Apathy Sketchpad

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.

This bus is slowly accumulating adjectives.
photo credit: Base on Mars

I’m going to assume you already know about the “atheist bus” campaign. I for one like it. It will get people talking, and doing so hopefully from a starting point of skepticism, which is the healthy way of doing things. But mostly I like it because the reaction to it has been comical and served to make religious people look foolish (which is pretty easy) and that always makes me smile. The funniest one I’ve put right at the end to force you to read the whole post. (I certainly can’t see how you could possibly read the end without reading the start and middle first.

For example, Theos have responded by pretending that it is in fact the best thing to happen to religious belief since the crucifixion was retconned out of the Bible. First, they donated £50. Then they started firing off soundbites almost at random, apparently in the hope that if they said something silly enough a newspaper might print it.

We’ve donated the money because we think the campaign is a brilliant way to get people thinking about God.

– Paul Woolley, Director of Theos

Fifty quid? That’ll pay for rather less than one third of one advert. That was entirely worth the bother.

Telling someone “there’s probably no God” is a bit like telling them they’ve probably remembered to lock their door. It creates the doubt that they might not have.

– Paul Woolley

That’s really quite a poor analogy, although it’s quite telling if Theos think that “skeptical but afraid of what might happen if they’re wrong” counts as belief.

The poster is very weak – where does ‘probably’ come from? Richard Dawkins doesn’t ‘probably’ believe there is no God! – and telling people to ‘Stop worrying’ is hardly going to comfort for those who are concerned about losing jobs or homes in the recession, but the posters will still prompt people to think about life’s big questions.

– Paul Woolley

That’s right, Richard Dawkins doesn’t ‘probably’ believe there is no God. Richard Dawkins believes there is probably no God. How can you not understand what adverbs are for?

Let’s leave aside the adverts’ basic proposition, “There’s probably no God”. Where did that “probably” come from? It doesn’t suggest the sales staff is overly confident about its product. If my pilot told me “This flight to Paris probably won’t crash,” I’d think about taking the train.

– Nick Spencer, Director of Studies, Theos

Like (seemingly) almost all religious people, they don’t get the point of this. Atheism isn’t about believing there is no god, it’s about not believing that there is. (Apparently this adverb problem is common in Theos.) It’s about not accepting patent nonsense for which there is not one shred of evidence. It’s about thinking about whether or not there is a god rather than believing just for the sake of it. It just so happens that everyone who does so comes to the conclusion that God is just a made-up person. (That link is what YouTube was like in 1996.) That’s the nature of correct answers.

And let’s leave aside the advice, “Now stop worrying and enjoy your life”. You would have to go a long way to find a slogan less suited to our New Year, recession-looming, mass-unemployment gloom.

– Nick Spencer

I don’t think “leave aside” means what Nick Spencer thinks it means. He’s right though: what people need in the midst of recession-looming, mass-unemployment gloom is a book full of contradictory and insane rules which must be followed to the mistranslated letter on pain of unimaginably awful everlasting torture.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking “who cares what Theos think? Get to the point! Tell me what eminent British philosopher Bill Oddie thinks!” Okay. But you’re crazy.

What they are doing is dangerous. In doing something like that they’re speaking straight to extremists. I’d like to know how they sleep the night after one of those buses gets blown up. I’ve put that point to their head office and you know what she said? That’s why they put the word ‘probably’ in. It’s pathetic.

That is a danger.

The problem is that they’ve aligned themselves with Richard Dawkins. I would happily design dozens of alternative slogans for them. There are so many good things that they could advertise and instead they’ve chosen to go with Dawkins.

Yeah, I hates them ‘militant atheists’ who constantly go on about how there’s probably no god and how they reckon, on balance, that the Bible is more than likely fiction. They’re fundamentalists. Why can’t they advertise something good, like the West Wing box set, or innocent smoothies?

