Conservatism, tradition, and ownership of the female body

As you probably know, US Congressman Todd Akin has invited a shitstorm this week with the following statement in the context of a debate about abortion:

"If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down."

And in case you haven't already heard about this; yes, he really said that. So if you're one of the significant number of women who have been raped and WERE unfortunate enough to get pregnant as a result... well, you must have wanted it reeeally, mustn't you?  I mean really, really deep down. Or something.  'Cause there's got to be something called "illegitimate rape" if there's "legitimate rape", hasn't there? Maybe you were just unconscious. Or underage. Maybe you just didn't fight hard enough. Whatever the case, it must not really have been proper "rapey rape" if you got pregnant.

For the hard of thinking, yes the above is sarcastic.

But what about the context, while we're at it?  Does that matter? Well, yes, as it happens - though maybe not for the reasons you think.

Congressman Akin wants to block access to safe and legal abortion, even in cases where the woman seeking it has been raped.  He is under the impression that his own half-baked notions about the "sanctity" of a cluster of undifferentiated insensate cells takes precedent over our right to control our own bodies. Why? Because he says so, and because... well, you know. You're only a woman. It's not like you're a real person, or anything.

It's long been my opinion that we pro-choice people play right into the hands of the "pro-lifers" (who're rarely pro-life about anything other than foetuses, have you noticed? When was the last time you met an anti-war, anti-death penalty, pro-healthcare, anti-hunting, fruitarian pro-lifer?) when we ask that tired old question "what if she's been raped?".

Why?

Well, it's related to my post from yesterday, in a sense - it's making an excuse that isn't necessary, it's tacitly assenting to the allegation that there's something about abortion that needs to be justified to other people.

If I get pregnant by ANY means, I am allowed as an adult and as my own person to decide what I want to do about that fact. It is no one's. Goddamn. Business. But mine. In fact, one might argue that my decision NOT to abort an unplanned pregnancy might require more justification, since that would affect other people than myself.

Pro-choice people are not "pro-abortion", whatever our opponents may say. None of us are going around telling people an abortion is a fun thing to do on a Saturday night, that they should invite some friends round, have a bottle of wine and make a night of it. We're not encouraging it, recommending it, we're not necessarily even saying we as individuals think abortion's ethically OK or that we'd do it ourselves; we're just saying that it's up to the individual to decide for herself. That's all.

So what's the opposing position to the pro-choice one? Well, let's face it - it's "anti-choice", isn't it? Let's be honest.

As I've already said, "pro-life" people are often - perhaps even usually - only pro-life when it comes to a foetus. Conservatives in the States are significantly "pro-life" and also significantly opposed to giving people the right to healthcare. Wait, what?

When a person says they are "pro-life", what they really mean is that they are anti-choice. What they're saying is that they want to take away your legal right, as a human, to make a choice different to the one they believe they would make in your place.  If someone is morally opposed to abortion, they  have every right to maintain an unplanned pregnancy, no one's trying to take that away from them. But if they make the mistake of thinking that their personal moral stance should be forcibly applied by legal means to everyone else in the country because they believe it... that must be opposed.  If it is not, and if the right to safe and legal abortion is repealed, what that will mean is that every other person in the USA has more rights over your body than you do. Because you can get pregnant, ergo because you're a woman.

You are not a second-class citizen. You are not the property of men in Congress. You are not a slave to the conservative anti-choicers. You are not an incubator. And you do not need to have been raped - "legitimate rape" or otherwise - to win the right to control your own body.

So yes, you should be angry about what Akin said. But you should probably be more angry about the fact that people like him have forced the pro-choice movement into a position where we have to plead special circumstances to maintain our right to make our own decisions.  So please, PLEASE - stop asking the "what if she was raped?" question.

A New Series: Interview with an Atheist

As some of you know, I've been working for a while now on what I thought was going to be a long blog post about the more common questions and objections atheists from believers - obviously I've been compiling my own thoughts on the matters, but I've been asking for contributions from other atheists as well because it's always valuable to have other insights.  And as we all must get sick of saying, all atheists have in common is a single unbelief - one can no more speak for another than one unbeliever in pink unicorns can speak for another unbeliever in pink unicorns.  It's become clear that this project is going to be a lot longer than anticipated, so rather than leave my blog for any longer than I already have (I am ashamed), I'm going to post it in stages.  Comments, as always, are welcome, and if there's a question or objection you get all the time that I haven't covered yet, feel free to mention it; I can either move it up the list for inclusion, or write it if it's a new one, or repost your own take on answering it.

I'll start with a simple one, but will add more in days to come.

Questions for Atheists: Part One: "How did you become an atheist?"

 
My own answer: "This is a question that will elicit a different answer from every atheist you ask, and some might not even understand the question as they may simply never have been otherwise. Very shortly I'll pass on a couple of accounts I got from other non-believers, but for the time being here's a brief outline of my personal experience so that's out of the way and you know where I'm coming from.

I was brought up to be a Christian; my parents weren't very devout but they sent me to a Church of England primary school because it was the best in the area. It was a small and slightly posh school, and we sung hymns and said prayers every morning at assembly as well as learning about Jahweh and Jesus in our lessons; to me, this stuff was simply fact just as I was learning that 2 + 2 = 4 was fact, it just wasn't in my makeup to question what adults were teaching me. We also had regular trips to the parish church, so although one thinks of the C of E as a rather moderate and undemanding organisation there was quite a lot to take in and a lot more saturation than you might think looking at it from the outside.

At home, my parents didn't exactly reinforce what I was learning at school but they didn't contradict it either; I was allowed to conclude that what my teachers and the vicar were telling me must be right. I was also, of course, exposed to the belief of my friends and their parents; these ranged from people who made no reference at all to Jesus or to the Bible in my presence through to one family in particular – the matriarch of which taught me to play the flute – that was so severely religious as to be genuinely very intimidating to me. The lady who taught me to play the flute troubled me especially. because from what I had been taught a Christian was inherently a good, kind person and the more Christian the better; this woman was the most devout Christian I had ever encountered, but she scared the crap out of me and not for no reason. Bluntly, she was not a kind or even a pleasant person, and I became thoroughly confused trying to reconcile this with the notion that because she prayed a lot and spent half her life in church she must be; I ended up trying desperately to ingratiate myself to her, probably only irritating her and making her more impatient and hectoring towards me.

