Quite Random

Humanism, creationism, monkeys

I’ve been working away for a little while now on a new web site, and would appreciate any constructive feedback anyone has. The new Suffolk Humanists web site features information and articles on Humanism, which is an ethical approach to life without religion. It’s in its early stages and short on content, but has some potential to develop moving on.

I’ve also written an article for the web site which may be of interest – in the light of recent correspondence alternately questioning and supporting Darwinian evolution theory in the US media, as well as the controversy over the teaching of Intelligent Design in UK schools, this article looks at the basics of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, creationist fundamentalism, the main creationist argument against Darwinian evolution theory, and the dangers of teaching Intelligent Design to school children as a scientific explanation for our biodiversity. See the article here – I’d appreciate any feedback on that as well.

Atheism is a dirty word

From a telephone sampling of more than 2,000 households, university researchers found that Americans rate atheists below Muslims, recent immigrants, gays and lesbians and other minority groups in “sharing their vision of American society.” Atheists are also the minority group most Americans are least willing to allow their children to marry.

Link: Atheists identified as America’s most distrusted minority – University of Minnesota

Apparently, even if Americans believe in different gods, they’re all agreed that atheists are “self-interested individuals who are not concerned with the common good”. I already knew that atheist senators in the US congress have to keep their absence of belief in a deity a secret, so this is no surprise. Watch out for this attitude coming to the UK, if our government and countless religious pressure groups have anything to do with it…

Sorry to see you go

Linda Smith has died of cancer aged 48, far too early, and we’re all worse off for it. She was one of very few people I can think of whose appearance on radio or TV would mean that whatever she was in was guaranteed to be entertaining – she expressed herself with incredible clarity and intelligence, and had an unbelievably quick wit. Her humour was most effective when used to ridicule people who deserved ridicule - subtle, and yet brutal. She described David Blunkett as ‘Satan’s bearded folk singer’. Linda Smith campaigned against faith schools and on other issues connected to the rise of fundamentalism and increasing religiosity in government. We need more people like her, not less.

Underground Dawkins

Poor Americans. They’re forced to download pirate copies of the recent Richard Dawkins program ‘The Root of All Evil?’ from the Internet, because as Andrew Hearst says on his Panopticist blog, “You simply would never encounter such a brazen denunciation of religious faith on this country’s airwaves, because the outcry from the religious right would be deafening.”

A simple denunciation of religion from our foremost atheist agent provocateur turns out to be peddled like illicit porn, and this in the land of the free. Oh the irony.

Scary news

Guantánamo actors questioned under terror act after film festival

It’s reassuring to know that actors pretending to be al-Qaida suspects are caught and questioned by police at Luton Airport under suspicion of being terrorists. No flies on our border control! These actors had just returned from the Berlin Film Festival, where they had been promoting the film they had made about the experience of a group of Tipton men who had been detained in Guantanamo after visiting Afghanistan. They obviously looked like terrorists… but that’s kind of the point isn’t it. The original suspects who accompanied the actors to the film festival had looked enough like terrorists to get arrested and taken to Guantanamo Bay, where they were detained without charge and interrogated for two years. The actors in the airport were asked, for reasons quite beyond me, whether they were making films to further the Islamic cause. OK, so Islamic terrorists are seriously into making films to further their cause – except that they’re usually bad videotapes with muezzins singing at top volume over footage of balaclava-clad nutters decapitating engineers, and they’re usually played on Al-Jazeera. They’re not films made by Michael Winterbottom that are shown at the Berlin Film Festival.