Interlude: 10 Jokes About Atheist Buses: #

1. Atheist buses don’t go anywhere when they die.
2. Christian traindrivers have warned that atheist buses might go off the rails.
3. Why did the bus turn atheist? Because it had a breakdown.
4. English buses let people know there is no god. Then atheists hire advertising space on them.
5. The Atheist Bus is a direct response to the Christian Bandwagon.
6. Why did the atheist cross the road? Because it was a bus.
7. The Atheist Bus was built by a freak tornado in a junkyard.
8. Atheist Buses don’t believe in guidance from above, except sat-nav.
9. Where did Richard Dawkins install his graphics card? The atheist bus.
10. Atheist buses come in threes. Christian buses also come in threes, but they’re all aspects of the same bushead.

Number four is a rephrasing of a Charlie Brooker line. The rest are mine. Any more, if you have them, in the comments.

The best reaction this campaign has sparked is the one from Christian Voice, who have, presumably on purpose, complained to the Advertising Standards Authority, saying

There is plenty of evidence for God, from peoples’ personal experience, to the complexity, interdependence, beauty and design of the natural world. But there is scant evidence on the other side, so I think the advertisers are really going to struggle to show their claim is not an exaggeration or inaccurate, as the ASA code puts it.

Bendy-buses, like atheism, are a danger to the public at large.

I’ve sought advice from some of our key people here, but I’m afraid all I’ve got out of them so far is peals of laughter. I am sure that Stephen Green really does think there is a great deal of evidence for a God (though presumably only the one that he believes in), but I pity the ASA if they are going to be expected to rule on the probability of God’s existence.

 

Theos are happy. They’ve done a load of research and concluded that:

More than a third of Britons believe that the virgin birth really happened, according to new research published today by Theos, the public theology think tank.

In the poll of over a thousand adults, undertaken for Theos by ComRes, 34% of people agreed that the statement “Jesus was born to a virgin called Mary” was historically accurate. Only 32% considered it fictional.

This is from their own website. It’s a bit of a worry then that they feel the need to refer to themselves as “Theos, the public theology think tank”. Presumably they intend for journalists to copy and paste this description into their articles (because apparently that’s what journalists do now) and only by restraint and professional pride managed to resist calling themselves “Theos, those handsome bastards, they”. They link to a PDF of the actual survey data, PDF being the most unhelpful format they could think of in which to store a table of numerical data other than perhaps an MP3.

The survey asked respondants to rate the following statements as historical fact, fiction, or ‘not sure’: “Jesus was born to a virgin named Mary”, “Jesus was born in Bethlehem”, “Angels visited shepherds to announce the birth of Jesus” and “Herod wanted to kill Jesus, so he ordered the death of infant boys”. Then it asked if they agreed with these: “The birth of Jesus is significant to me personally”, “The birth of Jesus remains significant culturally”, “I will be attending a Christmas church service this year” and “I do not celebrate Christmas as a religious festival”. They’ve drawn a couple of odd conclusions, just because they habitually forget that there is a difference between ‘religious’ and ‘Christian’. But basically, they say, a large number of people believe in the whole pack of lies that is the conventional nativity story.

Now, far be it for me to suggest that their survey is in any way not totally reliable, but according to their data, 38% of Jews — more than in the general population — believe in the virgin birth, 49% of Jews believe Jesus was born in Bethlehem, 38% of Jews plan to attend a Christmas church service, and 43% of Jews and 36% of people of no religion disagree with the statement “I do not celebrate Christmas as a religious festival”. I am reminded of the survey that said 21% of American atheists believe in a god. These surveys are nonsense, surely?

Now I should mention that their survey contained only seven Jews, so the margin of error on these numbers is wide open, but sampling noise can’t turn zero into a finite number.

The idea that a third of people in this country believe in the virgin birth sounds pretty reasonable to me, but I’m not sure I can trust it when it came from a survey that said that Jews and atheists celebrate Christmas as a religious festival. At some stage in that survey, something went wrong. Until I know what it is and can account for it when interpreting the results, it’s pretty hard to accept these surveys as evidence of anything.

