Synogenes.com

Check out the scandalous subsidy of irrationalism in the form of funding for Scientology:
Scientologists get £270k!

Pretty soon we'll need to get grant applications in for the Church of the Grand Leprechaun. I'm sure we'll be able to present at least as good a case...

Rationality has an image problem. For many, the word rational means without emotion, cold, clinical, somewhat inhuman, and certainly not warm, cuddly, and friendly. To be able to think rationally is seen as being free of any considerations of empathy, sympathy, care for others, or even humanity. The picture of the rational person is someone who is hard-nosed, logical, dogmatic, uncaring.

For anyone who considers themselves a rationalist, this is a complete nonsense, and insulting. So why is it a prevalent view?

Rationality necessarily excludes the irrational, and so the implicit identification of emotion and feeling with the irrational gives rise to the prejudice. If a person is rational, then they must not be irrational and if emotion is irrational, then they must be devoid of emotion. And of course, if they are devoid of emotion, they are “outside” normal society in some way, unable to take part in the emotional world.

For those who cling to irrational beliefs, this is a useful means of circumventing the rational case, for clearly an unemotional person will fail to grasp emotional arguments, they’ll fail to empathise, they’ll fail to have faith. One doesn't need to consider rational people as feeling individuals, since we've defined them as being devoid of emotion, so we can denigrate them and treat them as geeks, nerds, robots, even. No other group of people could be expected to tolerate such prejudice and it is a measure of the passive acceptance of this caricature, that rationality is a kind of guilty secret.

The opposition between rational thinking and emotion is of course unfounded.

Rational thinking is a skill in just the same way as doing arithmetic is, or knowing how to use a washing machine, or being able to cook, or play a musical instrument. What distinguishes rational thinking is the ability to reason, to recognise when an argument is unfounded or questionable, to weigh up evidence and to think critically, regardless of how we feel emotionally.

We rely on rational thinking to control emotion in some areas of activity. For example, in designing an aeroplane, we would not want the decisions made by engineers to be based on their variable moods, or their emotional attachments to particular people or things. We want their work to be reproducible, testable, based on sound engineering principles which should hold whatever the emotions experienced by the people involved. That’s essential if we are to have confidence in the aeroplane. So rational people, far from being devoid of emotion, are a little more in control of it during certain activities.

What you feel and what you think are not necessarily the same, and in any case we should certainly not simply believe everything we think. Rationality gives us the ability to question what we think and this process provides some consistency with how the world really works.

For those lacking rationality, thinking is a process subject to their shifts in emotion; they are prone to believe what they feel. And in areas where we are not making significant choices, this emotional basis for thinking can work very well. But when it extends to more serious matters, such as designing machinery, making major life choices, etc, those with limited rationality are at a serious disadvantage, prone to believe specious advertising claims, easy prey for con-artists, likely to believe and follow fads. In a real sense, they are deprived of an important measure of control over their lives.

It used to be said that you shouldn’t let your heart rule your head (when it was thought the heart was the source of emotion). The fact is that everyone uses both. Rational people are emotional just like everyone else. They have feelings, prejudices, likes, wants, needs, and so on. But they also have an ability to think critically on demand, just like calling on any other skill.

Many people are quite defensive about their rationality as if it’s some secret vice, not to be seen in public. But it’s something to celebrate – look, we’re thinking rationally! We looked at those arguments and now we understand why they’re unsound! We chose to do that because…

Getting in control of our thinking gives us tremendous opportunities and satisfaction. It improves our confidence and emotional well-being, it makes us less subject to peer-pressure and fads, it makes our lives more in control. It opens the possibilities of understanding the world around us, and it even helps us understand the emotional reactions of other people. It makes us better able to relate to others. It’s something to celebrate.

“Are you religious?”
“No I’m a rationalist. I can think!”

It really is cool to be rational!

Stem cells are those cells which are undifferentiated and have the potential to develop into any other type of cell. They are currently obtainable from four sources. Embryonic stem cells can be obtained from surplus foetuses left over after in vitro fertilisation. These cells are otherwise destroyed.

Second, there are egg donations, consciously made by people willing to support the research. Third is somatic cell nuclear transfer. This is where genetic material is inserted into an egg cell without any fertilisation taking place and it raises the spectre of cloning. Lastly, we have aborted foetuses.

Some people are quite squeamish about the idea of human cells being used in laboratory study but medical science has always done this. Until now, mostly dead human tissue has been used but the techniques enabling live human tissue to be used, and in particular undifferentiated stem cells, means that for the first time we are dealing with tissue that in some circumstances could develop into a human.

