Synogenes.com

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?

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.

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.

The Human Fertility and Embryology Act from 1990 is being overhauled and the current white paper proposes to ban the use of hybrid-embryos conforming to public concern.

Opponents are concerned about the ethical and moral issues involved though thre is already a move to collect the skeptical comments from some scientists. Already the camp opposed to the process are using the american technique of raising the certainty threshold before a scientific proposal can be researched. It's been well-tested in the US: someone challenges the proposer to acknowledge that there is some doubt about the outcome of the research and on that basis, argues that the proposal won't deliver and is therefore not worth doing. This approach has been used to prevent climate research, to oppose pesticide limitation, limit stem cell research, and as part of widespread opposition to environmental controls. Now the approach is being used in the UK to limit stem-cell research.

Any scientist worth the name will argue that there is always doubt - that's why we do experiments and study real-world data. In the case of the hybrid embryos, there's no guarantee that they will deliver everything we need in terms of stem cell research but that's not a reason for rejecting the proposed work.

The stronger case is made by those who have moral or ethical objections but these are quite vague. A common objection is that it is playing God, creating a "something", a potential new species which has not naturally arisen. This is tantamount to saying that if variation arises naturally then it's OK to exploit it, but not using techniques to induce those variations. This objection unravels when we look at animal husbandry, and especially so in the deliberate manipulation of plant species. Agriculture has been doing this kind of artificial manipulation of nature for centuries. The only difference is the timescales.

When we think of playing God, we are of course invoking the presumed capabilities of a mythical all-powerful being, the perjorative intent of the phrase being used to make us think that the process is inherently wrong, not because the outcomes may be harmful but the very act of manipulating nature is wrong in itself. This seemingly goes not apply to the use of electricity, or even fire, processes which directly and deliberately manipulate nature. It also divorces the consequence from the cause, which is actually the whole point of ethical argument. Is it wrong to produce antibiotics for example? For years we have been using bacteria to produce quantities of antibiotics:
Research is very well established in this area.

But to be fairer, the concern is often really about the "human" part of the process, the human DNA. Here the moral issue really comes down to the religious basis for the objections. It;s about interfering with human biology at a low level. Medical intervention is apparently acceptable but low level cellular intervention is a problem. But what exactly is human? Is it the DNA, which can be constructed from inert constituents and assembled - it hasn't been done yet but the technology is available? And what of the living host cell that would have such DNA introduced to it? If we judge it to be human, what then of the so-called soul? At what point does conception take place? Would such a hybrid be 1% host soul? Soulless? Incomplete soul? The raise absurdly doctrinal questions for religious people reminiscent of the Inquisition.

One argument though is based on statistics. The claim is that such embryos would be 99% human. But in fact we share 85% of our DNA with mice. Does that make us 85% mice or mice 85% human? And in fact at the level of genes, we share 99%.

So some of the confusion is around what constitutes a human. As the mysteries of life are unravelled, there will soon be nothing supernatural about creating living tissue and the ethical issues will properly concern our understanding of what constitutes a person. Collections of cells grown in a culture do not constitute a person and the ethical question is really about whether it is moral not to study such tissues.

As Dr Stephen Minger of King's College, London, put it:
At present we have no therapies to even alleviate the symptoms for conditions such as Alzheimer's, spinal muscular dystrophy and motor neuron disease, never mind make an impact on disease progression.

So the ethical dilemma is in practice about stopping research because of quasi-religious notions of what being human consists of. The consequence of preventing this research is the rather uncharitable condemnation of sufferers from incurable diseases to continued suffering.

The possibilities for medical research now becoming available are precisely brought about because we are understanding that the biochemistry and genetics of living organisms has an enormous amount in common. Human life is not special and that is the broadside to religious thinking for it undermines the notions of chosen peoples, creation myths, notions of souls, sins, redemption and some all-powerful being that supposedly created us.

Because science is demonstrating life to be prosaic, commonplace, generic, mundane, and above all intelligible, religious and mythical interests are coming to the fore. Building on popular prejudice, they seek to role back scientific research but it's the people who suffer incurable diseases who will pay the price.

Last week, the catholics were threatening the government that unless they were given exemption from anti-discrimination law, they would close their adoption agencies.

This is the same threat that was used in the USA when anti-discrimination legislation was passed there too. In that case, only two agencies actually closed because the catholics don't want to lose access to the young, especially vulnerable young people who will be more susceptible to catholic indoctrination.

See the Washington Post article.

Even if they do decide to close, the cases would simply be referred to other adoption agencies so the idea that there would be massive disadvantage to the children is ridiculous.

What is incontrovertible is that the children placed for adoption would no longer be labelled as catholic children, there would no longer be a certainty that they would be subjected to superstitious indoctrination and moral coercion. At least if they are referred to a secular adoption agency, they will be free from the clutches of the catholic church.

It is no accident that the catholic church wants to involve itself in the welfare of the young - it is the clearest method of inculcating religious belief in people with the best chance of persistence. Catch them young and they will believe what they are told by people in authority.

There is every reason to oppose the role of the catholic church in adoption agencies and it is to be hoped that preventing them discriminate will bring other benefits as well like freeing vulnerable children from being subjected to religious indoctrination. The removal of the catholic church from adoption agencies could be of enormous benefit to large numbers of children.

We frequently hear complaints that by critically examining ideas and rejecting them, we are thereby attacking the individuals who hold those views. Church people often claim they have been insulted by what people say about their notions of supernatural beings, miracles, and the like. An attack on the irrationalism of Islam is interpreted as an attack on both the rights of muslims to worship, and an attack on the muslims themselves. It is neither.

The reaction is understandable because where positions of influence depend on the respectability of the ideas advanced, as they do in political circles, criticising widely accepted beliefs undermines the credibility of those posts. To put it more concretely, if we demonstrate that bishops are neither expert nor even consistent in matters of ethical judgement, it is hard to justify their presence in the House of Lords, as least as far as they claim any sort of right to be there. In the same way, an Imam who is shown to be prejudiced or denigrating the rights of others, will find their claim to be a leader undermined. So it is no surprise that those who hold positions of power based on an irrational set of beliefs, are somewhat resistant to rational debate, and are keen to conflate the ideas with the people holding them.

By defining themselves in terms of their faith, they assume that others should also define them that way too. If indeed that happens, then any question of their faith is interpreted as an insult. It’s a very convenient tactic to deflect criticism from the core religious ideas and claims.

But what happens if ideas are treated this way? What happens if ideas are insulated from critical assessment because those who sincerely hold them might feel insulted in the process? Anyone claiming sincerely held strong beliefs could use the defence against insult as an argument for being free to live by those beliefs. So what about racists? Should they be allowed to be free of insult just because they are racists? Of course not. Ideas are not people, they don’t have rights.

But why should we concede a right not to be insulted? Whether or not someone feels insulted by an argument against something they believe, that cannot be an argument against the expression of the criticism. If the state used such an argument, we’d have repression and censorship such as existed under fascism. No-one seriously wants that. There is no right to be free of insult.

