Apathy Sketchpad

Almost exactly a month ago (yeah, yeah), the Centre for Policy Studies published “In Bad Faith”, rallying against… well, let’s let the author, Christina Odone, explain…

The witch hunt is on. A Government obsessed with phoney egalitarianism and control freakery is aligning itself with the strident secularist lobby to threaten the future of faith schools in Britain.

I shall defer responding to this to the rather brilliantly ranty article published by Andrew Copson in the Guardian:

Few apart from than Odone can have noticed this dangerous development. Under Labour governments since 1997 more new state-funded faith schools have opened than under any other government, and there is no sign that this increase is being stemmed or about to be. Certainly no evidence for such a change of direction is presented in today’s pamphlet, a mish-mash of anecdote, selective factoids and non-sequiturs (”The schools are not divisive. Not one of the 72 British citizens convicted under the Terrorism Act of 2000 attended a faith school.”).

So what’s the problem?

[Faith schools] are out with Gordon Brown.

The Prime Minister may acknowledge that his faith is important to him. But so is his standing with the Labour party – all the more so given his record-low popularity with the voters. Gordon Brown knows that for the ‘Old Labour’ rump of the party, equally committed to secularism and comprehensive education, faith schools are anathema. Tony Blair and ‘New Labour’ were ready to ignore this constituency, but Gordon Brown cannot afford to.

It occurs to me that what people voted for in the last election was not faith schools, not Blair, nor Brown, but it was Labour. If Labour are largely against faith schools then surely Odone is accusing Brown of nothing more than keeping the promise Blair reneged on?

Here is her example of a faith school that’s good:

In contrast to the graffiti that covers the neighbouring buildings, and the litter on the streets and pavements, the Sir John Cass complex is impressively tidy and clean. Youngsters (the school is co-ed) in navy blue uniforms walk briskly but quietly in the corridors, greeting teachers with ‘Hello Sir’ or ‘Hello Miss’. When they spot the head, Haydn Evans, they fall silent to attention. It is easy to understand their awe: when one boy arrives with his tie askew, Evans, eyebrow raised, picks him up on it: ‘Where’s your uniform?’

He sounds like a dick who rules by fear to me. I mean, I’d hate to generalise just from that, but it’s hardly convincing me that faith schools are worth the rampant discrimination and segregation required to sustain them. In any case, this is a Church of England school with 60% Muslim students (just like most faith schools, I’m unwilling to bet), and yet they persist in the pointless and rather silly charade of having a little prayer that most of the students don’t believe in. If this school, with students from a broad mix of (parents’) faiths, is the best example in favour of faith schools you can find, surely that’s an argument against them? At least it’s an argument against the aribtrary suspension of discrimination laws for their special case?

After this she bangs on for a while about the good results faith schools get in league tables. Now I don’t know a lot about schools, but I do know a bit about science. I know that you can’t just say they’re good because “they account for a third of all primary schools but make up almost two-thirds of the top 209 primaries”. That could mean anything. It could mean that selection works. It could mean they’re largely in areas where people get good results. You have to compare them with a matched control group, not just every other school. That’s a meaningless comparison.

In any case, to be frank I’d not be at all surprised if faith schools gave good exam results. I just think that those good exam results will be on the CVs of fucked up children. That, to me, isn’t progress. I for one would rather my children, should I ever have any, grew up to be well-balanced people with poor grades than unlikeable conservative nerds. Obviously I’m exaggerating, but it’s the children of ultra-religious people who need secular education most, and saying “if you don’t like it, pick another school” is like saying “let’s legalise murder, and if you don’t like it, don’t kill anyone”: it very much misses the point. Faith schools are a Catch-22: the people who want them are the people it is most important shouldn’t get them.

She also makes an appeal to populatity, saying

Among Christian parents, faith schools are so popular that they are allegedly pushing their children into late baptisms to secure places at these schools. Meanwhile, parents who were turned away from over-subscribed faith schools refuse to accept the alternative: about 70,000 appeals are launched each year.

But this is also misleading: the public in general are against faith schools. Parents want their kids to go to good schools. They don’t care what religion that school is.