There is a huge cultural and ethical significance afforded to life, especially human life and this research evokes strong reactions from excited enthusiasm right through to abhorrence. And it matters. On the one hand we have the potential to cure a wide range of debilitating illnesses, to extend our understanding of human medicine in a way never before possible. On the other, we are learning how to create life from primitive building blocks opening the possibility of human cloning, genetic manipulation, transgenics and the like.

Much of the debate is couched in the terms of rights. A right is a power or liberty to which one is entitled or a thing to which one has a just claim. It is extremely difficult to apply this concept to cells which can neither act nor demand the expression of a right. Arguably the notion of cells having rights is a nonsense. But not so if those cells are defined as a person.

In modern society, the person is a legal entity with rights enshrined in law. It is this identification of stem cells with persons (albeit potential persons) that creates much of the ethical confusion. Once we concede that a stem cell has the same legal status as a person, the question of rights must be addressed.

And if the technology exists to take two elements which cannot survive and combine them to generate a cell which can survive and develop, does that imply we have created a legal entity called a person? For example, with somatic cell nuclear transfer – neither part can survive yet the combination can. Whatever a person is, it has to come into existence at some point and yet if it cannot show sentience, it cannot express what is necessary for rights to be claimed.

And there’s another difficulty because if we attach rights only to those able or willing to claim them, what happens to those persons who are unable to communicate? Those in a persistent vegetative state are of course, granted rights which we all feel they are entitled to, though they would fail any criteria based on communication. In law, those rights are exercised by proxy, someone else has to take the decisions.

So for stem cells to be treated as persons, the assumed rights have to be represented by a proxy. This is what religious zealots gravitate towards in claims about the rights of the unborn – they demand the right to represent the potential rights that may be afforded a group of cells if at some stage, they might become people. But it is ethical nonsense. In the same way as the right to free speech means nothing to someone in a persistent vegetative state, there are no rights associated with stem cells or foetuses. Rights do not exist in the abstract but are embedded in social practice.

For religious people, keen to defend the notion of souls, they have to resist scientific progress in understanding the origins of life because for them this process has to remain mystical. Understand how life comes about, evolves, mutates, develops, and you take apart the notions of souls, miracles, and supernatural beings. For rational people, an understanding of ethics helps us get our social priorities right.

There's an excellent site discussing these issues at
this site.

In the UK there are 7000 faith schools, which means that in 7000 schools children are being indoctrinated every day into irrational beliefs. They will carry those beliefs until either the rational nature of the real world impinges on them, until they have a crisis in faith, or suffer contradictions in their beliefs that lead them to become rational.

In some cases, this is a major emotional and philosophical step. Those who have a world-view centred around belief in supernatural beings with the attendant sense of duty and guilt which emanates from the worship of those entities, will have substantial emotional effects when those beliefs are shaken.

In other cases, the indoctrination will be slight and the transition will be relatively easy.

For some, the pattern is set for the rest of their lives. They will resist all attempts to get them to think rationally about these beliefs, they will fend off any question about the likelihood of there being a god, they will not doubt miracles, they will believe that the Qur’an or Bible is the word of their god, some will believe they are eating the body of Christ when they eat a wafer on a Sunday.

These schools get state subsidy to indoctrinate children into irrational beliefs. The absurdity of this is shown if we decide the assume there is a different religion, let’s say based on some improbable supernatural being (call him the Lord of the Fairies) who sends emissaries to earth to influence the affairs of man (call them Leprechauns). Now providing we can demonstrate a reasonable number of adherents with unshakable faith, how could we deny them the opportunity to get state funding to teach in the context of their faith? Of course, such a suggestion would be rejected out of hand and rightly so.

And yet… it doesn't happen to accepted religions.

Now let’s be fair about this. Of the 7000 faith schools, in 2005, 6955 were christian, 36 were jewish, five were muslim and two were sikh. All of them propagating irrationalism in the context of education, a context both students and parents trust and expect to be educationally sound. Irrationalism is no basis for ethical teaching and ethics can and should be taught without religion in any shape or form. But the schools get their funding (capital and day-to-day running costs) because of their adherence to irrational faiths.

It’s the kids who are having their heads played with, it's their reasoning which is being systematically impaired. Day by day they are being encouraged to believe that the world is not subject to the scientific principles that they are taught in science. They are taught to believe in prayer, miracles, all-powerful beings that can rewrite the physical laws of the universe.

Those selected and approved irrationalisms get state funding, those more socially obviously irrational (such as the King of the Fairies and Leprechauns) would be laughed out of court. We should insist that they are judged on the same basis.

