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.

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.

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".

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?

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.

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.

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.