Apathy Sketchpad

The Church of England have launched a rather silly new website called sayoneforme.com. The site mostly consists of a big friendly green box into which you type a prayer. Then you click the button underneath, which I swear is marked ‘Amen’. A cynic might (and did) suggest that for all the difference it would make this might simply delete the text and say God’s read it, but instead the prayer is emailed to a selection of bishops who will pass it on to God for you if you’re too lazy to pray manually or if perhaps you don’t know how.

There’s also a page of submitted prayers, so we can find out what Anglicans feel is worthy of God’s time but not theirs. (To be fair, God has more.) There’s also a rather worrying amount of personally identifiable information in these prayers, for example at least one full name alongside a description of the person’s problems, which seems pretty inappropriate to me.

I pray for Andrew – that he may find meaning and purpose in his life, and peace which passes all understanding.

The first thing that struck me as odd was that people pray in text-speak.

i love you jesus
keep me surrounded you
fill me wz ur holy spirit
let me know about you -ur ways -ur service
i need u
i love you jesus

It just seems rude to me. There’s even some all in capitals, as if that will help God hear it.

we pray for simon our vicar on his move. please set us the righr peauson to be our right vicar.

I do get annoyed when I mean to type “R” but instead type “AU”.

World peace is a common theme:

O God almighty I pray for all the countries with wars to settle.

Dear god,

please stop the wars from all around the world and let there be peace. please keep my family and my pets safe.

Dear God

Thank you for life and other people so i can make friends.And thank you for famlies if we didn’t have them i don’t know what will happen and please end war

Amen

Please stop all wars

dear god
please put a end to war
please make us give up somthing for lent
thankyou for making me

I think the biggest prayer was this one, although it is at least helpfully divided up into four sub-tasks for God’s convenience:

Our Lord in Heaven.
Please:
1- Give Peace for all the world.
2- Give health for all sick people.
3- Give work for all jobless people.
4- Let us love you, because you loved us first.

This is how democracy works in the Information Age. I don’t know if God is going to get away with not ending all wars now.

I thought this one especially sweet:

Dear God

Thank you for food. Thank you for animals. Thank you for birds that sing beautifully. I really appreciate all you have given us .

Amen

It reads like they just bumped into God in the office or whatever and it occurred to them they never really said thankyou properly. “Look, God, mate, I know I don’t tell you often but I thought you should know, we all really appreciate the way you created the universe like that. I mean, we use it all the time. Seriously, good work on that one.”

dear lord
sorry for leaving litter on your beautiful earth.

Games like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto come in for a lot of stick, from simpletons who assume we’ll be violent in real life after playing them, and from moralistic fools who think we shouldn’t be playing them anyway because it’s ‘wrong’ to press a button that makes a machine draw a picture of how it imagines a man killing a prostitute would look.

But then I read that someone’s released the Bible on Xbox Live Arcade. It occurs to me that the events of the Old Testament would make for a violent, sex-crazed, prostitute-laden videogame that nobody could criticise. You could play as the Angel of Death, and storm down Egyptian streets slaying babies, or you could, well, drive around killing prostitutes. If the indiscriminate killing in Grand Theft Auto is too offensive, why not make a game based on Deuteronomy 2:33-34, where you run around a city killing everybody? A lot of people would be upset at this game, but I don’t see how they could complain because most of them are big fans of the book.

The New Testament game would be less fun, but easier because you’d get two lives.

Also the real-time-strategy element would probably be a bit unbalanced if all you have to do is march around the city a few times playing horns and the whole place falls down. What Biblical stories would make good criticism-proof videogames?

There is a law which states that you can’t discriminate according to religious beliefs. In principle I think this is a bad law, because the idea that someone can’t be refused employment on the basis that they’re delusional is absurd, but pragmatically I think it’s necessary. Relatively few people choose their religious beliefs and people whose parents have inducted them into cults have it bad enough without having a tough time getting a job.

The pragmatic necessity, though, doesn’t extend to any old nonsense. This week, there have been two weird uses of this law. The first was Tim Nicholson, who won a judgement about unfair dismissal after he was sacked for hectoring his company about green issues.