Isn’t it time we gave the kids, and reason, a chance?

For those in the commercial software business, open source is seen as potentially undermining the market for new software. Why, after all, would anyone spend several hundred pounds buying Microsoft software when there are packages around for free which provide all of what you need, and none of the bloat? Need a browser, try Firefox. Need a mail client, try Thunderbird. Need word processing, try OpenOffice.org. Not only that, but there is a veritable army of developers world-wide just itching to fix any bug reported. New versions are available for download in double-quick time from a huge number of sites, and there is a community of helpful people able to provide online support anytime, anywhere. All for nothing.

And yet, millions of people still use the Microsoft software. They choose to spend the money, buy the commercial product, and rely on the Microsoft machine for providing hotfixes, patches, support, and new versions according to Microsoft’s own unique interpretation of the calendar.

Some of the reason is of course, the monopoly power of Microsoft and the fear that because of the carefully crafted compatibility features of Windows, not all open source software will run smoothly. Indeed there have been court battles over compatibility and the amount of information Microsoft makes available to others to enable them to develop competitor products for the platform. In that climate, consumers don’t want to take the risk – even if it’s free – because once having installed the open source product, maybe Windows won’t work properly anymore.

And what about intellectual property in software? Having developed a unique piece of software, this is now intellectual property which can be exploited to make money. If the open source movement develops similar technology and gives it away for nothing, that undermines the business. But can you realistically have intellectual property in programming? Once the algorithm is in the public domain, for example because it is now taught on university courses, surely anyone can implement it without infringing copyright. Any time frame for preserving such rights will be outstripped by the pace of technical change - the old copyright model is just left in the starting blocks.

In core areas of software development, such as browsers, operating systems, mail clients, document production and management, and databases, open source software is exploiting very well-known technical principles, so well-known in fact, that it’s hard to claim intellectual property rights. The more software which moves into this category, the better it is for consumers because they will have free reliable software - but it poses a serious challenge to the business case for software companies.

Intellectual property rights actually restricts the availability of software and impedes developments in functionality as one commercial block fights another in the courts. Open source, on the other hand, openly welcomes innovation and provides an excellent mechanism for delivering quality. But it comes at a price - constant change and update. Software users need to be able to take responsibility for keeping up to date and must be willing to accept that software will require maintenance. In a real sense, software is never finished.

As the pace of knowledge growth increases, the demands on software development will outstrip the ability of large commercial companies to respond. Open source will provide a massive, responsive, collaborating team, drawn from around the globe, for any interesting programming project. Commercial companies will have to adapt or lose the business.

Microsoft recently invited the Firefox developers to work in its compatibility labs to enable the browser to work better on Vista. There’s some cynicism due to Microsoft’s previous actions but this might be a recognition that as the software industry becomes of age, the scale of demand for innovation and quality means that companies like Microsoft need to rethink their traditional ways of delivering products. Already Gartner are suggesting that Vista may be the last Windows OS. Perhaps we are already moving towards an open source windows environment.

Commercial software becomes less and less viable as the means of producing it become more widely available around the world. As people become more skilled at generating software and collaborating via the internet, there is less of a market for commercial software, despite the massive monopoly of Microsoft. It is almost as though the mass availability of the programming environment and programming skills, takes ownership of the technology out of the hands of the corporations. To protect their markets, they will either need to commercialise the open source environment, or give up the intellectual property right claims over software. Already Google, Ebay, and others, are exploring commerical links with open source. There are interesting times ahead as corporations try to keep control of the software sand slipping through their fingers.

Whether you try to or not, you accumulate gadgets. The TV has a remote control, and so does the stereo, and the VCR/DVD has one. If you have a mobile you get at least two gadgets – don’t forget the charger. Then there’s a camera (and a charger), the MP3 player (and charger), then there’s the all-in-one charger that fits (almost) all the other gadgets.

As early as 1977 we were taught about recharging gadgets regularly with the tamagochi, little gizmos that needed care and attention and feeding with electricity, excellent training for the mobile phone. When we all learned how to play Solitaire and Minesweeper, we were almost oblivious to the fact that we were receiving mouse training. When the mobile came along, it was perfectly natural that it would need recharging.

In almost every case, the interface to these devices has been appalling. The drive to produce smaller and smaller devices means that unless you have eagle eyes and very nimble fingers, you are unlikely ever to be able to operate the menus on an MP3 player, a digital camera or one of the recent mobiles. But that’s not a problem for the manufacturers because it is overwhelmingly a young market – and the young have good eyesight and nimble fingers.

