Category: Religion

Posts on religion and secularism, and how religion can intrude on secular interests.

Why should anybody (secular) get married?

ban-marriage-bigOne of my final tasks for the year just ended was to write a test on the Civil Union Act, which regulates civil partnerships and marriages in South Africa. If I achieve over 80% on this test, an official-looking letter will arrive sometime in 2014, attesting to the fact that I am now a marriage officer, authorised to solemnise civil unions.

In light of deciding to take this test and become a marriage officer, I’d been planning to sketch an argument for why marriage is a reasonable state to enter into. That task has been made either slightly easier – or more difficult, perhaps – thanks to Tauriq Moosa having subsequently posted rebuttals to some common arguments for marriage at The Guardian‘s “Comment is Free” blog. Easier, in that half my job would be achieved through defeating his negative arguments, but also potentially more difficult in that if I can’t do so, my positive arguments would need to be all the stronger.

I’ll start with Tauriq’s post (the informality is explained by the fact that we know each other socially, and “Moosa” would thus be jarringly formal). To put it really crudely, I’m of the view that his post is open to charges of being somewhat disingenuous in how it represents marriage. I say this because while it purports to be a critical analysis of some alleged myths about marriage, the exploration of those myths seem to be little but a prologue to get to an expression of Tauriq’s own view, expressed in his conclusion as follows:

For myself, I can see no reason that sufficiently makes marriage, in general, a viable option worth wanting or supporting. I would much rather live in a society that had little interest in my relationship life, but protected me and everyone nevertheless. It’s not a black-and-white situation of total societal interest or disinterest. Keep marriage, if you so want, but it shouldn’t hamper or restrict others from benefits or equal treatment, especially when there appears so little reason for having it.

The reason why the “myths” are little but a prologue (in other words, serving little argumentative function) is because by Tauriq’s own evidence, they are no longer widely believed to be true. So, they are being trotted out as straw men, with Tauriq arguing against a minority position, in order that he can defeat those straw men on the way to (and as a motivation for) asserting his own view. Asserting your own view is of course the point (or part of the point) of an opinion column, but here, his view is granted extra (yet illusory) credence through the demolition of the straw man.

It’s an entirely separate issue whether the minority view in question is a good one or a bad one. The point I’m making so far is simply limited to the fact that my own view doesn’t get bolstered to any great extent through showing that a minority of people believe the opposite. Defeating a fringe position, in other words, is no cause for celebration.

I say that the myths no longer have any social currency, and that subscribing to the myths is a fringe position, because of exactly the evidence Tauriq himself cites – that increasingly, people aren’t bothering to get married. He cites data showing the US marriage rate to currently be at the lowest it has been in a century, with 31 marriages per 1,000 married women now, compared to 92.3/1000 in 1920.

The same decline in the rate of people getting married is evident across Europe (the graph below, note, is tabulated per 100 1000 people, not 1000 women)

 eurostat-marriage-rates

You can see plenty more data like this (including on how many women are getting married, and at what ages) on Philip N. Cohen’s website, where the post containing the table above asserts that “marriage decline is both worldwide and real”. So it doesn’t seem, contra Tauriq, that “we should thoroughly reassess the importance of marriage” – it seems like we already have. So do we still need to explode the “myth” that marriage is useful, virtuous, necessary and so forth? Or, is going through the motions of doing so just a pretext to express a (supposedly) contrarian view (yet, one that seems fairly widely held in the end)?

Furthermore, contrary to the perception endorsed in Tauriq’s post, it’s not clear that those who do chose to get married also get divorced in higher proportions (at least, not in the UK and USA). In the UK, the Office for National Statistics does record a step-change in divorce rates in the early 1970s, but notes (pdf) that this “rise is often attributed to changing legislation (the Divorce Reform Act 1969 and Matrimonial Causes Act 1973) and changing attitudes in society”. Leaving aside this step-change, they report that long-term divorce rates seem to have remained stable. This is apparently also true in the USA, though the data are apparently incomplete. I’ll not pin anything on the existence of a trend one way or the other though, as doing so incompetently will no doubt incur the wrath of the guild of demographers.

I’ll move on to the four “myths” that Tauriq lists, as it is here where I’ll interject thoughts regarding the positive argument for marriage (whether or not we think of marriage as a religious institution).

“Myth” 1 – It’s tradition

Here, Tauriq rightly points out that none of “tradition, religion, family and/or culture” are sufficient to justify marriage (“or any activity”). Sure, but so what? It’s true, as he points out, that arrangements that depend solely on those sorts of (often coercive) factors would often involve moral wrongs or adherence to archaic norms, but this is little but another straw man. What if a) a couple want to be married; and b) it happens to be the “right thing to do” according to their tradition, culture, family or religion? Should they refuse, or quell their desire to be married, simply because other people only get married because of (b)? For people who meet criterion (a), (b) is not a problem – it would arguably only make their marriage more meaningful, both to themselves and to other members of that community/culture/religion/etc.

“Myth” 2 – It’s a public declaration of love

Tauriq argues that marriage is

about “showing” we’re settled, our partners are “off the market”, and we’re in a position to build a family. Most of this, however, is a display for others. Plenty of monogamous couples maintain stable, healthy relationships without rings or certificates to “prove” loyalty

Sure, many do, but it’s entirely unclear how this adds up to the public declaration of love being a myth, or inconsequential, for those of us who do appreciate tokens of commitment such as rings, and symbolic events for attesting to that commitment, such as weddings. The view here seems a fairly misanthropic one, which simply rules out the possibility of others having a more charitable disposition to these sorts of rituals. Of course it’s true that for some people, marriages can be nothing but meaningless theatre – but then one can argue against those sorts of marriages, rather than dismiss the possibility of marriage always being theatre.

The loss of objectivity (cf. the misanthropy mentioned above) is found in passages like

who are we trying to prove our love to? Our proof should be our treatment of each other: anything else is addition, not basis. There is more to be worried about if we need to “secure” someone, like a raging animal, with a ring or certificate or other public stamp.