Ideas should be criticised and attacked mercilessly to identify weak argument, fallacies, non-sequiturs, and so on. The people engaging in those debates deserve full respect, even those who are adamantly trying to resist change, doggedly defending what seem to many to be absurd ideas. We involve ourselves in those debates to increase understanding. It’s only when we pin ideas to our egos that we risk insult.

Daniel Dennett advanced the position that religion is a social phenomenon that deserves scientific investigation, in his book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. Well worth a read. For those who feel insulted by such scrutiny, they need to remember that these are only ideas.

Amnesty International is a very well-respected campaigning organisation for human rights, identifying and exposing torture and human rights abuse around the world. It benefits enormously from being always seen to be on the side of compassion, humanity, justice, fair play. Virtually everyone would support its aims and passively or actively support its campaigns.

Governments of all hues have earned the attention of AI at times and there are scarcely any governments immune, whether it be caused by torture of republican prisoners in the Castlereagh barracks in Belfast, or the extrajudicial incarceration of muslims in Guantanamo Bay.

But those same people who would normally back AI, get rather touchy when the subject of rights is brought closer to home with the issue of abortion rights. Many are quite wrongly claiming that AI is breaking its principles by ignoring the rights of the unborn in favour of the rights of the woman.

See for example Catholic Times.

They talk in terms of the child and mother when in fact they should be referring to the embryo and woman. The woman is not the mother until a child is born. The difference is crucial.

Rights in human society are afforded to individuals by virtue of them being people and not simply because they consist of human tissue. Rights are afforded to individuals because they are valued as people in society and they cannot be people as unborn embryos.

Therefore we cannot talk of human rights for embryos any more than we can for stem cells. (There are of course some catholics who argue for rights for stem cells as proto-children displaying a woeful ignorance of basic biology.)

The catholic church, of course, is opposed to abortion because it believes there is some mythical entity that appears at the point of conception called the soul. It doesn't trouble them that there is not the slightest evidence in support of this belief, but they are happy to use it to prevent a woman having control of her own body, her own fertility, and by implication, her own future. Even rape victims are expected to suffer the continued violation of their bodies.

Rather than being inconsistent for AI to deal with human rights from the point of view of the woman, it is absolutely consistent. It is the catholic church which is hypocritically talking about compassion, at the same time as condemning millions of women who do not have adequate access to contraception, to unwanted pregnancies.

By basing human rights on a belief in mythical entities, the catholic church makes the exercise of rights dependent not on the collective strength of those socially demanding them, but on the whim of a single allegedly infallible human being. And it's not just the catholic church - this argument applies to all those who seek to root ethical principles in religious dogma.

Ethics is a socially pragmatic practice. It changes with the times, with historical events, with the rise of science, with an understanding of psychology, with the more detailed understanding of the processes of reasoning. Wherever religion infects ethics with a dependence on insubstantial, mystical beliefs, the experts in the case become those in authority within that religion, whether it is an imam, an archbishop, a rabbi, or a priest or a pope. By claiming additional moral rights, they distort the process of justice and rational ethical argument. This is a fundamental political abuse and Amnesty are being completely consistent in its ethical stance.

The irony will doubtless be missed by those catholic critics of Amnesty who are rather selective about their choice of rights.

Have you ever been to a meal where the hosts want to say "grace" before you can start, in other words say a prayer. As an atheist, I would personally find it insulting that I am expected to participate in worshipping mythical beings and thank them for what I about to eat, and I would get angry that someone is expecting me to at least passively condone this practice.

From the host's point of view, they are simply expecting guests to respect their practices whether or not they are insulting to the intelligence of the guest and I find that offensive. The host is relying on the privileged position of religious practice as being beyond criticism and hence it would be considered socially improper to object.

But I do object to anyone expecting me to go along with religious practice.

Another example that can occur in workplaces is where a staff meal is restricted in the venues it can choose from because of the need to accommodate people who choose not to enter establishments where alcohol is consumed. We find good-natured people trying to be accommodating and giving into this social coercion. Some strict muslims will not themselves go into any establishment where alcohol is consumed, won't share a table with others who are drinking alcohol, and impose on themselves such strictures as to make their attendance at a works do, very difficult if not impossible. Those who give into this kind of coercion are pandering to irrationalism, allowing the irrational beliefs of an individual to direct the practice of the rational many. Our good nature, coupled with the sensitivity to offending irrational religionists, provides inadvertent support for their restricting practices.

Just as the Dawkins site urges people (especially in the US) to come OUT about atheism, this is one simple area where a rational statement can be made.

Next time a muslim says they can't go to a staff do because alcohol will be consumed, we should have the confidence to say, "it's a personal choice". If someone insists on saying prayers at a meal, we should have the courage to object and to leave the table rather than participate and invite others to do the same. We should insist that we are respected and not subjected to offence by the assumption that we will participate in irrational religious practices.

The same incidentally goes for funerals - in order to get buried in the accepted place, a graveyard, the bereaved are often inveigled into participating in christian services, almost as an additional requirement in getting someone interred. Since the ground is usually owned by the church, they can impose such restrictions - but we don't have to participate in the services, we don't have to sing the hymns, we don't have to mutter the prayers.

Coming out as an atheist means challenging these restrictions, pleasantly and politely, but firmly. Saying no to irrational practices will undoubtedly cause offence to the devout because they have lost the reason for doing what they do - perhaps many of them never knew what the reasons were. But we need to start questioning these simple passive ways in which religion is given inadvertent support, and brave the reaction which will undoubtedly follow.

Since so many people believe the words of the Qur'an to be the exact words of a supernatural power which must be obeyed, I thought I'd read the book myself. It's not for the faint-hearted.

It's not chronological so you don't get a sense of a passage, or history, or even a progression. There are 114 books (Suras) each of which repeats a substantial part of what has already been presented so there is a huge amount of repetition. That's important for regions of low literacy where much of the teaching takes the form of chanting - by learning to chant selected suras, it's possible to cover the essentials of the religion.

In each sura there are passages which repeat tales of previous prophets from Abraham onwards but these are interspersed with vitriolic attacks on non-believers and supporters of other faiths, and passionate inducements to follow the words of the one and only God. There are sections which explain the punishments for disbelievers - as an atheist I qualify for amputation of an alternate hand and foot if I spread my disbelief.

There is a huge quantity of medieval social advice such as what to do with slaves, wives of slaves, cattle, and other property including who can legitimately inherit women and children, what to do with orphans and how to inherit their property. There are strong messages to treat people fairly including ensuring that orphans end up with their inherited wealth - except that it will eventually go to the husbands of any females.

What comes over more than anything else though is that there is an almighty contest between those "chosen" by God to believe and worship, and those "chosen" by God to disbelieve (or believe something slightly different), the latter being condemned to eternal fire. Fire features very strongly in the pain and suffering to be meted out in bucketloads to those who have heard but choose not to believe. This god is all-forgiving but very violent and aggressive - proud of mass murder of entire populations who didn't believe, but supremely forgiving of those who accede to the threats and convert. Once having converted, it is not possible to change your mind without incurring death as the inevitable punishment for so-called "apostates".