This is throw-away technology. Each year, or even more often, phones are thrown away and replaced, cameras are discarded, hand-helds are superseded with something which will now tell you not just the temperature in Tokyo but can provide you with expensive unwanted updates about arcane news items, and even tell you where you are. There is literally no point in improving the interface to the point where it will have long-term usability. Indeed, half the point is to occupy the user learning about the interface. By the time they have mastered it, they’ll be ready for and wanting the next one.

Have you ever seen someone texting someone on a mobile. They sit entranced peering at a tiny screen, thumbs twitching frantically trying to reduce the length of words sufficiently to be able to write a message at least halfway efficiently. The argot produced, a crude mixture of letters and numbers, missing vowels turning ambiguity into an artform, provides part of the learning/entertainment itself. The device itself is barely functional for the transmission of anything other than a short message – a message that could easily have been left on an answerphone in a much shorter time.

The tiny phones are equipped with a web interface. Now web pages need screen real estate because without the space, you can barely display anything. If you reduce the content to fit the size of the screen on a mobile, you have barely the functionality of a ticker tape. Even the business of clicking a link is problematic. Of course, some websites are WAP-enabled? Imagine you were connecting an early 80s computer to the web - now scale down the functionality, and you’re getting close. It’s a non-existent user experience.

In almost every case, the marketing hype has conned large numbers of people to jump on the bandwagon with under-performing, poorly-featured, largely dysfunctional devices. Of course, being able to make and take calls on the move is a great convenience, but the rest?

OK, so the user experience is not that great - so what’s next? Convergence… Instead of one gizmo, your device now contains a movie camera, sound download and playing, ability to play DVD clips, GPS, information feeds, and so on. You can’t actually see the video because it’s too small, and you haven’t time to listen to all the stuff you’re carrying on it, and most of the information feed is advertising gunk, and after taking twenty photos, you can’t see the point anymore, and you keep having to charge it… and it costs...

Despite working in the computing industry, I find myself more and more disconnected from the world of gadgets. A new TV/DVD player? I wonder nowadays whether the time invested in learning the interface is justified by what I might ever want to record and play. The drive to pack more and more features into a device leaves me wanting to avoid it, rather than spend time getting used to yet another gizmo.

I doubt that I’m alone in that. The accumulated frustration of poor interfaces and inadequate functionality is making me gizmo-averse. I long for screens I can read, keypads I can use, menus I can follow without a manual, terminology that fits my use rather than a marketing plan, devices that detect their environment and configure themselves or ask me sensible questions. I don’t want to spend my time learning an interface to a device that is designed to become obsolete, learning to be ready to consume the next version.

I’ve even found myself picking up a biro and a notebook. It’s not that we don’t have usability experts, excellent designers, people with creativity and subtlety – but the god of the marketplace sees us as mere revenue streams. There’s so much potential for improving the quality of life, but all we get is a continuous stream of rapidly obsolete techno-junk. The technology offers so much promise but the consumer market and the desperate grabbing of more and more cash from customers, means they are condemned to a stream of barely functioning cutting edge toys whose only value is the status of owning them. The brand without the content.

It's quite remarkable how much interest has been stirred up in religious circles by the Dan Brown novel, The Da Vinci Code. Its notoriety is hardly due to its glittering literary style; it reads as if it was hastily assembled from what was intended to be a screen play.

The reason the book is in the news at all is because it weaves its plot around the myths associated with the figure of Jesus, the central figure in Christianity. Whenever an author uses a religious iconic character in fiction, they run into trouble with the religious authorities. Salman Rushdie attracted a fatwa for writing Satanic Verses - a fatwa is a religious judgement by an Islamic authority - and in this case lived in fear for his life.

Dan Brown's book risks only wealth. But why should christianity care what's in a book, a throwaway novel? Partly the reason is to do with the content. Jesus is portrayed as having been married with at least one child, and so the plot goes, the church suppressed this knowledge so as not to permit a holy blood line.

Of course Islam depends on just such a blood line from the prophet Mohammed, fuelling the division between Shiite and Sunni muslims. Christianity of course breaks the link between earthly and supernatural existence - Jesus is supposed to have gone back up to some non-earthly paradise without leaving any relatives behind. Relatives, as in this world, can sometimes get up to all kinds of mischief and the plot suggests that the church took drastic steps to prevent this happening.

So you can see that where Christians have perpetrated a set of claimed truths based on one interpretation of the very sparse historical evidence, having someone come along and rewrite the story is a little unsettling for them. If people are encouraged to doubt what the church says, it may lead to disputes, schisms, rejection of faith, or at the very least one or two difficult questions.

