Monday 19 December 2011

A Christian nation

I suppose that if your infant son had been born disabled and died very young, in pain and incomprehension, without having experienced any of the few joys that human experience makes possible, you'd find it hard not to agree with the officially sanctioned priests that God moves in mysterious ways. Not having had this experience, I can only marvel at David Cameron's faith and his determination to impose it on those of us less blessed in the suffering department. To the extent that the BBC website's comments, as edited, are a barometer of British public opinion, I suppose that this, from a Muslim, is representative or at least reflective of what Muslims in Britain think.

“It’s very seldom I get excited by what our prime minister has to say and this is one of those times. As Muslims we also believe in the Bible. We believe in the teachings of Jesus. Not only that, but in the teachings of all the biblical prophets, including Moses in the Torah. So this is something that we feel is absolutely in tune with the Muslim thinking. We have to base our behaviour according to scripture, God’s revealed message.

Would that be the same Moses who insisted his troops return to the scene of their recent victory against the Midianites, kill the married women and enslave the girls in order to rape them? Or is that just an allegory? If so, what's the message, chaps? Assuming that there is only one Moses in the Bible and that the Bible is 'God's revealed message', the only appropriate question to pose the author of this unctuous comment is presumably: 'are you an insane pederast or are you just a Muslim?'

Some of my friends wonder whether I get too worked up about religion. My challenge to them is to defend the right of Sheik___ to express the opinions published on the BBC website and teach them to my kids. No doubt there is a legal defense, but do you really believe there is a moral one?

Extinguishing the darkness

'But what if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well?'

Kurt Vonnegut

The late, dead Steven Jay Gould, self-indulgent self-promoter, too clever by half, not clever enough to make the cut, is most famous in academic circles for being a co-author of one of the most highly cited papers in evolutionary biology. Described by one of his critics as 'a man whose ideas are so confused as to be hardly worth bothering with, but...one who should not be publicly criticized because he is at least on our side against the creationists', Gould was a brilliant essayist but he allowed his science to be dictated or revealed by what he wished were true. Because he thought that natural selection is a sort of Thatcherite plot to subvert the true teachings of The Founder, he devoted most of his career to exaggerating the importance of other evolutionary mechanisms and modes, most notoriously 'punctuated equilibrium'. His paper, 'The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm' is therefore almost always cited in order to mock the straw man it attempts to set up. The paper's chief virtue is that it introduced to a wide audience an arcane but useful architectural term.

A spandrel is the space necessarily created when two or more arches meet as in, say, a church roof. In architecture the space often becomes a vehicle for ingenious triangular artworks and Gould used it as a metaphor for biological traits that have the appearance of design but are in fact unavoidable design consequences of other 'decisions' that natural selection has taken. Gould's critics pointed out (perhaps deliberately missing his point, but then it's hard not to kick a man when he's down) that biological spandrels are always eventually co-opted by natural selection making the adaptation/spandrel distinction distinctly fine. Having come of age, evolutionarily speaking, when this debate was still current (the Spandrels paper made its obligatory self-immolating appearance in my PhD thesis), I was excited recently when I observed what I'll wager is a never previously noticed spandrel being co-opted not once but twice in the service of furthering the aims of its successive hijackers: toads and me.

In my greenhouse there are rows and columns of pots sat upon the floor, packed together as tightly as possible. Viewed from above, the pots are square and there are no spaces between them but they taper slightly towards their bases so that they will stack easily. This structural quirk creates between each group of four adjacent pots an invisible (from above) and wasted (from the perspective of efficient floor-space use) square-based pyramidal void. A spandrel, literally and figuratively, in other words. Toads love these voids because they are moist, warm and replete with slugs. I love toads because they love to eat slugs. Now, it often happens that I am working my way through a group of pots, weeding them. Often I lift a pot and disturb a toad, which has been whiling away the daylight hours snoozing in its niche. I smile benignly at the toad; it frowns at me and shuffles into an adjacent crevice. Inevitably this process is repeated, sometimes dozens of times, until eventually there are no more niches. If toads did not eat slugs things would then get ugly for the amphibian but in point of fact I simply pick it up and move it back to the other end of the group of pots. We part, if not as friends, certainly on cordial terms.

So Christopher Hitchens is dead after a long, public illness, stoically borne, pathetically traduced (see here for a reason, should you need one, to immediately venture forth and start summarily executing Daily Mail readers), lovingly lamented (see here) and tragically ending in another victory for cancer. Hitchens numbered among his friends the very brightest and best of our times, all of whom will say something to us of what he meant to them. What then can a not-even-acolyte say in farewell and in gratitude to an intellectual hero of Hitchens' stature? I say this: thank you for shining a light into the dark spaces where superstition lingers on this, the eve of our species' emancipation from fear. Thank you for seeing that your adversaries, retreating bruised from their latest headlong encounter with 'the wall', will eventually run out of spandrels in which to cower. Thank you for articulating the outrage that so many of us feel at the liberties we permit prophets, priests and other perverts to take with our children. You who, of course, can no longer hear must have died knowing how much we will miss you.

Wednesday 14 December 2011

Does Jesus keep you safe at night?

As I have mentioned elsewhere, my two children occupy a tectonically stable summit in my geologically active mental landscape. There are few things I would not do for them and none that involve no less effort than having a chat with a man that probably has more incremental influence on how they turn out than I do (I've given them some genes and can't take them back). Mr Baker is the Head Teacher of Christchurch School, a Voluntary Controlled State School in Bradford-on-Avon, where we live. Within quite strict limits, he is free to decide what my kids are taught and how.

In the UK, education to the age of 18 is free, although there are fee-paying schools that provide a better education than the State can afford. When my wife and I chose the school that our kids attend, our choice was limited by our finances and the schools to which we were entitled to apply. In practice there was a single option, the alternatives being so ghastly that they literally made my skin crawl. For the record, both Corinne and I (though I speak only for myself) are happy with the education they are receiving and there are few other schools we (I'd) rather they attend, money notwithstanding.

The most and best we can do for them as parents is to put them in the way of opportunities to learn and hope that they grasp them. It's also my view that there they should be protected, for a while longer, from exposure to some unavoidable but deferrable truths about the world they were born into. I don't want them to watch hard core porn, for example, or to join the local chapter of the Hitler Youth. I expect most of the parents of my childrens' peers would agree. When I suggest, however, that I don't think it's appropriate to teach five year-olds that human sacrifice is an appropriate way to expiate sins (the disgusting fantasy at the heart of Christianity), I am regarded as a troublemaker. Hence my meeting with Mr Baker. I'd been relaxed, by my standards, about the nonsense that primary school teachers spoon into children until Pieter came home one day and vouchsafed the following information:

'Daddy, did you know that Jesus keeps us safe at night?'

'No.' I said, 'Who told you that?'

'Miss ___', he said. 'We were asked to say something about night and ___ said "Jesus keeps us safe at night" and Miss ___ said "Yes, that's right."'