In this way, critical thinking, hesitation in front of preaching, searching for evidence, in fact any expression of doubt, incurs the wrath of a jealous god. The book is assembled from oral testimony collected over 23 years but is nonetheless accepted as being the literal word of Allah, deviation from which guarantees eternal damnation - despite the ubiquitous declarations of Allah being the most forgiving and peaceful god, etc.

The treatment of Judaism is curious. There is collective guilt allotted to those who have killed a prophet with all manner of warnings about how devious, dishonest, scheming, and untrustworthy followers of Judaism will always be. Guilt allotted collectively, redemption impossible except by unquestioning adherence to the words of the book. Muslims are urged never to trust jews or christians and reference is made often to ancient battles as justification. This extends even to those who convert.

Of course, the tales told in the religious books based on the followers of Abraham all share a common lineage and Islam repeats the myths found in earlier books, such as the Adam and Eve story, Isaac, Noah, Lot, and so on. And the Torah, similar to the first five books of the christian old testament, is revered as the word of god by jews, and this book contains similar stories. Islam claims also to revere those old texts but with subtle differences. Islam regards Jesus as just another prophet with god, the supernatural power, as being indivisible so you can't have Jesus and the holy spirit sharing the table. Three is obviously a crowd, but so is two - we have here a very very jealous god.

So on the one hand, you have a message saying Islam respects all those religions, but then there is the hectoring message that belief in any of the others will send people to eternal hell. The symbolism of the religion is very similar to the others too: there is hell, angels, souls, sin, redemption, forgiveness, plenty of guilt, prophets of course, a final judgement day, and so on. And like all the others, it's wrapped up in a carrot and stick approach: pray and believe or sin and burn in hell forever.

Like the other faiths of the "Book", they all are all designed to exploit social psychology, to encourage or enforce obedience to principles that may have had a social purpose in medieval and primitive societies but the morality expressed in these books is in many cases offensive today. Amputations are not an acceptable, or even effective, way of addressing those who disagree with elements of a religious faith. This is recognised by the translator (you can't have an editor of the Qur'an because you can't change the word of God...) who apologises in the introduction for the direct nature of the threats of violence against non-believers urging readers to concentrate on other passages. Not convincing I'm afraid!

The Qur'an is an interesting historical document, no doubt, just like the Torah, the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, and so on. They tell us a lot about the societies that produced them and tried to live by the ethical rules contained in them but all ethics are historically determined and if we miss that point, we end up with the crude dogmatism we see from the Pope, the Imams, the Archbishops, and the other religious authorities.

I'd recommend people to read these books but be aware that you're in for a hectoring, abusive and bullying experience - you are to be damned unless you do what you are told. Put in the context of a primitive, often nomadic and agrarian society, you have the oral tradition designed to coerce and enforce adherence to socially useful practices mixed with peculiar dietary restrictions and denials. Viewed as a source for anthropology, these books can tell us a lot about those societies and an excellent companion is Albert Hourani's The History of the Arab Peoples which illustrates how well these ancient books helped enforce the social customs.

But let's be aware that these are books from one or two millenia ago - we are dealing with history here. Reading these books puts in stark relief what happens when entire populations are nowadays encouraged to enforce medieval or ancient practices based on suspicion and aggression with blind adherence to an oral tradition reporting the supposed words of a supernatural being. The books of course are riddled with contradictions and spawn parallel academic traditions of textual dissection designed to reinforce the political authority of religious rulers.

Reading these religious source books helps make sense of the blind irrationality of Bush, Rasmullah, Abedinejad, the Pope, and others. It explains better the aggression of militarist Israel with its apartheid policy towards Palestinians, and also some of the psychological triggers for suicide bombings.

There has always been a sense of wonder at how, even with all of our accumulated knowledge about biochemistry and genetics there's some spark of life required to get artificially made biological constituents to behave as a living organism. Gradually we are getting closer to understanding exactly what is required for biological molecules to start behaving biologically.

About five years ago, the mystery of what triggers fertilisation was solved when Tony Lai of the University of Wales College of Medicine found an enzyme that kicked the whole process off. New Scientist reported it at the same time as indicating that his research was coming to a halt for lack of funds.

It's been known for a long time that stem cells can be jolted into cell division by an electric shock so this mundane mechanism can kick of the cell replication process. The interesting question though is that starting from the biological building blocks, phospholipids, proteins, etc, what is needed to assemble them into a state identical to a living cell, and then what, if anything is missing.

At this point the research comes head to head with religion. Because if it's possible to create an organism that respires, feeds, replicates, where's the mystery of life? What need is there for souls, spirits, and the like.

We are already at the stage of being able to grow entire organs from stem cells as replacements for people who have serious damage or illness. So far we have grown skin, bone, blood vessels, and even bladders.

Nerve tissue is likewise possible offering a future in which the paralysed may walk again without the need for any miracles.

Once we can control the start of the process from raw materials, tissue becomes repairable in a manner previously unimaginable. For some this is a nightmare scenario but for those whose bodies have parts which are diseased, undeveloped, degenerating, it offers a massively improved quality of life. A blind person could have a replacement eye grown from their own cells, deaf people could have their hearing restored.

Combined with gene therapy there could be cures for diseases like diabetes in which the pancreas could contain modified stem cells leading to the production of insulin.

There is already alarm and disquiet about these techniques with the frequent assertion that it is playing God but if that's true, so was surgery, so was treating diseases with antibiotics. The reality is that God is invested with powers that are beyond our own, the supernatural, the fabulous, the omniscient. But as science advances, such possibilities become realities and what was formerly attributed to a God, becomes mundane. That's a serious problem for the religious because science always undermines their claims and always will.

God is always positioned in the world of magic with a claim that his (it's always his) powers cannot be understood. The moment they are understood, they cease to be God's and become ours and that's the way it always goes.

The spark of life is almost within our grasp. Once producing living things is mundane, the whole business of souls, miracles, the sanctity and the value of life, becomes highly socially charged. It will require a very strong sense of socially-grounded ethics to cope with the questions that come from being able to design and grow new organisms. It's more than ever important to ground ethics in social practice and keep it away from the theists.

It's a classic example of the symbol being taken to represent the thing...

A school teachers gets the kids to vote on the name for a class teddy-bear and being in an islamic country, the primary school kids choose Mohammed. Hardly surprising, but the teacher has now been arrested and is awaiting charges, apparently of blasphemy.

Some sensitive islamic folks have taken the fact that the name was used to identify a teddy-bear as somehow an insult to the prophet of Islam, Mohammed. Just what exactly is blasphemous in the identification of a toy as Mohammed will presumably exercise islamic legal scholars but surely the only safe way to behave for islamic parents is to refuse to allow the name Mohammed to be used in any context. Ludicrous.

