Category: Secularism

On secularism in government policy, where secularism is not understood to be (necessarily) hostile to religion.

Faith healers and medical deceivers

On the last night of January, I participated in a rather interesting hour of radio, during which Hlomla Dandala hosted a interview with me and someone claiming to be a faith healer. The faith healer’s name is Pastor Louisa, and you can find some information on her ministry – which includes curing people of AIDS – on her website.

I do have a recording of the show, but haven’t yet found a way to convert it into something that plays outside of the TuneIn Radio app on my phone (informed advice on this is welcome) – if I do get it converted, I’ll be sure to post it here.

What became clear fairly on in the show is that Louisa is not a charlatan, in the sense that she’s knowingly exploiting others. She was desperately sincere, and also, unfortunately, sincerely confused. When invited to facilitate a miracle over the phone to someone who called in, she engaged in a few minutes of shouty, enthusiastic prayer and exhortations to be confident and inspired, after which she asked the caller  whether she “felt better”.

Yes, said the caller. I then asked – “so, does that get added to your list of miracles performed?”. Yes, said Pastor Louisa. On those weak standards, all of us perform dozens of miracles every day – just figure out what language people like to hear, or what buttons they like pushed, make them happy, and then claim to have performed a miracle!

Also, she made it clear that she never tells people to stop taking their medicine. Dandala asked her how she knows whether it’s the prayer or the medicine that heals… and the predictable answer that she gave was that she “just knows”. As far as I can determine, then, she gives her god the credit for the job performed by modern medicine.

You’ve heard how this (faith healing) works before, I imagine, or rather, how it doesn’t work. On the recommendation of Dan Dennett, I watched the documentary Marjoe a few years back, and it’s a wonderful expose of charismatic preachers and healers, involving Marjoe Gortner taking a documentary crew behind the scenes of his final revival tour, held after he had already lost his faith. Watch it if you can, but basically, if people want to believe something strongly enough, it’s difficult to stop them doing so.

The difficulty in talking to Louisa was in resisting the impulse to mock, but instead to feel sympathy for her confusion, and the desperation of those who take her seriously. I failed in this effort at least once, when she spoke about how she had to stop talking to us because she was out in the open, under a tree, and it was cold (this was late at night). I suggested that a miracle might sort this out – after all, if she could cure Aids, what’s the problem with a little heating?

Failures of good grace aside, these people can be dangerous, especially in communities we don’t often hear about, where faith healers and other quacks can do their thing without being exposed to scrutiny. Communities like the Amish are a similar problem. And the overarching problem we all have in a constitutional democracy is in striking the balance between objective application of the law and respecting the various freedoms we believe people are entitled to, like subscribing to and practicing a religion.

For adults, there’s less of a concern regarding people being free to harm themselves than there is for children, who can’t be expected to know any better. But desperation, and poor educations, mean that adults are also sometimes more gullible than one would like, which is why it’s incumbent on all of us to speak out against quackery where we find it, while still trying to avoid being gratuitously cruel to those we criticise.

And those of us in positions of authority should perhaps be most careful, because their trust is vested in us, and they spend money, time and attention on us.

Someone getting a lot of attention right now is Professor Tim Noakes, as he goes around the country giving talks and radio interviews to promote the book he’s recently co-authored, The Real Meal Revolution. During a recent interview with Redi Tlhabi, he informs listeners (at 38m40s) that there is “absolutely no risk” involved in cancer victims trying the ketogenic diet, because it’s proven that starving cancer of carbohydrates is an effective treatment.

Well, yes, it can be. But as he so often does, he’s cherry-picking, or simply believing in the version of “science” that suits his agenda. Because according to the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute, and other sources,

Many scientists have tried killing tumors by taking away their favorite food, a sugar called glucose. Unfortunately, this treatment approach not only fails to work, it backfires–glucose-starved tumors get more aggressive.

This is only true for some glucose-starved tumours, to be sure, but it still means that saying “absolutely no risk” is absolutely untrue, and that Noakes is giving advice – to an audience of thousands – that stands a good chance of harming a listener who happens to have the sort of cancer that responds aggressively to a low carbohydrate diet.

As I’ve said many a time, this isn’t the approach of someone who is a responsible scientist. But, just like the faith-healer, I think he’s utterly sincere, and utterly committed to fostering our good health. More the pity, then, that he’s unable to see how his religious fervour might end up achieving the opposite goal, at least for some. And how – consistently – he’s wreaking havoc on basic principles of critical reasoning, and setting a terrible example for budding scientists everywhere.

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.