Anyway, partly because I grew up in a small, almost exclusively white and Christian town in Yorkshire and partly because my memories of my childhood incline me to be astonished that I didn't bounce off walls through sheer doziness, I had not the smallest inkling until I was about halfway through primary school that there was any debate at all about the accuracy of Christianity – or, in fact, that there were any other options available or any other ways of thinking.

 

When I was in year three (that's seven to eight years old) we studied a module on the Hindu faith and on Diwali, the festival of light. As this was only primary school it was not, of course, a detailed or particularly nuanced examination of the topic, but nevertheless the revelation that other people in other countries (yah – that was how Olde Worlde this little town was) believed in other gods was to me a bolt from the blue. Even as a rather dopy and pitifully naïve child I was taken aback by the condescending tone with which my teachers taught us about this new and strange religion; there was a distinct air of “of course we know better because we're clever and educated, but we have to be nice to these backwards people who believe these things and not laugh at them”.* As any reasonable person would, I started to wonder why what I “knew” to be true was intrinsically any better or more true than what another person “knew” to be true. After all, until this point it had been my understanding that everything I'd been taught about Jahweh and about Jesus was simply empirical fact – and yet here I was learning that there were people in the world who didn't believe a word of it, and in fact who believed something completely different and contradictory.

 

My thoughts on the subject didn't progress much further at that point; this new idea that perhaps believing in Jesus wasn't quite as concrete and universal as I had thought just sort of lingered in the back of my mind, but I didn't have the intellectual capacity or the world knowledge to do much with it at that age.

 

When I was about nine something happened that was utterly trivial on the surface but which had mental and emotional effects on me that – eventually – changed everything. There was a game that my younger brothers and I liked to play in which one rolled a die and selected a piece of a cardboard fish according to which number came up (this sounds a lot stranger now I come to describe it than it did at the time). There were several fish of different colours, and each was made up of four parts; when all the parts had been chosen, the player with the most whole fish of one colour won. On the occasion in question, I was playing the game with my mum and the younger of my two brothers; the game was almost over and I needed just one more roll of a particular number – I can't remember which – to complete a fish and win the game. We were playing on the carpet and when it came to my turn, the die rolled under a cupboard; I chased after it and picked it up before anyone else had chance to see it. It hadn't landed on the number I wanted, but I lied and said it had; I've never been a good liar, and my mum obviously picked up on some “tell” I was displaying because she looked at me very closely and, after a moment's pause, asked if I swore to God that the number was as I said it was. I didn't know what that meant, so she explained that swearing to God was the same as making a promise to God, and that to lie or to break a promise to God was a terrible thing. Looking back I don't know quite what made me do it – given that at the time I still believed in Jahweh and all that – but after a brief moment of indecision I told mum that I was willing to swear to God that the number I rolled was the one I needed. She accepted this promise and I won the game.

That night, though, when I went to bed, I couldn't stop thinking about what I'd done. I was frantic with worry and guilt, and I remember praying so God would hear me and just apologising again and again and again. I couldn't even tell you exactly what I thought was going to happen to me, but as a child my imagination was both vivid and literal and the possibility of being burned alive forever and ever was definitely a concern. Looking back on the misery I felt that night and for some time afterwards, I cannot understand how religious people can know that a certain deed or activity – be it theft, or adultery, or drinking alcohol or eating certain foods – is against the rules laid down by the god/s in whom they believe, know that there are penalties for doing those things... and then do them anyway. To me, this seems no less unaccountable than knowing about gravity and then stepping off a tall building and expecting to hover or fly.

For a long time after this (my memory of the experience suggests it was months, but common sense tells me that I was a child and it was probably mere weeks at most – the truth is that I can't be sure) I prayed a lot more than had been my habit, and eventually my apologies and self-recrimination changed to agonised pleas to God just to give me some sign that he was there and that he could see my suffering. For a while I thought the lack of response meant that God had seen what I'd done and abandoned me, then I thought that maybe he just didn't care, but gradually this changed and I began to think that maybe he wasn't answering me because he just wasn't there despite what I'd been taught.

Over this same period I was, as you might expect, thinking a great deal more about Jahweh and Jesus and heaven and hell than I had in the past. I also tried to ask some of the adults I trusted about it, although I never dared confess to anyone the lie I had told to God. At this point my faith was seriously crumbling and I felt like a complete freak, like there was something wrong with me; I honestly thought I was the only person in the world who had ever experienced this, it was the loneliest feeling imaginable. It seemed from my perspective at the time – and it's a difficult concept to put into words – that what I had been taught was no less true just because I was struggling to believe it and that the problem was with me, that there was something wrong with me; my own thoughts had turned traitor against me, and there were moments when I felt I was going mad. On one occasion I worked up the courage to speak to the Vicar when he was visiting the school – a very bold act on my part, as he appeared in my eyes a terribly revered and important person. I tried to explain that I didn't understand how everyone was so sure about Jesus and God, and although he listened patiently enough I cannot imagine what would compel an adult to give the reply he did to a frightened child. He told me that if I didn't believe what I'd been told, I would be separated from my parents and from my brothers, that I would be cast into hell all alone and that I would never see any of them again. He didn't specify that this would happen when I died, and I managed to get the impression – which I assume he didn't mean to create – that this exile was imminent, that I might be torn away from my family at any moment if I continued to let my faith waver. Here, again, was someone telling me that to believe was a simple act of will, that I could simply choose to believe what I'd been told regardless of whether it made sense to me – and now I knew the punishment for failing to do so, because the vicar of all people ought to know how God would punish me for my disloyalty.

Not long after all this happened, my family moved to another part of the country and I spent my final year of primary education in a new and far less religious school. In retrospect this was a good thing for me as it provided a distraction; I was quite a shy child, and this bashfulness combined with my funny accent and general failure to be in any way cool meant that I had a lot of trouble fitting in – it wasn't pleasant at the time, but I wouldn't change it because it taught me a lot. After a year at my new primary school I went onto a very large and almost totally secular secondary school, and without the daily ritual Christianity finally lost its hold on me and I stopped worrying about it.