To which one can only say “of course, and the caricature doesn’t help make the case”. I don’t know many married couples, to be sure, but I’ve never met one – or even heard of one – that disagrees with the relationship being the important thing in the marriage, with the ring, certificate and so forth being mere legal or symbolic devices that attest to that relationship (for whatever, and various, reasons). Tauriq then says:

Furthermore, as high divorce rates show, being tied to one person doesn’t work out for many, especially for the rest of our lives. Compromises can be made. Couples now swing, maintain open marriages, and so on. But this should only make us question why we’re still devoted to the “one true love” ideal in the first place.

As suggested above, the divorce claim might not be an easy one to substantiate. But the fact that fewer people are getting married – and that the ones who do get married are increasingly open to the sorts of compromises or arrangements he mentions – indicates that we’re (in the majority, I mean) no longer “devoted to the “one true love” ideal in the first place”. To borrow a phrase, this should only make us question why anyone is still saying that we are.

Myth 3 – Married couples make better parents

One one level, of course this is a myth – as Tauriq points out, it’s good parents who make good parents, and being good at that job has nothing to do with your legal standing in relation to a partner or partners (if there are any partners at all, seeing as a single parent can be just as “good”).

Having said that – from a purely pragmatic point of view – if it is the case that a child will accrue certain advantages (or rather, avoid disadvantageous treatment) though her parents being married, married couples would as a side-effect “make [for] better parents”. So, if you know that you are living in a society in which these prejudices exist – and that you have no ability to overturn them in your lifetime – this would be an entirely rational reason to get married.

Myth 4 – You get better legal and financial benefits

I see no reason to disagree with this, in general (and here, Tauriq doesn’t mean that it’s an actual myth, but rather that while true, it’s not a reason to get married but instead a reason to overturn the laws in question). It’s true that in many jurisdictions, married couples accrue certain advantages, and it’s also true that some relevant and archaic laws need revision here, such as in cases where same-sex marriages aren’t recognised. But as I note above, for some people this presents an entirely rational reason for getting married, unless of course we can all be persuaded to boycott the institution until the relevant laws are changed.

To conclude

Why should anyone have to pass a government’s arbitrary, and usually archaic, notion of what constitutes a stable relationship to obtain benefits? If much can be done from a legal and contractual side without marriage, then marriage loses all credibility.

For some people, a legal relationship is what marriage is, though – again, the straw man comes to the fore, where Tauriq seems to think that most people are still living out some sort of fairytale when getting married. Any contract requires a legal definition, and any legal relationship – whether you call it marriage or not – will not differ what what Tauriq is railing against, except it usually won’t be accompanied by a fun party.

Besides, you can play this game with anything, and I hope the reductio will help make the case that singling marriage out is itself somewhat arbitrary. Why should you have to conform to some arbitrary mark on a calendar to have a birthday party? Why can’t you just trust me when I say I’ll repay my home loan, instead of us having to sign this piece of paper? Why can’t I just go in there and help myself from the buffet, without paying for my meal?

Part of what gives a game significance is that there are rules, and that the rules are commonly understood by all the players. Yes, rules can be bad (prohibiting same-sex marriage, for example), and we need to change those bad rules. We are however doing so in much of the world, and our pace in doing so is improving all the time. When people get married – or do anything – for bad reasons, we can criticise their choice. This bears little relation to whether that choice, when properly understood, is a good one or not. A final quote, before I wrap this up:

My point isn’t eradication of marriage, but rethinking marriage’s importance and assumptions. This could help open all people up to different kinds of sexual and romantic interactions they might otherwise never experience – or, at the very least, increase tolerance, since society isn’t rewarding only one kind of relationship. It could help lessen stigma and actually treat all citizens – single, in relationships or otherwise – with respect. Marriage’s benefits, of stability, legal ease and economic pay offs can still be met, without institutionalisation.

To a large extent, the post reads as rethinking entirely constructed, stereotyped, and mostly, uncharitable assumptions regarding the importance of marriage. Some people inside marriages are themselves already open to many different kinds of interaction than they might have been in a marriage 50 years ago, and already be getting married for non-stereotypical reasons. I’m concerned that Tauriq might need to “open up” to the possibility of those kinds of marriage existing too. If he did, “it could help lessen stigma”, and help him treat all married couples “with respect”.

Marriage’s benefits – at least the legal ones, and some of the economic ones – cannot be met without “institutionalisation”, as they would require some form of legal contract, whatever you end up calling that contract. But that’s not the reason I got married, and I don’t think it’s the reason most people get married (though I have no data here).

The analogy I’m fond of in explaining why secular folk still see value in marriage comes from Scott Atran’s work in the evolution of religion, but in particular the insights he integrates via Richard Sosis and Candace Alcorta. Public signalling of a commitment – especially where that signalling is expensive (not only or even necessarily in terms of money, but in terms of consequences) – creates strong incentives to not cheat the co-operative system. It increases co-operation, because the demonstration that you’re playing the same game, by the same rules, has been witnessed by people whose judgements you value, who can do you reputational harm, and who can assist you where necessary also. All of these relationships increase in strength through shared involvement and commitment to rituals that are in essence (but not in effect) arbitrary.

This is the same principle as lies behind behavioural psychology experiments like StickK.com. I wrote about StickK 6 years ago, wondering how long it would survive, and I’m pleased to see that it’s still going strong. Basically, it’s a vehicle for putting your reputation, or your wallet, on the line – you might commit R5000 to a bigot like Errol Naidoo, for example, if you fail to lose 5kg by March (or whatever), and the website’s public record (and enforcement) of this tends to increase compliance. Because you really don’t want to give him your money, you lose the weight.

Reliable signals of commitment tend to be more costly. Sometimes, like in the case of weddings, this can mean “more extravagant”. (For related interesting reading, investigate the “handicap principle“.) And I know that part of Tauriq’s concern here is that he wants us to be better humans, and to not need these sorts of tricks to make us respect each other, or honour our commitments. And perhaps one day we won’t need them at all.

But perhaps, many of us already don’t need them, and instead just enjoy them. Perhaps the ritual, and the state of being married, can actually have significance for us, rather than simply being ceremonial or arbitrary. Yes, some people chose this form of commitment unthinkingly, and marriage as a social convention is often accompanied by wrongs such as paternalism.