By extension there's a whole new area of islamic jurisprudence opening up... There are 25 prophets named in the Qur'an including Adam, Ibrahim, Ishaq, Ismail, Sulaiman, and so on and these are popular names. Sooner or later we'll need a list of approved names for teddy-bears, or any other toys.

If a child calls a pet cat or dog the name of some prophet, does that become blasphemous?

This is the sort of crazy situation you get when you venerate a symbol and insist on the right not to be offended. In normal conversation it's laughed off as ridiculous but when you're dealing with a medieval state machine insisting on it's right to vengeance when insulted, the mere hint of a slight can trigger a catastrophic response.

Islamic law is based on the ethics and morals of the middle ages and the followers insist on its literal truth - hence it cannot be changed. Any reasonable person would ask where in the Qur'an does it say anything about teddy-bears? The unreasonable will scour the book for any reference that justifies the interpretation of blasphemy. Guess who's in charge?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/7114439.stm

Apparently religious folks are responsible for the decline in faith because they have been treating god as a "fact in the world" - that's according the crusty cardinal Cormack Murphy O'Connor. You see the problem is that you apparently can't treat imaginary gods as if they were real without sounding, well, a bit whacky.

Instead he was arguing for keeping the mystery and his coup de grace was explaining that his god also existed for atheists too, it's just that they didn't recognise it. He explained (though that's really stretching the meaning of the word to the limit) that a life without religion was dangerous and used Hitler and Stalin to frighten the children. He tried to imply that a secular society would end up like Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany.

But then, as if not really being convinced of the strength of his argument, he declares that "To believe in god is not unreasonable." Errr, yes it is!

The big problem with any arguments with theists is that they dispense with reason in the first breath - it's a faith thing and therfore does it does not have to meet the rigorous standards of reasoned argument and it reduces to "I believe because I believe because..." As Dawkins pointed out, there are no other areas of human dialogue where such positions would be taken seriously.

In the political arena where such claims are the expression of blind prejudice, they start wars. Take for example the belief that Blair and Bush had about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. There was no evidence but they didn't need it, because they were guided by that alluring vagueness called faith, and as we all know, nothing fails quite like faith.

The whole point of the movement called the Enlightenment was to subject claims to reasoned testing, to free people from irrational leaps of faith which often had dire consequences. Instead of killing people who became ill, under the medieval backwardness of belief in devils, we started to make medical advances, to study the symptoms, try to identify causes.

Instead of the cardinal offering patronising and disingenuous respect for atheists, he would be better advised to try to improve his ability to reason rationally, to question faith wherever it appears and to promote scepticism, and above all, to respect the advances in knowledge brought about by the very rationality he fears so much.

Cardinal, witch doctor, shaman, and crystal-selling new age mystic merchant... they all have the characteristic that they've dispensed with reason. You wouldn't want any of them making decisions that affected you.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7390941.stm

Well I must admit, I thought it was paranoia at first, the idea that an open social networking site would ban atheism from its groups. It just seemed absurd... but it seems to be true. If you go to MySpace and try to find atheist groups, you'll find a few tiny groups, no trace of the largest group, the Atheist and Agnostic Group which prior to November 2007 sported over 35,000 members.

It seems religious intolerants simply report the group for having ideas offensive to them, and the group gets banned - and it seems impossible to be un-banned.

There are several possible responses to this silliness. Play tit-for-tat and simply report any and every religious group for offensiveness, insult to reason, etc. Turn the other cheek and abandon MySpace which is essentially giving in. Launch a campaign to expose the intolerance by reporting this widely and raising the issue wherever we can to make it plain how religious influence inhibits free discussion. Perhaps a combination of all three would make the rulers of MySpace review their policy of closing down atheist discussion.

If you read this, please post a notice on your own blog, forum, discussion group, etc. You can see more at: http://www.secularstudents.org/node/1933

Late addition: There does seem to be some indication that the group was hacked and that the new site is at http://groups.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=groups.groupProfile&groupID=100002606&Mytoken=2D2AA199-7777-4D8F-BB118B8C54BAD16A17021819

It's version III of the group which tells its own story...

If I said I was a deity, I would be judged to be insane or at the very least deluded. If on the other hand I said I believed in a deity, I'd belong to a very large group of followers of a religion.

The credibility gap seems to concern the distance from the evidence and the demands made. If an individual of our acquaintance claimed to be a deity, we would expect them to have supernatural powers, omniscience, and other characteristics we know from experience to be impossible for humans. So we rule out the possibility that they could be a deity, and regard them as dishonest, insane, or at least deluded.

So as long as the idea of a god is out of reach of evidence, separated from the world of consequences where such a claim could be challenged, it can remain apparently credible. Any demand for evidence is dismissed by the definition of a god - a god is ineffable, omniscient, ever-present, invisible, etc. For the world of everyday reality, gods cannot be shown to exist because there can be no tangible consequence. For many that's enough to rule them out.

So to provide justification for belief, there has to be some indication which will attract and convince believers. So an appeal is made to explain the origin of some mysterious aspect of human lives. Typically this involves quasi-mystical concepts like "the good", "evil", "truth" and so on. Since such concepts cannot be explained on a factual basis (they refer to intangible concepts or at best are simply adjectives), they are placed in an appropriately abstract state - ready for an equally abstract untestable explanation.

Now this abstract space that religion occupies is full of controversy. Since nothing can be demonstrated, everything can be challenged and churches, though united in their main aims (perpetuation and growth), can only appeal to equally abstract ineffable causes.

In much the same way as philosophers have entertained themselves discussing the nature of reality without arriving at anything approaching a consensus, religious discussion has as a sole purpose (soul purpose?), the perpetuation of the focus on the question in dispute. Making the question of "good" and "evil" into a difficult question, lends apparent profundity to the question.

In fact, terms like "good" and "evil" are adjectives used to express a comparison with our own values. We judge things to be good or evil in comparison to values we support. There is nothing in reality that corresponds to the good, or the evil. It's a false profundity.

Unfortunately, theological discussion and its philosophical equivalents provide career paths for those perpetuating the confusion. But a moment's clear thinking shows the absurdity. Given that there is some deity, how is its nature discovered in such a way that we can distinguish between support for Zeus, or Odin, or Allah, or Jahweh, or any of the thousands of others? And if all are equivalent, we are reducing religion to a psychological and social phenomenon. That's why religions fiercely defend their differences. But there is no strictly philosophical basis for ruling out any of them if any of the others are included.

On the individual level, how can someone distinguish between what they call a religious experience, and an intense emotional one? It can only be through the way they are predisposed to describe them. And how can such a description be distinguished from delusion? Unfortunately, it can't.

It's only the social acceptability of religious statements which avoids religious individuals being considered as delusional. Society accepts religious statements as non-delusional whereas psychologically equivalent statements which talk about supernatural beings would be considered medically significant, and the individuals would be given some form of treatment.

For the religious, their forms of thinking, providing they are mild, doubtless have psychological benefits. But those benefits apply equally to other beliefs in imaginary beings. A child takes comfort from the presence of an imaginary friend - the comfort is no less real for the fact that the friend is imaginary.