For many years after this – well into my teens – I was, I suppose, agnostic; I no longer believed in the Christian god but I sort of thought there might be a god of some sort out there somewhere, although I didn't feel the need to worship it or even try to understand it. I couldn't tell you when this finally changed to outright atheism because I don't know myself; as I got older though, and more inclined to look around the world and think about how things are, I've found that more and more bad stuff and less and less good stuff can be attributed to religion. If you're religious as I once was, the positive or negative effects of religion on the world are almost of secondary importance because they don't change what you perceive as the fact of God's existence; but to me, because I no longer believe anything in religious scripture has any basis in fact, it can be difficult at times not to become depressed by the amount of influence those scriptures have on our lives, even on those of us who don't share the beliefs."

*Incidentally, I feel this is a good time to mention that I am not old and we're not talking about a “different era” here. I left school in 2002.

David's answer: “I came out of an evangelical Christan upbringing, and was a pretty strong believer until around my late 20's or early 30's. But there were always things about it that I was either not comfortable with, or that I felt were flat-out wrong. In retrospect, I think that I was almost destined to end up as an atheist eventually.
I think the fact that I was never all that emotionally attached to Christianity probably made me a lot more receptive to new ideas and realizations as they came along. I was one of those more "logical" Christians who felt that their beliefs had a solid rational basis. And since I thought it was all true, I followed it as best I could (which was not terribly well.)
 

At some point, as my new realizations began to pile up, I decided that I would settle the matter and I bought and read tons of books about science and religion in order to educate myself. And I came out an atheist about 4 or 5 years ago.”

 

Mike's answer: “If there was a “Eureka!” moment that started the ball rolling it was around 5th grade in parochial school when the religion teacher drew a circle on the board to illustrate the continuity and eternity of god. For some reason it just did not make sense. I asked her why what she drew was supposed to be continuous when she clearly had a start and end point in drawing a circle on the board. Rather than a satisfactory answer and after some discussion this earned me a trip to the principal’s office and a meeting with the paddle.

 

The lecture on how scientists buried fossils in order to fool the masses and test the faith of believers did not help much. Particularly since it came shortly after my first trip to the Smithsonian of Natural History with my parents. I had a rather jaundiced eye toward religion from there on out. I don’t really have a moment when I finally said “I’m an atheist” but rather a confluence of events that left that as the only intellectually honest position.”

A slightly scary parallel.

At the weekend I started reading a book entitled The Closing of the Western Mind by Charles Freeman (which can be bought here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Closing-Western-Mind-Faith-Reason/dp/071266498X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1327323426&sr=8-1 and is heartily recommended), which has me enthralled - but also worried.

The guy's a serious historian but he writes well for the layman; he's very fluid, and in many ways this book reads more like a novel than like a history book.  I haven't finished it yet, but so far he's been covering the mindset of the shifting ancient Greek culture, the alterations made by the Romans, and the backdrop that allowed Christianity to flourish and eventually displace the classical values of intellectual rigour, observation and the right to question anybody, no matter how highly regarded.

To put it in simple terms, the Greeks and later the Romans had no problem at all with the religions of those they conquered, and in many cases were more than happy to incorporate new gods into their own pantheon. Frequently when conquering a new territory the gods of those they defeated would then take a place in the ritual sacrifices and observances, and thus the new subjects would be free to worship their old gods as long as they were happy to play lip-service to the Roman gods too (declaring there were no gods at all could get you into trouble, but we are talking about a very ancient civilisation working with far less data than we have now. And we can't feel smug about it - we're not that different now).  Observances on holy days was simply part of Roman culture, and by showing deference to the gods one also demonstrated respect for its values and loyalty to the state.

This all worked fine for a long time because almost everyone back then worshiped a pantheon, a group of gods rather than a single omnipotent deity.  To that way of thinking, encompassing a new god or thinking of it as another aspect of one you already believed in was not a problem, and the Romans made a point of being very tolerant of other religions in order to keep the people of their new territories happy.  Where they started to run into trouble was with Judaism and then - even more so - with early Christianity.  Here was a religion different to every other they had encountered in that it acknowledged only one deity, and in fact condemned Roman society and culture for tolerating multiple gods and goddesses.  Some Jews and many early Christians refused to participate in worship to the Roman gods, and many became martyrs to their cause. Early Christianity, through being unfamiliar and alien to Roman culture and religion, was able to at once exploit religious tolerance and condemn those who extended it.  Here too, for the first time, was a religion that claimed reward in exchange for simple faith, not for good actions, and which therefore actively promoted the mindset according to which blind faith becomes a virtue and analytical thought consequently becomes undesirable, even dangerous.

I haven't finished the book yet and I think I'll have to read it twice to fully grasp all the nuances and implications, but this to me demonstrates an alarming parallel to what has happened in Europe over the last few decades.  In Europe, even those nations like the UK that have a state religion are governed largely by secular values of fairness and equality for all (although no one would deny for a moment that we sometimes fall short of these values).  We have experienced centuries of warfare caused directly by intolerance of opposing religions, and as a result we have learned that it is better, safer and more humane to live and let live with people whose beliefs are different than our own.  In recent decades, however, we have experienced an influx from the Middle East, which has included a large number of Muslims... and Islam as a religion, by any objective terms, is several centuries behind the moderate and considered religious mores most European Christians hold dear.

Christianity, Judaism and Islam are very similar in fundamental principles - they worship the same deity, although few devout believers would be keen to accept that. However, for most Christians and Jews (not all by any means, but most) religious mores have taken a backseat to secular values, whether the believer appreciates that consciously or not.  Ephesians 5:22, for example, states "Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord" but even among relatively devout Christians in the UK few would try to claim that women are not equal to men, or do not deserve equal freedoms and rights (the segregation in the Jewish temple is an interesting aspect, but again has become - in most cases, the more orthodox Jews provide exceptions - more symbolic than anything else, as both genders are given equal rights under law). Leviticus 20:10 condemns people who cheat on their spouses to death, and we're all aware of the laws against working on the sabbath and fancying people of your own gender.  The point is that almost all Europeans, however strongly they believe in Jahweh and/or Yeshua, are accustomed to the idea that religious law must fit within the secular laws hammered out over centuries largely to protect people against the dogma of others.