'Pieter', I replied, 'lots of grown-ups don't believe there is any god.'

'Oh, yes there is, daddy', he said, very seriously.

Prompted by this conversation, and steered into a diplomatic approach by my wife, I'd requested a meeting with Mr Baker to discuss the way in which our kids are taught about religious belief. Arriving uncharacteristically on time I was about to ring the bell when Mr Baker hove into view through the glass door. I waved, assuming he'd recognised me; he opened the door for me, turned his back and asked the receptionist 'So who am I supposed to be seeing, then?' It was an easy gaffe to make but an avoidable one. Never mind; he shook my hand, showed me into his office and asked what he could do for me. 'Please don't poison my children.' Would have expressed succinctly what I wanted to say but I wanted to make him feel the impotent pain of a father watching his childrens' minds being stolen.

I began by explaining that I'm an atheist with kids, who happens to live in Bradford-on-Avon. We decided to send our kids to Christchurch because it is the best school available to us. None of the alternatives have a different policy to teaching religion; all have a 'Christian ethos'. What, I wondered aloud, could a parent in my position do (I had some ideas)?

Mr Baker earned my respect by acknowledging my difficulty and stating his own, that he is answerable to a board of Governors, a third of whom are appointed by the Church-of-England church that owns the land and buildings. He said he'd been reprimanded for removing the teaching of 'spirituality' from the 'RE - religious education' syllabus; that one of the governors had suggested that all children attending the school should be prepared for 'confirmation' (into the Church of England); that there had been complaints following his decision to invite a local Muslim to lead a school assembly; that there had been opposition from some parents to the project, which the kids loved, of studying life in a Sri Lankan village, on the grounds that Buddhism is apparently rife in Sri Lanka. But when I pointed out that somewhere between a tenth and a fifth of the world's population (the stats are very hard to come by and highly unreliable) is declared atheist and isn't it therefore a school's duty to bring this to the attention of children, he admitted that it hadn't occurred to anyone to set the study of religion in the context of a world in which billions have no god. RE, even in enlightened schools, consists in the study of faiths, not in the study of myths.

After I'd been in Mr Baker's office for about five minutes, there was a knock on the door. A little man in a tracksuit, whom I took to be a sports teacher, came in without waiting for an answer. Ignoring me, he said to Mr Baker 'there are four of us waiting for you'. I need 15 minutes said Mr Baker. The small man frowned and left. Mr Baker and I carried on talking and I gradually received the impression that I was being told that there is little he (Mr Baker) can do. I suggested giving a talk, with the permission of parents, to kids in their final year at primary school, about atheism. He told me that the deputy head is chairing a working group (including some parents) on the teaching of spirituality in the school. 'Can I be on it?' I asked. I'll need to check with Mark, he said. There was another knock on the door and the little man came back in, looking quite irate. 'There are five of us waiting for you now.' He said. 'Who was that?' I asked. 'Mark', said Mr Baker, 'the deputy head.'

I am going to become a thorn in the side of the forces of evil, who want to teach my children that Jesus died for them on the cross.





Friday 23 September 2011

Cretin of the Week: John Gray

It is ironic that the subjects I detested most at school – Latin, Mathematics and Modern Languages – are those I’d now find most useful had I mastered them. Of the three, it was for Latin that I reserved the most highly refined species of loathing, distilled drop-by-drop from the deep fractionating column of my hatred. I literally burned my books the day I was permitted, aged 14, to drop it.

It’s all PO’s fault. PO was my first Latin teacher. Were he still alive I should think he’d be about 130 but I suspect the world contains one fewer tyrants than it did in his too-long lifetime. PO was driven into a puericidal rage by anyone incapable of declining Latin verbs to order. Since I tended to lose my way after amo, amas… I was on the receiving end of at least half of each lesson’s quota of sarcasm.

‘You little cretin!’ was PO’s favourite insult and he invested the two syllables of the final word in that sentence with more venom than a tobacco-chewing cobra could spit. Why a word that caused me so much childhood trauma has become my own insult of choice is mysterious but its deployment is up there with orgasm and the first glass of red wine of an evening in my personal hierarchy of stress-busting devices. Since sex and booze are off the menu for now, I make no apology for abusing the C-word on Alphatuosity, a blog that owes its existence to a superabundance of CRETINS and a dearth of cretin-hunters.

There, I feel better already.

John Gray: Cretin of the Week

Many religionists hold their beliefs sacred. That is to say, criticism of their religious beliefs is felt not intellectually but viscerally. What is more, a propensity to sacralize objects, totems and beliefs is a human universal and, probably an adaptation. This is why blasphemy, which ought to be a concept as antiquated as alchemy, was illegal in England and Wales until 2008 and remains a crime in Scotland. And also why referring to Muslims as goat-fuckers got Theo van Gogh murdered (by a goat-fucker).

John Gray doesn't understand this and so he thinks that beliefs don’t matter much to theists and that, in attacking the foundations of those beliefs, atheists are not just fighting on the wrong front, they are fighting in the wrong war (see here). Had he said that the war cannot be won, I’d have reluctantly agreed with him (because it is futile to try to reason someone out of a belief he was not reasoned into). But Gray's current preoccupation is with showing that atheism (which he seems to equate with humanism) is just another religion, science just another myth and myth just another prop, holding open the echoing spaces in our animal minds. His modus operandi involves stringing together a series of half-truths, apparently in the hope that enough of them will make a whole truth. But Gray's series departs further from sense with every term he adds.
'We tend to assume that religion is a question of what we believe or don't believe. It's an assumption with a long history in western philosophy...'
'When they attack religion [atheists] are assuming that religion is what this Western tradition says it is - a body of beliefs that needs to be given a rational justification.
'In most religions...belief has never been particularly important. Practice - ritual, meditation, a way of life - is what counts.'
'Myths [are] stories that tell us something about ourselves that can't be captured in scientific theories.'
'Myths can't be verified or falsified in the way theories can be.'
'I've no doubt that some of the ancient myths we inherit from religion are far more truthful than the stories the modern world tells about itself.'
'The idea that science can enable us to live without myths is one of these silly modern stories.'
'If Darwin's theory of evolution is even roughly right, humans aren't built to understand how the universe works.'
'Science has given us many vital benefits, so many that they would be hard to sum up. But it can't save the human species from itself.'
'Unbelievers in religion who think science can save the world are possessed by a fantasy that's far more childish than any myth.'
'[It's] only religious fundamentalists and ignorant rationalists who think the myths we live by are literal truths.'
'Evangelical atheists who want to convert the world to unbelief are copying religion at its dogmatic worst.'
'We'd all be better off if we stopped believing in belief.'
'What we believe doesn't in the end matter very much. What matters is how we live.'
Res ipsa loquitur, as PO might have said. I rest my case.