In chapter two, Odone makes a poor attempt to address the idea that selection may be responsible for the better results:

Critics maintain that faith schools use the admissions procedure to usher in a better-off intake. As evidence, they point to the schools’ under-representation of children on Free School Meals (FSM)…

But the National Audit Office warns that FSM do not necessarily serve as the best proxy for poor income. Its reservations were corroborated by research carried out last year for the Centre for the Economics of Education.

Fair enough perhaps, but let’s not forget you’re happy to use league tables against a hopelessly unmatched control as a proxy for efficacy. Besides, she’s in favour of selection:

To the Government, as Ed Balls’s attack revealed, a request for a marriage certificate as part of an application form is an ignominious attempt to flush out single mothers. To the Orthodox Jewish school, it is the only way to verify that both parents are born Jews.

Yes, but here in Britain we don’t stand for that kind of shit. Born Jews? That’s not “maintaining the religious ethos of the school”, that’s racism. I’d think Jews, of all people, would know better than that. She lists other, similar examples, which yes, do ensure that the school’s religious makeup is controlled, but plainly also act as proxies for performance selection.

Chapter four (chapter three saying nothing of any consequence) again opens with what Odone wrongly considers a lovely story about what she hopefully-wrongly perceives to be one of the better faith schools. Since the schools featured are her choice from the minority of ones that responded, from the minority of ones she contacted, I dismissed it out of hand. After that she starts explaining the idea that Muslim students or their parents might be offended by many aspects of what she quite wrongly describes as our “secular” state school system. These include “gym where their modesty is affronted” — believe me, at secondary school I would have liked little more than a decent affront to modesty in gym class and it really doesn’t happen — and “the school trip to a farm where they might come into contact with a pig” — which did happen. It was a Gloucester Old Spot. It wasn’t scary or offensive in the least. Of course, I’m not a Muslim, but screw them; if they want to complain about the prospect of their child maybe meeting a pig then they should have a better reason than “oh, we just don’t like pigs”. But Odone says that “feeling misunderstood or rejected by their peers at school, and frustrated in their ambitions beyond it, these youngsters are likely to be receptive to radical messages.” People will blow up trains because they met a pig? Are you serious?

Next is her observation, if you can call it that, that “not one of the 77 convicted on terrorism charges since the Terrorism Act 2000 attended a Muslim school”. What the Guardian article didn’t tell me was the comedy gem hiding after the semicolon: “one, Ader Ahmed, was home-schooled.” So basically he went to a really small faith school? I’m against home-schooling too. That plays right into my existing prejudice. (I realise the pamphlet isn’t aimed just at me, but then, I tend to think that people who share one opinion with me probably share other related ones too.)

Next, she starts implying that the alternative to proper Muslim schooling is little girls being packaged off to Pakistan to marry close relatives:

“The Drugs sex and rock and roll scene is not an option for Muslim girls,” Humeira Khan points out, “or if it is, it sparks huge conflict. So suddenly marrying them early or sending them home [to Pakistan or Bangladesh] becomes a huge pressure.”

Trust me, it’s not an option for anyone at school. Did you never even watch The Inbetweeners? Unless you’ve been sitting up all night watching Skins, which frankly raises even more worrying questions, there’s no reason to be afraid of what happens in the average British school. I’d be far more concerned about the effects of a Muslim education on a young girl. If that results in some people sending their children to more illiberal countries, I think we have to accept that as a consequence of being ahead of the rest of the world. Lead by example. You know or “liberate” Pakistan and Bangladesh.

The fifth chapter (by which point I was skipping the “example” schools entirely) points out that far from “educational ghettos where Christian children learn about Creationism and Muslim children about jihad, while Jewish children are taught they alone are Chosen People” (an accusation I would never make — they’re not educational! Ho ho!), “faith schools in the state system must follow the National Curriculum, including Citizenship education.” Well that’s swell and all, but — and again I don’t know a lot about schools so this may be totally wrong — surely a school which actually is pluralistic, multicultural and inclusive is going to be more effective than a school which is monoreligious, monocultural and exclusive, with a lesson (eating up an hour a week of expensive teaching time) in place to teach students tolerance as if it’s something that can be examined? Odone points out that “all maintained schools are under an ‘obligation’ to promote community cohesion,” but that doesn’t mean they actually do it. The government could mandate that all bank clerks must fly to work on jetpacks, it wouldn’t make it so.