His solicitor, Shah Qureshi, said: “Essentially what the judgment says is that a belief in man-made climate change and the alleged resulting moral imperative is capable of being a philosophical belief and is therefore protected by the 2003 religion or belief regulations.”

This was best summed up, I think, by David Mitchell on the News Quiz, who essentially said that it’s good these ideas get respect but that it’s bad that the way they do so is to be more like religions. He said that arbitrary religious reckonings musn’t be questioned but scientific facts backed by evidence are fair game and that that was the wrong way around.

More recently,

Alan Power, a trainer with Greater Manchester Police, will rely on a previous judgment that found his belief in mediums who contact the dead is akin to a religious or philosophical conviction. In an unpublished judgement in Mr Power’s favour seen by The Independent, the employment specialist Judge Peter Russell said that psychic beliefs are capable of being religious beliefs for the purpose of the Employment Equality (Religion or Belief) Regulations 2003.

If you need convincing that this is perverse, read this:

Judge Peter Russell… said: “I am satisfied that the claimant’s beliefs that there is life after death and that the dead can be contacted through mediums are worthy of respect in a democratic society”

Really? I would say they’re worthy of mockery, and I’d further say that they’re a very good reason to sack him if

Mr Power told the court that he had a belief in psychics and their “usefulness in police investigations”.

According to a blog,

The judge said that a later hearing would have to establish whether Power was ‘dismissed for the possession of religious or philosophical beliefs or for his alleged inappropriate foisting of his beliefs on others’.

But then, according to the Times,

Mr Power, who worked for Greater Manchester Police for three weeks in October last year, was sacked over his work with neighbouring police forces and his “current work in the psychic field”, the tribunal heard.

If Power wins the second hearing then this would effectively shepherdus into the fictional world of Rob Grant’s Incompetence. This is a book set in a dystopian future in which it is illegal to discriminate on the grounds of incompetence, and therefore everyone does the job they want and most of them are terrible at it.

This is part of the wider problem of religion: it demands that we respect ideas that range from slightly odd to downright idiotic, but doesn’t properly define which ones, so any attempt to mandate that respect is doomed. You can’t build an internally consistent set of rules if you have to accommodate the mandatory respect of a handful of strange beliefs. You end up having to respect any belief regardless of its merit and that leads to people being killed by elevators with buttons wired up for floors that don’t exist.

It should be illegal to fire someone because they believe in man-made climate change because that’s sensible. It should be legal to fire someone because they believe in psychic mediums because that’s stupid. Surely we have a law for that? Surely that’s what the ‘unfair dismissal’ means?

Obviously fundamentalist religion bothers me. It makes me very angry to see anyone try to enforce rules based on ideas that are unproven, much less false. But I’ve never really known what to think of the more mainstream, moderate everyday religion.

I mean, I don’t like it in principle because I think if people are going to believe something then it should be true. (And for the record, anyone who falls for Mormonism or Scientology is a fully levelled-up imbecile, with a million inexperience points and the Shield of Ignorance card.) I also object to the relativist attitude the current culture promotes. Lastly, I object to anyone identifying themselves as ‘Catholic’ because that’s an endorsement of Pope Batshit-Mental XVI, and more generally a large number of believers gives any religion’s lunatic fringe a dangerous illusion of credibility. And these are all fine objections in principle, but in practice, in reality, for the purposes of day-to-day thinking, I just find it weird.

I think I’ve essentially been an atheist ever since it occurred to me to think about religion. For years since then I’ve surrounded myself with young, middle-class, liberal science students and their ilk, so now when I meet someone I assume they’re an atheist in the same way I assume they like cake: so completely have I accepted that there aren’t any gods that it simply wouldn’t occur to me that anyone might disagree. I mean, I know religious people exist outside of churches and other countries and the Internet, but only in the same way that I know a lot of people are conservatives and I know the weekend isn’t an infinite time-bank in which I can catch up with any ridiculous amount of work I care to ignore during the week: I can remember that these things are true but they’re kind of not programmed into my internal model of the world. You know, like general relativity.