But equally, reliance on emotionally perceived messages from deities, imaginary friends, or other delusional objects, can have serious consequences. While the messages from god accord with normal social values, we say that people are "good". When they don't, we lose no time in diagnosing the patients as schizophrenic. When they are muslim suicide bombers, we call them terrorists. When it's someone like George Bush who claimed to have a hotline to God, millions of Americans took him seriously and Iraqis are still suffering the consequences.

The belief that some religious people have that the deity is what keeps them moral is perhaps the most worrying aspect of religion. If an insubstantial super-being is required to keep them in tune with accepted social values (which we call morality), then their behaviour is on very shaky ground indeed. Far better that they lose the mystical and engage honestly with the values of society that they support, and dispute those they disagree with. At least they, and everyone else, will know where they stand.

The Blue Brain project has been working since 2005 on using supercomputers to simulate the operation of parts of the brain, producing a computer model which behaves in the same way brain tissue behaves.

The Blue Brain Project.

Simulated Brain Cortical Stem.

The purpose of the research is to develop simulated models which can show the same response to their environment as human tissue and that offers enormous therapeutic and research potential. For example, if the simulated tissue reacts in the same way as human tissue, we can experiment with the simulation to see how, for example, it will react when treated with certain drugs. Or how it would respond over time if a section of it was removed.

It has already been shown that the simulation can learn and remember and the researchers are able to see memories being retrieved. So not only do these simulations have medical research potential, but they also illustrate a very controversial aspect of human brains - consciousness.

One theory of the brain argues that consciousness is what is called an "emergent property" of brain tissue. When the brain complexity reaches a certain point, it becomes able to monitor its own functions, to become self-aware. At that point, it is argued, the brain shows the properties we identify as "consciousness". This comes in varying degrees, from vague awareness of individuality, to sophisticated abilities to think on demand and to be aware of doing so. Manipulating concepts, recalling memories on demand, exhibiting emotions, all have their roots in consciousness.

If these simulated models can be shown to possess emergent properties, then the whole debate about mind-brain takes an interesting turn. Religious people particularly maintain that people have something ethereal called a "soul", some immaterial essence derived from some spark of life. The only evidence ever offered for such a notion has been the first-person reports of individual belief, which of course is never susceptible to rational investigation. You either believe the report, or you don't - you can't test whether or not it's true because it depends on the perception of the individual reporting it.

But if a machine simulation can demonstrate just those characteristics of consciousness, self-awareness, memory, emotion, etc, then we have a curious situation. A machine which can report exactly the same first-person sensations, feelings, as a human. What then happens to the notion of a soul? Does the machine simulation have a soul? Religious folk would be opposed to the notion, but they would find it difficult to distinguish between a machine claiming a soul and a human, other than by insisting a soul only belongs to a human.

But by defining a soul as something specific to humans, in a form which cannot be investigated, the term loses any meaning beyond an expression of faith.

It's early days yet and although the Blue Brain project has produced some impressive initial results, they haven't produced anything too challenging for religious irrationalists but that will change. Give a machine self-awareness and the ability to make moral judgements based on ethical principles, and we could see the arrival of a new kind of Turing Test, one based on distinguishing between a dogmatic clerical leader and a Mark 1 Moral Reasoning Engine. My guess is that they'd be almost indistinguishable at the outset but the machine would learn and quickly outstrip the clerics.

That wouldn't be a major milestone since dogmatic ethics is very limited, but the process of moral learning would be a clear indication that moral reasoning does not require belief in any deity. People can be good without a God.

The recent publication of the report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse was frightening in more ways than one. It took evidence from over 2000 people who suffered at the hands of the educational establishments run by the catholic church over a period of six decades, and discovered that sexual abuse was "endemic" in boys schools, and that thousands of boys and girls were terrorised by priests and nuns. The Commission found that physical abuse and neglect was rife, that church officials encouraged ritual beatings, and that they shielded their orders' paedophiles from arrest.

It also found that government inspectors failed to stop beatings, rapes and humiliation.

Such a discovery invokes the utmost disgust in decent people and those affected rightly expected that the report's publication should lead to criminal charges, trials, prosecutions and sentences. And yet none of that will happen!

The reason for this baffling evasion of responsibility? The church, in the form of the Christian Brothers, sued the Commission to keep the identities of all of its members, dead or alive, unnamed in the report. That's right! The Catholic Church went to court to pursue its evasion of the law to protect from criminal prosecution those very people it had entrusted with the education of young people, and who perpetrated decades of child abuse.

So not only did the church tolerate and even condone the beating and abuse of children in its care, but it sees no moral conflict in continuing to protect those who perpetrated the abuse from criminal charges. So that's our example of catholic church moral standards - condone the institutional abuse, then use the law to protect those known to be guilty!

Of course, the Pope is wringing his hands in sorrow, and the Bishop of Down and Connor has offered an apology talking about his "visceral pain",all breath-taking in its insincerity. How can they possibly be apologising when the institution they represent has acted to prevent the perpetrators facing criminal charges?

So next time a Christian explains how it is their religion that informs them about what is right and wrong, how their beliefs provide their moral compass, we can now see more plainly than ever that morality consists of social values and the church, as much as any other institution has to be held accountable to society. Leaving religious people to interpret their moral codes according to some supra-social dogma is socially dangerous whether it's Anglican, Catholic, Islamic, Buddhist, or any other.

Religion is an appalling source for moral values - to get anything at all salvageable from religious dogma, you have to ignore not just large sections of the religious books themselves (which variously glorify everything from mutilation to genocide), but turn a blind eye to the infamous moral record of religious authorities as well.

Leaving the Land of Woo, by Bob Lloyd, is now in production and should be out by the middle of October.

Woo is that land where the constraints of the real world don't apply, where therapies and cures are effected through undetectable energies, where our biochemistry and physiology are irrelevant and are replaced by aligning chakras, and unblocking channels. It's the land where magnets and crystals can influence our bodies in ways unknown to modern science, defying all reason and rationality.

Leaving the Land of Woo looks at how we get our knowledge of the way the world works, how we test it, and how we can challenge theories to see if they are right. It looks at the varieties of Woo including theories about alternative medicine, food, religious beliefs, and claims about the paranormal. It takes a critical look at what these varieties of Woo have in common, and shows how the theories all rely on a believing viewpoint in which our rational faculties are suspended. Such a viewpoint would have catastrophic effects on our practical lives if allowed to extend into all areas, and yet we are led, credulously, to spend vast amounts of money on untested, baseless products.

Leaving the Land of Woo provides a checklist of useful questions to be asked of alternative medicine practitioners, and a guide to evaluating the claims made.

If you have ever even been tempted to spend real money on Woo products, whether alt-med, foody therapies, supplements, detox, or religion, you could save yourself money by buying this book. It would pay for itself just by avoiding one encounter with Woo.