John Gray's ideas first came to my attention when I bought a copy of his book Straw Dogs, an analysis of the human condition that makes Schopenhauer's seem all coyly optimistic. I bought the book because I’d read a review by Will Self, in which he described Gray as possibly the cleverest man in the world. Like many reviews, this one turned out to say more about its author than its subject (see below). The article from which the statements above are taken is essentially a summary of Straw Dogs and to see why Gray deserves my inaugural Cretin of the Week award it is necessary to look more closely at the argument in that book.

The central claim of Straw Dogs is that humans are 'just' animals and that therefore belief in either progress or in our ability to manage our species' inevitable exit from life's stage represents not so much hubris as a hilarious category error. The book was widely reviewed and much praised. It was nominated as book of the year by J.G. Ballard, George Walden, Will Self, Joan Bakewell, Jason Cowley, David Marquand, Andrew Marr, Hugh Lawson Tancred, Richard Holloway and Sue Cook. 

What fascinates me about this is that, by implication, it came as news to these critics that humans are 'just' animals. Why else would an insight that has been blindingly obvious for 150 years to anyone with a passing acquaintance with evolutionary biology be heralded as revolutionary? What really pissed me off about the book and its fawning fans, though, is that he gets Darwin almost completely wrong. A self-confessed bookish man, Gray has clearly read The Origin of Species but, like the Nietzche-reading imbecile played by Kevin Kline in A Fish Called Wanda, he hasn't understood it. 
'Darwin teaches that species are only assemblies of genes, interacting at random with each other and their shifting environments.'
No he doesn't. Darwin had no knowledge of genes and famously made a dog's breakfast of attempting to rescue his theory of natural selection from the apparently fatal flaw of blending inheritance. Species are not 'assemblies of genes'. Species are notoriously difficult to define in a way that captures every example of the concept because 'species' is not a natural category. The units of which they are comprised, however, are organisms, not genes. Genes do not interact at random; in fact almost nothing (save creationism) could be further from the truth. Genes that get copied do so because they are exquisitely adapted to their environment, which consists mainly in other genes, with which they interact in a highly restricted fashion that has been shaped by eons of co-evolution. As an example of alphatuosity, this sentence is probably unbeatable. Except by the next three.
'Species cannot control their fates. Species do not exist. This applies equally to humans.'
Complete bollocks, to be blunt. Having (wrongly) informed us a few paragraphs earlier that species are assemblies of genes, Gray now says that they don't exist. This statement suits his argument but it is nonsense. The reason that 'species' is not a natural category is that lineages of organisms split, fragment and merge over time. A river delta is a more apt metaphor than a tree (which Darwin used) in picturing evolutionary history. The trouble is that where we draw the lines that demarcate a species is a matter of taste not biology. That is not at all to say, however, that species do not exist. It is a very unusual human being who is sexually attracted to chimpanzees and vice-versa. Some cichlid fish literally have eyes only for other members of the same species, which preserves distinct lineages ('species') until the lakes in which cichlids live become too murky for the fish to discriminate (here).

What Gray probably means is that natural selection does not act for the good of the species (naive group selection is still a common misunderstanding of Darwinism). The entity that is selected in natural selection is the gene. It is genes - not individuals, populations or species - that persist through generations and wax and wane in relative abundance. Because it is only in special circumstances, in highly social, intelligent animals that genes 'for' identifying with conspecifics can spread, Gray is right to argue that most species do not control their fates. Humans, of course, manifestly do influence the fate of the groups with which they identify, including all members of their own species.

Admittedly I have picked two particularly stupid excerpts from Straw Dogs to analyse but they illustrate that you'd be unwise to take seriously anything its author has to say on the consequences of Darwinism. In fact, as a result of his misreading of Darwinism, the whole of Gray's thesis is grounded in a non-sequitur. Not unlike the last Pope, Gray has woken up to the fact that humans are animals and he has broken this alarming news to the rest of the intelligentsia. In his excitement he has gone on to conclude, falsely, that fluctuating gene frequencies - aka evolution - somehow rule out the possibility of 'progress', a concept that itself is coherent only by reference to evolved human values. For good measure he declares culture incapable of altering the trajectory of its own evolution.

Bizarrely, having declared that the reification of species is a philosophical error, Gray has embraced the reification of a genuine myth: Gaia. I think it may be his enthusiasm for Gaia that has earned him the adoration of the chattering classes. Consider the following from Self's review of Straw Dogs.
'Gray doesn't provide a blow-by-blow account of how exactly Gaia will shrug our troublesome species off of her broad back, but shrug he certainly believes she will...'
Oh, well that's alright then. If the professor believes that Gaia will shrug us off, it must be true.

If all philosophical lives are a journey then Gray is a Wandering Albatross, drifting the oceans of thought, alighting occasionally on a speck of idealogically solid ground but never for long. For this, at least, I admire him. The inability to change one’s mind in light of new evidence is perhaps the greatest obstacle – bar stupidity – to attaining wisdom with which our evolved psychologies burden us. You’d have thought, however, that having moved from leftist to Thatcherite to Blairite to anti-capitalist to Gaian in about thirty years he’d have a healthy disregard for the value of his own opinion by now.

Saturday 10 September 2011

Press '1' if you're suicidal. Press '2' if you're just thinking about it.

The NHS (that's the National Health Service for non-natives - a medical care system that contrives to be simultaneously both free at the point of service and poor value for money). You couldn't make it up. Several weeks ago, in search of a free detox, I rang the number my GP had given me for our local NHS addiction treatment provider. There was nobody there. Now I'm neither paranoid nor delusional but, if I were, I suspect this would have been enough to push me over the edge. When I rang back later, a nice lady asked me some questions about my drinking, which I answered honestly.

'Right, then,' she said, 'we'll be in touch'.

'About what?' I asked.

'About making an appointment for you to come in for an assessment.' Shit-for-brains, she didn't add.

'But you've just assessed me.'

'No, that was the pre-assessment.'

'So, when will you contact me?'

'Oh, about two weeks, I should think. There's a bit of a waiting list.'

I hung up. So you have to get in a waiting list to receive a phone call to make an appointment to go to Trowbridge to get assessed to determine whether you need admission and this is after you've just told someone you drink two bottles of wine a night. After some reflection I realised that this is in fact a brilliant stratagem for meeting targets. Make your drug addicted patients wait long enough for help that they've requested shortly after hitting rock bottom and they mysteriously disappear from the waiting list. Often under the wheels of a train. Problem solved. Ingenious!

As some of you know, I've been through two pyschiatrists, hell, a clinical psychologist, a course of Chlordiazepoxide and several dozen Baclofen tablets since this farcical phone call. So when I received the follow up call yesterday (the one about making an appointment to get assessed) I had to exercise all my self-restraint not to unleash my formidable arsenal of the lowest form of wit.

'It's OK.' I said. 'I went private.'

'So we can close your file?'

'Yes.'

'Oh good. Well done.'

I'm not sure whether the nurse was addressing this closing remark to me or to herself. Either way, I'm in the statistics as another triumph for the NHS.