But the church has a much deeper problem with this story. Since someone has produced a tale with sufficient credibility to cast doubt on the church version of events, this encourages people to examine their beliefs, to question their gullibility. As with any question of belief, given two or more options, we try to narrow down the probabilities. If possible we look for evidence to rule out some of the options. If we can't find any more evidence, as in the case of many religious claims, we look for plausibility. And that's where the problem arises.

Religion is fundamentally irrational so once someone puts together an equally plausible story using the same sparse factual content, the religious authorities cannot appeal to rational argument, nor can they point to evidence. So how can they persuade people that their version is the right one? How can they defend themselves against the next one?

It comes down to the strength of the PR machine. At the moment, Dan Brown is winning and will continue to make a fortune out of the controversy, as will the many publishing offshoots of this burgeoning cottage industry. In the long run, the church will win out because it is embedded in social institutions that teach our children to belief christian myths.

In the meantime, the church is taking advantage of the free publicity, getting plenty of advertising, and trying to expand its market. There's no question of any rational debate about religion in this - both sides have a vested interest in an empty theological debate which boosts sales. A veritable army of theologians is turning out refutations and discussions offering anything but rational discourse.

For rationalists, this little circus is a wonderful example of the intellectual poverty of religion when faced with a rather poorly written, if entertaining, tale of clerical intrigue. Perhaps some of the clerics think they are defending points of principle, but maybe some of the business heads are thinking more about bums on seats and cash-flow.

It's always been a puzzle to me why religious people are granted so much authority in matters ethical. But a little thought makes it much clearer.

In the church in England, historically the leaders campaigned against literacy to prevent ordinary people being able to read the bible and decide for themselves what it meant. Mass literacy would undermine the status as experts of the clergy. Having the church representatives as the only people able to interpret what is declared to be the word of God enables the clergy to control the population's behaviour.

How is the control exercised? Through religious concepts such as sin, redemption, forgiveness. By inculcating these notions in the minds of a believing population, religious institutions can exercise control over the actions of large numbers of people.

Of course, one on one, the clergy would have a hard time maintaining this level of control. But when these customs and practices are embedded in social institutions, traditions, even laws, then people follow them as the natural way to behave. In that way, the church authority becomes something that represents the natural order of things. It becomes more unusual to contemplate differing from the teachings of the church than to question the irrational claims. When laced with notions of sin and damnation, the fear created is enough to suppress criticism. Of course, sometimes a burning stake was used to reinforce the belief.

When literacy is a means of power, because it is access to information, those who have that ability are seen as natural leaders of the social group. The priest, the monk, the Imam, is seen as the focal point of social power and their advice takes on an authority quite independent of the abilities of the person. They are both vehicle for a social message, and buffer against any divergence in behaviour from the religiously acceptable.

But what gives them authority in moral matters? Well, firstly they have access to authoritative scriptures, whether the Bible, Koran, or any other religious text. The social conditioning that puts authority in these texts, also allows the religious representative to inherit that authority.

Secondly, as judge of compliance with religious norms, the clerics wield very real power over the life chances of the individual - sometimes even the power of life and death. The religious state often uses force to compel religious observance. It is a dangerous business to oppose state-backed clericalism.

Thirdly, psychologically compliance to peer pressure provides social cohesion. To deviate from the state-sponsored religious norm is to put oneself outside of acceptable society and so some other mechanism of solidarity is needed before people will take the risk. If there are few dissenters, or if those who do dissent are persecuted, there are strong psychological pressures to conform, and rewards for those who do so.

Any expertise that religious clerics possess in ethical matters will come from a variety of sources. The social work done by vicars provides a source of social skills but not necessarily any particular expertise in ethics. Ethics is about the application of social values and where religious dogma is brought to bear, those values will be religious. Whatever the result of rational consideration, religious principles will predominate.

Therefore clerics involved in ethical issues are anything but objective and will have their rationality compromised by the need to promote their religious principles. For that reason, if for no other, religion should be kept away from children learning about ethical principles for without that separation, there is a significant risk of indoctrination.

So what might we expect from rational ethics? A consideration of the interests and well-being of those involved of course. Perhaps the application of some general principles such as the maximum good for the greatest number, with a proviso of protecting the interests of the minority. Any general ethics will necessarily come into conflict with religious dogma precisely because general ethical principles will be socially and historically determined - they change over time, and that conflicts with any ethics based on a dogma.

For that reason, many religions continue to reinterpret their religious texts to attempt to reduce the conflict and maintain their social influence. Those religions which defend the letter of the text, such as Islam, have a particular problem in this respect. The religious teachings become increasingly anachronistic, and their defence more vigorous and dictatorial.