Should Muslims handle pork and wine?

halal signOn hearing that Muslim staff at the UK supermarket chain Marks & Spencer could now refuse to sell pork and wine, the decision seemed to be an instance of making too great a concession to religious sensibilities. I’ve shied away from gratuitously offending those with religious beliefs for some time now, but being opposed to Blasphemy Day, for example, doesn’t mean that you need to commit to respecting every demand made in the name of some or other god.

There are various reasons to think that Muslims should not be able to opt-out of handling wrapped and sealed pork, or alcohol in bottles. On a broad political or legislative level, allowing them to do so would result in a private choice incurring a very public cost. In a secular society like the UK, USA or South Africa, my decision to adhere to a particular belief system that comes with costs doesn’t commit anyone else to bearing those costs – and here, all (pork- and alchohol-buying) shoppers would encounter the inefficiency of not having all cashiers available to them.

We’d also need to determine which sorts of beliefs allowed for these sorts of concessions, as there’s in theory no end to the number of religious demands that could be made of employers. This point was made in amusing fashion by MoDawah (@kingofdawah) – ‘expert on everything’ and ‘media Muslim’ on Twitter, who said things like:

  • Just heard that Hindu employees of Aldi don’t have to sell any goods that they fear may be a reincarnated ancestor of theirs #diversity
  • Tesco just announced Atheists don’t have to sell anything that they don’t believe exists #diversity
  • Waitrose announces that Nihilist members of staff don’t have to sell anything that negates one or more putatively meaningful aspects of life

As to whether this concession is even demanded by the Muslim faith (as opposed to certain Muslims just feeling uncomfortable selling these goods), I was alerted to an analysis of the issue by an apparently authoritative Shaykh, who makes it quite clear that Muslims can sell pork and alcohol (though, not in their own supermarkets):

It would be permitted to work on the check out of a supermarket that sells things Muslims consider impermissible (such as pork, alcohol, wine, or food items with haram ingredients). One’s earnings will be lawful (halal).

One could also point out that it would hardly come as a surprise to an employee at Marks & Spencer that these products are on sale there, and that you’d therefore encounter someone wishing to buy them on a regular basis. Reasonable accommodation can be made, certainly – I can understand an employee talking to a supervisor, saying “I would like to be excused from X”, but X can’t be some core competency of the job, like a cashier being asked to sell things to customers.

The long and short of it might be something like: “why did you take the job, if you knew you couldn’t perform it for religious reasons?”

Even though the concession in question doesn’t seem required by Islam, and even though it also introduced inefficiencies, my initial reaction to reject it was nevertheless tempered on reflection, when I considered whether it was possible to accommodate this sensitivity (because it’s not a legal requirement of Islam) without introducing those inefficiencies, and of course without putting us on a slippery slope which commits us to respecting all sensitivities (which would be impossible).

For example, monitoring the demand for halal checkout lines (where pork, alcohol, etc. would not be sold) could allow us to designate the required number of lines as such, then clearly signpost them as such so that someone wanting to buy pork or alcohol doesn’t get turned away when they reach the front of the line.

But this idea wouldn’t be simple to implement at all, and would introduce inefficiencies of its own. Employing people to work on the halal checkout lines leaves you with the problem of what to do with them when demand drops, or when you calculate it wrong. While you might have assumed that you need to bring in three “halal cashiers” on a particular day, you might find you only need one. Don’t send two of them home, though – first because you might not be allowed to, given their conditions of employment and relevant laws, and second because there might be a sudden rush of Muslim customers. The HR complications, in other words, might be significant.

Lastly, there’s a general issue raised here that is rather tricky, in that there are a number of historical concessions to religion that were made before religion and secularism became so politicized and public, and in a time where we were far more willing to politely live and let live, rather than taking to Twitter to shout about nobody respecting what we feel entitled to (there is of course the other side of that coin, where we’ve learnt more about what our rights are, and are now expressing legitimate grievances more often too).

Conscientious objection is one, but dis-analogous because it seems self evident that it’s asking a lot more to put a gun in someone’s hand and ask them to kill, versus putting a scanner in someone’s hand, and asking them to ring up some pork chops. Likewise, it seems a clearer violation of someone’s sensibilities to ask them to perform abortions if they have a religious objection to doing so.

But here in South Africa, marriage officers can lodge an objection to performing gay marriages, and become legally exempt from having to officiate under those circumstances. Even though I’d never want a homophobe to officiate my wedding – regardless of whether or not I was gay – should he or she get to have the option of refusing? I think not. Those of you in other parts of the world will no doubt know of similar concessions already made, and that you might ideally want to revise.

Not all preferences can be accommodated. Regardless of whether it’s a religious issue (as in this case) or not (imagine an environmentalist cashier, and how he or she could develop a principled objection to selling some item, or a vegan, or a Pollan-ite), the answer can’t simply be to accede to any demand, because as I’ve argued before, that means those who complain the loudest winning a disproportionate number of battles.