Islam, in this respect, has come as quite a shock to Europe.  Any woman living in a British city will be familiar with that small number of Muslim men who stare at our bare heads and unhidden figures with a curious mixture of lust and contempt.  We ourselves are unnerved and baffled by women in ninja suits, and covertly discuss the implications of this dress; I myself think people should be able to wear whatever they like without endangering the safety of others (so in circumstances under which a balaclava or motorcycle helmet would not be allowed, neither should a face-covering hijab), but I struggle with the definition of "voluntary" in such conditions - can a woman trained from birth to believe herself inherently shameful and inferior ever be considered as "choosing" to cover her entire body? We have been introduced to honour killings, child brides, the sort of sexism we have not seen in centuries, and terror threats on a level we have never encountered before.

And because we have learned through hard experience that everyone's better off if we can all respect one another's values, we've done our best to accommodate all this, to legitimise in the name of "multiculturalism" what we would not accept for any reason other than a basis in religion.  We have instituted sharia courts, insisting that they are only there as mediators where people prefer them to conventional law, while failing entirely to consider the fact that under sharia law a man's word is equal to that of two women, and that it will be the man who decides which court a woman is subjected to.  We tread on eggshells to avoid offending Muslims, to the extent that we stifle our own hard-earned and vital freedom of expression (http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2012/01/18/london-atheist-group-accused-of-bullying-after-posting-a-harmless-image-of-muhammad/), and every time someone in the Islamic world kicks off and blows something up or executes a journalist or mutilates a woman we are told - effectively - not to judge Islam by what its adherents do. When a group of Muslim men were prosecuted for grooming and raping large numbers of underage British girls, a peer in the House of Lords tried to tell us their crimes were attributable to Western women, who through showing insufficient voluntary interest in these animals forced them to drug and rape children.

The trouble with this, of course, is that the principle of "respecting others" only works if both sides agree to it - which Islam openly and proudly does not. The more exemptions we grant Islam under our laws, the more they demand.

This is exactly the mistake the Romans made; they extended liberality and tolerance to a group of people who had no problem with exploiting the freedom while sneering at those offering it. There are signs that we are beginning to identify and resist this two-faced abuse of our values - the pigs buried on the proposed site of a mosque in Seville, Draw Mohammad Day etc. etc. - but I don't think it's enough, I think we need more people more willing to stand up and say "no, this is wrong and it's not racist, intolerant or "Islamophobic" to say so".  Islam is quite open about its intention of taking over the Western world... last time that happened, Europe sank into the Dark Ages and we lost knowledge and values we have only recently - centuries later - started to regain.

Power at a point - it's not always about force of numbers

Much has been made over the last couple of days about the actions of a bloke called Andy in the USA, who owns and runs a gelato store.  The story is explained and linked here:

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2011/11/21/an-honestly-classy-apology-from-the-gelato-mio-owner/

Hemant - the friendly atheist - seems inclined to give Andy the benefit of the doubt and accept his apology; PZ Myers has been vociferous in his refusal to do so, both on Twitter and his Pharyngula blog.

Personally I'm undecided about the apology; I'm not sure there hasn't been a bit of a false dichotomy set up here, forcing people to choose between thinking he's sincerely sorry for causing offense and thinking he doesn't mean a word of it and is just worried about the beating his business has taken (can't it be both?). But the story's drawn attention to the power of the geek - the poster was apparently only in place for a few minutes before Andy calmed down and removed it, but that was long enough for his admittedly fairly vicious act of illegal discrimination to make it online and go viral. Within twenty-four hours Gelato Mio's ratings on Google etc. had plummeted, and he was answering incensed emails from all over the world.  We know that atheists are typically younger, more educated and more tech-savvy than the population average, and this is just the latest example of of the way in which atheists all over the world are using these advantages to communicate and coordinate action against discrimination like this; for another example, look at the backlash Bastrop High School received after a teacher publicly trashed student Damon Fowler for privately objecting to the unconstitutional inclusion of a christian prayer in his graduation ceremony.

The wish to exclude non-believers seems distressingly prevalent in the USA, from Bush Sr.'s now infamous (and as yet unretracted) comment "No, I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered as patriots. This is one nation under God" to endless polls showing atheists to be the most untrusted minority in the country through to Andy, the owner of Gelato Mio, deciding in the heat of the moment that he will not serve atheists in his store.

But what would happen if the more conservative US christians got their way, the ones who would see atheists banished from the Land of the Free? Polls have shown that around 93% of members of the National Academy of Science are atheist, and extrapolating from general trends we can guess that many medical doctors, teachers, authors and other educated professionals would be lost. Meanwhile, other studies suggest that almost none of the prison population would go, and similarly much of the migrant population these same conservatives seem to spend their time complaining about would remain. Fortunately someone who is better at internetting than I am has already put this together in a rather nice youtube video, which I have linked below for your enjoyment.

By excluding a superficially insignificant minority group from his store, Andy of Gelato Mio suffered a potentially devastating blow to his public image; he also lost a lot of money on the night, and might well continue to lose it as word spreads about his actions. This might be seen as a microcosm of what will happen to the USA if the fundies get their way and atheists are marginalised even more than they are at present.

Another christian who wants to have her cake and eat it...

I've just been having a couple of entertaining and actually relatively intelligent discussions with several believers on facebook, but as is so often the case a rather less reasonable individual has wedged herself in and provided an excellent example of a religious (non)argument I personally find really irritating.

The conversation began with a believer wanting to ask other christians why they felt that "the personal truths of spirituality can be proven matters of universal fact?", and at the same time to ask atheists why they "demand proof of something that cannot be proven in a physical, scientific manner?".  I didn't see an answer to the question addressed to christians, but for what it's worth here's the answer I gave to the part addressed to atheists (much of which had already been said by other atheists):

"[W]hy is it that you demand proof of something that cannot be proven in a physical, scientific manner?" I'm going to answer this in three parts.

1: Science is the closest thing we have to an objective method of assessment and understanding. It's not perfect, but the scientific method has built into it as many safeguards against confirmation bias, false positives/negatives etc etc as we can reasonably manage, and study methods improve all the time.

2: As others have said, the only reason I demand evidence is that people who have these beliefs don't seem willing just to keep them to themselves and let the rest of us get on with it. If I believed there was an invisible dragon in my garage and I did nothing with that belief, imposing it on nobody, it would do no harm to anyone (except possibly me, I suppose). But if I wanted to tell other people what to do and legitimise my demands by referring them to said invisible dragon, people would have every right to demand proof that the dragon existed - particularly if some of the actions I was telling them the dragon demanded were morally abhorrent to them.