Thursday 8 September 2011

Some of my best friends are American: taking pride in prejudice

Don't get me wrong, I'm not anti-Semitic/a racist/homophobic/a misogynist. Some of my best friends are Jewish/black/gay/women. Who are you kidding? The minute you utter the sentence 'some of my best friends are...[enter despised group of choice]', you are identifying your unfortunate friends as the exceptions that prove what you take to be a rule. Moreover you are identifying an individual with a group and applying all manner of conscious and unconscious labels that you associate with the group to the individual. You are saying, in effect, that you like your friend, in spite of his membership of the group.

There are two distinct errors here. The first is that the labels are likely to be prejudices - opinions formed on the basis of insufficient evidence or none at all. The second is that you are unconsciously assuming that all the labels apply to every individual in a group. I see that you are nodding sagely, agreeing that prejudice is a very bad thing and noting that you yourself have never uttered The Sentence. I'll bet you have, though, unless you belong to a particularly maligned minority: Americans.

'Fucking Americans!' Are you really telling me you've never uttered or muttered these words? Everyone I know has a story that illustrates the alleged stupidity, parochialism and inflated sense of worth that characterizes Americans. My own favourite was told to me by an Australian guy who'd chatted up a pretty student at a bus stop in Harvard. After a while, she said she didn't recognise his accent. 'Oh, I'm Australian' he said. Her brow furrowed. 'Australia? West or East Coast?'

The thing is, some of my best friends are American. What's more, most of them live in Dumbfuckistan (aka the Republican voting States, aka Jesusland), as distinct from the Democrat States (aka the United States of Canada). See here. In fact, I have a nasty feeling that not only did some of them vote for George Bush, they actually have no regrets about doing so.

What disturbs me about this is that I sometimes feel the urge to apologise for this lamentable lapse of taste (liking some Americans) and that this urge is often strongest when my interlocutor is highly educated. The thing is, it's fashionable to hate Americans and has been for as long as I can remember.

How 'we' (educated, Western Europeans) chortle over polls suggesting that one third of Americans believe that aliens have visited earth (here) or that 24% of Republicans think that Barack Obama might be the antichrist (here) or that 55% of them believe that creationism and Intelligent Design should be taught alongside evolution in public schools (here).

We tend to forget that a clear majority of the world's top scientists are based in the USA (63% of the top 1% most highly cited scientific publications are written by scientists in the USA), that it boasts 15 of the top 20 universities in the world (the previous two statistics here) and that philanthropy levels in the USA are more than double those in the UK, Germany or the Netherlands (here).

When we mutter 'fucking Americans', what we really mean is 'fucking ignorant Americans' and educated Americans could and do justly mutter the same thing about the ignorant elsewhere in the world. Especially in France (here). What is particularly characteristic of ignorance in America is that it goes hand-in-hand with being a Christian (see this delicious article, which describes the National Academy of Sciences - 93% of whose members are atheists - as 'one of the most poisonous organizations in America' and 'a nest of atheists', thus neatly refuting the point it sets out to make). I shall expand on this point in another post. A lot.

Of course it is not very nice to be dismissive of the opinions of the ignorant but it is not prejudiced. By definition, the opinions of ignoramuses are uninformed and therefore worthless, except as anthropological curiosities.

Prejudice ought to be a matter for shame not pride, exactly in proportion to how educated you believe yourself to be. It also behoves us to learn to recognise our own prejudices before they come back to bite us. One man's prejudice is another man's clear-thinking analysis of the facts. How you react, for example, to the research suggesting that Askenazi Jews are more intelligent than other races (here) or that Africans are less intelligent than Caucasians (here) says a great deal more about your prejudices than it does about your lack of them.

'Prejudiced' is the pejorative adjective of choice of the terminally prejudiced.

There's an old joke about a regimental sergeant major, tried beyond reason by a lippy cadet, shaking his swagger stick at the cadet and bellowing 'Smith, there's a SHIT at the end of this stick!' To which Smith replies 'Yes sir! Not this end sir!' Show me an accusation of prejudice and nine times out of ten I'll show you a stick with a shit on the end of it. Not the pointy end.

Friday 2 September 2011

Uncommon sense

The Catholic apologist Peter Kreeft (see his website here) writes about the existence of god and has a large following. Google returns about 470,000 results from a search on his name. His writings are a splendid example of alphatuosity and as good a place as anywhere to start my crusade.

Most arguments for the existence of God turn out to be variants of one of three ideas: the argument from first cause, the argument from design and the argument from natural law. In this post I am going to discuss only the first of these, which Aquinas was the first to articulate. The argument says that all effects have causes in a chain that extends back into history until we arrive at the First Cause. The first cause is declared to be itself uncaused. It is a brute fact, stated as a premise of the argument. That's all there is to it. Aquinas was simply saying that there must have been a first cause, which we call God.

Aquinas's reasons for thinking the premise reasonable are subtle and ingenious, especially when viewed in the context of what passed for an argument elsewhere in the 13th century. He didn't know about atoms and quarks and quantum mechanics and therefore couldn't have realised that it is very far from clear that all effects have antecedent causes or, at any rate, that these effects are independent of observation. The reason the argument fails, however, even if one allows Aquinas's unbroken chain of cause and effect, is that the premise - that there must be a first cause and we might as well call it god - is silly. For it begs the question that every thoughtful child eventually asks. Who made god? In Why I am not a Christian, Bertrand Russell disarms the idea with an analogy. 

'It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindus view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the ele­phant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, How about the tortoise? the Indian said, Suppose we change the subject.' 

1. All effects have tomatoes.
2. The first tomato was a turnip.
3. Therefore turnips are ultimately responsible for all effects.


In this argument, 1 and 2 are premises. They are stated as facts, not to be disputed within the bounds of the argument. Point 3, the conclusion, is logically inescapable if the premises are accepted.


1. All effects have causes.
2. The first cause was God.
3. Therefore God is ultimately responsible for all effects.


Hopefully it is now clear that the difficulty with these arguments is not in the internal logic, which is inescapable, but with the soundness of the premises.

As an aside, it is worth noting that the fact that smart children spontaneously appreciate this flaw in Aquinas's great argument is sometimes taken as a reason to doubt that the flaw exists (what, that old argument?). This objection is truly feeble. If a fatal flaw in an argument is so obvious that untutored children appreciate it, surely that should be cause to doubt the argument, not the children?


I am not especially concerned here to establish the validity or falsity of the argument from first cause. So far as I am concerned, Russell's question about what the tortoise is standing on demolishes the argument. If you disagree with me and agree with Kreeft that it's tortoises all the way down, we are just going to have to park that disagreement for a time, while you go away and think about it.


What I am interested in is showing how alphatuists fool others, and perhaps themselves.

At the end of his essay, Kreeft approvingly quotes C.S. Lewis:

'I felt in my bones that this universe does not explain itself'.

There are two curious things about this quotation.