Every time we go into a shop these days we are presented with an increasing choice. Even if we are buying mundane items, we still have to choose. Try going for a coffee. Chances are you'll be asked about the type of coffee (choice of maybe 5 - 10), the size (thimble to bucket), the sweetness, milkiness, and up to half a dozen characteristics you didn't want to know about. If it's a trendy coffee shop, you'll be asked to choose from a list you don't understand.But it's not your fault that you haven't attended their internal training course for their counter staff. It's really not your fault that you didn't know you have to ask for a regular Americano if all you want is a coffee. But you will be made aware.

Choice is the in thing.But how much choice are you really getting if half of it is of no interest. You are required to engage in a conversation you didn't want to have. You had no choice because if you wanted the coffee, that's the defined way for you to get it. If you don't go through the script, you don't get the coffee. Your choice came down to suffering the sales patter and get a coffee or don't get either.

So how about if all you want is to buy something to wear. Although people often assume there is plenty of choice in clothing, what you can choose from is only the range of goods made available in the shops and fashion is carefully controlled to ensure that there is uniformity. That's the way chains protect their investment. Rather than risk backing a fashion that doesn't sell, retailers will follow the fashion determined at least a year ahead. Your choice is totally manipulated. That's why we see so many people wearing ridiculously impractical clothes - jeans with no wasteband so they're falling down, high heeled shoes that no-one can walk in, short tops that expose the midriffs even in January, jeans with pockets only an ape could reach, enormously wide belts too unconfortable to sit down in, and so on.

Men's fashions are just as ridiculous. Shirts with tears in them, t-shirts with pockets in the middle of your back, trousers with bits of zips or tapes attached almost at random, clothes covered in advertising logos, wherever you look you are faced with much the same non-choice.Even in state provided services, the mantra is that people have to have choice. In education, parents must be able to choose the school for their child.

In medicine, patients must be able to choose where and how they are treated. In reality, if you're ill what you really want is prompt, effective care. Being able to choose is in many ways irrelevant providing you get that care promptly and it's effective, but the illusion of having choice is that it provides some control. Because you are choosing how to consume, you are somehow exercising control.

But there's a difference between exercising democratic control, and exercising market choice. In the former you effect what can happen, in the latter you only affect what happens to you via a product. To exercise democratic control means that people affect the outcomes independent of a market, whereas market choice simply means you have to enter the market and consume before you can affect anything, and then the effect is limited only to your own consumption.

Once market choice replaces democratic choice, and product selection takes the place of democratic control, people lose control over their basic state-provided services. It then becomes very easy to replace those services with a private substitute. Would you like to buy a maths course for your child or perhaps buy a discount double-course version of French. It comes with a free side-salad and a dictionary.

In moving the grounds of politics from political alternatives to selection of choices amongst market offerings, the exercise of political power is passed to those who control the markets, and of course, they then have plenty of choice.

We have to question whether or not the drug industry can and should be trusted with something as important as human health. Like any commercial business, the drug industry invests money to develop products which it sells at a profit. The bigger the market it can generate and sustain for a product, the higher the profits. If it can develop products which are needed by large numbers of people, there will be even higher profits.

Given the cost and length of time taken to develop new pharmaceuticals, it is not surprising that drug companies want and need to continue selling the same product for many years and therefore take pains to sustain and protect the market with licences and trade agreements. Having invested over a long period in competition with other companies, who have similarly invested in competing products, they want to sustain income from the product as long as possible.

But this gives rise to tendencies that are not in the interests of those whose health the drug industry appears initially to serve. Why, for example, would any drug company be interested in curing a medical condition if instead it was possible to turn it into a chronic but managed illness? Commercially, this is an ideal outcome generating a large number of consumers who, by virtue of the chronic nature of the illness, will continue to consume the drug over long periods of time, sometimes for life.

And given the competitive nature of the research into new products, much of it will have been done before in other companies but will not be accessible because of commercial secrecy. So a potentially large proportion of the costs of development are consumed in reproducing research that has already been done - and the consumer pays for this wasted work.

And where do new products come from? Are they in response to new illnesses? Or are they in response to a wider definition of those chronic conditions that people are encouraged to believe they suffer from? In the latter case, the generation of new conditions is an important source of increased market. If people can be persuaded that they suffer from allergies, skin conditions, headaches, cold symptoms, aches and pains, and so on, they can be encouraged to sign up to long-term self-treatment generating increased revenues for the drug companies. Hyperchondria is highly profitable.