It doesn’t need to be, though, and criticisms like the one I deal with above admits to very little nuance, instead succumbing to as crude a set of generalisations as those it purports to critique.

A year without God

imagesYesterday, I was alerted to a peculiar piece on the Huffington Post that describes an ex-pastor’s plan to live as an atheist for a year. I say “peculiar” (and my Tweet yesterday said “bizarre”) because atheism is an ontological position, not a lifestyle. An ontological position, in short, is what you hold to be true. Leaving aside perennial (and sometimes technical) debates about whether atheists are all agnostics, or should call themselves agnostic, a crude summary of things is that atheists have the ontological view that god(s) do not exist, and religious believers have the view that god(s) do in fact exist.

Neither of these positions seem to be something you can “try on”, like you might try on a pair of trousers to see if they fit, or if you like their style. In fact, the whole project reminds me of a sort of Pascal’s Wager in reverse, and therefore open to at least one similar criticism, namely that it’s pretty difficult to “fake” belief or disbelief. Pascal responded to this by arguing that if you apply yourself to religious study, and immerse yourself in religious community, the belief or faith will arrive in time, and your feigned position will become a sincere one.

I don’t want to be snide about Ryan Bell’s (the ex-pastor in question) project here, partly because there’s no reason to be – he certainly seems well-meaning and sincere – and partly because his open-minded approach, and the engagement he’s been trying to have inside the church till now reminds me of Chris Stedman (someone who I think worth taking seriously). Also, I have no doubt that some of the more intemperate atheist bloggers will soon unload their scorn upon him, and perhaps a corrective to that is a useful thing for its own sake. But the model Bell is following seems flawed, in that it confuses lifestyle with ontology, and furthermore, I fear that it obscures two important details.

First, Bell is arguably already an atheist. The lack of conviction he describes, and the lack of closeness to the church, its teachings and its god, offers quite a clear indication that he’s already “lost his faith”. So, one way of putting his resolution would be to say something prosaic like “former pastor decides to leave the church”, and that’s hardly a story.

Dennett and LaScola’s new book, “Caught in The Pulpit: Leaving Belief Behind, offers numerous examples of religious leaders who have lost their faith (you can also read a paper of theirs on this topic for free). Most of these people continue simply going through the motions, but when they stop doing so, it seems a bit dramatic to describe it as a switch to atheism – they are returning to a default state, without the add-on of strange metaphysical beliefs. So framing it as “trying on atheism” feeds, I fear, into the canard about atheism being just like a religion, with its own rites and texts and so forth.

I’d rather suggest that Bell is leaving the church, and proceeding with living a regular secular life. And that makes him just like many people who profess religious belief, in that for both the UK and the USA, it seems to be increasingly common for self-identified religious people to not go to church, not read the Bible (or other text), and not pray. In the UK, the RDFS survey and YouGov data showed evidence of this trend, and each new Pew “Religion and Public Life” report for the USA reveals decreasing consensus as to what it means to be “Protestant” (etc.) in terms of how you live and what you believe.

As you’ve no doubt heard, the fastest-growing “religious” group is the nones, i.e. those who claim to have no religion. One-fifth of the USA public (and a full third of adults under 30) say that they have no religion. Bell, in other words, can be described as shrugging off a needless accessory, rather than “trying out” some other belief system. He’ll be living a secular life, and nothing need change beyond that. At some point – and as I say above, perhaps that point has been reached, and he just hasn’t acknowledged that – he’ll stop believing in God. And it’s then that he will be an atheist, rather than simply “someone who doesn’t pray or go to church”.

The second important issue that I think Bell’s experiment runs the risk of obscuring is highlighted in this quotation:

I will read atheist “sacred texts” — from Hobbes and Spinoza to Russell and Nietzsche to the trinity of New Atheists, Hitchens, Dawkins and Dennett. I will explore the various ways of being atheist, from naturalism (Voltaire, Dewey, et al) to the new ‘religious atheists’ (Alain de Botton and Ronald Dworkin). I will also attempt to speak to as many actual atheists as possible — scholars, writers and ordinary unbelievers — to learn how they have come to their non-faith and what it means to them. I will visit atheist gatherings and try it on.

To speak of learning “how they have come to their non-faith” is an interesting way of putting it, in that it seems to presume that faith is the default. I’m reasonably confident that it’s not, and that if we could wave a magic wand and eliminate all religion today, it would never gain the traction that it currently has ever again – there simply wouldn’t be sufficient numbers of people who would find religious claims plausible for that to happen.

But this isn’t the detail I wanted to highlight. Instead, notice how something which you could also describe as simply “educating yourself” gets framed here as a noteworthy or exceptional task. In highlighting this, I certainly don’t mean to pick on Bell – in this, he’s simply an example of what I think is very common, namely that too few of us (whether religious or not) bother to do the work of properly understanding what the “opposition” is saying, or even what our own intellectual traditions’ arguments are.

I doubt it’s an exaggeration to say that after reading those books, Bell will be more informed regarding atheist arguments than the vast majority of atheists. Given that he’s already (I presume) well-versed in religious arguments, I look forward to following his thoughts during this “year without God”. But the second detail I wanted to highlight is that educating oneself, and reading what your strongest critics say about what you believe – is something religious folk should do in any case, not only when they’re “trying on” atheism, to see if it fits.

Towards a free society and Thinking Things Through

FSI Thinking Things ThroughOn December 3, the Free Society Institute (the secular humanist NPO that I founded here in South Africa) held their third conference, titled “Thinking Things Through“. It was a one-day event, featuring talks on science, freedom of speech, secularism and more. The channel containing all 6 presentations, as well as the panel discussion that rounded off the day, can be found here on YouTube.

My contribution argued that secular humanists – especially in the context of the developing world – should recognise that religion might not be our most pressing concern. The evidence for a negative correlation between religion on the one hand, and education and financial upliftment on the other, seems to be growing.

Second, the sorts of religion that folk in the developed world adhere to is typically nowhere near as concerning as the fanaticism you’ll find in some parts of the world. In summary, the us/them discourse that permeates much of the atheiosphere could well be confusing far more than it clarifies. Watch for yourself, and feel free to comment.