But then… there are a couple of my friends who are theists, and every so often I see a Facebook update or something* that casually mentions God or Jesus or Allah vel cetera as if it’s a real person and it just weirds me out. For one thing, I don’t know what to do when I’m invited to thank God for some meaningless turn of fortune. Anything honest seems impolite. How is that fair? They’re the one with the delusion — if anyone’s going to be in an impossible situation, surely it should be them?

In the end I just ignore them. I know if I correct them they won’t listen anyway. Although that said, I do the same thing in pub quizzes and I’ve lost out on a prize that way, so maybe I need to be more assertive. In the meantime, though, my sheepishness to correct the deluded stands me in good stead for handling the religious. Sometimes I post passive-aggressively atheist messages just to balance it out.

The feeling that it’s weird persists, though. Here, I think (in that implicit, subconscious way we do most of our low-level thinking) is a list of updates, from people I care about, to let me know what’s going on in their lives… and here’s one that also involves a fictional character that my friend genuinely believes to be real. I literally don’t know how to process that information. It’s like presenting DOS with the command “c:\make me a cup of tea”. My face just goes blank while my brain throws it the neural equivalent of an unhandled exception error and emails a crash report to Charles Darwin.

I don’t really have a point to make here about anyone other than myself. (I thought I’d wait until the end to mention that. So you’d read it.) I think I just needed to write this somewhere before it drove me crazy. I vaguely hope that any religious folk who happen across this post might understand a bit better what it’s like to be an atheist, although I suspect they might only learn what it’s like to be a socially inept geek-atheist who is procrastinating rather than write his thesis.

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*It’s always online. I assume this is either because there’s less taboo about being religious on the internet or because people rapidly learn not to invoke their imaginary friend in my company.

Apparently, the ‘relics’ (or ‘bits’) of St Thérèse de Lisieux are coming to town, which should at least prove marginally more lively and relevant than anything the Pope has to say on his forthcoming tour. Thérèse is a relatively modern saint, canonised apparently after someone reckoned a visit to her grave restored their sight, so I would hope these are genuine remains from that grave rather than just some joke shop bit of bone approved by the Grand High Catholic Board Of Reality who have so far authenticated three of John the Baptist’s heads.

My question is this: is the following quote from St Thérèse the sort of thing you would want to publicise if it was your religion?

Be not afraid to tell Jesus that you love Him; even though it be without feeling, this is the way to oblige Him to help you, and carry you like a little child too feeble to walk.

Read it again, this time mentally substituting ‘your boyfriend’ for ‘Jesus’. I think that’s a little bit like something Jo Brand might say.

Theos, the self-appointed ‘public theology think-tank’, whatever precisely a ‘think-tank’ actually is, have done another survey. Their last one, you may recall, reached such eminently plausible conclusions as ‘38% of Jews believe in the virgin birth of Christ’ and ‘36% of people of no religion celebrate Christmas as a religious festival’. This one says that 39% of Britons (including 50% of Londoners) believe in ghosts. The margins of error aren’t quoted, but you can work them out and they’re about 39%±2% and 50%±5%. It also says that 22% (±2%) of Britons believe in astrology.

Seriously? You want me to believe that half the population of London actually think that see-through dead people float through the city rattling people’s drawers? I’m sorry, but that simply isn’t plausible to me. I know people are easily led and a bit gullible. I accept that. But I thought Theos said that 34% of people believe in Jesus and 33% say they’re not sure. You can’t simultaneously accept Christianity and believe in ghosts, and that only leaves 32%. Okay, so there are error margins on this but I don’t for a second accept that all atheists believe in ghosts — because I’m one and I don’t. Someone would have taken a photograph by now. I don’t think there’s anything that exists that hasn’t been photographed, aside perhaps from the Higgs Boson.

The director of Theos, Paul Wooley, said

The extent of belief will probably surprise people, but the finding is consistent with other research we have undertaken.

It’s consistent in that they all report implausibly high belief in ridiculous ideas, yes. Then he said

The results indicate that people have a very diverse and unorthodox set of beliefs.

…which I thought very charitable to the respondents.