Chapter six, ‘Smears’, mentions creationism. Odone claims that creationism in Britain is basically a myth:

Creationism, then, is not a wild fire sweeping the country’s schools; it is not taught in science classes in place of, or as an alternative to, evolution. Instead, Creationism is taught, in a handful of schools, as part of their study of the Bible in RE. Those Christian students who subscribe to a literal interpretation of the Bible will believe that God made the world, and man, in seven days; but thanks to the National Curriculum they will also know that science has proved otherwise. In this way their Christianity has to accommodate their learning.

Channel 4 say otherwise. And so does the scary Jewish headmaster in their film.

After that there is a summary saying “as we have seen, the charges against faith schools can be
dismissed one by one” which as I think we have seen, she didn’t actually do with any kind of success.

And that’s why she’s awarded this month’s Crackpot title.

Here’s a few quick things too big for Google Reader; too small for their own blog posts. (Not really sure why they’re too small; I’ve done two-line posts before now, but it’s my blog and I’ll do what I like.)

Fist, this fantastically silly story from the Telegraph:

Satanist father and Christian mother fight for Sunday morning custody rights

Kristie Meyer has cited the religious beliefs of her former husband, Jamie, as the main reason why an Indiana judge should restrict his visitation rights. … However, legal experts have warned that the American Constitution prevents judges from showing a religious preference. …Mr Meyer may now be asked to prove that Satanism, which he says is about celebrating man’s desires rather than worshipping the devil, is a real faith.

Sounds to me like an eminently sensible faith, compared at least to Christianity.

Meanwhile, legal observers say his former wife may have to show that Satanism - which is recognised as a religion by the US Internal Revenue Service - is harmful to their daughters’ upbringing. Mrs Meyer has argued that her ex-husband’s public expression of satanic beliefs has embarrassed their children.

Can you really legislate on the basis that parents mustn’t embarrass their children?

Pat Roberts, her lawyer, has asked the judge to order Mr Meyer to drop off the children at his ex-wife’s church so they can attend with her during his visitation time. “Frankly, (it) can be emotionally damaging or confusing to children when they’re faced with these two different forms of worship,” Mr Roberts told the Chicago Tribune.

Yes, if you go around exposing children to alternative viewpoints, the indoctrination might not work. Honestly, I can’t see any other way of reading this.

… “Allowing them to go to church for a couple of hours on a Sunday morning is… not unreasonable.”

I think it is, but probably for a different reason. I hope that reason prevails in this case, and honestly I think it will.

Also, in case you missed it, here’s a comic I drew at Ghost Hamster.

Now, below the fold, some replies I sent to 419-scammers which the scammers did not respond to.

Read the rest of this entry »

I feel now like I may have been a bit harsh on the Church of England. Obviously I don’t think it should remain Established a moment longer, and naturally my ideal world wouldn’t include it, but…

Well, first of all, it’s at least trying to be progressive. They ordain women, much to the chagrin of Anne Widdecombe, a woman so conservative she even objects to equal rights for women, and gay people (although they do ask them not to actually have sex, although in fairness that’s as much the government’s fault for failing to legalise gay marriage as such). If there really has to be an Established church (which there clearly doesn’t) then I’d rather it be them than most of the others.

And what happens?

A breakaway sect of Anglicanism (a phrase I never imagined I’d have to type — cake or death, anyone?) forms, designed to keep those dirty gays out. And people (like the aforementioned Tory notjob) desert the Church for the safety of Catholicism, where of course there is no danger at all of anything remotely resembling liberalism, progressivism, or any form of acknowledgement that it’s not the middle ages or that making stuff up is different from research. These people usually justify their actions by saying things like “you can’t just ignore the parts of the bible you don’t like”, while wearing cotton-polyester blend. So either you’re being selective, and therefore will need to either stop being a sexist homophobic bigot or find a better reason, or else you’ve got to accept the whole bible, including all the really fucked-up stuff with rape and murder and slavery and so on and so forth. Honestly I’d be happier if they just came right out and said “I think homosexuality is wrong and I won’t be a member of any church that supports it”. They’d be flat out wrong, but at least they’d be honest. When did palatable become better than honest?

If all this is right, then to say the C of E is doomed because it’s losing people is like saying that a cancer surgery patient is doomed because they’re losing cells. If enough of the fools abandon the ship then the Church may even end up being a force for good.