Mandela, atheism and “borrowed interest”

flagAs I remarked in a post on the day after Mr. Mandela’s death, his value to South Africa (in particular) was in the unifying effect that his words, character and narrative offered to us. And while there’s certainly a risk of overdoing the praise-singing and mythologising when an important figure leaves us, it’s arguably more distasteful when such a figure becomes the subject of attempts to illegitimately bask in some reflected glory, through claiming some sort of kinship with them.

In asserting that Mr Mandela’s “atheism” is another reason to celebrate his life, The Freethinker magazine (and, presumably, those who, like Richard Dawkins, retweeted the story in question) seem to be exploiting what I’m told advertising types refer to as “borrowed interest”, but which you might know better as simple opportunistic exploitation of largely irrelevant details about someone’s life.

I say largely irrelevant, because Mandela’s role involved highlighting what we have in common, rather than our differences and antagonisms. If any of the labels we use to describe religion and related issues could fit, the one that would have the best chance would be humanism, because his relationship to the citizens of the world seemed to transcend the quite limited boundaries offered by religion and its explicit opponent, atheism. The focus in religion vs. atheism is on difference, rather than commonality, and hardly seems either a good fit or a fitting thing to bring up while people are still mourning Mandela’s death. It’s crass, and opportunistic.

Furthermore, it also seems largely a fabrication, or at least a fantasy, that he was an atheist at all. The “evidence” offered in The Freethinker consists solely of a birthday wish to Mandela from a South African atheist, urging Mandela to “come out” as an atheist. In another piece, it’s asserted that “the other [after Andrei Sakharov] great moral atheist leader of the 20th century was Nelson Mandela”, but we’re given no reason to believe this assertion to be true.

We do now know that Mandela was a member of the Communist Party, and some might therefore think it follows that he was an atheist. On the other hand, we do know that he was baptised as a Methodist, and we have Wikipedia quoting an interview with Mcebisi Skwatsha, in which Mandela apparently confirmed that he was a Methodist. In Mandela’s book Conversations with Myself, he says “I never abandoned my Christian beliefs”, and a comment on Pharyngula points to a CNN story, where it’s described how Mandela would regularly receive blessings from Chief Rabbi Cyril Harris.

Mandela also spoke at churches on a semi-regular basis, and in short, clearly seemed to have no antipathy to religion. Instead, his attitude to religion seems to have been exactly the right one for the leader of a nation to have – to hold it as a personal issue, and to devote himself to allowing others to exercise their religions, or lacks of religion, in the manner they see fit. In other words, regardless of what his personal beliefs were, he seems to have been fully committed to secularism in government.

When Christians or other religious folk try to claim deathbed conversions, there’s no shortage of voices pointing out how distasteful [it is] to “claim” people for one side or the other. It’s no less distasteful when atheists try to do the same. In this instance, exactly because of Mr Mandela’s apparent reluctance to choose sides in this matter, it’s perhaps even more distasteful than usual.

IHEU Freedom of Thought Report 2013

iheu-logo-2013On International Human Rights Day in 2012, the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) published their inaugural “Freedom of Thought Report”, which highlighted parts of the world in which being an atheist was at least sometimes inconvenient (thanks to legislation that privileged religion, for example), and often dangerous.  For the 2013 version of the report, coverage has been expanded to include every country on the planet, making this an invaluable resource for those who are seeking data on religious freedom, and in particular the freedom to not be religious.

There are some frightening places to be “found out” as an atheist. The report highlights that

  •  Atheists can face death sentences for apostasy in twelve states
  • In 39 countries the law mandates a prison sentence for blasphemy, including six western countries
  • The non-religious are discriminated against, or outright persecuted, in most countries of the world

For a snapshot view of where things are particularly bad, the IHEU has created an interactive map that offers a quick-read indicator of the situation in each country, but if you want to read how the indicators are justified, you’d need to download and read the full report. For South Africa, the IHEU reports that while we do have significant built-in safeguards for religious freedom, there is nevertheless “systemic discrimination” against the non-religious. As regular readers would know, I’ve often highlighted a lack of respect for the National Policy on Religion in Education (meant to keep public schools secular), as well as other more bizarre instances of religion being afforded too much respect, such as with the South African Police Service’s “Occult” investigative unit,

While there might be room to dispute the interpretations given in particular instances, what is of concern is the extent to which this sort of discrimination can be observed, and also the fact that it can be found in some parts of the world you might not expect. Four western countries earn a rating of “Severe”, thanks to legislation that allows for jailing people for blaspheming or disrespecting religion. To quote from the IHEU’s press release,

Those countries are Iceland (a sentence of jail for up to 3 months), Denmark (up to 4 months), New Zealand (up to a year), Poland (up to two years), Germany (up to three years) and Greece (up to three years). Jail time could be handed to someone who simply “blasphemes God” in the case of Greece, or “insults the content of other’s religious faith” in the case of Germany.

As the editor of the report, Bob Churchill, comments:

It may seem strange to see some of these countries up there with Uzbekistan or Ethiopia (also rated “Severe”) but as Kacem and Alber say in the preface, these laws set a trend.  Failure to abolish them in one place means they’re more likely to stay on the books in another place, where they can be disastrous. And even in the western countries with blasphemy-type laws there is evidence that they chill free expression, and in some countries, like Greece and Germany, people are actually prosecuted and convicted and do jail time under these laws.

I’ve remarked on many occasions that the freedom to blaspheme or to cause offence to those with strongly held religious sentiments is not a good reason for doing so. To have this freedom is important, yes, but we also say something about ourselves when we abuse freedoms such as these to cause gratuitous harm. Not all such harms are gratuitous – there is certainly room for causing religious offence, to remind the most sanctimonious adherents that nobody else is under an obligation to treat their god with any respect.

Yet, if we want to be treated with respect ourselves, these freedoms should be used responsibly. If a point can be made without blasphemy, for example, we should perhaps consider whether including the blasphemy adds enough value to make it worth the risk that you’ll not only be dismissed by your intended audience, but that you’ll also be contributing to bad public relations for atheists in general, but especially in your part of the world.

