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.