The first is that these words were written by G.K. Chesterton, not C.S. Lewis. Perhaps Kreeft felt in his bones that it was the sort of thing that CS Lewis might have written. Perhaps the error doesn't matter very much because C.S. Lewis certainly did have such intuitions about the universe. He wrote, for example, in Encounter With Light, the unanswerable and moronic question:

'If you are really a product of a materialistic universe, how is it that you don't feel at home there?'

and, in Miracles,

'How could an idiotic universe have produced creatures whose mere dreams are so much stronger, better, subtler than itself?'

A better question might have been 'How come natural selection didn't expel such idiotic alphatuists very early in its history?'

The second odd thing about Kreeft's use of the phrase is his evident approval of the notion that gut instincts are a good guide to the truth. He makes this point explicitly at the start of his essay when he says that the First Cause argument is 'basically very simple, natural, intuitive, and commonsensical'.

Appeals to intuition and common sense are frequent in alphatuosity. Practitioners regularly encourage their disciples to trust their intuitions even, or especially, when they conflict with reason. You do not have to be an evolutionist to see why intuition is a terrible guide to the truth, though it helps to have a grasp of how natural selection works.

Consider for a moment the theory of relativity. According to this theory, the faster you travel, the slower time passes, relative to an observer at rest. So if you get into your starship and whizz off to Mars at light speed, you'll have aged a little bit less than your friends back home when you return. If you spend decades rushing very fast around the galaxy, like Lieutenant Ripley in the Alien movies, you will return to find that your children have grown old and died before you get home. Does this make sense? If it does then perhaps you are a genius on a par with Einstein, whose counter-intuitive insight makes him one of the most revered figures in the history of science. Or what about quantum mechanics? Is Schrodinger's cat alive, dead or undead? Or, bringing the debate back down to earth, can a gene for tasting great to predators spread? Yes it can.

Common sense is in ordinary language the name for the rules of thumb we use to evaluate minute-to-minute decisions in life. It works really well because ancestors whose rules of thumb encouraged them to discuss vegetarianism with the saber-toothed tiger did not leave descendants. Our ancestors never faced situations in which they were traveling at warp factor nine, nor did their survival depend upon an appreciation of the quantum mechanical events 'occurring' in the subatomic particles of which they were composed, Common sense is therefore silent on these issues and it requires a huge intellectual effort to grasp, let alone manipulate the equations that govern these counter-intuitive truths.

The argument from first cause is a historical curiosity that gives us a glimpse into the frightening minds of our not-very-distant ancestors. Aquinas, enlightened by the standards of his day, also wrote 'Wherefore in order that the happiness of the saints may be more delightful to them and that they may render more copious thanks to God for it, they are allowed to see perfectly the sufferings of the damned.' As Richard Dawkins put it succinctly in The God Delusion, 'nice man'.

Whereas Aquinas had an excuse for being a complete wanker, Peter Kreeft does not. Whereas G.K Chesterton (just about) had an excuse for thinking that feeling something in your bones is grounds for rejecting the entire post-enlightenment scientific enterprise, you have no such excuse. If you listen to the siren calls of alphatuists who command you to obey your intuitions, you are destined to founder on the unforgiving reefs of reason. The truth, as Fox Mulder so rightly said, is out there. Go find it. Or if you really still want to believe in God, here are 666 reasons to do so. Thanks again to R, the source of all interesting factoids and websites for directing me to the link.

High and dry

Another week, another mind-altering substance. This one is called Baclofen, an anti-spasticity agent that has been around for years and has been used primarily to control the symptoms of MS and cerebral palsy. A cardiologist, Olivier Amiesen wrote Le Dernier Verre, published in English as The End Of My Addiction, about how Baclofen 'cured' his alcoholism.

Baclofen is a GABA (gamma aminobutyric acid) receptor agonist, that works by binding with GABA receptors in the cell membranes of neurons, opening potassium channels via a series of intermediate metabolic steps and thereby inhibiting the release of certain neurotransmitters. Why that in turn reduces alcohol cravings remains in the realms of speculation.

I've finished my course of Chlordiazepozide, so the number of psychotropic substances I ingest each day is stable at four. Since three of these have anxiolytic properties, a pot-toking jellyfish probably suffers more anxiety in the course of a bad day in the plankton than I do in an average week. My new psychiatrist cheerfully told me that he is using me as 'a sort of a guinea pig' because the Medical Research Council has recently declined to fund a full scale clinical trial into the efficacy of Baclofen in addiction treatment so, for the moment, he must rely on anecdotal evidence from his patients.

Clutching his prescription in my sweaty hand, I paid another visit to Bliss (the pharmacy, not the state of mind), handed over £12 and swallowed my first dose. At this rate of expenditure on pharmaceuticals it will take me 32 years to spend as much as the Priory would have charged me for a month's stay. I may not be a financial analyst of the first water but I know a bargain when I see one and Baclofen is definitely up there with Sainsbury's own-label Chianti and the flame-haired masseuse at the Hotel Lipka in Montenegro.

Speaking of the Priory, a friend(1) has alerted me to the entertaining factoid that 'the Priory chain was sold to a bunch of US private equity sharks, Advent International, which specialize in “mid-cap growth companies” (addiction is a fine growth business, of course)'. I worked for a few years in the leveraged buyout group at JP Morgan and became accustomed to going on site visits, during the course of which we observed soon-to-be-made-redundant wage slaves going about their futile working lives. This activity was referred to as 'kicking the tyres'. Presumably Advent's executives got to kick the retards before they handed over the wonga to the Priory's previous owners...wait for it...RBS.

Boarding the train back to Chippenham my new drug was immediately put to a stern test by the bloke who sat next to me, sipping beer from a can all the way. I was trying to read a book by the wonderfully euphonious philosophical quartet Bennett, Dennett, Hacker and Searle, the first and third of whom argue that qualia (the 'what it is like' of sensations) do not exist. I can assure them that the beer quale not only exists, it has real effects in the brains of addicts like me.

But this blog is meant to be about alphatuosity, so let me present you with a fine example, taken from the Priory's leaflet on alcohol dependency, on display in the waiting room above the machine dispensing free coffee (an addictive substance on which, according to John Walsh of The Independent, the average Brit now spends more per annum than on utility bills - see here). 

Is alcohol dependency a disease?

It has a cause, a symptom and is treatable - so it has all the characteristics of a progressive disease. People who are dependent on alcohol lose control of how much and how often they drink. The only effective remedy to is to stop drinking completely. 

Alcohol dependency is described in medicine as a 'morbid process'. Put simply, it may kill you if it is left untreated.


Let's briefly but critically appraise this lovely example of complete horse shit.

It has a cause, a symptom and is treatable - so it has all the characteristics of a progressive disease.

Right. So love is a disease, is it? It has a cause (meeting someone with whom you experience mutual sexual attraction), a symptom (several actually, all mind-altering) and is treatable (by marriage). The non-sequitur (see this splendid cartoon series for daily illustrations of the concept) is an essential weapon in the armoury of alphatuists. The method involves making simple, inarguable claims, then drawing invalid but superficially plausible conclusions. I believe in God. I needed a parking space. I prayed that one would be available. There was a parking space just where I needed it. Therefore God exists.