Blasphemy is only one issue, of course. Arguably of greater importance is the sort of discrimination that goes unnoticed, because it doesn’t attract the same kind of ire, and thus the same attention in the media. It’s evidence of systemic discrimination when your school, or your child’s school, has “a Christian character”, when your university textbook is overly religious, or when your public representatives in government seem more interested in pleasing gods than in doing right by the voters.

The IHEU highlights these and other issues worldwide, and offer us a great resource in this catalogue of discrimination against the non-religious, and something by which to measure progress, year-on-year. For comment from the IHEU, please see the contact details below. South African media are welcome to contact me for a local angle, if you plan on writing something about this.

FOR IHEU COMMENT:

Bob Churchill

Communications Officer
International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU)

Office: +44 207 490 8468 | Mobile: +44 7743 97 1937
Skype: bob.churchill | Twitter: @bobchurchill

Thinking Things Through (report-back)

For the interest of those of you who couldn’t attend the FSI conference last weekend, here’s a brief report-back on how the day unfolded. If you were able to attend, feel free to share your thoughts on how it went in comments.

FSI_confThe Free Society Institute (FSI) hopes to avoid the pitfalls of restrictive labels such as “atheist”, “freethinker”, “skeptic” and the like. Not only can those labels be politically problematic, in that they might cause otherwise sympathetic people to ignore what you might say, even before hearing it, but they are also ideologically loaded – people already have a sense of what they mean, and we don’t necessarily mean the same things by them.

Instead, the value proposition of the FSI is captured in the phrase “Thinking Things Through”, where the commitment to doing so will be expressed in thinking not only about religion (as with many atheist and agnostic organisations), but also about science, and social justice, and any other aspect of our lives that might benefit from discarding lazy stereotypes and instead, taking the time to think things (including our own beliefs) through.

This theme is what we intended to emphasise at the FSI’s third national conference (the previous two were held in 2009 and 2010, in Cape Town), held with the support of the International Ethical and Humanist Union (IHEU). This conference also served in part as a re-launch of the FSI, with the value proposition described above.

Our members are of course free to describe themselves as atheists, agnostics or some related term, but the FSI hopes to be an umbrella body for a broad coalition of people who care mostly for minimising the damage we can do to ourselves and society at large through believing things on the basis of poor evidence, whatever the content of those beliefs happens to be.

In short, the FSI is a South African non-profit organisation dedicated to promoting free speech, free thought and scientific reasoning. We are advocates for the values of secular humanism. The FSI hopes to help create a community, both virtual and physical, that collaborates in developing and distributing the knowledge and skills required to foster a free society.

A free society involves not only freedom from false beliefs, but also an environment in which it is easier to recognise and discard false beliefs, thanks to education, the free flow of information, the promotion of scientific literacy, and where possible, eliminating barriers to human flourishing (from the mundane examples such as misleading advertising, to the severe, such as oppressive laws).

2013 Conference: Thinking Things Through
The conference hoped to highlight the value that can be found in careful consideration of issues, and to highlight the costs associated with ignorance, for example in basic reasoning skills. In pursuit of this goal, we made sure to include presentations that spoke more broadly about these and related issues, rather than focusing on hackneyed debates regarding religion and its proper place in society. In fact, the only talk that dealt explicitly with religion was perhaps far more sympathetic to religion than many attendees would have preferred.

The speakers, in order of appearance

Conrad Koch (and occasionally, Chester Missing) was our MC for the day. Koch is a comedian and an anthropologist, while Missing is the star of the Emmy-nominated show, Late Night News, and the world’s most revolutionary puppet. The combination of these speakers and talents provided not only for raucous laughter, but also inspired some serious self-reflection among those present.

It was Koch (or Missing, I can’t recall) who asked some of the more pertinent questions of the day, including why so many of us in the audience were white, male, or both – and why secular humanism seemed to have such a demographically unrepresentative face in a country such as South Africa. International readers will know that this is a problem for all such organisations in just about every part of the world, but unless we’re made to think about it, our chances of remedying it are non-existent.

You can find Missing on Twitter at https://twitter.com/chestermissing

Cecilia Haak was the opening speaker, and offered a presentation titled “The Square Kilometre Array Telescope: Looking back in time”. Haak is eminently qualified to speak on this topic, given that she is currently an infrastructure engineer on the SKA project, working with the team that is building MeerKAT, precursor to the SKA, and the SKA radio telescope — which will be the world’s biggest. Haak was one of the contributors to the submission that secured South Africa the bulk of the hosting rights for the SKA.

Haak explained the significance and scope of the SKA project to a fascinated audience, describing what it is we hope the project will reveal to us in time. The implications for scientific research in South Africa were discussed in a very engaged question and answer session, where it became clear that the audience – even though arguably more informed on these matters than most – might have agreed with the sentiment that we could do with more (and, better) scientific journalism in South Africa. Later in the day, we would hear a presentation from Sarah Wild on exactly this issue.

You can find Haak on Twitter at https://twitter.com/ceciliahaak

David Spurrett, Professor of Philosophy at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, then presented a talk titled “Showing your working: Science, and the collaborative nature of good reasoning”. Spurrett is an active researcher in cognitive science (especially addiction and decision making), philosophy of cognitive science, and philosophy of science.

Spurrett described the method and value of scientific reasoning, emphasising that “it’s like common sense, but better”. In a highly engaging presentation, he used notable figures from the philosophy of science to make it clear how good scientific reasoning was within the average person’s ambit, and to illustrate various principles and strategies for improving our reasoning.

You can find Spurrett on Twitter at https://twitter.com/DoctorSpurt

Eusebius McKaiser, author, TV show host, and currently the host of Power Talk on PowerFM 98.7 was our next speaker. McKaiser is a widely published social commentator and political analyst, who previously studied law and philosophy at both Rhodes and Oxford. McKaiser’s talk was titled “The power of sloppy thinking: turns out Dawkins isn’t an atheist!”

The talk focused on the distinction between the labels “atheist” and “agnostic”, using Dawkins and “The God Delusion” as a springboard into that topic, rather than explicitly focusing on Dawkins himself. McKaiser’s ambition was to inspire the assembled atheists, in particular, to reflect on whether they were guilty of a similar sort of thoughtlessness as they sometimes accuse theists of, in claiming certainty in respect of things they could not be certain of.