3: Your phrasing in this question betrays a trait in believers that - bluntly - I personally find intensely irritating (this is not a personal attack, it's a criticism of a particular style of religious thought). "[T]hat cannot be proven in a physical, scientific manner" is the key phrase. In recent centuries, much of what used to be attributed to gods has been shown to have natural causes. The extent of this knowledge is such at this point that it is increasingly difficult to find room for any deity within this physical universe or conforming to known physical laws... so more and more, religious people have decided their "god" exists in a different realm, or a different dimension, or is so far beyond our comprehension as humans that we cannot hope to seek him/her/it (which is always funny coming from people who reckon they know what God X thinks of gay people, for example).

Over the last few decades, "god" has morphed and changed and adapted so much that the word now has no reliable meaning; when they're telling us what to do, a christian means Jahweh as described in the bible. When they're defending their deity against rational thought, logic and science, a christian frequently resorts to an ineffable, unknowable, undetectable and inscrutable god of the fuzzy amorphous "beyond our ken" variety.

The only reason "God" cannot be proven (or disproven) by scientific methods is that the definition of "God" changes every time you look too closely at it."

There were many of perfectly sensible responses to this, but in amongst them was this (and the person she was claiming to paraphrase was ME!):

"To paraphrase...she explains that science restricts itself to natural cause. It only explains the natural world. The reason why is because the essance of science is testing ideas against the natural world, to hold constant certain variables. If there is an omnipotent force in the universe you cannot hold its actions constant. You cannot test explinations involving supernatural cause because you can't test statements about Gods actions"

And then, in a second comment:

"Lucy, this is the reason why God cannot be proven by scientific methods ^^ "

 Now, I didn't even bother making the point that omnipotence is logically impossible (the ol' "microwaved burrito" argument) and I won't here, but at this point another believer - a christian I already knew from other discussions and posts in the group - weighed in with:

 "Lucy, this is how one dictionary defines the Christian God (since this is what seems to be up for debate) "the incorporeal divine Principle ruling over all as eternal Spirit : infinite Mind" Incorporeal: "Not composed of matter." How can God be a spirit and still be bound by matter? How can God be eternal and still be bound by time? This doesn't make sense. God is the creator of the laws themselves, God is not bound by them. And the Bible clearly tells us that "God is a spirit" living in a spiritual dimension called "heaven." God is not bound by laws and does not dwell in this world. The reason God cannot be proven or disproven by the scientific method is because the scientific method is the study of the natural world, which God isn't a part of. We cannot hold God's actions constant. We can't scientifically study God. We can't put God in a test tube."

... and, I confess, I started to take the piss:

"I love this. In order to make room for god to exist, he/she/it's now got to have no physical mass, no physical properties, exist in a separate dimension and outside of time, and be utterly undetectable within our universe... except by people who "just feel him/her/it", conveniently. This is the perfect example of my point 3 above; carefully adapting the attributes of "god" so as to make him/her/it intrinsically invulnerable to disproof. At what point do you give up and accept that a being with no physical presence in our universe (leaving aside the "god is everywhere" thing, by the way, as well as the "made in his image" bit), no physical properties and no influence on anything we see just isn't there? (If you're struggling with this, by the way, substitute "purple jelly monster" for "god" in my second sentence, and see if it still sounds reasonable to you).

Actually, scrap that - if your argument is that god is undetectable, unknowable and incomprehensible, I'll settle for an agreement from believers to just stop telling the rest of us what to do and how to think - since you're the ones claiming god is categorically beyond our capabilities to understand."

The point I was trying to make with the title of this entry is that this is a perfect example of a religious person making two mutually exclusive arguments, failing to spot the problem and thus putting forward an argument they would never accept from a believer of any other faith (to demonstrate the spuriousness of this reasoning, I recounted a true story about a conversation I had some time ago with a "medium" who - when I tried to devise an experiment to demonstrate the validity of his belief that the spirits of dead people talked to him - presented precisely the same excuses as justification for the fact that the ghosts he claimed to talk to could not be detected by science).

This person is a christian, who believes - at a minimum - that Yeshua was the son of (and/or a part of) the god Jahweh, a deity whose opinions and demands on various topics are laid out in the bible. This person claims to know that a specific god exists, and that he has various attributes. So far, so normal... but now line that up next to the argument she's making above.

Most of the time, this person professes belief in Yahweh, with all his likes and dislikes and known "history" - and, furthermore, she professes this to be a valid belief. In the above discussion, however, she argues that "God" is systematically and intrinsically unknowable, an entity existing outside of our physical universe and beyond our comprehension.  Why do I argue with these people?! This one's just told me that her own belief in the god of the Bible is invalid!

(Add to which, of course, the additional contradiction in her claim to know that an undetectable and unknowable being is there despite the fact that he's... you know, unknowable.)

Just another example of the double-think to which religious people must submit in order to maintain their faith in the face of fact...

A note about Poes

I keep getting dragged in recently by the admin of  a group n Facebook called "It's a proven fact that atheism is a mental disorder".  I can't work out whether the guy's sincerely out of his mind, or an extremely clever Poe.  If he IS a Poe he's a good one, because he hasn't yet strayed into the territory of just completely making shit up to sound as mental as possible, which is how most Poes give themselves away.  I'm not the only one; the guy must be asked about once a day if he's a Poe, and it seems to really annoy him. Well, you know what I mean - either he gets really annoyed about it or he pretends to.

A point I like to make to believers in these circumstances is that if SO MANY people think they're a Poe, that should worry them.  If your beliefs are so indistinguishable from the insane shit people come up with when pretending to be a psychotic zealot, that's a ma-HU-ssive comment on your beliefs, and one that should make you think for a moment.

Atheism and the family - the need to come out.

Sunday dinner at my folks' this evening, as my brother's visiting.  Mum sent me a message on facebook earlier recommending a video with Frank Skinner and Rowan Williams and asking "no chance of you reconsidering your policy of upsetting every religious loony on the planet?". She doesn't say much about it, but I was reprimanded earlier this year for being "a very intolerant atheist".  Nothing direct was said at dinner tonight, but I got a bit of a disapproving frown when my restraint cracked during a conversation about security for the Pope's visit last year (we got there via the illness of a friend who organised the choir for part of the tour) and I laughed and said something like "nothing says "I trust The Lord" like four inches of bulletproof glass".