Watch out for the release:
http://www.leavingthelandofwoo.com

It is welcome news that the European Court of Human Rights has ruled against the display of crucifixes in classrooms in Italian schools, on the grounds that it violates the rights of parents to educate their children as they see fit, but more importantly, that it violates the child's right to freedom of religion.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8340411.stm

If schools decided to inculcate in children political beliefs in the same way as church schools indoctrinate children into irrational religious beliefs, there would be a massive public outcry. The schools would be charged with manipulating children, even abusing them. Somehow, our societies grant a free pass to churches to do the same thing with religious ideas.

In Italy now, catholicism is no longer the official state religion but the crucifixes remain. In countries such as Spain, there is an ongoing conflict between the secular state and the catholic church. There, the catholic church has benefited massively from a default tick box on tax forms which channels funds destined either for charity or the church itself. Even priests were paid for by the state. And despite formally being a secular state, the church still has a very strong involvement in education.

In the UK, the growth of faith schools increases the likelihood of religious indoctrination of children. Almost every new school now has a religious involvement despite education being officially secular.

It will be interesting to see how other countries react to the ruling. Although some have been only too willing to campaign against the wearing of islamic dress in schools, they've often shied away from including crucifixes, yarmulkas, fish badges and the like. But surely there's a difference between the individual expression of a religious belief, and the public display of an institutions support for it when that institution is entrusted with the education of children?

We should be teaching children to be critical when presented with irrational religious ideas. They should be able to think critically about them, understand their social and political significance, understand their consequences. They need to know about religions but that emphatically means not educating them into religions.

Whenever there is a natural disaster, the media always turns to some religious representative to wallow in the suffering, to explain that God is with us, that there is some underlying fundamental reason for suffering, and that people shouldn't see the tragedy as any reason to doubt their faith.

And the media always accepts that position with only the mildest of criticisms. Even the formidable John Humphrys of Radio 4's Today programme today gave the Bishop of York, John Sentamu, an easy ride as he sat quiet during the bishop's hopelessly incoherent diatribe. The worthy bishop was wrestling with a question that Humphrys put to him: how can a merciful god be responsible for such devastating disasters? For a bishop you'd think the question would be easy.

Of course it's a fair question and one which cannot be answered by the religious. The worthy bishop wriggled all over the place talking about the goodness of Christ, and the munificence of nature, and the power and beauty of the world, and all that stuff. But what he couldn't do was explain the actions of a supposed all-powerful deity causing disaster. You have to be a deluded theologian to wriggle out of that.

Haiti lies on the edge of the Carribbean tectonic plate and one of the fault lines which has been stable for the last three centuries or so, gave way to the pressure of plate movement. It was around 10km down in the ground that the quake occurred. That has nothing whatsoever to do with ideas about mythical super-beings, omniscient gods, or anything of the kind. This is a geological process which is well-understood but difficult to predict.

Whenever there is a disaster of some kind, it is natural that the media will focus on the human aspects of the story, the suffering, the relief effort, the economic and social consequences, and will try to convey the sense of human loss.

But to have a religious representative pontificating about the goodness of his mystical deity and coming over all pious about his sympathy towards the suffering people of Haiti, is not just irrelevant, but somewhat insulting. Attempting to gain publicity for religion at a time of such enormous suffering is opportunist and cynical at best.

And far from being a reason for deepening faith in religion, such disasters ought to help people realise that there is a material world, subject to physical laws and it operates quite independently from any mystical super-beings.

Such disasters show very clearly how utterly irrelevant religion is to the real practical interests of living people. If the religious bodies want an all-powerful god in charge of everything that happens in the universe, let's see them step up to the plate and claim responsibility on his behalf, instead of wriggling incoherently to evade it.

You can see the reports now. As the leader of a multi-billion dollar industry, the Pope as the CEO takes all major decisions and also bears the overall responsibility for the organisation and its activities.

Faced with the incontrovertible evidence that there has been systematic breaking of the law and abuse of children across the organisation, that there has been a systematic cover up and protection of those who should have been brought to justice, the Pope, as the person with whom the buck stops, has decided to live up to his responsibilities as CEO and offered his resignation.

No doubt he would receive massive compensation for his resignation as is typical in multinational business enterprises where a CEO has brought the corporation to the point of (moral) collapse, and a place will doubtless be found for him to serve on various international or government bodies, perhaps specialising in ethics.

Those around him will acknowledge his bravery and honour in taking his responsibility seriously and doing, albeit belatedly, the decent thing.

But of course, that won't happen. Despite the abominable actions of a church administration bent on covering up crime and protecting its own, despite the enormous weight of evidence from thousands of people who were abused as children by representatives of the church, the Pope is wringing his hands and regretting all sorts of things. But what he won't do is accept any personal responsibility and take appropriate action.

Because although it is a religion business, indeed a massive multinational corporation with investment branches all over the world, in this case the CEO is declared to be infallible. And of course, if he's infallible, then he can't have made any mistakes and so cannot bear any blame. There must be many thousands of CEOs around the world envious of his position, powerful yet free from criticism, directing but without responsibility, issuing instructions yet answerable to no-one, apparently not even a god.

Being the infallible interpreter of a voice from an immaterial superbeing clearly has its advantages. It would be understandable if catholics took the opportunity to distance themselves from this odious hypocritical religious administration. After all, it's run as a business, selling a product whilst abusing the faith and confidence of millions, harbouring a distinctly criminal element, to which it has turned a pious blind eye for decades. Why would anyone have any confidence in them at all?

Whilst of course it is very welcome that the official catholic establishment expresses its own horror and dismay at the extent of child abuse within its institition, the concentration on feelings, with phrases like "deep sorrow" and "heartfelt sorrow", and their sense of "deep shame" serves as a smoke screen in front of the legal reality.

The Pope was, and is, the CEO of a major international corporation in whose midst child abuse was carried out systematically and the institution itself participated both actively and passively to avoid it coming to light. And now we are asked to accept an apology and heartfelt sorrow in lieu of legal culpability. The idea that he is to do "penance" is simply insulting. He doesn't seem to acknowledge that he is legally obliged to conform to secular law.

The truth of the matter is that in any corporation, the CEO is where the buck stops. Since the Pope's administration of the corporation played a significant role in preventing these crimes from coming to light sooner, there is no legal difference between that and any other conspiracy to protect the criminally guilty.

As an accessory, the Pope should face charges along with all the Bishops who knowingly failed to act, who left child-abusers in post, or transferred them to fresh new pastures. And the hand-wringing apologies are simply not a way of addressing legal culpability.

There is a popular myth inside the Christian churches that representatives follow a "higher law", that of God's law. They popularise the notion that judgement before this mythical superbeing is somehow more fundamental and significant than being answerable to secular law, the law governing our societies.

And in the pretence of being deistically accountable, they seek to avoid being judged by a rather more mundane secular process. But that absolutely should not happen. The church is not above the law. Just because their representatives claim allegiance to a superbeing, that does not mean they have a "get out of jail card".

Once convicted and sentenced, they may well take solace from the fact that they have at least paid an earthly price for their crimes but any claims they might have to be dealing with the superbeing, far less actually following his will, must remain outside the scope of law.