You can find McKaiser on Twitter at https://twitter.com/eusebius

Sarah Wild, Science Editor at the Mail & Guardian, spoke next on “Spreading bad science”. The Mail & Guardian appointed Wild as Science Editor in 2013, making her one of only two dedicated science editors in the country (and lamentably, one of only 6 dedicated science journalists). Wild is the 2013 overall winner for the Pan-African Siemens Profile Awards for excellence in science journalism, and also the author of a book titled “Searching African Skies: The Square Kilometre Array and South Africa’s Quest to Hear the Songs of the Stars.”

Given her position at the Mail & Guardian, Wild was perfectly situated to inform this very receptive audience of the difficulties inherent in balancing what the public seem interested in (rather than “the public interest”) with comprehensive and informative communication about scientific research. As she pointed out, any political development always stands a good chance of bumping a science story out of that week’s newspaper, even though the political story might have far more fleeting significance.

You can find Wild on Twitter at https://twitter.com/sarahemilywild

Gareth Cliff, morning host on 5FM, judge on IdolsSA, City Press columnist, and the author of “Gareth Cliff on Everything” spoke to us next on “Sacred or profane: religion and the politics of offence”. Cliff is one of a small group of South Africans who reliably gets people talking, whether or not they agree with what he’s saying, and his presentation at Thinking Things Through was no exception.

Cliff’s presentation was very personal and honest, discussing his relationship with his radio listeners, the regulatory authorities, and generally, the sensitivities of audiences and how much they should be respected. Cliff did make it clear while the truth should never be the handmaiden of political correctness, there was nevertheless a strategic and emotional dimension to communication that could not be ignored.

You can find Cliff on Twitter at https://twitter.com/garethcliff

Jacques Rousseau, founder and chairperson of the Free Society Institute, gave the last presentation of the day, titled “Towards a Free Society: What do we do next?”. Rousseau lectures critical thinking and ethics at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. In 2009, he founded the FSI to promote secular humanism and scientific reasoning in South Africa.

Rousseau’s presentation sought to make the audience think about the large overlap in motivations and desires between religious and non-religious folk, and to ask them to consider whether we spend enough time thinking about similarities, rather than differences. Rousseau argued that the caricatured view many atheists seem to hold regarding religious folk was getting in the way of our recognising that it’s not usually religion that’s the problem, but rather poverty, in both an economic and an educational sense.

You can find Rousseau on Twitter at https://twitter.com/JacquesR

The day’s proceedings concluded with a panel discussion involving all the speakers except for Sarah Wild, who unfortunately had to leave before then. Barry Bateman, Pretoria correspondent for Eyewitness News, hosted the panel discussion, and the conversations he elicited from the speakers offered a very suitable end to an intellectually stimulating day.

You can find Bateman on Twitter at https://twitter.com/barrybateman

All the presentations were recorded, and will be uploaded to YouTube once editing has been completed and permissions obtained from the speakers. To be informed as to when the videos are released, keep an eye on the FSI homepage and/or the Twitter feed of the FSI Chairperson, @JacquesR .

Many thanks all the speakers, and to Anneleigh Jacobsen, Greg Andrews, @Dr_Rousseau and @Jonathan_Witt for some invaluable help behind the scenes. Thanks also to the @IHEU, for their financial support. If you attended, thanks for your support too!

A manual for creating atheists

RNS-ATHEISTS-MANUALHaving just finished Peter Boghossian’s first book, A Manual for Creating Atheists, I must confess to jealousy in that it’s the most recent example of a book in the category of “books I wish I had written, and should have written, but didn’t buckle down and write”. I’d have picked a different title, but nevertheless – Boghossian’s book is a fine example of how to deploy the principles of good critical thinking towards effecting social and political change, in this case undermining epistemologies based on faith.

I was fortunate to be at The Amaz!ng Meeting (TAM) earlier this year, at which Boghossian spoke, and was at the time impressed by how he was able to distill some quite complex debates in epistemology into very succinct, and actionable, principles. Like him, I’ve spent the last 20-odd years teaching basic critical thinking to young students, and have sometimes struggled to find the language to convey what (from one end of the telescope) seem completely obvious ideas to students who appear completely mystified by both the grounds of – and the motivation for – cynicism around “knowledge” they take for granted.

Boghossian’s book does a great job in describing these contested ideas, and does so in a way that it very charitable to the political dimension of the different points of view – if I were a religious believer, I shouldn’t feel insulted by anything in his book, because it’s painstakingly fair, even when very critical. This is why I’m no big fan of the title – as Boghossian says somewhere in the text, atheism is a byproduct or happenstance result of clear thinking (and seeing as this is something I have said for a while, I reserve the right to wave my timestamped slides around, Pete!), so it’s slightly unfortunate for that, rather than the “street epistemology” the book so cogently argues for, to be highlighted.

In focusing on “street epistemology”. the book’s strength is on things that you and I can do to nudge (usually gently) those who believe strange and unwarranted things away from those beliefs, or more accurately, toward realising how they are applying quite different standards when it comes to the merits of those beliefs than they are to other beliefs they might hold, and why this is a problem.

Besides the content that deals with epistemology, argument and rhetoric, one of the strengths of Boghossian’s book is the sample dialogues he offers of (reconstructed, but real) dialogues he has had with people of faith, in which the virtues of his approach are made clear, and the value of this form of “street epistemology” are brought to life. Also of value to other teachers of philosophy to young students is a handy flowchart at the back of the book, that offers a guide for disabusing students of the relativistic urge – if I’d known how pervasive, and pernicious, that urge was going to be when I got into this all those years ago, I’d have bought the book just for that.

Regrettably, 20 years later, such a flowchart is still useful, perhaps even necessary. Thanks to books like Boghossian’s, this might not be the case another 20 years from now.

Occult crime unit – offensive to common sense and to morality

The following piece was originally published on GroundUp, and is republished here with their permission.

Vampire CopsDecades after its formation, the Occult-Related Crime Unit (ORCU, founded by Kobus “Donker” Jonker in 1992) continues to waste public resources, misdirect police attention, and stigmatise young people who are by and large more misunderstood than malignant.