People who are dependent on alcohol lose control of how much and how often they drink.

True but then people who are dependent on oxygen lose control of how much and how often they inhale. The true-by-definition statement is another hallmark of alphatuosity. The point of treatment for alcohol addiction ought to be to enable an addict to regain control. Telling an alcoholic that he cannot control his drinking is like telling an explorer he cannot head east from the North Pole. It is true but useless. The alcoholic, like the explorer, needs to know something that is true but not trivial. 


The only effective remedy to is to stop drinking completely. 

The argument from authority is very powerful. The above sentence is untrue. Many heavy drinkers and some (but very few - see here - alcoholics) learn to moderate their consumption without stopping completely. Presented to suggestible individuals, in a leaflet published by a respected psychiatric hospital, however, it is treated my most readers as being the gospel truth. Ordinary people will do truly appalling things if instructed to do them by an authority figure (see here for a description of a classic series of experiments by Stanley Milligram in which volunteers complied with instructions to administer fictitious electric shocks to a 'subject', who was in fact an associate of Milligram). Alphatuists know this and will often abuse positions of authority by asserting useful falsehoods as undeniable. The key to the gates of heaven are to be found beneath that bulge in my cassock, little boy.

Put simply, it may kill you if it is left untreated. 

Life is a morbid process. Metabolism leads inexorably to death. The point is not that alcoholism 'may' kill you if it is not treated. The point is whether or not the small quota of life each of us experiences is enhanced or diminished by alcohol. It's a moot point and one on which the Priory's leaflet is silent.

Because the Evening Standard is now free I picked up a copy at Marble Arch tube station yesterday, which is why I know that 'shopping mall bosses are shocked at staff who cannot read or write' (see here, if you must - the article is journalism at its most tawdry). Why the bosses are shocked is not explained but one sometimes wonders whether the illiterate are not the lucky ones.

No doubt Advent International will meet its IRR target for the Priory acquisition. My friend is right. Addiction treatment is a growth industry, one driven more by credulity than greed.

(1) It's odd but true that 95% of the interesting factoids I know have been vouchsafed to me by, at most, 5% of my acquaintances. I am not blowing smoke up the arse of this guy (although I suspect he'd enjoy it if I did) when I say that he is responsible for a clear majority of the 95%.



Wednesday 31 August 2011

Psychotropic drugs and the cult of AA

Perhaps the only good thing about being a depressed alcoholic is that I get to take a lot of psychotropic drugs without fear of prosecution. My daily cocktail currently includes Venlafaxine (a serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor that acts on two separate neurotransmitter groups), Mirtazipine (a noradrenergic and seratonergic antidepressant), Zopiclone (a non-benzodiazepine hypnotic agent), Chlordiazepoxide (an anxiolytic benzodiazepine derivative with anticonvulsant, sedative, and amnesic properties) and a line of coke with my cornflakes. I also take strong vitamin B complex tablets, pills to control my hayfever and Diclofenac for the gout that plagues me from time-to-time, but I don't think they count as psychotropic. Floating on the mild high induced by the soup of pharmaceuticals bathing my few remaining neruons, I could have strolled through the recent riots in Tottenham without a flutter of anxiety troubling my chemically lobotomised brain. Until very recently I was also drinking between two and three bottles of red wine a night (that's about 205 units a week, rather more than is generally recommended).

It's a minor fucking miracle that anything resembling Tom Mitchell materialises from the pharmaceutical fog when he wakes up each morning and stumbles downstairs to make a mug of tea. Ask any honest psychiatrist how and why each of the drugs listed above works and the answer will involve an expressive shrug and some stuff about molecules binding to receptors. In truth, contemporary psychiatrists work a bit like a monkey pressing buttons on a keyboard, a few sequences of which release treats if pressed in the correct order. They know that the sequences have certain effects; they understand that pressing the keys sends certain signals to the computer's processor but beyond that you may as well ask the monkey what's going on for all the coherence of the answer you'll get. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that mediaeval apothecaries operating using Paracelsus's doctrine of similars were as well informed.

It grieves me to report that I have drunk my last alcoholic drink. The final sip of the liquid that has been my lover, trusted friend, confidante and unfailing source of uncomplicated pleasure for 23 years passed my lips on Tuesday 23 August 2011, at about 11pm, when I was barely conscious and certainly unable to appreciate the poignancy of the moment. The following day I went to see a new psychiatrist (my psychiatrists have a half life of about 18 months) to discuss options for detox and rehab. For a variety of reasons this man's approach clicked with something in me and, when he asked when I'd like to start detox, I replied 'tonight'. The course of Chlordiazepoxide, which prevents seizures during withdrawal, that he prescribed expires tomorrow morning, after which I'm on my own, chemically speaking (except for the other psychotropic drugs, of course, but they have ceased to count, or work).

I have been dithering about this decision for a couple of months. My hesitation stemmed not just from the fact that I really, really didn't want to make it (true) but also because it is astonishingly difficult in the UK to get help quitting any addiction unless you are prepared to join a cult.

When I asked my psychiatrist (the one before the current one) for advice, she recommended admission to the Priory's 28 day 'Addiction Treatment Program' (ATP). For about £18,500 you get a supervised detox, a private room, three barely edible institutional meals a day and the opportunity to participate in an Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) 'fellowship' group. AA's approach is based in the so-called 12 step method, which is a truly terrifying set of instructions for brainwashing highly vulnerable and often desperate addicts.

See for yourself:

1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

Allow me to paraphrase.

1. Take a vulnerable subject and persuade him that he is worthless, dirty and spiritually dead.
2. Into the void you have created slip a convenient substitute - God (our God).
3. Hit the poor bastard with the sucker punch - he can never leave because, if he does, he will immediately go to hell (aka step 1).
4. Go forth and spread the word.

Now I knew some of this at the time my psychiatrist suggested the Priory and I said that I didn't really think that an approach that required me to relinquish control over my fate to a higher power was destined to work with me, a monist, a materialist and an atheist.

Did she immediately see that I was right and suggest other approaches? Did she hell. She asked me to keep an open mind (see my earlier post on the real meaning of such a request) and suggested I talk to one of the 'experts' on the ATP. This I agreed to do (psychiatrists wield tremendous authority). The lady I met was lovely. Inarticulate and severely screwed up but sincere and lovely. She told me that yes, there is a lot of talk about God and a lot of evangelising but 'many' participants think of the fellowship as their 'higher power' and wouldn't I consider just taking the bits of the program I wanted and ditching the rest? She even knew an atheist (only the one but who's counting?) who was still 'with the program' after a decade. How could I dismiss it without having so much as attended a meeting, she enquired? I swear, this woman could have taught the Reverend Moon a thing or two.