Let them face charges in court and let them answer to our justice system. If they want to do religious penance as well then so be it but it absolutely is not a substitute for the legal process. The sooner prosecutors stiffen their backbone and address the legal issues, the better.

Given the lamentable record of the Catholic Church in addressing the long-standing criminal activities of its child-abusing members, it is no surprise that the Belgian authorities saw fit to confiscate material which was being reviewed by the bishops.

If the bishops had had a clear intention of addressing the issue, instead of working on the material themselves, they would have voluntarily involved criminal investigators. That they didn't do so is sufficient grounds for having zero confidence in their ability to address the issue.

We are left wondering what, if anything, they intended to do. Suppose they found evidence of child abuse. Their first decision would have been whether or not to inform the criminal investigators and that allows for the possibility that they might not have. It is entirely possible that in the interests of their own institution, the church, they would make a decision to attempt to resolve the "problem" internally. That of course, it utterly unacceptable.

The very fact that they were willing to filter through potential evidence and make a prior judgement about what if anything would be reported to the police shows how malleable is their sense of morality and justice. There should have been no question of the church looking into crimes committed within its ranks. Those criminal child abusers are subject to criminal law, defined and implemented by the state. They are not first accountable to the church.

There is an important principle here. The church has always pretended that they are answerable to some "higher authority", as if that supersedes the laws of the state. The church has behaved as if it can pick and choose whether or not to subject itself to civil law and the Belgian authorities have demonstrated that they don't have the choice.

The potential for incriminating evidence to be hidden away under the guise of "confidentiality" meant that the only way for the police to be sure of getting at the evidence itself was to seize it. The church should be ashamed of trying to conduct an internal review instead of voluntarily opening its documents to criminal investigators. This doesn't show the church implementing its so-called "zero tolerance" policy, but of once again trying to hide from the public gaze the shameful internal workings of the church administration.

We can see why so many people have "zero confidence" in the morality of the church.

The Vatican has announced losses for the third year with income of around €250m and expenditure at €254m. Donations from the faithful in churches were up 9% to $82m.

What this shows is that even though the church has been involved in the most disgraceful actions over the exposure of child abusers in its organisation, including refusing to release name to an investigation, the faithful still rally around and give it money.

With an income of a quarter of a billion Euros, it's obviously a very big international business but given that it's major iconic product is falling apart at the seams, that it's social influence attracts odium rather than passive acceptance, and that its political past is mired in right-wing dictatorships and repressive regimes, it's no wonder that it is beginning to lose money.

With ethical positions that beggar belief from the refusal to allow condoms in the campaign against AIDS, through to it's appalling treatment of women, to its persecution of gays, it's a wonder any catholics remain who try to justify the church position.

On a social level, parents must be very worried about the protection their children receive at the hands of catholic education. Even though the actual risks of crimes being committed is low, the fear is produced by the church's unwillingness to address the issue openly and forcefully.

Hopefully this is a sign that people are waking up to the irrelevance of religion, to the distorted social reality it engenders, to the prejudice and moral bankruptcy of religious institutions.

But then maybe we'll see a rebranding exercise. Isn't that what businesses do when they find themselves up against the wall? Change the logo? Change the name?

It has always been popular amongst religious people to claim that atheists have no source of their moral values, that atheists are by definition immoral.

Qualiasoup has an excellent video presentation which exposes this argument in all its glory and like all the other Qualiasoup videos, this one is highly recommended.

It is understandable that not many people want to see the Pope during his visit to the UK. After all, he's the head of an international business that systematically covered up the most appalling abuses of children across several continents, turning a blind eye to the most glaring evidence, permitting the criminals to hide and continue their abuse.

Instead of looking after the welfare of the children in its care, the church concerned itself only with the spiritual welfare of the child abusers. Such a staggeringly distorted sense of ethics and morality leaves decent people with a sense of disgust, and many wonder why the Pope, as the CEO of the catholic church, doesn't resign and submit himself to the mercy of the courts.

But as if that is not enough, the catholic church has always been a reactionary monstrosity promoting prejudice and discrimination completely out of step with modern society. Through its attitude to gays and to women, as well as its support for authoritarian right-wing regimes, it has shown itself to be anathema to any sense of social progress or justice.

In its pronouncements on the issue of HIV/AIDS, it has elevated following its dogma over the very lives of those at risk of the disease. Condoms can prevent infection and that simple fact alone should, for anyone with a sense of morality, trump any religious dogma. Not so for the catholic church. It would rather see thousands die than compromise its antiquated and socially hostile position.

And then of course there is the position on abortion. Failing to understand the difference between a small collection of cells and a human being, the church insists on the immaterial existence of something called a soul, yet another dogmatic belief that flies in the face of what we already know. Ignoring the welfare of women, it forces desperate people to the backstreet abortionists.

So the church opposes stem cell research which can potentially save many lives. It opposes abortion even in the case of rape victims. It hides child abuse inside its own institutions and protects the abusers. It forces catholics to risk AIDS rather than to take sensible precautions by using condoms. It supports autocratic and dictatorial right wing regimes. And yet it claims the Pope is infallible! It's as anachronistic as the Qur'an and the Pope is every bit as reactionary as the most literal of Ayatollahs.

Why would anyone be surprised that so few people actually want to be in the company of this crowd? What could they expect to see as the slogans of the tour? Die for Dogma? Suffer Little Children? We can only hope that this falling off of ticket sales (did we say "sales"?) is the beginning of mass disillusion with the religious bandwaggon. When an institution is this rotten, the only thing to do with it is to close it down.

To many moral and ethical atheists, the statement from the Pope today is an appalling and disgraceful insult. To compare people who do not believe in a superbeing to the Nazis under Hitler is an monstrous insult, implying that it is the lack of belief that leads people to the inhuman acts carried out by the Nazis.

Ratzinger of course belonged to the Hitler Youth but that was because it was compulsory for boys of his age. He had no choice. The removal of his rights by Nazi society meant that he experienced the indoctrination of a state which glorified race above all else. It fueled the racism against the Jews, and the brutal anihilation of every organisation that expressed independent will. It's a bit like the lack of choice shown children educated in Catholic schools from an early age and it might be suggested that this relates to the torture and abuse of the Inquisition - just a thought.

But of course, such a crude simplistic interpretation of history is just plain stupid. Only prejudice would lead someone to such mendacious conclusions.

Atheism, by contrast, is simply the expression of disbelief in a deity. That doesn't imply that atheists are devoid of ethical judgement, or moral values. Atheists are every bit as moral and ethical as anyone else and they get those values from the society around them, from their peers, from all the cultural and historical influences to which they are subjected, just like any religious people.

Morality doesn't come from religion even in the case of religious people. It comes from the cultural mixture of influences in the society in which we live, and that's as true of Christians as anyone else. To imply that religion is necessary for morality is an enormous arrogance, and historical and socially inaccurate to say the least.