Amongst all the crimes that we can speculate police in this unit might have seen, there’s one we can be sure of – and it’s one that they are complicit in. The crime in question is against common sense and morality, and is vested in the reinforcing of a Christian evangelical “Satanic Panic”.

In the context of South Africa’s constitutionally-protected freedom of religion, restricting membership of a police unit to only Christians – and dedicating that unit to protecting a Christian version of reality – is itself worthy of special attention as an occult-related crime.

Because a unit can’t investigate itself, I’d ask the Minister of Police to consider funding a new Occult-Related-Related Crimes Unit, which I volunteer to lead. Our mission? To be ruthless in pursuing crimes related to simplistic, moralising, and religiously prejudiced views of crime, society at large, and especially the youth.

Even on the very fuzzy definition of “occult” used by ORCU, too few such crimes occur to merit the existence of a dedicated unit. But it is in the definition of these crimes, as well as the background metaphysics and psychology, that ORCU starts to appear just as spooky as the crimes and motivations ORCU exists to combat.

In response (I presume) to a fairly constant barrage of criticism on social media, the South African Police Service (SAPS) removed the web page that gave us our best insight into how a unit in a 21st-century police force is being guided by ideas from the Dark Ages.

But thanks to the Wayback Machine, we can see not only that “Child has an interest in computer” is a sign that said child might be involved in a cult, but also that this and other equally ridiculous diagnostic advice has remained unchanged since September 2004 (the archived page from then – the earliest date the page was captured – being identical to the one that was removed in November 2013).

I don’t mean to dispute that adolescents, and others, commit crimes in the service of motivations they themselves think of as occult. But when they do so, why is it that this motivation is singled out for special attention? We don’t have a jealousy-related crimes unit, or a greed-related, tender-related, BEE-related, or alien-related unit – even though all of these provide possible motivations to commit crimes, mostly with far greater regularity than the occult would.

Then, if we find that a crime is committed because the guilty party thought themselves under some supernatural instruction, we know full well what to do next: arrange for that person to get the psychological help they clearly need, alongside whatever other sentence is appropriate.

Diagnosis and treatment of this particular confusion is not within the typical police-person’s field of expertise, perhaps especially when that police-person is selected explicitly because they hold a competing – and no less bizarre, to some – set of metaphysical beliefs.

As mentioned above, we have freedom of religion in South Africa. You can be a Satanist if you like, and if you were refused employment on those grounds, the person refusing you would be acting illegally. Hell (sorry), refusing you entry into ORCU would probably be illegal too.

But because of the strongly Christian bias of ORCU, and government in general, you’d of course keep your exercising of freedom of religion to yourself. If you’re a child, though – especially a child unfortunate enough to have parents who take SAPS’s word for these things – you might find yourself described as a Satanist or cult member through no fault of your own.

The warning signs for parents include your using a computer, engaging in sexual activity, watching horror movies, losing your sense of humour and “rejecting parental values”. In other words, being a teenager is a warning sign. Make sure to only part your hair to the right, because “draping hair across the left eye” is another dead giveaway.

It’s also important that you avoid getting a nickname at school, because “phone calls from persons requesting to speak with someone other than your child’s name” is apparently a warning sign for parents that you’re being contacted by your “satanic/demonic name”.

The document also speaks of cults, that come in “religion-based, personality, or secular” versions. I can’t imagine what a secular cult might be, but suspect it has something to do with Idols, or MasterChef, given that cults can involve “unique games”, “dress codes” and “chanting and singing”.

More seriously: these attempted analyses of occult motive are premised in an occult view themselves, namely that of Christianity. The occult, and what is problematic about it, is being defined in a completely partisan way, by an agency of a Government committed to freedom of religion.

It is undeniable that some practitioners of any given occult view engage in harmful behaviour. It would nevertheless be untrue and unfair for us to generalise from those cases, concluding that the entire set of occult practises should be criminalised – especially if we do so from a position of known bias.

Lastly, the vulnerable group here is the youth, who are already besieged by insecurity around their identities. The ORCU document told parents – in a country where homophobia is virtually endorsed by the President, and corrective rapes a scourge – that “child experiences sudden gender confusion” is a warning sign of the occult.

It’s therefore not simply the case that ORCU is a waste of resources that could better be deployed elsewhere. The unit, and its core beliefs, are themselves so offensive to common sense and morality that one might call it a crime.

Jacob Zuma, wives, and the wrath of God

JZOver the weekend, I had a chat with a man from Nkandla (who will remain anonymous). As you no doubt know, that’s where Jacob Zuma is building his palace private residence, and it’s also the place that his own spokesperson (Mac Maharaj) didn’t want to visit because he feared he’d be unable to defend it once he had (at least, if you trust the interview recorded in Richard Calland’s book, The Zuma Years).

We didn’t talk about the residence, but I suspect that this man from Nkandla would be opposed to the deception surrounding the expenses incurred there, as well as the quantum of the expenses. Another point of agreement between us was with regard to the irrelevance of the number of wives Zuma has, both in terms of his political credibility, as well as to negative judgements regarding what Zuma costs the people of South Africa.

The political credibility part is less controversial, and unless you insist on monogamy for whatever reason, I imagine you agree that this shouldn’t impact on our judgments regarding Zuma (assuming, of course, full volition on the part of the wives and so forth). As for the costs incurred on the public purse, my interlocutor and I agreed that if the law allowed for polygamy, and for public support of the President’s wives, then it’s the law that needs to change, rather than Zuma that needs to change.

One could argue that Zuma should set the example, and defer the marrying of anyone other than who he was already married to (when taking office) until after leaving the position. But this would mean a less than full acceptance of Zuma’s cultural values, and would to my mind run contrary to the cultural inclusivity our Constitution demands. It would be an assertion that norms other than Zuma’s were standard, and that he’s allowed to contravene those – and practice his own, (implied) aberrant or inferior culture, so long as it’s done in a way that’s convenient to the rest of us.

It may be that we don’t want to be as culturally inclusive as the Constitution demands. But that’s not the argument here – instead, this would be an instance of insisting on the primacy of a particular set of norms under the guise of financial concerns. Instead, we should say that financial concerns disallow one set of cultural norms from being as well supported as others (if we wanted to be honest about the matter). Or even more honestly, we could say that culture X is somehow inferior to Y.