AA should be banned. Is most respects I am a believer in the motto caveat emptor. If I offer you a bottle of snake oil for £100 (or £18,500) and you are stupid enough to hand over the wedge, that is not a matter in which the government should intervene. In this case, however, the victims of the scam are particularly vulnerable to exploitation and their resistance to BS is likely to be at an all time low at precisely the moment they are targeted by the AA cult.

'Hang on', I hear you say, '"victims", "scam", "BS", "cult"? Surely AA helps people, doesn't it?'

No. It doesn't. About 70% of the individuals who embark on a 12 step based ATP relapse. According to the government's own mental health guidelines (see here) 12 step methods do not have significantly different outcomes than other approaches to addiction treatment. The other approaches were CBT, couples therapy, psychoeducational intervention (whatever that may be) and 'coping skills'. Let me ram the point home. Going on a 'coping skills' course is statistically neither more nor less likely to help you successfully give up alcohol than AA.

Lest you think that I am making this up I have quoted verbatim the wording in a footnote (1).

I wouldn't be so worked up about all this if AA were not so all-pervasive in the addiction treatment industry. Out of curiosity, I checked out every residential rehab unit within 50 miles of my postcode. Every single one of them either uses a 12 step approach or is run by the Salvation Army.

Faced with the option of checking into a rehab clinic that requires you to leave your brain at the door or going it alone, I decided to go it alone. My beloved, wise and inspired sister had tracked down a psychiatrist at a Private Hospital in London. He specialises in addiction and had successfully treated a friend of my brother-in-law. Dear friends, let me tell you how much it costs to detox safely and without added institutional meals and charlatanry. £9 (sic). That's what the oh-so-aptly named 'Bliss Pharmacy' at Marble Arch charged me for the 52 Chlordiazepoxide tablets that Dr S prescribed. I'll admit that the one and a half hours I spent with Dr S set me back £380 but boy was it worth it.

Amy Winehouse recently became more famous than she could ever have dreamed of being in life by the simple if drastic expedient of dying. A friend sent me the link to her song 'Rehab', in which she explains her refusal to acquiesce to pleas that she should go there. If someone had had the wit and the wisdom to tell Amy that she didn't need to go to rehab, she might not have felt the need to rebel with such fierce and suicidal determination and she might still be alive today.

'Rehab' by Amy Winehouse

So what next? I'm detoxed. I've said 'no, no, no' to rehab. I'm not going to be in the 70%. I am semi-resigned to a life of sensory deprivation (the friend who advised me not to worry about this - 'masturbation is an art form' he said - is evidently better versed in this field than me). For the moment I'm working very, very hard and thinking as little as possible. One step at a time.

The explorer Benedict Allen became infamous for killing and eating his faithful pet dog Cashew, while lost in the Amazon rain forest. Cashew had become separated from Allen some days earlier when his canoe capsized but the dog had somehow tracked his master and was reunited with him. Several days later, delirious with malaria and hunger, Allen chopped the poor dog's head off and ate its flesh. I think I have an inkling how Allen must have felt, when he regained his sanity. He had killed his best and most faithful friend in the belief that it was absolutely necessary if he was to survive himself. Cashew's story has a sad denouement. A few minutes after eating him, Allen vomited up the dog's remains. Cashew died for nothing but Allen lived to tell the tale (in fact I heard the story from the man himself, when I was an undergraduate). Will the murder I have recently committed have a similarly pathetic ending?

By the way, I don't really do coke with my cornflakes. Just wanted to know who was paying attention.

(1) 'The clinical evidence revealed no significant difference between TSF [twelve step facilitation] and other active interventions in maintaining abstinence, reducing heavy drinking episodes when assessed post-treatment and at various follow-up points up to 12 months. TSF was significantly better than other active interventions in reducing the amount of alcohol consumed when assessed at 6-month follow-up. However, the effect size was small...and no significant difference between groups was observed for any other follow-up points.

No significant difference in attrition rates was observed between TSF and other active interventions in attrition post-treatment and up to 6-month follow-up. However, those receiving TSF were more likely to be retained at 9-month follow-up, although his difference was not observed at 12- and 15-month follow-up.


The quality of this evidence is high, therefore further research is unlikely to change confidence in the estimate of the effect.'


Friday 19 August 2011

On balance

Keep an open mind. The slogan of charlatans everywhere. What they mean, of course, is keep an empty mind and most of us are happy to oblige. Purveyors of homeopathy, crystal therapy and religion all understand that humans have a propensity to notice coincidences and imbue them with meaning but to fail to notice the absence of a coincidence. In other words, we are born superstitious.

My Dad was a practicing Christian in his youth but, like most thinking people, harboured his doubts. One day he prayed to God to give him a sign. Just at that moment a minor earthquake struck Pietermaritzburg in South Africa, where he was on his knees at the time. All doubts instantly expunged, Dad fervently implored God to desist. And, amazingly enough, God desisted.

I was close to my Dad and often, as a child, was plagued by nightmares that he had died (he was much older than most of my friends' fathers). The night before he actually died I dreamed of nothing at all. But suppose I had? It's not that unlikely. Let's suppose that I dreamed 100 times during my childhood that Dad had died, when in fact he had not. That's about 1% of the nights between my birth and my father's death. Assuming that the dreams were randomly distributed - not, of course, an accurate assumption but this is just an illustration - there's a 1% chance that I'd have dreamed he'd died the night before the actual event. And yet, if I'd actually had the dream on that night, I guarantee I'd be telling the story to this day. How remarkable, I'd be saying. It really makes you think, doesn't it? Well actually, no. It really makes you not think.

It is not a sign of intelligence or wisdom to insist on considering 'both' sides of every argument. As Bertrand Russell pointed out, we are technically obliged to be agnostic with respect to a hypothetical teapot in orbit about Mars. No-one can prove its non-existence but that is not a reason to waste time worrying about its potential existence. There are sound independent reasons for doubting that such an orbiting teapot exists and the burden of proof lies with the teapottyists.

The dominant surviving religions are deeply embedded in the societies they have infected. We atheists are often chastised for demonstrating a lack of 'balance'. Surely all those people can't be wrong? Surely, I say, no-one is stupid enough to believe that all those people can't be wrong? Why must we treat with respect imbeciles who preach the existence of a loving creator-god who answers prayers? One wonders what the exploding penis of honey bees (see here) says about the mind of god. One wonders about the problem of evil (we have free will, which lets Big G off the hook). One wonders about the under-reported observation that prayers are not, in fact, answered. One wonders why anyone would treat the claims of advocates of the loving creator-god hypothesis with any less contempt than the claims of teapottyists. Respect, we are rightly taught, must be earned. So must contempt. Believers have earned it in spades.

A balanced view admits opinions that offer evidence for their veracity. It excludes opinions of the teapot-in-orbit-about-Mars variety, that depend for their acceptance solely on an appeal to the unproveability of the contrary viewpoint. I am all for balance. I am all for keeping an open mind. But let us take the advice attributed to many different wise men but perhaps most plausibly to Carl Sagan to keep an open mind but not so open that our brains fall out.


