high school which, though it doesn't have the best results in the area, is improving year on year.

It's easy to get the wrong conclusion from results tables at a school. Near where we live, there are still some grammar schools around, which, on the face of it, do better.

However, it's easy to forget that they start off with cleverer kids because they have the filter of an 11 plus exam to rely on.

Figures from the Chicago Publc Schools Lottery analyis show that it really doesn't matter which school your child goes to, if they're clever they'll do well. However, those kids who were put into the lottery to get to a better school, whether they got into the chosen school or not, did do better than those kids who weren't put in.

The obvious conclusion is that pushy parents are the real indicator of how well you do, not the school you happen to go to.

This is generally the reason why faith schools appear to do better - the kids are self-selected - the parents of many of those children go to quite extraordinary lengths to get them into those schools, including moving house, changing jobs and even going to church for months - if not years - and doing voluntary work for churches in which they have no real faith. Needless to say, these parents are on the whole, middle-class and speak English as their first language,

Supposedly, faith schools are supposed to open up some places for children not of their faith, but in fact, very few of them reach the target, and they discriminate further in their selection of pupils by making demands on parents of huge donations to school funds and expensive uniforms. Faith schools on the whole have fewer pupils speaking English as second language and receiving free school meals than the average.

Given all these hoops to jump through and their filtering techniques, it's hardly surprising that their results are better. Although in all likelihood, no better than any school would do with the same pupils, with all the awkward ones filtered out.

This bias in selection is a well-known trap in scientific studies, and many drug companies try to get away with it to highlight a positive result.

While some schools are allowed to cherry-pick their pupils in the first place making them look better when results come out a few years later, the 'less attractive' schools miss out on all those high-achieving pupils and have to work so much harder to achieve good average results. Of course, there's a spiral in both cases, with better-achieving schools getting more good pupils to choose from, and worse-achieving schools getting less.

What headteachers of failing schools need to focus on then is not just achieving results, but good PR to get them more successful pupils in the first place. They need to be reaching middle-class parents and convincing them that their school is the place to send their kids.

Our local school has actually been very good at this - they have also improved results thanks to a new, dynamic headteacher - but starting courses in law and latin also helped, good sports results too, and seemingly a hotline to the local paper.

There are all sorts of fringe benefits to our children going to this local school too of course: It's 5 mins walk, not an hour's bus ride; 90% of their current schoolmates will be going there to; Friends they have there will be from our neighbourhood, which means they can play with them outside school.

If we wanted to be really cynical, we're also indirectly increasing the value of our house - if it does become a more popular school, house prices in our area will go up, as middle-class parents attempt to move into the catchment area.

The other indicator that a child will do well at school is involvement of the parents in the PTA. Again this is probably due to having pushy (or more kindly 'involved') parents, although I do think that there must be an element of teachers taking that bit much more time when dealing with children of people they know, not least involved with the school.

We've been heavily involved in the junior school PTA but the high school doesn't yet have one. We'll probably end up starting one, but actually, it's a quite a good social thing anyway, and gives me a chance to do some of my prize-winning baking, so I'm actually looking forward to that.

Tuesday 15 September 2009

70 year old virgins

I am all for blasphemy, I think there should be much more religious intolerance from atheists to religious types. I try my best, but can only dream of being as diaphragm-rupturingly funny as newsarse:

Bomb Plot Trio to Inherit 70 year old virgins

Scouts Guides and religion

My kids go to Cubs and Brownies, I know this is hypocritical, as the movement requires the children to have some kind of faith.

I wasn't sure what to do about this, would there be some kind of test, would my kids be asked directly and have to lie to get in?

I talked it over with them and told them the situation and my eldest decided that it would be wrong to lie, but seeing as they counted Buddhism as a faith, he was quite happy to say he was a Buddhist, as when we'd talked it over, he liked the sound of it, and while he didn't agree with everything or believe a lot of the spiritual stuff, we reckoned that was the case for about 99% of the people who would put 'Church of England' on a form if asked.

My daughter who 'got' the idea of the Flying Spaghetti Monster at the age of 6, decided she would tell them that that was their religion if asked and I was quite excited of the prospect of having a battle with the Guide Movement over her right to believe in something patently stupid and silly just like every other religion. I imagined the story getting onto the Today Programme and Newsnight. I could even picture Jeremy Paxman allowing himself a smirk. It was going to be great.

Of course they never even asked.

They do have to do the oath thing of course, and to add insult to injury, that involves them swearing to do their duty to God and the Queen.

I've explained that their duty to both of those is precisely nothing, so it's a pointless oath. It's a shame though that they now both have a bit more contempt for the movement which provides them with all sorts of opportunities for fun, education and personal development.

It's such an anachronism this religion thing in the Scouting movement. They've already diluted it down now so as long as you believe in practically anything it's OK, as long as you don't declare yourself an atheist. Plus it's crazy to deny kids the right to join based on their 'beliefs' - at 7 years old what do you know after all, they believe all kinds of weird stuff, probably they still believe in Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy.

The National Secular Society had a bit of a campaign about it, but that seems to have stalled now:
http://www.secularism.org.uk/scoutschallengedoverdiscriminati.html/

I did ask about becoming a helper, but then they did really make it clear that atheists weren't welcome. Which is a shame, because they are always really short of leaders and by having the religious requirement, they're excluding a large proportion of the population.

Monday 14 September 2009

Overkill?

Without being too self-analytic, something I hate in others (who I suspect, in my heart of hearts, are too stupid to get any useful sense out of the analysis anyway), I'm wondering if I'm not laying it on too thick with my kids when it comes to religion.

I am becoming the sort of grumpy old man who shouts at the TV anyway (particularly during beauty product commercials) but I've found myself trying to counter ALL the religious propaganda that I see on telly for my kids' benefit. Partly because I believe that they should grow up with a healthy skepticism about, well EVERYTHING, but also, I must admit, because it outrages me that people on the TV - in politics and elsewhere - feel free to slip in god references wherever and whenever they can and remain unchallenged about it. I'm sure they don't think of it as propaganda, but it certainly feels like it. If it were a mainstream political opinion, there would be an 'opposition' speaker ready to counter it, but religion has a free ride.

I particularly object to the media dragging up some random cleric to comment on anything with a moral dimension, like they have a monopoly on morality.

What's more disturbing is the religious 'education' they get at school. Supposedly it's a state school with no religious agenda. In fact, the head teacher is a born-again type, and they regularly invite the local vicar in to brainwash the kids. One teacher told my son that the big bang was just silly and that god made the world in 6 days etc.

I've noticed that my kids (10 and 7) are echoing my thoughts on religion, and that's somewhat gratifying, but the last thing I want is to indoctrinate them. I've tried having open discussions with them about it, but basically they're not that interested, and would rather talk about Pokemon, Lego or Hannah Montana. It's easy to see why religion is so pernicious. Kids are much more likely to take in a very simple explanation than a complex one and religion has all the easy answers to just about everything. Admittedly this is all more or less variations on the same answer "God", but the real answers are never that simple, or perhaps it's just my presentation skills that are the problem.

It's a really fine line between equipping them with the critical facilities to question religion and actually doing what religionist parents do, i.e. telling the kids what they should think.