Mum and I haven't discussed religion much since I was in my early teens; as far as I know she's still vaguely a believer, but I don't know how much of her dislike of my antitheism is born of her belief itself, and how much is just discomfort at my open contempt for that which has historically commanded so much unwarranted respect.  I also don't know how to take the smile with which she delivers her occasional reprimands; I have a feeling it's one of those things where you try to sound like you're joking to avoid sounding too critical but actually you're totally not joking. Basically, I'm not sure how much she objects to atheism itself, but mum definitely isn't keen on me taking the piss out of religion.

This has got me thinking about how irreligion affects the relationships people have with their families. As it happens, I don't confront my mum about the whole religion thing because I don't want to hurt her, and however flawed I consider her reasoning where faith is concerned I love and respect her tremendously. But I'm one of the lucky ones, because the fact is that if I wanted to I could say whatever the hell I liked about it all to my family and my brothers, and whether they agreed with me or not (I know one brother does, I suspect my dad does, and I don't think the other brother cares much one way or the other) they'd still love me - I don't think there's anything I could do, with respect to religion or otherwise, that could make my family turn their backs on me.  Among atheists worldwide, however, things are not so rosy.  I know people who are lucky enough to be in situations similar to mine, but I also know people who have become estranged from their families after coming out as atheists. Many of you may be familiar with the story of Damon Fowler, a teenager from Louisiana who was thrown out of home by his mother and forced out of town after his teacher outed him for privately asking that an illegal prayer be omitted from his graduation ceremony. In some parts of the world, atheists have little choice but to stay in the closet because they risk ostracism, persecution, in some cases even physical injury and death if they come out.

Clearly, this is wrong; it results from the continuing prejudice against atheists, a disgraceful form of discrimination that seems to be largely overlooked in modern society. It is this discrimination, more than anything else, that makes me feel that those of us lucky enough to be able to declare our atheism in safety ought to do it. The more people come out as atheists, and the more we're willing to talk about it, the more accepted atheism will become - eventually, I hope that atheists even in the most religious nations will be able to express themselves without fear of persecution. That time is a way off, and I wouldn't want to try and guess how long it will be before atheism is universally accepted... but I do know that we can speed the process by being open.

http://outcampaign.org/

A video I WISH I'd seen as a kid

Just a quick plug for the brilliant NonStampCollector's channel on youtube; the below is a video I particularly love, and one that I sincerely wish I had seen as a child because I think it would have reduced the time I spent not quite daring to think Jebus wasn't all that after all (well... youtube would have had to exist when I was a child for that to work, but wishing by its nature tends to be impractical). It sounds silly to say it now, but even seeing this video in my twenties, it came as a bit of a jolt; of all the problems with religion I'd identified for myself, I'd completely overlooked the trivial and unimpressive nature of the "miracles". I'd like to say that was something to do with the fact that I was examining religion from the outside and was therefore not too concerned with the minutiae of its internal tenets, but given how much time I spend mocking believers specifically using the minutiae of their religion's internal tenets, I don't think I even buy that myself. Yup - just missed it.

Anyway, I wholeheartedly recommend this video and NonStampCollector's videos in general; his "Special Investigation" videos are very funny too.  Take a look!

How religion appears to outsiders like me.

I originally wrote this back in 2010, but I want to reproduce it here as it's the only piece I've ever written that really did - I believe, based on reactions - help a couple of believers to understand how their beliefs (and religious belief in general) appear to a person who simply does not have them. Having said that, the believers whose responses were equivalent to "huh - OK, that sort of makes sense and I hadn't thought about it like that before" were the decided minority; I got many more responses along the lines of "but belief in God X is DIFFERENT!" and the usual screams of "DISRESPECT!!!". One aspect that did amuse me was that even though I'd deliberately and explicitly been at pains to draw parallels and form analogies that could be applied to any of the "big three" Abrahamic religions, each and every respondent who reacted badly had interpreted what I wrote as a direct attack on their particular belief system.

This really only works if you can consider it dispassionately, and in fact in the original post I suggested that any believers reading it might mull it over in relation to a religion other than their own in the first instance.  Anyway, for what it's worth here it is; as with my previous post, it's been subject to minor cosmetic amendments:

"Imagine to yourself that you go to visit an old and dear friend, someone you've known for years. After you've gone through the usual pleasantries and made a cup of tea, your friend eagerly shows you a book he got out of the library a little while ago; Aesop's Fables. You know a little bit about it, that it's a very old book of stories that are designed to teach lessons, but as your friend talks you're surprised to find that he seems to be taking them as fact – even though most of them deal with talking animals and can't possibly be true.

As you probe the subject, you discover that the Librarian suggested the book to your friend and told him that Aesop is not dead but all around us, ever present, ever watchful, and knows everything that everyone in the world does, says or even thinks. The Librarian told your friend that the book of Aesop's Fables – the divinely inspired word of Aesop – is proof of this, and that your friend would suffer misery in Hades for all eternity after his death if he didn't believe in the absolute truth and sanctity of the Aesop's Fables and live his life according to His lessons.

Your friend is eager to show you the book and encourages you to have a read through it. It contains hundreds of lessons on different subjects, but the Librarian has told your friend which are the important ones, such as:

“Don't do to other people things you wouldn't like them to do to you.” (The Fox and the Stork)

“Pursue pleasure only after your work is done.” (The Ant and the Grasshopper)

“Be grateful for what you have.” (The Plane Tree)

“Gentleness achieves more than force.” (The North Wind and the Sun)

Some of these you consider to be reasonably sound lessons, although you wonder why your friend feels he needs an ancient storybook to teach him these things. Some of the Fables, on the other hand, strike you as out-of-touch and even dangerous:

The Fox and the Monkey, which teaches that it's acceptable to physically hurt somebody in order to make a point.

The Man and the Serpent, which teaches us both that an enemy's transgressions may never be forgiven and that violence should be met with violence.

The Bat, the Bird and the Beasts, from which the moral is “that which is neither one thing nor the other shall be unloved”.