In order to protect their future product range, drug companies are now patenting genes. This absurdity gives huge commercial power to the companies investigating the genetic nature of some chronic illnesses. The implication is that once identified, any treatment that relates to the genetic basis of the illness involves a royalty payment. In other words, if you can identify the genetic basis of a chronic illness, you not only profit from any drugs you make to manage the illness, but anyone else using the same genetic information pay a royalty as well. Massive profits with a penalty for anyone else who tries to cure the condition. Research about the human genotype should be public domain.

So what's the alternative? Who is going to fund the research into these drugs? There is a strong case on health grounds for no longer trusting the drug industry to make, via the market, the choices about which new drugs are developed. It is clear that the commercial pressure to stimulate the perception of chronic illness and to avoid cure is not in the public interest. So let's consider a more sensible prioritisation.

Suppose that the research into drugs is made public domain so that all results are available to all researchers. That removes the competitive advantage from individual companies but increases the speed of research and removes duplication. State sponsored research would mean that the rights to these drugs would reside with the state as would all licencing rights. Companies would bid for development contracts to either carry out research or develop the drugs and produce them, or both.

The drugs chosen for development would be based on the health needs of the population. There would be far less diversity in the treatment of trivial conditions and much more focus on curative treatments. Rather than having fifty different preparations all containing paracetamol for cold symptoms, it may be that we have ten and the resources are redirected to something more medically advantageous.

If a drug is needed worldwide to treat the consequence of a disaster, we avoid the disgraceful scene of drug companies refusing to allow the cheap development of drugs in the third world. There would be no question of commercial interests because governments would own the rights and could make them available. Public health would be more important than private profit. Of course there will be an argument that without private investment, there wouldn't be the funding to do the research. It would be an interesting calculation to work out the wasted R&D through duplication together with the production of unnecessary drugs, coupled with the cost to the NHS of treatment of chronic illnesses, and offset costs required to direct medical research towards more socially important areas.

Public health will always be second priority to drug corporations making profits out of chronic illness. Drug companies can't be trusted to work in the public interest.

A woman recently was sacked in Dewsbury in West Yorkshire because she insisted on wearing a niqab, a veil which covers all of the face except the eyes.

It was argued that she could not do her job because of the way she was dressing. Since she was teaching children who in learning with a teacher, examine the teacher’s face to get cues about their behaviour, their responses to questions, and the teacher’s intentions, it was argued that she could not adequately perform her duties.

But the real issue ought to be about religious symbolism being forced into the context of a classroom. Children in this environment have no alternative but to be confronted with a highly prominent symbol of devout faith in the context of their normal lessons. At the very least, it distracts their attention from the content of their normal lessons, and at worst involves them in discussions about the nature of devout faith in a religion.

That may well be acceptable to the wearer of the niqab, indeed it might be positively invited by the veil, but it should not be seen as acceptable in an educational context.

Given that she took part in the interview for her job in front of a mixed panel without wearing the niqab, one wonders what now makes it essential to wear it when teaching children. It looks as though, on practical educational grounds alone, she should not wear a face covering when teaching children. As for the overt expression of her religious beliefs, like any other such expression they should be outlawed in schools for all religions. And that goes for dog collars, kippas, crosses, and any other visible attempt to promote religion to children.

Just because someone wants to express their religion, that doesn't make it acceptable to do so in a position of authority and as a role model in front of children who at best, do not yet have the capability of establishing their own views. If we found people aiming to confront them daily with an expression of political beliefs using a clearly-identifiable symbol, we would rightly condemn it as an attempt at indoctrination.

But we should be clear that religion does not have a place in education and apply the same consistency to nun's habits, dog collars, kippas, and other religious symbols. The politicians are choosing the easy option to dismiss her on the grounds of covering her face, rather than the principled approach of protecting children from religious bias and indoctrination. After all, if they were to do that, they'd have to rethink their support for faith schools as a whole.

A number of groups in the US have called for a boycott of a computer game called Left Behind: Eternal Forces, on the grounds that it is "training for religious warfare".

BBC News coverage of the story.

Those who object to the game dislike the theme of the game which is that if you do not become a follower of Jesus, you automatically become the enemy. Now that might be an embarrassing message for those liberal followers of the supernatural superstar but it really shouldn't be so surprising. After all, the church established itself precisely on its wars against unbelievers.

Islam of course has done the same with the exact same medieval messages as Christianity. Whereas the more politic church representatives sway with the wind of public opinion to preserve their influence, the Islamic theocracy have, because they insist on the literal truth of the Qur'an, refuse to budge. Consequently they come across as more extreme.