Of course, I’ll still want it disestablished.

(There are some really fucking weird versions of Cake Or Death on Youtube…)

I’ve just read a post about “what prayer is” on Why Don’t You, which was inspired by a post about “prayer in schools” on GodBeGone. Heather sees prayer as “special pleading” to God, which seems pretty reasonable to me. Obviously it depends on what you hope to achieve by the prayer, but many people seem to want to effect a direct change in the material world purely by praying. My basis for this is mostly Christianity, as I’ve seen most of it and they mostly pray in English. Almost every Christian prayer I’ve ever heard has made specific requests of the recipient: deliver us from evil, say, or strangely, from the Hail Mary, that she prays for the person praying to her. (Presumably this is the Catholic equivalent of having ‘contacts’.) There are loads of studies of prayer used as a medical intervention (all of the properly done ones reporting that prayer doesn’t help, and that telling someone they’re being prayed for makes things worse). And then there’s this, from the Telegraph:

An 11-year-old girl died from diabetes after her parents prayed for her recovery rather than calling for medical assistance.

…

[Local police chief] Mr Vergin said the couple, who run a coffee shop in Wausau, had blamed her death on their lack of faith.

There’s a picture in the article of the parents and the girl, and the caption is just brilliant:

Dale and Leilani Neumann say they are not ‘crazy religious people’.
But after Madeline died, they prayed that she might be resurrected

There are churches which routinely endorse this kind of thing, and they (like Madeline’s parents) are protected by specific “healing by prayer” legislation. The whole thing is covered in more detail (and it somehow manages to get worse) at Pharyngula.

Personally, I see this as just one part of a much larger problem: people genuinely seem to think that praying will achieve something. This is one of the most dangerous aspects of Christianity, and it’s also one of the stupidest. Let’s be ridiculously generous, and grant these people the irrational and bizarre assumption that there is an almighty god who watches us and has little else to do but interfere with our lives. So what kind of a god is he?

The conventional Christian wisdom (and I use the word “wisdom” somewhat figuratively) is that he is all-loving. In which case, it would seem to me, he would simply cure these people without being asked — at least, if he thought that was the right thing to do. The idea that he is omnipotent but has no initiative somehow doesn’t ring true to me. He did, we’re led to believe, create the universe, after all. I can’t imagine who would have suggested that. (I’m not completely sure it was a wise move, in hindsight.)

It’s also fairly well accepted by those who think he exists at all that he has a Divine Plan. Usually the plan is held to be ineffable — that is, that no human ever can or will understand it. Let’s again be ridiculously generous and grant them the assumption that it is possible for something to be Beyond Human Understanding — that is, simultaneously impossible to understand and true. I would have said when something can’t be understood, it’s probably because it’s bollocks, but let’s assume for now that that isn’t true. So now the theory is that God, who is all-loving and omnipotent, has devised a Divine Plan, which presumably therefore represents the very best course of history that the human race could possibly take. We’re left to assume that things like the holocaust were strictly necessary for some unimaginably greater good further down the line, or perhaps for avoiding some even more terrible event which has now been averted. If so, thankyou God, although I don’t really see how it was your call. If all of the above is true, then it would seem to me that God would be an idiot to mess about with his Plan just because a load of humans who don’t understand it in the first place ask him to. (It would also suggest that God isn’t going to let a little thing like “free will” interfere with the Plan, so now all forms of action become pointless. Why take the girl to the doctor if God’s already decided how this ends? It also implies that murderers shouldn’t really be punished because anything and everything they do is sanctioned in God’s Plan. This is a really dangerous train of thought to stay on too long.)

And as if all of the above was somehow insufficiently absurd, when one prayer doesn’t work, they start getting more people to join in. People genuinely organise huge gatherings for prayer, and the Pope not so long ago tried to instigate a 24-hour “shift” prayer to rid the church of corruption. I ask you — if God is all powerful, then surely he can take a suggestion once, evaluate it, and implement it or not without having thousands of other people pester him about it as well? He’s not your MP, and even if he was, I’d like to think he was smart enough to realise that almost all petitions are a moronic waste of time. The merit of an idea isn’t a function of how many people support it (nor is the reverse true) and in any case God has never been known for his commitment to democracy. He tends, at least in the literature, to prefer a kind of auto-theocracy, where he rules all and anyone who doesn’t follow his rules is burned horribly or drowned or turned to condiment or something.