Tony Blair, recently succeeded by Gordon Brown as Prime Minister and Theos as Religious Crackpot of the Month, thinks that religion is important even if you subscribe to one of the wrong (i.e., not his) ones. This, to me, seems perverse, but apparently there are others who share this slightly obtuse idea. I read about this case earlier today. It’s from the Scarborough Evening News, which fairly obviously I don’t read myself. I saw it via. the National Secular Society’s press feed.

A former nun, whose son was turned away from Scarborough’s only faith secondary school, will appeal against the ruling next month.

 

Caroline Brookes… applied for her 10-year-old son Soony, who is a Buddhist, to attend St Augustine’s Roman Catholic School… However the local authority told her he will be starting at Raincliffe School…, instead.

…

St Augustine’s School was heavily oversubscribed this year, with 155 children applying for the 86 places available. Mrs Brookes will appeal against the decision on June 13. She will have to convince an independent panel that St Augustine’s School is the right school for her son. Soony currently attends St martin’s Church of England School…

Mrs Brookes said: “St Augustine’s School is the only faith secondary school in this area so it would provide the right environment for Soony. What is the point in having a local faith school if only catholics can attend?”

I’ve stripped out a lot of the pointless paragraph breaks that all news websites seem to insert between every sentence regardless of whether or not they make any sense (presumably to create the illusion of impact and length). I’ve left in the dodgy punctuation and apparently random capitalisation, though. I presume the Scarborough Evening News isn’t a very impressive publication. I also stripped out all the addresses, since I figured you probably don’t know the area. Anyway. I guess the part I can’t get my head around is this quote:

What is the point in having a local faith school if only Catholics can attend?

It’s a Catholic school! Why do you want your non-Catholic son going to a Catholic school? Soony says

At Raincliffe there is nowhere I can sit and pray. At St Augustine’s there is a special prayer room, which is really nice. Also all my friends are going to St Augustine’s. No-one I know is going to Raincliffe so it would be really hard for me there.

And that’s fair enough, but you know what? Schools aren’t actually shit. If you want to go aside somewhere and pray for a bit I’m sure they’ll find you somewhere — I’m sure there’ll be someone marking somewhere who won’t mind you sitting quietly for a few minutes — and you just can’t avoid making friends at secondary school, unless you spend all your breaks holed up praying, anyway. I can see that it’s better to go where your friends go, and I can see that it’d be ideal to go somewhere with dedicated facilities for prayer (if that’s important to you — which frankly I doubt it is in this case considering the kid would rather drop his religion and become a Catholic than go to the non-faith school). That’s unfortunate, but it’s not news, even locally.

There’s also a clear case to be made that the rule allowing oversubscribed faith-schools to select students based on religion is discriminating against this child unfairly. (Although it seems to have let in the entire output of the local CofE school, which is also not Catholic.) But that’s not what this story is about, at least from the mother’s point of view, because we also have this quote:

This is becoming a nightmare for us. If the appeal does not work then I don’t know what we will do. I have thought about home tuition but it is expensive and it will mean he will not be with his friends. We are just praying the appeal will be successful.

What?! So let me get this straight, so I’m not misunderstanding anything: the prospect of your child attending what passes in this country for a secular school is “a nightmare”, for some unspecified reason that either you or the newspaper thought unimportant or self-evident enough to omit, and are theoretically willing to home-school him as an alternative, but what would be okay is for him to go to a school run by a mad cult who think that they can turn wine into blood (which they then drink), run by a bigot in a frock who is held to be automatically right whatever he might choose to say because they have some old paper which says so. And you think this would be okay because they, like you, have faith — albeit in something which flatly contradicts the thing that you have faith in.

How the hell am I supposed to respect religious people when I can’t understand them? And how am I supposed to understand them when they don’t make any sense?