Your friend assures you that he knows these lessons are dubious and says that common sense must be applied. This puzzles you, and you ask him how – given that all the fables are the infallible Word of Aesop – he is able to reconcile the total faith Aesop demands with choosing to ignore some of His commands. Surely if Aesop, in His divine and infallible wisdom, gave His followers these lessons it is very presumptuous for His followers to amend or abridge His sacred Truth? Your friend tries to explain that cultural context for the Fables has changed since they were written, and that what is morally abhorrent to us was perfectly acceptable when the Fables were written more than two thousand years ago. You think about this, and then ask your friend how he knows, while acknowledging that some of the lessons are wrong, that the rest are correct and divinely inspired. You want to know, in fact, why – if some of Aesop's teachings can be disregarded in favour of personal ethics and values – your friend does not feel free to take it one step further and live according to his own ethical choices without reference to Aesop at all.

Your friend's answer to this baffles you; he states that without Literary-mandated laws to tell us right from wrong, humanity would have no morals and would descend into Sin and chaos. When you point out that humanity had justice and ethical values long before Aesop's Fables were penned – that the ancient Egyptians, for example, had courts of law and condemned and punished theft and murder – your friend answers that Aesop gave the ancient Egyptians consciences. This, of course, raises more questions for you; if Aesop created the conscience so that humanity could tell right from wrong, why then does that conscience disagree with some of the Fables that also come from Aesop? Why are some acts morally acceptable in some cultures but not in others? Why, in fact, did Aesop need to write down His lessons at all if He'd effectively built them into us? Your friend answers that Aesop loves His children and will not force us to believe or to do his will; for that reason, some people stray from Aesop's will and need the Fables to guide them and save them from eternal misery in Hades after death. You, of course, reflect that giving people a choice between obedience or eternal suffering is not really giving them free will at all, but your friend's only response to that is that Aesop is a loving Storyteller but that He works in mysterious ways man is not meant to understand.

This becomes a bit of theme as the conversation continues; you find that when you ask your friend a question that he cannot answer, you are very likely to be told either that man cannot comprehend Aesop's divine plan, or that something's metaphorical, or that you have closed your mind to Aesop, or even simply that you will be go to Hades if you don't believe – this latter is particularly confusing when it seems you are supposed to simultaneously believe two things that contradict each other. When you point out that you yourself fulfill many of Aesop's demands even though you don't believe in Him, your friend tells you that you've missed the point. It is not enough just to live a good life – you must do so because you are following the teachings of Aesop, or you will suffer for eternity anyway. Even more confusingly, it comes out that a believer in the Fables who lives an evil life can still be taken up to the Elysian Fields – as long as he repents and apologises to Aesop – where a non-believer can't no matter how good person he may be. It occurs to you that this means no one in the whole history of humanity could have made it to the Elysian Fields before the Fables were written – which seems a little wasteful, not to say utterly unfair - but by this time you're beginning to see that logic has no place in your friend's thought processes.

At this point you give up on making sense of the Fables themselves, and gently remind your friend that many of the tales attributed to Aesop are believed to have been written by other people, or even to be simple folk-tales that eventually got written down. In fact, you point out, many scholars have questioned whether Aesop – as a single, historical figure – ever existed at all. Your friend gets very angry at this comment, and tells you you're being very disrespectful to question his belief in Aesop and His teachings. In response you explain that you've got nothing against Aesop in particular, and in fact that there are also discrepancies in the stories attributed to Homer, for example, and Shakespeare too. Weirdly your friend is quite happy to acknowledge flaws in historical accounts of other Storytellers, but remains adamant that Aesop is somehow, by His very nature, different and above question.

Your friend has a young son, and you ask your friend if he's been allowed to read the Fables too. You find that in fact the son has been actively encouraged to read the Fables and to understand that they are the divine Word of Aesop. He asked a lot of questions at first, but once your friend explained to his son that if he asked too many questions or didn't believe everything the Fables have to say he would spend eternity in Hades away from his mother and father, that stopped and his son is now very devout. In fact, he reads passages from the Fables every night! Your friend's wife is an unbeliever and that troubles your friend, but he tries to explain to her why she's wrong and in any case he's made sure their son knows he's right and she's wrong, so the son knows to believe him.

A momentary expression of concern crosses your friend's face as he tells you that his son has interpreted the Fable of the Bat, the Bird and the Beasts to mean that people of mixed race are unloved of Aesop, and that therefore people of different races shouldn't mix. In fact, he also stood up in his sex-education class and told the teacher that bisexuality is a Sin under Aesop and should be punished; your friend is a little uncomfortable with these values, but very proud of the level of faith they demonstrate. He certainly wouldn't want you to think that all Fablists hold such values, and feels he can hardly be responsible for his son's somewhat fundamentalist approach just because he was the one who taught him to believe unquestioningly in Aesop and His teachings.

* * *

I hope you've been able to read all that calmly and without feeling like I'm picking on you or your specific religion; what I've written above is just an analogy to help you understand how religious belief appears to people who are on the outside and it doesn't target any religion in particular - hopefully you've been able to set aside your own convictions long enough to understand the point I'm trying to make with this story. But you may be thinking – quite reasonably – that the beliefs held by the friend in this story, while certainly odd, are harming no one; after all, he seems to be a moderate in his beliefs, and able to set aside the bits of Fablism that aren't compatible with what we now consider reasonable behaviour.

But I want you to take it a stage further, and join me in imagining a society in which Fablism has grown steadily over several hundred years until it has reached the point at which many people are followers of Aesop...

In this society, the influence of Fablism is so pervasive that bisexual people are ostracised, regarded as freaks and perverts, and many feel unable to be honest about their sexuality even to their friends and families. Fablists are powerful enough to make interracial marriage illegal as it's seen as a sin against Aesop; purists even insist that their children be educated at Fablist schools where children are segregated by race to remove the temptation to sin. Some parents object to their children being taught that animals cannot speak, and the Fablist versions of natural history and biology are already taught exclusively in some schools. Snakes, as agents of Aesop's wrath, are revered and there have been several cases of fundamentalist Fablists refusing antivenoms when they or their children have been bitten.