And the answer which seems in principle correct – namely operating as a secular organization, and only making these concessions on an ad hoc basis – is certain to offend some religious sensibilities, some of the time. What this seems to mean is that it’s the religious sensibilities that need to change, rather than the rest of us needing to feel their impact on our secular lives.

[Edit: today, Marks & Spencer are saying that allowing Muslims to refuse to sell these things was never their policy.]

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!

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.

Thinking Things Through: A national conference on secular humanism and science

On Sunday, December 1 2013, the SciBono Discovery Centre in Newtown will host the 3rd national conference of the Free Society Institute (FSI). The conference theme is “Thinking Things Through”, and it will focus on resources and ideas that help us to make more informed decisions about what to believe, and why.

Why “Thinking Things Through”?

We all make choices every day – decisions that impact the way we live, the health of our families, and the things we spend our money on.  The FSI believes that taking time to carefully think things through leads to better choices, and that better choices lead to better lives, and help to foster freer societies. This conference is dedicated to the idea of thinking things through – and we hope it’s just the start!

What is the Free Society Institute? What are their goals?

The FSI believes in the value of thinking things through, and that every person can improve the choices they make and the lives they live with better thinking.

We work to keep people accountable; to challenge those who take advantage of others; to make debates more informed, and to be a rational voice on issues such as free speech, free thought and other values – in short, on the things that matter in our society. We believe that thinking things through can improve the quality of life for everyone – and that we all deserve the best life possible.

Who should attend?

Anyone with an interest in science, secular humanism, skepticism and the role of religion in society will benefit from attending Thinking Things Through. The conference will address these and other themes, with an emphasis on showing how careful consideration of issues can lead us to more robust – even if sometimes surprising – conclusions!

Who will be speaking?

Chester Missing, Cecilia Haak, David Spurrett, Eusebius McKaiser, Sarah Wild, Gareth Cliff, Jacques Rousseau and Barry Bateman

For more, visit: http://thinkingthingsthrough.co.za

 

Contact: Jacques Rousseau / Jacques.Rousseau@fsi.org.za

“World-views” and secular education

imagesFourth-year medical students at a local university were yesterday witness to a panel discussion on various world-views, with the intention of familiarising them with some of the different points of view that their patients might one day hold. I was invited to participate in this panel, which I gladly did, seeing as these sorts of public interventions are one of the values we can easily, and cheaply, give to “the cause”, as it were.

Joining me on the panel were an Imam, an Anglican priest, a Hindu doctor and the daughter of an African traditional healer (who was also a student in the class). The point of the panel wasn’t to debate who was right and who was wrong, but more to sensitise the students to the differences, and to prompt them to how they might approach sensitive topics of conversation with these various sorts of world-views.

It was an interesting experience, partly because it again brought to the fore just how normal, and just how abnormal, a largely materialist, or naturalist, point of view was – even in a room of about 200 people trained in the scientific method. The student who arranged to have me invited to participate reported that around 70% of his classmates were religious, and after yesterday, I fear that might be an under-estimate. One horror-story he told me is of a group of students training in psychiatry who decided to pray over someone that was clearly experiencing some sort of mental episode, rather than getting her to somewhere she could be diagnosed and treated.

But it’s not only the uncommonness of a naturalistic outlook that struck me – it’s also how alien it seemed to be to the audience. The tenor of some of the questions seemed to regard me as some sort of curiosity, or exhibit – a rare creature from a strange and distant land. Over and over, for example, I had to repeat the point that they should think of me as representing the “secular” world view, because religious folk can be secular too. Secular doesn’t mean lacking in belief, it means leaving your (metaphysical) beliefs at home when you go to work, especially in the public sector.

Then, the usual questions also came up: how can love just be in the brain (well, it is, but that doesn’t make it any less special); where do you get your morals from (the same place as you, the same place as the apes, etc.); what is your purpose in life (that question loads the dice – I reject the need for an “ultimate” purpose).

So, when I sat at the end of the panel to talk to the local atheist and agnostic society about how to grow their society and build capacity, I stressed something they could do, that I fear many smaller, community-based groups forget: education. Take your core membership, and have them learn about the history of skepticism/secularism/humanism/etc. – and not simply learn to recite cutting lines from Hitchens, or the names of a bunch of logical fallacies.

We need people to go out there are dispell myths and misconceptions, and that requires the knowledge to do so. If you’ve got some of it, and also have access to a younger group of people wanting to promote the secular, scientific, humanist world view, help them to learn how to educate others about what we believe and don’t, but more importantly, why we believe and disbelieve. Even when you don’t persuade, the conversations will nevertheless be far more interesting as a result.