It’s moronic. And the problem is, that nobody in this story did anything but try to help. Her parents genuinely thought that if they sat at home and didn’t call the doctor for long enough, Madeline would get better. Then she died, and they genuinely thought that if they sat around the body and wanted it hard enough that Madeline would come back to life. (There is a sentence which can apply to multiple news stories.) In real life, their actions are unjustifiable. They were negligent and they imposed their ideology on a vulnerable young girl who trusted them and was too young to understand what was happening to her. The same is true of Jehovah’s Witnesses who apply their religious rules to their children, and the child dies where a blood transfusion would have saved them. It also applies to Daily Mail readers who think that vaccinations are harmful and their children — and other people’s — die of preventable diseases. I nearly added “worse still” before “other people’s” but I thought better of that. “Your” children aren’t yours. They’re theirs. They’re no more “yours” than “your” friends or “your” parents are. It’s an indicator of relationship, not possession, and anybody other than yourself, regardless of relationship, mustn’t be subjected to your delusions if that puts them at risk. But if you believe it, like this guy does, they absolutely did the right thing.

This article, from the universally accepted standard source for anti-vaccination nutjobs that is The Daily Mail, has quotes like this:

I’ve done a lot of research, mainly on the internet, and I’m doing what I think is the right thing for her.

You’re wrong. The world is complicated and nobody is expected to understand the whole lot. That’s why governments have advisers. Delegate this decision to someone more qualified.

Or this:

I’ve been called selfish by doctors and health visitors. In fact, I’m more vigilant than most parents - I’ve chosen to educate myself about immunity and how to deal with diseases, rather than blindly hand over responsibility to the State or doctors.

You are selfish and slightly moronic to boot. Do the smart thing and trust medical experts on medical matters. You can answer all their questions about your area of expertise, which is probably the lives of Katie And Peter.

Or this:

If Max did get measles I’d give him a boost with Vitamin C and Vitamin A from cod liver oil. If we have a second child, there will be no vaccinations at all.

You are negligent parents and should not have children — you’re literally no different to the Neumanns, except with fish oil substituted for prayer.

The problem is that even the best of intentions are worthless if you’re too ignorant to make the right decision. Some people say there are two kinds of truth: “scientific” truth, and “religious truth”. The former, they say, affects the world we live in, and the latter guides us in spiritual matters. Usually these people are either trying to protect their religious convictions from proper scrutiny, or else are trying to distance themselves from people like Madeline’s parents. The problem is that you end up saying “religious things can’t be understood, and aren’t a useful basis for real-world decisions, but they are nevertheless true“. To my mind, you are by that point using the word “true” in such a weak sense that it loses all meaning.

I prefer an approach that says “you go ahead and believe in your god, but only if you recognise that it’s irrational and don’t inflict it on anyone else”. I think about the universe, of course I do. Life is incredibly strange compared to everything else we know about science, and it seems to require a special origin to explain it. Personally, I tend to assume that “life” is a property of the universe which operates on some tiny level (say, the quantum randomness) and consciousness is an emergent phenomenon which appears when this ‘control’ is placed in a system as complex as a living human brain. It seems plausible to me, and it appeals to my kind of mind. (I like emergent complexity. It’s elegant and the neatest way to explain the existence of complexity at all. I’d hate to have the kind of mind that prefers to substitute God for a difficult question.) But since I’ve no evidence, I don’t put too much stock in that hypothesis, not that I can think of a situation it would affect anyway. That is a healthy and reasonable approach to take. If people said “I think there’s a god, and I think he’s against it, but I can’t be sure so you’d best get that transfusion anyway” then that would be reasonable.

Free speech is important, but I think we badly need a new crime of causing death by misinformation. Deaths from measles rose by infinity percent between 2005 and 2006 after the whole stupid autism “controversy” kicked off, and it’s in no small part because people like the Daily Mail publishing stories like this one. In principle, this would mean a lot of churches would be liable too, but really it would just mean that they’d have to be careful about what they preached — which I think would be a good thing.

It could save lives, and in so many more ways than by simply preventing deaths.

