Author: Ophelia Benson

A ‘relationship counsellor’ was fired after (and for? the Telegraph is cagy) refusing to give sex advice to homosexual couples. Therefore, the former archbish of Canterbury George Carey says, laws banning discrimination have ‘taken precedence over religious freedoms.’ Well, yes, if you like to put it that way. By the same token, if you choose to believe that the bible both mandates and allows slavery, and that that translates to people of your particular race being allowed to enslave people not of your race, and you act, or attempt to act, accordingly, then yes, your ‘religious freedom’ will be curtailed to that extent. Laws against discrimination in the form of enslavement by race or other category do indeed take precedence over the freedom to enslave by race or other category. You know what? That is too god damn bad.

The complaint is fundamentally stupid, because no freedom is without limits. Freedoms and rights come with various implicit stipulations in the background – within reason; other things being equal; of course not to the point of harming other people; and so on. The former archbish might as well complain that laws banning murder have taken precedence over religious freedoms to execute blasphemers and infidels. He wouldn’t say that, because it is no longer the done thing in his part of the world to execute infidels, or even to enliven the Telegraph with wishful thinking about executing infidels. But it is still the done thing in his particular fetid corner of his part of the world to hinder and reject and refuse service to gays, and he is too blinkered and ungenerous to realize that that too is a parochial bit of small-minded nastiness that is just as temporary as the old practice of executing infidels. He is too lost and empty to realize that in a few decades at most his desire to defend the persecution of gay people will look just as tyrannical and demented as a desire to defend infidel-murder would look now.

Lord Carey, in his written statement, said that recent decisions by the courts were “but a short step from the dismissal of a sincere Christian from employment to a religious bar to any employment for Christians”…They claim that the ruling [in the Lilian Ladele case] meant that the right to express the Christian faith must take second place to the rights of homosexuals.

That’s right, and a good thing too. The ‘right’ to ‘express the Christian faith’ by refusing service to gay people must indeed take second place to the rights of homosexuals not to be treated as automatic inferiors and pariahs. I hope the asymmetry is obvious enough? On the one hand a putative ‘right’ to treat other people badly, on the other hand a right not to be treated badly. Are we clear about this? My right to treat you badly always takes second place to your right not to be treated badly. In other words, the ‘right’ to treat people badly is not a right at all. To claim that it is, is an abuse of the language of rights (in that it resembles the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam, which makes all rights subordinate to ‘what sharia allows’).

The fact that boffins from a supposedly ‘moderate’ church like the Anglican one are running around squalling about the end of their ‘right’ to persecute people is enough to show that Dawkins really isn’t all that wrong about ‘moderate’ religion.

Whatever you do don’t miss Johann Hari on the BBC saying what’s what about the pope. He does a tremendous job. He reads what the pope told the bishops in 2001; he asks what would happen if this kind of thing happened at the BBC – imagine the top boffin telling all the staff to keep everything entirely secret and moving the child rapist to a different creche in a different part of London; he says repentance is not enough, this is a criminal matter.

It’s not enough to say sorry, if you’re sorry, hand yourself over to the police and allow them to investigate it.

When Marc Roche of Le Monde is waffling on about waiting for a better pope he cuts in and says we wouldn’t talk this way about any other organization – we wouldn’t say oh dear what can we do, we’ll just have to wait for a better boss of the outfit. He’s a man of steel. Don’t miss it.

PZ says many good things on the subject, for instance on what the textbook that inspired De Dora’s educational advice actually said.

…that was a small part of a two page section of the text that summarizes the legal history of efforts to keep creationism out of the public schools. It is not a book that condemns Christianity, carries on a crusade to abolish religion, or calls believers delusional; it is moderate, entirely polite in tone (praise Jesus! It meets the most important criterion of the faitheists!), and plainly describes an entirely relevant legal and social issue for biologists in non-judgmental terms. It does use the accurate, factual term “myth” for what creationists are peddling, and that’s as harsh as it gets. It is exactly what the less rude proponents of evolution teaching should want.

In other words, if textbooks and teachers can’t even do that, they really are well and truly stifled and censored, and education is reserved for people who can afford private school.

[W]hat kind of support does a reasonable and polite statement in a textbook get from the intellectual cowards — a phrase I use in complete awareness of the meaning of each word, thank you very much — who want to run away from any conflict? De Dora whines, ‘well, he has a point’. Pigliucci makes a worthless complaint about knowing our epistemological boundaries, implying that the statement of fact in Tobin and Dusheck is a violation of the separation of church and state…If a science teacher can’t even flatly state that the earth is 4.5 billion years old, not 6000, because philosophers will complain about epistomological boundaries, we’re doomed. If the effect of biology on society can’t even be mentioned in a textbook, then the relevance of the science is being sacrificed on the altar of religious submission. Getting enmired in these pointless philosophical “subtleties” when the facts are staring you in the face is a recipe for the further gutting of science education in this country.

Exactly. And gutting science education is not a good thing to do.

Jerry Coyne made a crucial point about this De Dorian Sci Ed 101 stuff.

…teaching evolution and dispelling creation provides students with a valuable lesson: it teaches them to think scientifically—surely one of the main points of a science class. They learn to weigh evidence and to show how that evidence can be used to discriminate between alternative explanations. It’s of little consequence to me that one alternative explanation comes from a literal interpretation of scripture. Indeed, it’s useful, for this is a real life example—one that’s going on now—of how alternative empirical claims are fighting for primacy in the intellectual marketplace. What better way to engage students in the scientific method?

Exactly. It’s a terribly narrowed and pinched version of teaching that De Dora is defending here. (He seems to be trying to claim this isn’t what he wants, it’s just what the law compels, but I don’t really believe him. I think he has a visceral dislike of all but the most apologetic atheism and I think that dislike infects everything he says on this subject. I could be wrong though – he writes so clumsily that it’s really impossible to be sure exactly what he is saying.)

Bizarrely though, De Dora said much the same thing himself at one point, but apparently without realizing he’d done it. He’s confused.

…the answer seems to be that we should ensure our high school science teachers are instructing students on how to think like a scientist, and imparting to students the body of knowledge scientists have accrued (and that all of our teachers generally are doing similar in their respective fields). From there, the children take that knowledge as they will.

God he’s a bad writer. But never mind that – the point is that he slipped up and said that teachers should be teaching students how to think like a scientist. So they should, but that means teachers need to teach students how anyone knows all this stuff, how the “body of knowledge” was collected and argued over and questioned and criticized – which includes for instance what it replaced, what previous claims to knowledge shaped it or got in its way or motivated it – and so on. It’s not enough to just open children’s heads and dump in a quart or two of Facts. If the Constitution requires science teachers to restrict themselves to such an impoverished version of teaching, then that’s a terrible worrying tragic situation. If it doesn’t, De Dora is talking nonsense.

Massimo is very annoyed that so many people are unimpressed by De Dora. Massimo does tend to exaggerate…

And speaking of content, what was so witless, wanky, wishy-washy, and witless about De Dora’s post? Oh, he dared question (very politely, and based on argument) one of the dogmas of the new atheism: that religious people (that’s about 90% of humanity, folks) ought (and I use the term in the moral sense) to be frontally assaulted and ridiculed at all costs, because after all, this is a war, and the goal is to vanquish the enemy, reason and principles be damned.

That’s rationally speaking?