Thursday 14 July 2011

Why it matters

When I was about ten years old the worst insults I knew were 'Jew' and 'homo'. I had no idea what either of these words meant but, if one of my peers was mean, I'd call him a Jew and if another was creepy I'd call him a homo. I remember vividly a game we played in our spare time, a variant of tag in which a tall, pretty boy chased the other kids around the playing fields while we shrieked 'homo! homo!' at him. If he succeeded in touching another boy, he was infected with homo-ness and became dirty. A few years later, when I'd understood that Jews have long been associated in Christian culture with miserliness and that 'homo' meant 'homosexual', I felt no shame at having misused these words. I felt smug about my new worldliness and my revulsion for Jews and homos deepened.
 
Those playground games were supervised by adults, men (mostly) and women whom our parents had charged with our education. So far as I recall, they never intervened. Never thought it appropriate to stop our game and rescue the unlucky child who had been labeled a homo. Never thought to ask us what we understood by this word. What were they thinking? What weren't they thinking? It wasn't until, as an undergraduate, I made a friendship with an openly gay man that I was forced to confront my prejudices. But for a chance encounter with a like-minded bloke in a bar in Cambridge, I might not yet have seen them for what they were. Anti-Semitism and homophobia remain ubiquitous and have resulted in contemporary times in atrocities ranging in scale from the Holocaust to the personal hell inflicted on gay men and women by intolerant societies.

Children learn with consummate ease but they forget only with extreme difficulty. Consider the simple case of handwriting. If well taught, kids pick up the basics in a matter of months and within a few years are able to record in arbitrary symbols, perhaps with a few spelling mistakes, any sentence uttered in their native language. Some children pick up bad habits, often from their parents, forming letters 'incorrectly'. If these habits are left uncorrected they can persist for life. This is hardly a big deal but nevertheless we practice correct letter formation with our kids in the knowledge that habits, good and bad, they learn now will stick. "Give me the boy until he is seven and I will give you the man."

Now I have two young children of my own. I would like to protect them from evil for as long as possible. This duty implies much more to me than keeping them away from paedophiles and other predators. Their mother and I are the guardians of the gateway to their developing minds. Childrens' minds are little engines for generating beliefs about the world. The raw materials for these beliefs are supplied by adults, specifically by the special class of adult known as teachers. Teachers therefore have a responsibility to avoid putting false beliefs into the minds of children. Parents must ensure that teachers discharge this responsibility and intervene if they do not.


Children in most schools in England no longer run around playgrounds screaming 'Jew!' and 'homo!' at one another, for which I am grateful. I am happy for my kids that they will never have to unlearn the false beliefs that Jews are miserly and homosexuals are creepy. I think this represents genuine moral progress (a large claim which I will try to justify in a future post) and is something our society should be proud of and should defend against the claims of moral relativists.

The deliberate reinforcement of some particularly vile false beliefs has been curtailed, then, but there are plenty of other false - and dangerous - ideas that we allow our children to be taught. Conspicuous among these are the tenets of the dominant religious ideology in the culture in which they are growing up. In the case of my children, this ideology is Christianity. 

My five year old son came home from school the other day and declared that "God keeps us safe at night." How did he know this? I asked. "We had to say something about night and ____ said 'God keeps us safe at night' and Miss ____ said 'That's right.'" I told Pieter that some grownups disagree with Miss ____. For example, I said, "I think that there isn't any god." "Oh yes there is, Daddy." Shot back Pieter.

Whatever our respective views on Miss ____'s beliefs, we can surely all agree that god or God emphatically does not keep us safe at night and that it is downright dangerous to teach children that he does. We would be rightly angry if our children were taught that god keeps them safe when they are crossing the road or playing with a box of matches. Why then should we smile indulgently when they are taught something equally ludicrous but less obviously life-threatening? Why should we impose on our children the burden of having to unlearn later in life, when unlearning is so hard, the false beliefs that we are quite deliberately shoveling down their willing little throats now?

In England we still permit, even encourage priests to visit our schools and teach our kids false beliefs. I suppose that I should be grateful we don't live in Ireland or Italy, where the instilling of false beliefs is far from the only thing on a priest's agenda. If these beliefs were about the correct way to form the letter 'P' then I would do what my wife advises and relax. But they are not. They concern the existence of a particular God and claims that the foundations of human morality are to be found in the word of that God, as revealed by his prophets and recorded in the Bible.

What exactly are these claims? It's tough to pin down a Christian these days but it's hard even in the Church of England, to deny that at the core of Christianity is the belief that god sent his only son to earth and caused him, after a few years of ministry, to be tortured to death in order to redeem the sins of humans dead and yet unborn. Practicing Christians remember this god/man at least once a week, in a ritual that involves drinking his blood and eating bits of his flesh. 

Let us be very clear about this. We are allowing our children to be taught that God's son had to die in mortal agony so that their sins could be forgiven by his father. And that Dad orchestrated the whole setup.

Of course, I think the evidence indicates quite clearly that god does not exist but, even if I did believe in god, why would I worship him if these are the sorts of ways he gets his kicks? More pertinently, why would I allow anyone to teach my children - too young still to argue back - to worship him?

The Bible is the core text of Christianity and is also, in part, held sacred by Jews and Muslims. To followers of all three religions it is a document to which we are meant to turn for moral guidance.

Moses' instructions to his army captains, who had been a bit sloppy in the matter of murdering the Midianites, is a celebrated example of Old Testament morality.

"Now, therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known a man by lying with him; but all the women-children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves."

Numbers, Chapter 31, Verse 13

Nor was Christ the loveable chap he is generally held to be. The New Testament is full of bad ideas too. Bertrand Russell pointed this out with mischievous wit in Why I am not a Christian.

"There is, of course the familiar text about the sin against the holy Ghost: Whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost it shall not be forgiven him neither in this World nor in the world to come.  That text has caused an unspeakable amount of misery in the world, for all sorts of people have imagined that they have committed the sin against the Holy Ghost, and thought that it would not be forgiven them either in this world or in the world to come. I really do not think that a person with a proper degree of kindliness in his nature would have put fears and terrors of that sort into the world.


Whichever way you look at the truth of the claims made by Christians, it seems to me a grave moral error to allow these claims to be taught, as though they were beyond dispute, to young children. How can it be right that we care enough about correct letter formation to practice it endlessly with our children lest they develop bad letter-forming habits, yet are so indifferent to their moral well-being that we allow them to be taught that human sacrifice is an appropriate way to expiate sins?

This blog is my personal take on religion and its dangers. My starting point, as a human being and a father, is that religion does matter. We are allowing our kids to be taught Very Bad Ideas in ways that present them as being very good and I contend that, in allowing this, we are culpable of a crime against our children at least as great as that perpetrated by my parents and the teachers who allowed me to scream 'homo!' at a ten year old boy without confronting me with what I was saying.