Fablists have split into many groups and factions over the centuries and decades, but they still unite to ridicule and even attack other faiths like Just-Soism, Bozism and the Shakespearians which, despite their many similarities to Fablism, are just obviously and undeniably wrong. Over the centuries, some of the worst wars in history have come about because of people's beliefs in different Storytellers, and even today more atrocities are committed in the names of the various Storytellers than for any other reason. In fact, because the faithful have been so strenuous for so long in demanding respect for their beliefs, the faiths have become a convenient excuse for all sorts of actions – every years acts of war and terrorism are committed with Storytellers as the justification. Many Fablists are uncomfortable with these acts, but ultimately they believe in the same Fables as do the terrorists and war-mongerers, and have little argument to make when a fundamentalist refers them to the Fable of the Man and the Serpent.

Please try to think about this as calmly as you can, and to understand that none of this – NONE – is a specific attack on any one religion; I have been careful not to say anything that cannot be applied to more than one faith. I have some questions for you now, and I would like you to consider them honestly:

Does the fact that the Fablist faith now has millions of followers make its basic tenets any less bizarre?

Would you be willing to accept that the Fables are true for no better reason than that someone told you they're true?

In my story, the friend has discovered Fablism as an adult. This was deliberate, and designed to provoke incredulity as it is rare for an adult to spontaneously become religious. But this incredulity prompts two important questions: firstly, does the fact that the son – unlike his father – was taught about Fablism from a young age make his beliefs in themselves any more rational? And secondly, if you are a religious person and were taught your beliefs in childhood, what does your skepticism about a person becoming a believer in adulthood suggest about the source of your own convictions?

Is it acceptable that children are segregated by race because of a 2,500-year-old book?

Is it acceptable that bisexual people are denied equality and basic rights because of a 2,500-year-old book?

Is it OK to commit acts of war and terrorism on non-Fablists in the name of a 2,500-year-old book?

Is it right that Fablists should have such power in society when they cannot prove that anything contained in their book came from a Storyteller, or even that there is a Storyteller?

Is it reasonable that Fablists should expect your compliance when they want to restrict your freedoms?

Would you stand in silence if your life, and the world as a whole, was being adversely affected by Fablism?"

Another atheist nobody.

I've been writing in various forums (fora? Hmm) for a couple of years now, ranting about many subjects but primarily - and always returning to - the conflict between religious belief and the rise of the "New Atheist".  I've finally decided to put everything in one place, not least because I recently discovered that someone's been passing off great chunks of my writing as his own and it will be useful, in the future, to have proof of my authorship.

In this, my first post, I'm going to reproduce an abridged - and minimally edited for aesthetic reasons - account of my own history with religion, first penned (or, less poetically, typed) back in 2010.

"I went to a Church of England primary school until I was ten, and I think the experience was probably quite damaging. My parents didn't hammer home the drivel I was taught at school but they didn't contradict it either, and at four years old we're programmed by millennia of evolution to believe what adults tell us without question. Hence, until the age of nine or so, I accepted completely that God was some big scary guy in the clouds, I believed in heaven and hell, in the virgin birth, the nativity and all the rest of that rubbish. I lived in genuine fear of going to hell over the tiniest things, and when you're that young your imagination is both vivid and literal.

In year five (that's nine to ten years old) we studied a module on the Hindu faith. It was presented as something we should respect, but also with an air of incredible superiority; there was a definite feeling that "of course we know better, but we have to accept that these backward people believe these silly things - isn't it funny?". Fortunately, because I'm at least something less than entirely stupid, this was a turning point for me; as any halfway reasonable person would, I began to question why "my" religion made any more sense. Over a few weeks or months - my sense of time scale looking back is a bit hazy, so I'm not sure how long it took - I came to the unexpectedly simple conclusion that it didn't.

From then until I guess my late teens I was an atheist while remaining respectful of other people's religious beliefs; if pressed, I would have said I was agnostic to avoid the argument - I'm rather embarrassed to admit that now. But more recently I've been thinking about the damage done by religion and have come to be actively anti-religion; to quote Steven Weinberg (I think), "for good people to do evil things, that takes religion". What infuriates me is that religious people cannot be reasoned with; if someone manages to categorically prove the existence of a god I will gladly rethink my position, but no matter how many times science disproves god, the credulous idiots refuse to listen to logic. And it's so brainless - they can get around anything with "because God has a plan" or "because God can do anything" or "because God likes to try our faith". What kind of argument is that?! You might as well put it down to magic, it makes just as much sense!

The religious argument is always "you can't prove god doesn't exist". That's true, but it's completely contrary to the scientific method applied to EVERYTHING else in modern life. By the same token, no one can prove that there isn't a tiny, immaterial invisible unicorn living in my ear canal and telling me what to do, but no one would credit that.

I've come to the conclusion that anyone who can consciously ignore their human inquisitiveness and intelligence to base their life on this kind of faulty logic deserves little respect for the opinions that result from that. For that reason I will not hesitate to argue with people about their religion in the same way I would argue with them about their politics or anything else. In doing this I encounter a real mixture of reactions; some people can be influenced by rational, reasoned debate, while others flatly refuse to give up the "God did it" argument - what I think of as the "sticking your fingers in your ears and going lalala" school of logic. I appreciate that for many people being made to question their faith is an uncomfortable experience, but I sincerely think it is for the best; even if we can't convert people completely to atheism, if we can at least prevent them from being totally certain that's something. How many suicide bombers do we think have blown themselves up because they thought there probably was a god but they weren't quite sure and thought that as long as they tried to live a good life they should be covered anyway?

Too many people use their faith to justify awful beliefs and actions - just look at the Westboro Baptists. How many of those complete arseholes do you think ACTUALLY believe there's a big guy sat in the clouds who'll send gay people to burn in eternal fire? My bet is that most of them are simply nasty small-minded homophobes who have found in that particular church an acceptable outlet for their bigoted beliefs - and allowed them to act on them in a way that people seem to think must be tolerated because it's part of their "faith".

Anyway, I could go on in this vein for pages but I'll leave it there - I think I've laid out the bare bones of why I don't put up and shut up about religion any more. Genuinely, anything that can be done to stop the spread of these malignant, anti-progressive, hateful belief systems should be done, or more and more people will be murdered, tortured and enslaved in the name of "God". Rant over."

Aw, I find that quite endearing now that I come to reread it; this was the start of my serious debates about religion, and probably my first in-depth expression of an antitheistic sentiment that has become only stronger as I've developed my understanding of the subject.