But what the Pope was really complaining about what the free expression of disbelief. In his world, if someone argues that religion is something that should not be foisted on children, that is interpreted as a violation of the child's rights. It seems that the Pope is utterly impervious to the blatant irony of this position, especially glaring given the manifest failure of the Catholic Church to even consider the rights of children during the recent child abuse enquiries.

But the expression of free will, free thought, the right to question values and social assumptions, is a sign of a healthy society. Being willing and able to question religious beliefs, just like political beliefs, is something we should encourage in our children.

The Pope sees this as an "aggressive form of secularism" but what he really means is that it is overt. Openly challenging beliefs is something that happens in a democratic society, a society very far from the cloistered secret world of the Vatican.

In his speech today, he drew attention to the attitude of Nazis to Christian pastors yet failed to mention the attitude of the Catholic church to dissidents and those of a challenging point of view. The Inquisition was hardly the most democratic of methods of opening a constructive dialogue.

People are increasingly turning away from religion for very good reasons. It is based on hypocrisy. It is internally inconsistent and externally inconsistent with what we know of the real world. There is no evidence to support any of the claims made by religions. It morally distorts those who cling to its precepts. It is politically disastrously reactionary. Historically it has always backed oppressors against the common people. And it relies on theologians to reinterpret anachronistic dogma in a vain attempt to make it relevant to modern society.

There is quite simply nothing offered by religion that is not already available in society from secular sources. Morality, ethics, open discussion, reason, compassion, love, caring and all the other valuable social qualities exist independently of any religious belief. People are better able to be moral and ethical people if they dismiss religion and think for themselves.

And that's why the Pope sees this approach as "aggressive". He is an anachronism, a wealthy, powerful man leading a largely secret and conspiratorial society of clerics, and in every sense he is no more progressive than the most reactionary of islamic clerics. More and more people are realising this and we should all be pleased with that.

There is an interesting conundrum facing the advocates of faith schools in the UK because the composition of the erstwhile Roman Catholic Sacred Heart Primary School in Blackburn is now apparently 97% muslim and as a result, there is likely to be a change of management. What that really means is that the families claim the religion of their children is that way - the children themselves haven't had the opportunity to exercise any right to develop their own beliefs.

The Catholic Church though, recognising that their creed does not fit with the majority of their clientele, has decided that it is no longer "appropriate" that the church should be running the school. Instead, they seem to be in negotiations with a nearby mosque.

This will doubtless cause some difficulty for those right-wing advocates of parental choice, who support the creation and existence of faith schools. On the one hand, they want to promote religion in schools, but on the other they will be fearful of the significance of a conversion of a Roman Catholic school to Islam. They want Christian church schools not islamic schools. They want Christian indoctrination, not children learning the Suras of the Qur'an.

Already there are xenophobic responses talking about Islam taking over, about forcing communities to convert, about indoctrinating children. But the irony is that every religious school indoctrinates its children. The whole point of religious schools is to get at children because they are at an age when they will believe what they are told. They have yet to develop their critical faculties and so are unlikely to question the irrational nature of religious belief.

One of the consequences of promoting religious education is precisely that there will be challenges between different religions. When one religion argues that they are the chosen race, or that Jesus was nothing more than a Prophet, or that there is no such thing as the Trinity, or that transubstantiation is an abomination, religious conflict inevitably ensues.

These struggles between different branches of irrationalism harm children, divide communities, and cause conflict. Religion is a problem, not a solution. The obvious answer is to remove religious influence from all schools. We should not accept the subjection of our children to religious indoctrination any more than we would accept political indoctrination in schools.

Already, the comments on web reports of the possible change of management of the school are showing vicious racist sentiments with some people talking about Asian take-overs, forced conversion to Islam and other xenophobic fears. But the reality is that if any school is based on a religious creed, it will encourage those xenophobic attitudes. And as demographics change, so will the dominant religion.

It is this worry that preoccupied many Protestants in the North of Ireland. Larger catholic families led to predictions that pretty soon, the Protestants would lose control of councils, and see their privileges disappear. That fear led to a hardening of prejudice.

Religion and racism are very closely connected. Religions define themselves through difference, suspicion, division and separation. Chosen races, exclusive rituals, separate institutions and hierarchies, together with religious books that express violent attitudes to those not believing the same things, all encourage hostility. Every religion claims their god is loving and compassionate but is also vengeful, violent, and punishing.

Little wonder then that the communities based on these religious beliefs express the same attitudes to each other. There are those who seek peaceful coexistence but within their religious doctrines is embedded just the prejudice against the other which fuels hostility and conflict. Religion is not the solution but one of the problems.

The Blackburn case is a classic example of the damage done by religious indoctrination of children. We should get religion out of the schools and give the children a secular education which equips them to assess the rationality or otherwise of religious claims. That will help undermines the horrible tradition of xenophobia that always surrounds these religious racist attitudes.

Some have argued that it was a case of "white flight", white racists moving out of the area rather than share their schools with families with Asian roots. As they allowed their prejudice to guide them out of the area, they simultaneously blamed muslims for taking over their schools. The connection between religion and racism could hardly be more acute.

Blackburn will doubtless have a public and nasty debate about this school but the interests of the children should raise the issue of the damage caused by religion in school. If the school was secular, with no involvement from any religious authority, why would it matter at all what religious beliefs were held by any of the families sending their children there?

Why would there be any issue to argue about at all? Instead of talking about muslim takeover, or forced conversions, there would be an atmosphere of liberation of the children from oppressive religious dogmatism, a flourishing of rational enquiry, a freedom to believe what they wanted. Isn't that what education ought to be about?

In an interesting twist, the Pope appears to be changing his mind on allowing the use of condoms but this poses rather a dilemma for papal infallibility.

Either he was right to condemn the use of condoms under every circumstance, or he was wrong. If his new decision to permit the use of condoms in certain circumstances is right, then his previous decision was certainly wrong which demonstrates, as if it is was ever needed, that the pope is indeed fallible.

On the other hand, if he is wrong now in changing his stance, as certainly the more conservative elements in the clergy will feel, then that too demonstrates his fallibility.

Of course, what will actually happen is that the theologians will weave a new web of casuistry to justify this sudden new insight into the meaning of the Christian faith so that the Pope can be let off this dilemma.

But coming alongside his change of heart, ought to be a willingness to accept responsibility. For years and years, he has been condemning the use of condoms in the fight against AIDS and as a consequence, countless thousands of people have become infected and died. He bears a responsibility for the consequences of his advice and we might reasonably expect him to acknowledge that.

Of course though, he won't. Just as he won't accept the responsibility of the CEO of the world catholic corporate business in holding himself ultimately culpable for allowing paedophile priests to hide from the law, he won't now hold himself responsible for his own actions.

In the peculiar world of religious hierarchies, he thinks he is outside of the law, answering instead to an invisible super-being. How much longer is this reactionary anachronism going to be allowed to influence world opinion? As the catholic church lurches from one crisis to another, we can hope that more and more people will see through the nonsense and take control of their own lives.