Apathy Sketchpad

That’s right, two Crackpot posts in a row. And they said it couldn’t be done.

This month, it’s everyone involved in the most pointless argument I have ever heard of:

Holocaust survivors said Monday they are through trying to negotiate with the Mormon church over posthumous baptisms of Jews killed in Nazi concentration camps. … ”We ask you to respect us and our Judaism just as we respect your religion,” [Ernest Michel, honorary chairman of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors] said in a statement released ahead of the news conference. “We ask you to leave our six million Jews, all victims of the Holocaust, alone, they suffered enough. … Baptism of a Jewish Holocaust victim and then merely removing that name from the database is just not acceptable,”

Essentially, among the less insane beliefs of the Mormon church is that in order to be reunited in the afterlife, you need to retrospectively baptise your ancestors. A group of Jews are angry at this, even though they presumably believe that a Mormon baptism is just a meaningless set of rituals that has absolutely no effect on reality. The Jews say this isn’t good enough because according to Michel

100 years from now, how will they be able to guarantee that my mother and father of blessed memory who lived as Jews and were slaughtered by Hitler for no other reason than they were Jews, will someday not be identified as Mormon victims of the Holocaust?

It seems to me that the clue is in the question there. I wonder if Michel routinely identifies people in the most passably-accurate-but-misleading way he can think of, referring to his family the way I might summarise a random internet contact if I want to pass on something from a blog that amuses me… I wonder if he has children and if so whether they tell their friends that they can’t come out to play because the honorary chairman of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors says they have to do their homework first. He should go on QI.

But no. According to the link I just posted, the standard Mormon defence is that the soul of the dead person doesn’t have to accept the baptism.

This just seems too surreal to me. I would have thought that Jews would ignore any rituals the Mormons did, believing them to be nonsense. I wouldn’t care at all if they wanted to baptise me. I’m pretty sure I’m already baptised into something, though I can’t for the life of me recall what exactly it is. Something with Jesus. I’d have thought that the Jewish faith, which teaches that the soul is already in heaven and not, as the Mormons think, in God’s waiting room watching the Holy Goldfish amble about for centuries on end and reading millenium-old magazines and cardboard books for four-year-olds, and so they wouldn’t even be told about the offer of baptism. I would have thought that, being dead, if the baptisee still has any existence then they’d have a pretty good idea if they’d picked the right religion by now and be in a far better place to make this call than their surviving relatives. This is like watching children try to argue semantics.

In fact, you know what this is like? I think I’ve found a parallel. (Bonus for regular readers: you may recognise the poster.)

A few days ago, a reader sent me a link to this Channel Four report. It’s a five minute video, so here it is:

There are some scary quotes in there, but the stats are worse. From their own survey, 80% of 50 Muslim, Jewish and ‘accelerated Christian education’ schools taught Creationism as fact and ignore evolution. Of those, five were state-funded schools. That’s 74% of 19 Jewish schools, 100% of 21 Evangelical schools and 50% of 10 Islamic schools. None of these schools is breaking a law*, although of course Paul Kelley would have been had he been reckless enough to educate in a secular way. The law, as has been mentioned, is an ass.

Personally, I think the best argument for teaching evolution in schools is that it’s the only way I know that you can make biology into a passably interesting subject. I for one always found it crushingly dull — because it was mostly a list of information presented in a “here’s what happens; don’t ask why, just learn it” kind of a way. Throw in evolution and you can explain why these things happen. You can talk about DNA and all the weird ways genes try to get copied. You can tie biology in to all kinds of other subjects much more effectively. I’m sure you can teach vast tracts of biology without mentioning genes or evolution, but I defy you to make it interesting.

That aside, the best reason I know of not to teach Creationism is simply that it’s patently false. Of course, Creationists won’t accept that, so a better argument is that there is no evidence to support it (because it’s so false). The only argument in favour is the whole stupid “parents’ rights” thing. And I do accept that parents have a right to educate their children in whatever way they want — but I think they should be made to look up the word “educate” before they start paying someone to preach at them, because filling impressionable young minds with damaging lies to promote an ideology is nothing more or less than exploitation — and it’s not even for personal gain: we’re talking about exploitation for the sake of an abstract concept. And I think it’s utterly abhorrent that the government would fund this.

I blame the parents for this. They should be outraged if their kids are being taught such bullshit, and they should get something done. The government are also in the wrong, of course, but you can hardly expect the government to act if the people don’t care. (You know, because the government only ever does what the people want.) People listen to parents. God knows why.

I’m not against the ides of schools being different and parents having choice. I’m not against the idea that some of those differences might be based on a religion — a school aimed at Muslims that makes sure the textbooks don’t have illustrations in articles about Mohammed, or a school aimed at Jews that only serves kosher food, that’s fine. And hopefully the genuine followers of those religions would be able to get places in those schools, because since all schools would be required to teach the same curriculum non-religious parents presumably would just pick the nearest school, or the one the kid’s friends were going to. The moment you let them teach different things then the idea of “choice” becomes an illusion: when you’re presented with one good school and one bad school, you don’t have a choice. Everyone with a brain will try to get into the good school and then you’re back to pot luck (or selection, if it’s a faith school). It’s just the same as the ridiculous claim made by the Department of Health the other day, that “operation success rates help patients choose treatment”. Their theory is that by publishing statistics on survival rates at different hospitals, they give patients a choice. No, you don’t. You just make life difficult for everyone, and worry people who can’t get into the best one. The stats should be public, certainly, but not for that reason. I think that all schools and hospitals should be good enough that you don’t care which one you use, and I think that if they’re not then you should fix it rather than shifting the onus onto patients and parents to find an acceptable one.

More to the point, if it’s legal to teach Creationism, that must mean there is no requirement for schools to teach facts that are true.

But of course, I don’t get a say. Because I don’t live in Normanton. If I did, I’d be allowed to vote against Ed Balls’ continuing reign of lunacy over the Department of Children, Schools, Families and Kittens, or whatever they’re calling Education now. (Honestly, the system of government we have here is utterly mad if you look into it for any length of time.)

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* According to the video, anyway. My understanding is that the teaching of evolution is compulsory in publicly funded schools, but I don’t know where I can find an authoritative source of information.