I didn’t see Baby Bible Bashers when it aired, because it was Valentine’s Day so of course I was out, er, at the pub with several friends. After three unrelated people recommended it I watched it on Google Video, and it was more-or-less what I was expecting. A load of pushy parents exploiting their children for varying levels of financial gain.

It’s a good video for anyone who thinks religion is a good thing to watch. (Parse that how you like.) These kids are home-schooled (I may never understand why that’s legal) and so they’ve basically been given nothing but religion down their throats from birth. Here’s a typical quote:

When he was three, he came in the kitchen and asked me, would he go to hell if he died and I said, “have you sinned against God?” And he didn’t say nothin’, so I said, “have y’always obeyed your mother?” And he said no. I said, “well, you’ve sinned against God.”

–Kendall Boutwell (11′25″ in)

Nice answer. I mean, say what you like about atheism, but it’s never terrified someone that much. What happened to shielding your kids from the terrifying reality of the universe until they were old enough to take it? That’s what I would do. I’d evade questions about what kind of awful things might befall the poor kids until they can understand the situation properly. Inventing extra dangers is just needlessly cruel, surely?

One kid’s grandmother says she’s never seen him preach and there not be at least one miracle. But then, she also thinks

Most babies say “dad”, first word. Terry’s first word was “hallelujah”.

–Sharon Munroe (9′20″ in)

No. No, it wasn’t. Nobody learns to say four syllable words before one syllable words. That’s almost necessarily false. That would be like solving quadratic equations before you’ve learned to count to ten.

My favourite quote is this, from one of the young preachers:

I know God is talking to me because I can hear it. Sometimes it sounds like me, but I say no: it’s God.

–Terry Durham (23′10″ in)

And the problem is that I can’t fault these people’s motives. I just can’t. They genuinely believe that preaching is the highest possible calling and that their children should be doing it — despite Samuel’s particular beliefs causing him to burst into tears when people have the sheer affront to be reasonable at him (43′45″ in) and causing a highly bizarre argument between a policeman, who is arguing that the Boutwells are on private property and are compelled by the law to leave, and the the boy’s father, who is arguing that the policeman should repent whatever unspecified sins he may or may not have committed as if this will alter the law (25′10″ in).

How is that poor kid supposed to lead anything like a normal life after that upbringing? He needs a proper secular schooling and he needs it now. And he needs proper secular therapy too, because if he goes crying to his parents, they’ll say something like “you see, they’re hostile. That’s what they did to Jesus. That’s why they plucked out his beard and whipped him with a cat o’ nine tails. They hated him,” and that won’t help even a bit.

This is child abuse, there’s no question about that. People like this shouldn’t be allowed to have children. These kids should be put into care.

A while back, there was a story about a woman named Nadia Eweida, who was suspended from her job, a check-in worker with British Airways, because she refused to comply with their uniform code which required her to remove her crucifix necklace. I mention it only now because the employment tribunal she took BA to has concluded. (Honestly, I could do Religious Crackpot Of The Week if weeks had names.)

For what it’s worth, here is my take on it (and therefore also the correct answer, and it also applies to the girl suspended from school for refusing to take off her ridiculous chastity ring): she has no case. The crucifix necklace is an entirely optional part of the Christian faith, and is very possibly a sin. Nobody is being discriminated against; this is just a bog-standard uniform rule which she happens not to like. She can get a job elsewhere. (Or elsewear.)

Of course, you could argue that if she really believes that a crucifix necklace is a requirement of her religion then she is being discriminated against, but that would be wrong on several levels. It’s still an important argument to make, though, as the rebuttals are informative. First, it’s wrong because it assumes that the religious discrimination occurs when she isn’t allowed to follow her religious rules at work and someone of a non-necklace-requiring religion (such as Christianity) would be. This is false. The same rules (no necklaces) apply to both. Discrimination would happen if she was allowed to wear necklaces and people of other religions weren’t. Mostly, though, it’s wrong simply because the alternative would be that all religious rules trump all company policies and laws in all cases, and that would be ridiculous because religious laws may as well, for all the grounding in reality they posses, just be made up on the spot. Someone could start a religion whose scriptures were a wiki and they’d suddenly find themselves high above the law, looking down on all the policemen and saying, “ha, you look like ants! And, like ants, I could kill you all and you couldn’t stop me!”