Academics fight rise of creationism at universities

There was a time when the biggest philosophical questions your average student concerned themselves with were the merits of a diet dominated by Pasta ‘n’ Sauce, or the wisdom of fancying unattainable women from Australian soap operas – I remember, I was there. There is now, however, a terrifying new development in British universities, the cancerous and insidious spread of creationism amongst science students. A recent upsurge in the number of students who are challenging Darwin’s theory of evolution is something to be truly worried about, maybe even moreso than the state-sponsored increase in the number of faith schools in this country, and the resulting apartheid and religious indoctrination of Britain’s children. Why is it worse? Because university students are supposed to be of the age where they are able to make their own informed decisions about their religious beliefs and their world view in general, and they are at university to enquire, study and learn - but creationism is anathema to rational thought and scientific enquiry. There is also the fact that these are science students – a significant number of our future scientists, doctors, environmentalists and researchers are likely to be creationists. Creationism is a comfortable bedfellow to a whole raft of irrational and unproven theories – one being that there is a God in the first place.

What is the problem with creationism? It might be easier to ask what is right with it. Creationism is a theory where the Earth, and Humanity, are divine creations from recent history – where everything was created in between six days and ten thousand years, depending on who you believe. Both the Bible and the Qur’an espouse creation theory – both books speaking of everything having been created by God. There is no supporting scientific evidence for creation theory – creation theory, whether you are Christian or Muslim, is based on the contents of a book, nothing more – what’s more, the book is a subjective liturgy, not a piece of research or accurate historical record. There is little or no mention of the presence of radioactive isotopes on Earth that age it at around 4.5 billion years, no mention of carbon-dated fossil records, no mention of the development of single-celled organisms from simple proteins. The Bible says it all happened in six days, and the Qur’an says all animals were made by God out of water. A creationist would probably also find a way to explain away the vestigial tail they have at the bottom of their own spine - they would indeed deny the evidence that’s embedded in their own pious backside.

Darwin’s theory of evolution, a theory with overwhelming evidence stretching back over many years of research, is under attack – by Christianity and Islam, Christianity more recently attempting to present a more credible theory in the form of Intelligent Design (ID). ID’s main argument is that the process of evolution was too complicated to have happened without divine intervention – utterly typical of the simplistic answer you’d get from religion. It’s too complicated to have happened on its own, so therefore God did it. The sheer weight and credibility of the evidence for natural selection and evolution, compared to the sheer non-existence of evidence for creation theory and ID, is so huge as to be absurd, yet polls reveal that 45% of the population of the US believe in creation theory, and we now have an increasing number of science students in this country taking the same stance. Fortunately, students presenting creation theory backed up by the Bible or Qur’an as if it was fact in their work are currently being failed (and so they should), and the Royal Society is set to host a debate in April entitled ‘Why creationism is wrong and evolution is right’. When science is under threat of being transmogrified by the lunatic religious, the stakes are about as high as they can get and the creationists have to be challenged to present their evidence, put up or shut up, because the damage done by wider acceptance of irrational, unproven theories could be irreversible.

Related information:

• Countering creationism
• US teaching debate: Intelligent design v evolution (BBC audio)

Religion and never-ending arguments

Richard Dawkins didn’t get arguing with as many complete and utter loonies in this evening’s Root of All Evil (Channel 4) as he did last week, though his opponents arguments still wandered into the mystifying. His reputation as Darwin’s Rottweiler may go before him, or it may be just his frank and direct language, but he tends to provoke some emotional reactions - it also doesn’t help when you choose to debate religion with people of a rather extreme persuasion. A satisfying debate is never too likely when an atheist discusses religion with the religious - people simply have to agree to disagree, because the atheist and the follower will find each other’s arguments just as ludicrous, and the argument often deteriorates into petty point-scoring, desperate and tenuous arguments, and insults. I learnt that the hard way when a fundamentalist Christian friend implied when pressed that my mother’s cancer was a punishment for sin.

People are entitled to believe in whatever they want - God, Allah, The Flying Spaghetti Monster. If people’s religion helps them to be a better and more co-operative person, to be generous and charitable to other people, and to apply moral standards to their life, that’s all very well, though all the millions of decent people without religion wonder what all this God fuss is about when they’re doing fine without it. Maybe most religious people in the world are decent, kind and peaceful. Sadly, the fact of the matter is that religion is and always has been the most divisive and destructive influence on mankind.

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