Those hard line Christian theocrats who defend the literal word of the bible will think that a game that teaches children to adopt the attitude of Christian warriors fighting to convert unbelievers, a fairly good thing. The co-founder of the games company defended the combative approach on the grounds that the baddy, that's the devil, is playing a convert-or-die game so you have to do the same. Hmmm...

But I think here's an example of religion finding its appropriate level - as a fantasy game. In this world you adopt a role, tangle with mythical objects, role-play, destroy the baddies, feel good about it, and move on. For some who play the game, they may be led to consider the similarity with other fantasy games, and see religion for what it is. The more thoughtful theologians would clearly see this as a trivialising approach to religion - but that's exactly what we should do with non-sensical irrational mythology. Turning it into a game is an excellent way of showing children how irrational and fantasy-ridden the whole business is.

There's a more pungent Islamic version apparently as well, called Quest for Bush in which the point is to go around with a gun shooting, you guessed, American soldiers.

At what point does directed fantasy become indoctrination? Well, the problem is that these ideas don't exist in isolation but form part of a matrix of social norms, ideas, beliefs, and practising actions in the context of those beliefs makes it easier to carry them out in reality.

That's the argument against socially realistic violent games. In an ideological context where religion is an accepted part of the landscape, such role play offers christian zealots a game environment for reinforcing indoctrination. But that also shows up the hypocracy because if it's acceptable to have proselytising Christian games vilifying an Antichrist character, presumably it's equally acceptable for an Islamic version to vilify apostates and infidels.

So the question seems to be, when is game more than a game? Clearly when it's part of an ideological struggle about the supernatural beliefs of mythologists. There's enough of a war machine behind each religion camp to make the effects socially very serious indeed.

If only it was just a game...

We often hear the claim that science is just another religion, based on beliefs and faith just as much as any of the mainstream belief systems. Scientists of course believe that certain things are true about the world and, so the argument goes, there's not difference between that an someone asserting their belief in a god.

A similar argument, though subtly different, is that since science cannot prove all that scientists believe, they are in the same position as theists. Their practice is based on their faith in certain things being true.These arguments are based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of scientific activity. Beliefs are held by all people of course, and scientists are no exception.

Scientists working in any field will have hunches, intuitions, feelings about the way things work, the causes and effects, the mechanisms behind what they observe. But whereas for theists, the belief and the faith is the end point, for scientists it is the stimulus for activity, the beginning of investigation.

In trying to make sense of observations, sometimes startling, enigmatic, simply confusing, scientists try to provide some consistent explanation and that means generating some kind of theory. The role of the theory is to connect the observations together in terms of what is already known, providing a model which is more explanatory and consistent than what came before. Sometimes, you can't produce a new model without challenging some of the accepted truths and when that happens, experiments are devised to test them. In this way, science progresses by falsifying theories, proving them to be inaccurate.

That doesn't mean that all scientific knowledge is destined to become obsolete - far from it. Our knowledge, tested against the real world, increases, with those inadequate theories being superceded by better, more consistent explanations. What is does mean though is that scientists hope and expect their work to be improved by the critical attention of others. Scientists advance their theories and experimental evidences for others to criticise precisely so that weaknesses and inconsistencies can be addressed.

So the status of belief in science is always contingent, it is always subject to change. Some theories are so powerfully explanatory and without parallel, and these are accepted. It is not inconceivable that they will one day be challenged, but with passing time, it becomes less likely. No-one for example expects the force of gravity to be doubted though there is intense investigation into the nature of it. New models produce new challenging questions, new evidence produces new theories, new fields of investigation and new experimental techniques open up new areas of knowledge. We accumulate knowledge and the scientific process is the quality control.

Contrast that with religion. In religion, belief is all, explanation counts for nothing. In order to believe in supernatural beings who control our destiny (the essence of any religious belief) we have to suspend our critical faculties, turn off our intelligence, and accept irrational statements as true.

This is far beyond the question of doubt. We can doubt the existence of a god and it is rational to await credible evidence before affirming its presence. In the same way as someone suggesting to you that there is a fairy at the bottom of the garden would elicit doubt, so too should any suggestion of supernatural beings. To do otherwise is to give in to gullibility, to fail to distinguish the credible from the incredible, to abandon your critical faculties.

Science then is the opposite end of the spectrum from faith. Belief plays a part in all
scientific work but it is a contingent belief, subject to evidential check and open to disproof. A claim that cannot be tested is not considered an appropriate subject matter for scientific investigation - indeed much scientific work is based on generating precisely testable hypotheses. Science is not a religion, has none of the characteristics of a religion, and none of the practices.