I think what Theos are increasingly discovering is that surveys can’t be trusted. They are repeatedly finding that a sizable fraction of the population will say yes to anything you care to ask them. I’m quite prepared to believe that London is an unusually credulous city, but given that the 2001 survey tells me that 1.4% of its population is Jedi, I’m tempted to think it might also be a city that doesn’t poll well.

And astrology? Really? Surely by now everyone in the world knows that astrology columns are just written by whoever happens to be passing at the time, with no thought or reference to any source of knowledge, just like the science reporting. I don’t believe that 22% of the population think that the stars and planets control their lives. I don’t accept that a fifth of the people I see in the street really believe that the arbitrary shapes drawn in the sky by convention dictate their fortune.

Are they counting ‘I suppose there might be something in it’ as a yes? Are they excluding ‘I don’t know’ responses from the results? Did they phone round houses in the middle of the day? We don’t know, because Theos’ press release doesn’t say. But any of those seems more likely than 4 million Londoners believing in ghosts. Nobody believes in ghosts. It’s a lunatic fringe belief, like crop circles or fairies.

Because, you know, the Pope never makes me cross.

First of all was the story of Jose Cardoso Sobrinho, the Archbishop of Recife’s decision to excommunicate a woman who helped her daughter get an abortion. The daughter was nine. She needed an abortion because her Catholic stepfather raped her. The rapist was not excommunicated. The Vatican supported all of this, so the only way these actions make any sense is if the Vatican considers abortion worse than raping a nine-year-old girl. And that nearly makes sense, except that the girl would probably have died in childbirth, so even if you consider her twin fÅ“tuses ‘people’ you still have to be pretty warped to expect her to die for the crime of being raped. (Warped, or Muslim.)

After that, the Vatican calmed down a little and celebrated International Women’s Day, by — I know, this has to be gold, doesn’t it? — by publishing an article asking the question “What in the 20th century did most to liberate Western women?” and reaching the rather brilliant conclusion that it was probably the invention of the washing machine. Not the right to work. Not women’s suffrage. Definitely a machine that makes cleaning clothes (which clearly is Women’s Work) easier. I mean, even if that’s pragmatically true (which it isn’t) don’t say so right after you’ve okayed raping small girls.

After that piece of light-hearted batshit whimsy, the Pope decided to refocus his efforts on Catholicism’s core competency: ruining innocent people’s lives with arbitrary and idiotic dogma. This time, it’s Africa’s turn. Speaking about the AIDS epidemic there, the Pope himself, not a lackey this time, said “the distribution of condoms… aggravates the problems”. The Telegraph have found themselves a priest to defend him — and let’s mention now that I’m only inferring he’s a priest from his photo. Nowhere do they bother to actually mention that he works for the Pope, because that might be a bit too much like declaring one’s interests for the mainstream media. Their priest, George Pitcher, rehashes the same old argument I’ve heard over and over again: “that the Church’s historic teaching that chastity outside marriage and fidelity within it would prevent the spread of killer diseases such as Aids”. And this is true, but alas irrelevant, because nobody is criticising that teaching. (At least, I’m not. At the moment.) What we are criticising is the Pope’s claim that distributing condoms will make the AIDS epidemic worse. This claim is demonstrably false. It turns out that if you grow up and go with the facts instead of just making shit up, you can actually make a difference and save some lives.

The problem I have with the Pope’s speech is not that he advocated abstinence: it is that he specifically lied about something that we know works. Even if nobody acts on his advice, if they believe the epidemiological claims that he makes then they will make bad decisions and people will die.

Angry about a potential Liberal Democrat policy to oppose religious discrimination in school admissions, a group of ‘faith leaders’ (a piece of journalese which roughly translates as ’self-important windbags’) have written a letter to the Guardian which is packed so full of logical fallacies there’s hardly any room left over for proselytising.

It’s mostly dull, but this bit is worth mentioning:

Tomorrow, delegates at the Liberal Democrat conference will have a choice of supporting the heritage and future of [faith] schools, or supporting a policy that would damage that which helps make them so successful. We hope that they choose to back the clear consensus of public opinion as reflected in the Guardian’s own poll published this week, which showed 69% of those with school-age children support a religious ethos in schools.