Of course, real life rarely gets these things right. In this case, it was got so badly wrong that British Airways offered Eweida £8,500 (that’s about a billion US dollars) to settle out of court, although this was mostly just an effort to get the bad press to go away. Eweida, though, much to her credit and the furthering of justice, told them exactly where they could shove their money, and then said “I’m speechless really because I went to the tribunal to seek justice,” when the judge correctly ruled in BA’s favour. Eweida demonstrated further that she has failed to understand the issues at hand in her own story by adding “I cannot be gagged about my faith. It’s not over until God says it’s over.”

I wish more people took that attitude — if enough do, it’s statistically likely that at least one will be struck by lightning soon after mouthing off.

I can’t help shake the feeling this would make a great T-shirt. (Or at least my hi-res version would.)

This month, the Religious Crackpot Of The Month award (I love how these nutters just roll around, regular as clockwork, at least once a month) goes to General Sir Richard Dannatt, who is something called the Chief of General Staff, seen here in fancy dress as a magpie’s nest. He wins the award primarily for making this comment:

In my business, asking people to risk their lives is part of the job, but doing so without giving them the chance to understand that there is a life after death is something of a betrayal, and I think there is very much an obligation on …a Christian leader to include a spiritual dimension into his people’s preparations for operations, and the general conduct of their lives. Qualities and core values are fine as a universally acceptable moral baseline for leadership, but the unique life, death, resurrection and promises of Christ provide that spiritual opportunity that I believe takes the privilege of leadership to another level.

I think that’s all that I need to say to convince you he’s totally mad, but just for good measure I’ll ramble on a little further. My main problem with this is not that there isn’t a life after death (although there isn’t), but that if I were killed without knowing there was a life after death and there was, I’d be pleased, which is not really the same as feeling betrayed, whereas if some crackpot general had convinced me there was and there wasn’t, then I (or more realistically, those who survived me) would feel very betrayed, and that this would be quite justified because they had literally been betrayed.

Even if it could be proven beyond reasonable doubt that there was life after death, he’d still be wrong. Given that it hasn’t, he’s not only wrong, but his position is diametrically opposed to the truth. If you replace the word “without” with the word “after” and delete after the word “betrayal” then you arrive at the truth.

This blog is equally at fault, and is linked by Libby Purves, who has written an opinion piece without expressing one, which would appear to be an act both of spineless sham diplomacy and of sloppy journalism (which is ironic considering she calls her section a “guide to religion and thought” — non-overlapping magisteria if ever there were any). The Times also choose to back this report up with a piece by Ruth Gledhill, their “religious correspondent”, although judging by her output, “religious correspondent” is a description rather than a job title. This is what she said:

I understand the Ministry of Defence was not too impressed by Sir Richard’s unabashed evangelical take on the eschatological aspect of the job he does. … And yet, after all, someone’s got to be head of the Army. Surely, given the close daily contact with death and destruction that Army service entails as Iraq is all to sad a witness to, it’s better that the person responsible for all this is someone with strong religious beliefs.

She is a crap religious correspondent if she understands the issues that poorly. After that is an acknowledgement that other people may disagree, but unfortunately it isn’t a sentence so I can’t infer any views from it:

Or maybe there are some who think not, Islam, Christianity and the state of the world in general.

What the hell does that mean?

And perhaps more to the point, where is the secular reaction to this? Why is that exactly nowhere to be found anywhere on The Times’ website? Why do they have a special Irrational Correspondent and no rational reaction?

I don’t know why I ask such questions. I know already that there exists no answer that will satisfy me.

Last night when I was trying to get to sleep, the only book within reach was The Student Bible. So I randomly opened it and started reading. I figured if the book of Numbers was anything to go by then I ought to drop off to sleep nice and fast. Unfortunately, I opened it to the book of Job. This is a little worrying because it suggestive that my accusation against Hare Krishna propaganda manual Facts For Life, that it could reliably be opened at random and produce something preposterous, may be equally true of the Old Testament.

Seriously, if you’re of the opinion that God is not a mentalist you definitely should read Job, optionally with annotations. If you can’t be bothered, then I shall summarise it here. I’ll try to leave in all the important bits.

