Author: Ophelia Benson

Yet another confusion between equality and deference to religion.

Something called the “Equality Challenge Unit” is doing a survey called Religion and Belief in Higher Education. Given the name of the “unit,” one smells a rat at once. One smells bossy people creeping around universities demanding more “respect” for religions and religious beliefs in the name of “equality.”

The ECU said the research will “inform the further development of more inclusive policy and practice”.

Ah yes – just what we’re afraid of. We don’t think universities should be “more inclusive” of unreasonable beliefs.

In a letter to David Ruebain, the ECU’s chief executive, [Keith] Porteous Wood takes issue with some survey questions, including one asking students if they agree that “the content of my course is presented in a way which is sensitive to my religion or belief”.

That’s why we don’t think universities should be more “inclusive” in that way. Being “inclusive” should not extend to welcoming mistakes and fantasies into the curriculum.

An ECU spokeswoman said that Derby was chosen through a “competitive and comprehensive tendering process”, and that “assuming that a religious academic wouldn’t be able to conduct robust and unbiased research raises several equality issues in itself”.

This is where we came in.

Paul W has a long interesting comment on Ben Nelson’s The Unquiet Scientist post from last year, a post which has been quiet so long that Paul’s comment might be missed.

One or two highlights:

…experimental data that seem to support the opposite view—including a bunch of very basic and very well-known social psychology results from the 1960’s and 1970’s about bracketing, conformity, and groupthink. They seem to support Overton reasoning: if you don’t voice the “extreme” views, the group tends to converge on a new center position, midway between the views that are voiced. The center thus shifts away from the people who self-censor their (perceived) “extreme” views.

And

The individual psychology of belief fixation is complicated, and the social psychology is far more complicated. If things were as simple and one-sided as Mooney makes them out to be, politics would be simple, and that’s just false. There are a lot of two-edged swords flying around, for basic, deep reasons.

Good image!

Once again Chris Stedman is at the Huffington Post (home of woo and worse, home of Jenny McCarthy in deep denial about the exposure of Andrew Wakefield’s fraud) saying how great it is when atheists Reach Out to peopleoffaith.

He had a good time at Christmas. He went home and hung out with his family. Excellent; lovely; I have not a word to say in dissent. But he drew a moral from it, which seems to be that atheists are grumpy therefore it is urgent for humanists to Reach Out.

The trouble with that is that not all atheists are grumpy and that, especially, even atheists who are grumpy are not necessarily grumpy all the time. Things aren’t as stark as that.

We cannot promote Humanist values when we expend our energy lobbing simplistic critiques at the religious, or demand that people stop participating in practices they enjoy simply because they’re associated with religion.

Yes we can. We can do the one, and then the other.

All right, I know; he means we give Humanism a bad name by doing the things he accuses us of doing. But I think that oversimplifies the matter. Maybe some vocal atheists give some branches of humanism a bad name by doing foolish or trivial things – but that’s life in the big city. I’m not convinced that vocal atheists need to shape what they say and do according to what might possibly give Humanism a bad name.

As the Interfaith and Community Service Fellow for the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard, I am working on the ground to build up positive Humanist community…To build, literally and metaphorically, a Humanist community that is healthy and sustainable, we must get over this sense that provocation should be our number one goal, and that positive engagement with others is unimportant.

What sense? I have no such sense. I don’t have some settled view that “positive engagement with others is unimportant.” I don’t put it in those terms, because I’m not enamored of managementspeak, but I certainly think it’s fine to get along and sometimes collaborate with other people. Of course I do! Stedman’s version is sheer strawman. What I don’t think, however, is that I have some affirmative duty to Reach Out to Faith Communities as such, any more than I have some affirmative duty to Reach Out to Republican Communities as such, or Banker Communities as such, or Realtor Communities as such. Stedman, on the other hand, does think he has such an affirmative duty. He seems to think that he has to Reach Out to People of Faith precisely because they are in some sense opposites. I don’t have that. To me, disagreement is disagreement. It’s not a motivation for Reaching Out. I disagree with “faith” as a way of thinking, so I’m not going to Reach Out to it. That doesn’t mean I’m going to pounce on anyone I happen to encounter who has it, it just means I’m not going to open a diplomatic mission to it.

I believe that ethics and engagement are central to what it means to live in the world as a Humanist, and that Humanist community and identity require an affirmative foundation, not one structured in contrast to ideologies we disagree with.

But you can have both. You can be affirmative and still go on disagreeing with ideologies you disagree with. The one does not interfere with the other. Stedman really wants to persuade people that it does (so he’s not being affirmative toward atheists, wouldn’t you say?), but it doesn’t.

I don’t know how Leo Igwe keeps going, I really don’t.

Leo Igwe, an activist arrested last Tuesday in the ongoing onslaught against child rights activists by the Akwa Ibom State government, was released today by the Police who claimed it was a case of mistaken identity.

Confirming his freedom in a telephone chat with Saharareporters, Mr. Igwe described his incarceration as a nasty experience.

It was a terrible encounter and it was premeditated going by the way they executed the plot to hold me accountable for “kidnapping;” my hands were tied behind me and they beat me mercilessly,” he said.

Martin Robbins has a good, longish piece on the subject today. More publicity, which could make it harder for people to bully Leo and his parents and siblings; excellent.

Jerry Coyne said some things about atheism and anger today, giving a few of the excellent reasons to be angry about religion.

What is the proper response to all this religiously-inspired nonsense?  Anger, of course.  No, you don’t have to be a red-faced, sputtering jerk when confronting the faithful, but controlled anger is without doubt the right response to a form of superstition that wreaks uncountable harms on humanity.  And not “transitory” anger, either—permanent anger.

…

Again, the proper response to religious stupidity, as it was to segregation in the South, is anger—persistent anger.  Anger that remains until the kind of religion that forces its tenets and superstitions down humanity’s throat vanishes for good.

It’s odd that we even have to argue this. With the bishop of Phoenix and the murderer of Salman Taseer to point to, how can there be any dispute that anger is necessary? It’s as if we’ve all been sleepwalking for several decades, lulled into a stupid complacency about religion only because we never looked hard enough at its gruesome ways of carrying on.

Yes I see you there in the second row, Mr Blair. Yes I know that many people do good things in the name of religion; I do understand that many people think the way to be good is via religious institutions. But they’re laboring under a misapprehension: they could be good via secular institutions. The special ways religion is bad, on the other hand, are harder to replace with secular equivalents. What secular official would try to compel hospitals not to save the lives of women by ending their pregnancies? What secular person is not shocked to the core to learn that US bishops earnestly defend exactly that policy?

Until there are no bishops and no mullahs coming up with creative ways to oppress people, anger is not something we can afford to give up.

Via a commenter at Jerry’s, a salient remark by Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker in 2002, in a Talk of the Town piece on Niceness.

The problem, of course, is that niceness is overrated as a virtue. Many cultures are nice. The Southern antebellum aristocracy was marvellously well-mannered; its members left tasteful calling cards, entertained gracefully, and conducted their personal affairs with the utmost discretion. But they had few other virtues; in fact, it was the practice of niceness that helped to keep other values, such as fairness, at bay. Fairness sometimes requires that surfaces be disturbed, that patterns of cordiality be broken, and that people, rudely and abruptly, be removed from their place. Niceness is the enemy of fairness.

He may have derived that from Mark Twain – it’s related to what Twain called Sir Walter disease. The South was rotten with delusions about chivalry and other such nonsense while it wouldn’t have recognized justice if it had bitten them on the ass.