It seems to me that the argument is completely empty: there’s no reason to think that a school’s religious ethos would be damaged by admitting pupils who didn’t subscribe to that religion. I went to a church wedding last year, and spent the entire time resolutely not-believing in God, and yet the whole thing went off without a hitch, all the while exuding religiosity. The actual beliefs of the participants is completely irrelevant: me toeing the line and sitting quietly at the back of the church looks exactly the same whether or not I accept the ideas being preached from the front of it, and that’s as it should be. The whole thing is worse when there are children involved, because the idea of what they believe is fuzzier: an adult can believe in God and while they’re still wrong we must at least respect that they’re capable of deciding for themselves what they believe (even if they choose not to). With children that’s less true: a seven-year-old Christian is just parroting what his parents taught him. Even I was a Christian at that age (I think — I really don’t remember much from that long ago). The idea that you have to have pupils of a particular religion in order to maintain a school’s ‘character’ is a ridiculous claim made to justify a form of discrimination that should have been banned decades ago.

To me, the strongest argument against faith schools is that they don’t give children a chance to be who they want to be: a child from a Muslim family at a Muslim school with Muslim friends is not really being given any opportunity to develop in any other direction than strict adherance to Islam. That works out great for Islam, but pretty badly for the child, who may turn out to be gay or rational and have massive problems reconciling these natural traits with his imposed faith. I would solve that by banning faith-based education, but a good compromise is to allow culturally-religious schools such as the one avowed atheist Marcus du Sautoy’s children attend but ban them from discriminating.

The first two sentences of the letter are:

Tomorrow, the Liberal Democrats will debate education policy, including their position on the country’s 7,000 schools with religious character. The debate needs to be informed by facts and not conjecture.

Let’s see some facts, then. I would like to see a single scrap of evidence for the claim that discrimination is required to maintain the effectiveness of faith schools. I fully expect that there isn’t any.

This has been kicking around my drafts folder for ages. Not sure why I never posted it, but here it is now anyway.

Suppose you got a massive bucket of bricks that weighed more than all but the fattest bastard. Clearly it is a bad thing to weigh more than it. Say then that every year you removed a brick, until it weighed the same as someone merely fairly chubby. It is clearly still bad to weigh more than the bucket of bricks. It is still true that those heavier than it die younger than those lighter. Only now, loads more people are heavier than it — primarily because it’s so much lighter than it used to be.

You now understand logic better than The Christian Institute:

A new in-depth study has added to mounting evidence that being born outside of marriage damages children. The report, compiled by researchers at the University of Essex, says that 44 per cent of babies are now born to unmarried parents. Cohabitees are estimated to make up three-quarters of those parents.

Well, technically, but hold on…

A new in-depth study has added to mounting evidence that being born outside of marriage damages children.

What? The study does no such thing. It says that co-habiting parents are more likely to split up than married ones (a fact which has many interesting causes, none of which involve Jesus), that children whose parents split up are worse off than those whose parents stay together, and that more children are being born out of wedlock.

Well yes, but unmarried couples are staying together longer than they used to: because the point at which the average couple marry — the number of bricks in the bucket — is changing. It’s not an illusory problem, and I’d hate to imply that it is, but the simplistic spin put on it by the Christian Institute (”The Christian Institute exists for the furtherance and promotion of the Christian religion in the United Kingdom”, so no agenda there) is just pathetic. To support that conclusion, you want a large cohort study, with a group of children of married parents and a matched group of unmarried ones — with similar incomes, social class, inteligence, location, and so forth, as any of those and other factors could affect odds of break-up and children’s welfare. That wasn’t even hinted at in any account of the report I can find. (I don’t think a RCT where the participants are unaware whether they’re legally wed would be particularly useful, but it would certainly be funny.)

And remember: the CI is a charity. Every time someone donates to them, the income tax paid on that is handed to the CI. So you funded this article. And so did I. And I’m cross about that, because it’s like everything I hate most rolled into one.