But until we do either of those things, the point is that it’s not Zuma’s problem that his wives cost more to support than Mbeki’s did. He could act in a supererogatory fashion, and choose to save us all some money, but he’s under no obligation to, and we shouldn’t judge him more harshly if he doesn’t choose to save us that money. That, at least, is what the man from Nkandla and I agreed over the weekend.

We didn’t talk about Zuma’s frequent insertion of religious rhetoric into political discourse, and I suspect that on that point, we would probably have disagreed. As he’s done in the past, when asserting that the ANC will rule until Jesus comes back, or claiming that “humanity has vanished” without fear of God, Zuma again inserted God into the National Elections in an address to the 33rd Presbyterian Synod in Giyani, Limpopo, on Sunday. Zuma is quoted as saying:

If you don’t respect those in leadership, if you don’t respect authority then you are bordering on a curse. Whether we like it or not, God has made a connection between the government and the church. That’s why he says you, as a church, should pray for it.

It’s easy to say that he’s appealing to a lowest common denominator here, in that an estimated 80% of South Africans are Christians. But this goes further than simply drawing on the support of like-minded people in claiming that he is “doing God’s work”, for example. This is divisive and judgemental (on spurious, metaphysical grounds, rather than principled ones), in that he’s threatening voters who might be tempted to vote for someone other than the ANC with being cursed.

Contrary to the entire point of the democratic process, whereby we freely choose our representatives based on their positions and performance in delivering what they promised us, here your mortal soul is in danger if you don’t vote ANC – regardless of positions or performance. Even if Zuma believes this to be true, threats that would be more suited to Medieval times are surely unbecoming of the President of a nation?

Furthermore, the opportunism of the rhetoric is perhaps even more clear in the next sentence, where he asserts that God has made a connection between “the government and the church”. By this, he has to mean that this government is looked upon with favour by a particular (his) god. He can’t mean God smiles on “governments” in general, because then God must also have approved of PW Botha’s government; and he can’t mean that God is only “connected” in some non-judgemental way to governments, because if so, what’s the point of highlighting an arbitrary connection, even as you say voters should pray for the government?

In today’s Business Day, Peter Bruce wonders “how much more can the ANC take“. While Bruce mostly addresses the political processes by which Zuma could be ousted as the ANC leader, this question can also be raised with respect to those who vote ANC. As he did in 2011, he’s blackmailing voters into supporting him through claiming that it’s only through him, and his party, that their souls will be safe.

Shame on him.

Respect to this Muslim on International Blasphemy Day

It’s perhaps an index of the level of ‘debate’ on religion and its place in society that September 30 each year is commemorated (by some) as International Blasphemy Day. Even four years ago, when my own atheism was far more assertive than it is today, I argued that Blasphemy Day was for the most part a bad idea, mostly because even though it certainly gets the attention of theists,

I don’t care about getting the attention of theists, so much as changing their minds. And I can’t recall many times that I’ve changed someone’s mind through teasing them – usually I’ve just made them more intractable.

Of course, Blasphemy Day does commemorate something worth remembering, in that it’s the anniversary of the original publication of the infamous “Danish cartoons” – which, whether or not you think they should have been published, certainly shouldn’t have been met with the violent reaction they encountered, causing (to mention one example) more than a 100 deaths in Nigerian protests.

But when you mock someone’s god (which you have every right to do), there’s no way to target only those followers of that god that do bad things as a consequence of their faith. Your offense is delivered by shotgun, causing emotional harm to anyone who feels strongly about that faith, regardless of how that faith plays out in their day-to-day lives.

So it is justified to think about the costs versus the benefits of this sort of offence – you assert your freedoms, yes, and you might also remind people that there’s no obligation on the rest of us to take what you do, seriously. And, Muslims who are peace-loving, kind, trustworthy and so forth must be rather saddened, in that it would strike them as perhaps gratuitous, but certainly the (indirect) fault of Muslims who seem nothing like them, except for the fact that they both identify with the same (roughly) religious tradition.

Making the distinction between Muslims who regard their faith as a motivation to do evil, or for whom the faith is at least an inseparable passenger to the evil done for political reasons, is not made easy when moderate, sensible, peaceful etc. Muslims don’t join in with the condemnatory voices of something like last week’s Westgate Mall terrorism in Kenya. Likewise with less tragic sorts of religion-related harms, such as the homophobic rhetoric of the Christian Errol Naidoo. Christians should be first to condemn him, just as all who want to claim that “we’re not all like that” should always be first to condemn the exemplars of their faith who are a discredit to it.

It is with this in mind that I must commend to you Kalim Rajab’s piece in the Daily Maverick today, titled “A perversion of my faith“. Others can fight about the accuracy or not of his interpretation of various scriptures. I won’t, not only because I don’t know enough, but mostly because that misses the point entirely.

We know that religion is more and more something quite different from what it was in centuries (even decades) gone by. Yes, there are literalists out there, who insist on some reading of a religious text, and do harm to promote and defend that reading. But outside of certain (increasingly easy to identify) regions, for example Saudi Arabia, to say that both person X and person Y are Muslims, or Christians, is to say very little.

I’m of course aware of the arguments of Harris and others who speak of the moderates giving shelter, or credence, to the views of the extremists. Making a view “mainstream” does allow for a range of expressions of those views, and this mainstreaming is part of the motivation for a counter-movement like Blasphemy Day. But if the moderates speak out against the extremists – just like non-theists often do – Harris’s argument becomes more difficult to sustain.

It remains true that Rajab’s god doesn’t exist (at least, if by “exist” we mean really exist as a consciousness of some sort). One day, I’d hope that this would be self-evident to everyone. But in the meanwhile, even if it is true that Islam tends to cause more violence than other religions, and even if it’s true that this violence is in the service of a fiction, surely we can nevertheless be happy, and supportive, when someone from inside that tradition denounces the harms done in its name?

The point is not always whether god exists. Sometimes – perhaps most of the time – it’s also worth focusing on what you do with that belief, or lack of belief.