Job is a nice man who lives in somewhere called Uz. He has ten children, a lot of slaves, and a faintly ridiculous amount of livestock. He is big on God. One day, God and Satan are having what can only be described as a friendly chat, in which God bets that Satan can’t make Job curse God’s name. So God agrees to let Satan smash all Job’s stuff as long as he doesn’t touch Job personally. So Satan kills all Job’s sheep (which must have taken a long time), then kills his slaves, and then kills his children, all with God’s permission. And Job still loves God, so Satan loses the bet. That is the end of chapter one: like its sequel, The Da Vinci Code, the Bible has very short chapters, although they mostly don’t end in cliffhangers.

In chapter 2, Satan and God go double-or-quits (basically) that Job won’t curse God’s name even if Satan hurts him a lot. So Satan, with God’s blessing, inflicts a lot of nasty boils on Job, boils being the only disease in the Bible, other than leprosy. And Satan loses the bet again.

I stopped reading after that, because it was late and there was no cliffhanger I needed to resolve. But the moral of the story is clear: God is a bastard who will happily kill (or allow Satan to kill) your family and your sheep and oxen and your slaves (which you’re allowed to have) and then cover you in nasty boils, just to settle a bet, and you should praise him for this. Presumably, so should your family and slaves, at least up until the point where they’re murdered by a mythical being.

It’s lucky we have the Bible for moral guidance, isn’t it, or we’d probably all be horrid to each other the whole time.

See, I really didn’t intend for Religious Crackpot Of The Month to be a regular thing. I thought, I’ll just do it once, and call it “of the month” anyway. But then, the new month rolls over, and almost immediately a perfect Crackpot sends a long and brilliantly angry email to Pharyngula, one of my new favourite blogs. I’m not going to go through and address each claim individually, as that would just be tragic, but let me just show you one or two of the best bits. You should read the rest yourself, because it’s more or less solid insane gold from start to finish.

I mean, a lot of it is just gibberish. Have a look at this, for example. I’ve found that if I turn my mind on its side and think in just the right way (and not to hard) then I can get this to sound like semi-reasonable logic (try it; it soon passes):

16. DNA of humans differ/vary by about 10-12% from each other. 50% of human DNA is identical to the DNA of a banana. Humans and apes have no common ancestor.

You have to get yourself into a frame of mind where individual words and what a sentence sounds like are more important than the actual concepts being discussed, and then you have to repeat the phrase “if human DNA is so similar to a banana’s, we shouldn’t be surprised if it’s similar to an ape’s” over and over until it sounds like it makes sense. And this is just ingenious:

18. There is no real vestigial/useless organ. There is no junk DNA. Note: Males’ nipples “arouse” women.

It particularly entertained me when I read this:

29. Atheism or evolution does not provide a solid foundation for morality. If there is no God, there is no good nor evil.

Because, yeah, it’s true. But then, the Bible doesn’t tell me what football team to support, so I guess that’s not true either. But this is my favourite one of his arguments, by some way:

11. The Earth is not millions of years old. Notes: Magnetic field decay; Archaeology; History, other “Time limiters.” Ancient people were as smart as modern men. Evolutionists have no excuse.

DNA cannot exist in natural environments longer than 10,000 years; yet, DNA have been FOUND in Neanderthal bones, insects in amber, Dinosaur fossils, etc. A dinosaur fossil was discovered still having soft tissue and blood cells.

DNA in amber? This Crackpot thinks Jurrasic Park is a documentary!

Well, okay, so fragments of DNA have been found in amber. Fragments. Small little strings of genes which scientists aren’t at all sure are preserved ‘as-was’. That’s hardly at odds with the fact that DNA decays over time, is it?

26. Evolution is science fiction (a myth). It is similar to the story of the Centaurs (horse-men) and Mermaids (fish-women). I don’t believe in Centaurs and Mermaids.

No, but you do believe in Jurrasic Park. It’s not fair. I want to get emails like this. Maybe I should write one of those suddenly fashionable atheist books.

Lastly, I leave you with one of the postscripts from the above email:

Notes for Jews:

Your Messiah (Saviour) has arrived over 2,000 years ago: He is the Son of God who became a man (while still being God), suffered and died on the cross, and lived again from the dead; was prophesied in Isaiah 53, and in the book of Daniel.