This hasn’t been a great couple of weeks for Christianity in Britain. We learned that the Church of England is suffering because young people aren’t interested and the people who are are dying of old age, and we learned that Cliff Richard has decided to pitch in to help, presumably because he is almost uniquely placed to sympathise with that plight. His contribution is to publish a book of his favourite Bible stories, including the story of how God killed everyone in the world except for one family and then regretted it, the story of how God murdered all the innocent first-born sons in Egypt despite having “hardened the Pharaoh’s heart” to ensure he wouldn’t release the slaves, the story of how God masterminds and helps with the genocide in Jericho, the story of Solomon, who was granted wisdom and then went off to worship someone else, and the story of how God had his own son tortured to death to “pay for” sins committed by other people according to rules God devised in the first place. I can see how that will help.

Also trying to help is the Church Army, who want to hook youngsters into the faith by analogising it to Doctor Who. They point out the many similarities between the Doctor and Jesus, and the storylines in the show and in the Bible. And there are many similarities, although frankly almost every single one of them is pathetic. They say

The Tardis was considered to represent a Church by being an ordinary object that points to something higher while the Doctor was likened to Christ in his willingness to sacrifice himself for others.

What? You could liken The Brittas Empire to the Bible if you’re willing to go that far.

My favourite Christian reference is the kenotic storyline in the episode called “The Chameleon Arch”, which is a machine that takes away all the Doctor’s powers and renders him human. It is a clear nod towards Philippians 2.6-11, where the incarnation is described as God “emptying himself”.

Not all that clear, I’m afraid. I thought that was a sub-par and rather silly bit of technobabble which had to be tolerated to tell what was, in the event, a damn good story. A story which, incidentally, really didn’t bear more than a passing resemblance to Jesus’.

We saw the Doctor persuaded to save a family of Pompeians in one of the most recent episodes, surely a reference to Genesis and Abraham’s bargaining with God over the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah.

I’m not at all sure it is a reference to that. It’s just a good dramatic theme. Nobody should read anything into the fact that it’s come up more than once. You might equally well argue that the fact that Biblical themes can be independently rewritten by a gay atheist suggests that they’re made up. Besides which, there’s shitloads of Bible and rather a lot of Doctor Who. Certainly there are parallels — but that just makes it more pathetic that these people are using such crap examples.

I don’t really know if Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor (as if that’s a real name) was tryong to help when he made a terribly dull speech entitled “Faith In Britain: A Personal Perspective”, which is buried somewhere on this webpage that’s sufficiently poorly designed that I can’t link directly to it. This is from the same lecture series as the previous winner’s speech. He says, for example, in this speech that

Only a modern person would think that religion is a private matter, something the individual does in his or her solitude

which presumably makes Jesus a “modern person”, since Matthew 6:6 says

But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.

I don’t mind that, of course. Ignorance of what the Bible says is what keeps Christianity going. What annoyed me was this bit:

I would want to encourage people of faith to regard those without faith with deep esteem because the hidden God is active in their lives as well as in the lives of those who believe.

He must be very well hidden.

Why can’t he “encourage people of faith to regard those without faith with deep esteem” because we’re smart enough to reject nonsense even when it surrounds us? Because we’ve managed to develop morality without been spoon-fed it by a book of made up rules? Because we’ve got enough confidence in our convictions to go against the flow and stand up for what we don’t believe in? If a Christian were to tell me that they regard me with deep esteem because of something God did, I would find that patronising and offensive, and I’d say so.

He also says this:

What did we do to generate unbelief? We spoke too easily about God, we spoke perhaps in the wrong way and we treated God as an idea rather than a living mystery to be approached in silence and prayer rather than in the arguments of the mind. If Christianity gave European thought the impression that God can be conceptually determined and pinned down and proved as a hypothesis, then it is hardly surprising that there has been resistance, as science and culture have developed, to worshipping this idea of God. We as Christians need to examine what we might have done to give people a misleading view of God. Faith in Britain might be improved by a deeper grasp of the mystery of God on the part of believers.

Now, I may have got the wrong end of the stick here, but to me that reads “whatever you think God is like, you’re wrong. He’s not like that, nor is he like anything else in particular, because he’s fundamentally mysterious and can’t be pinned down or rigorously defined. Of course, that doesn’t stop him existing and it doesn’t stop us knowing how he feels about gay people and stem cells.” If that is what he means, then he’s a moron.

It’s for largely this reason that I’m not sure Religious Crackpot of the Month is really viable any more. I think clearly all these people require recognition, but they can’t have it because it was this month that I read

The primary cause of unhappiness in Britain is not lack of material wealth but a loss of faith in God and religion, a group of MPs says today.

Apparently, there’s a report out by a group of all of five MPs who

argue that if values related to relationships, responsibility, trust, self-esteem and potential – all with their roots in the Judeo-Christian beliefs that once underpinned Western legislative philosophy – were to have greater emphasis in society, everyone’s wellbeing would improve.

So I did what I always do: I found the report. It turns out that the document, called “Faith In The Future” (the same pun, you’ll note, as the government used for their document), is available from a group called Theos, and it is to Theos that I award this month’s Religious Crackpot trophy.

Theos seem to be quite large and well established. They have a website that looks very professional (although it is in fact crap — it doesn’t even have an RSS feed), and describe themselves as

a public theology think tank which exists to undertake research and provide commentary on social and political arrangements. It aims to impact public opinion about the role of Christianity in society.

They go on to say

It was launched in November 2006 with the support of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, and the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor.

You probably know what I think of those endorsements.

Its first report “Doing God”: A Future for Faith in the Public Square examined the reasons why faith will play an increasingly significant role in public life.

They call themselves a “think tank”, although that’s a bit rich unless you count quoting the Bible as ‘thinking’. Really, they’re just a load of antidisestablishmentarianists hell-bent on reversing the work done since the Enlightenment in secularising society:

what Theos stands for

Society is embarking on a process of de-secularisation. Interest in spirituality is increasing across Western culture. Faith is on the agenda of both government and the media. In the arts, humanities and social sciences there are important intellectual developments currently taking place around questions of values and identity. Theos speaks into this new context. Our perspective is that faith is not just important for human flourishing and the renewal of society, but that society can only truly flourish if faith is given the space to do so. We reject notions of a sacred-secular divide.

And they’ve released quite a lot of frankly rather impenetrable literature about how secularism is bad, but they don’t really understand what it is. They can’t really tell it from atheism:

We can, though, at least make some assumptions. In a seriously secular country, the vast majority of people wouldn’t believe in God, however vaguely. Few would claim to belong to a religious group. And nobody would pray. What would be the point?

No. It’s entirely possible to be religious and secularist at the same time. Take this speech by Barack Obama (which I’ve copied from Dwindling in Unbelief):

We all know the story of Abraham and Isaac. Abraham is ordered by God to offer up his only son, and without argument, he takes Isaac to the mountaintop, binds him to an altar, and raises his knife, prepared to act as God has commanded.

Of course, in the end God sends down an angel to intercede at the very last minute, and Abraham passes God’s test of devotion.

But it’s fair to say that if any of us leaving this church saw Abraham on a roof of a building raising his knife, we would, at the very least, call the police and expect the Department of Children and Family Services to take Isaac away from Abraham. We would do so because we do not hear what Abraham hears, do not see what Abraham sees, true as those experiences may be. So the best we can do is act in accordance with those things that we all see, and that we all hear, be it common laws or basic reason.

Theos can publish all the inane sophistry they like, but the bottom line is that God doesn’t exist and even people who think he does can’t agree (in the case of Murphy-O’Connor, even with themselves) what he’s like or what he wants, and even those who feel they have a clear idea of both of these things can’t offer even the slightest shred of evidence or indeed any good reason to listen to them. So until Theos can prove that God exists, they will remain a sectarian group of crackpots trying to further Christianity’s already excessive influence on British politics.

And that’s just not on.