The Guardian has reported that:

A plan by the education secretary, Michael Gove, to send a copy of the King James Bible to every school in the country – each including a personal inscription from him – has run into trouble after government sources reported he has been told to find private funding for the project.

For more information about the Bible, you many want to read some of the customer reviews on Amazon.

Family Radio - telling you and your family that Judgment is imminent

Family Radio? Sounds friendly, doesn’t it.

Let’s gather round and listen, children. What does Family Radio have to say today?

This spring, you’re probably going to Hell !

Cheers, Family Radio.

Family Radio are advertising via London Tube posters, that as of 21 May, in the year of our Lord 2011, God Himself will judge you and your family and the world will end. “Cry mightily”, the poster instructs “unto GOD for HIS mercy”.

Presumably after 21 May, Family Radio will offer an apology to all its listeners, especially those with recently terrified children in their families.

Or they’ll make excuses about the ambiguity of biblical prophecy and push the date back another few years.

Family Radio helpfully explains the proof of their infallible prediction:

In 2 Peter 3:8, which is quoted above, Holy God reminds us that one day is as 1,000 years. Therefore, with the correct understanding that the seven days referred to in Genesis 7:4 can be understood as 7,000 years, we learn that when God told Noah there were seven days to escape worldwide destruction, He was also telling the world there would be exactly 7,000 years (one day is as 1,000 years) to escape the wrath of God that would come when He destroys the world on Judgment Day. Because Holy Infinite God is all-knowing, He knows the end from the beginning. He knew how sinful the world would become.

Seven thousand years after 4990 B.C. (the year of the Flood) is the year 2011 A.D. (our calendar).

4990 + 2011 – 1 = 7,000

[One year must be subtracted in going from an Old Testament B.C. calendar date to a New Testament A.D. calendar date because the calendar does not have a year zero.]

Thus Holy God is showing us by the words of 2 Peter 3:8 that He wants us to know that exactly 7,000 years after He destroyed the world with water in Noah’s day, He plans to destroy the entire world forever. Because the year 2011 A.D. is exactly 7,000 years after 4990 B.C. when the flood began, the Bible has given us absolute proof that the year 2011 is the end of the world during the Day of Judgment, which will come on the last day of the Day of Judgment.

Amazingly, May 21, 2011 is the 17th day of the 2nd month of the Biblical calendar of our day. Remember, the flood waters also began on the 17th day of the 2nd month, in the year 4990 B.C.

The Holy Bible gives several additional astounding proofs that May 21, 2011 is very accurate as the time for the Day of Judgment. For more information on this subject, you may request a copy of We Are Almost There, available free of charge from Family Radio.

Link: http://www.familyradio.com/graphical/literature/judgment/judgment.html

Thanks, Family Radio. We’re all convinced.

A Christian street preacher who raged against the “effeminate” and said gays would go to hell has won £4,000 in damages for being arrested.

Anthony Rollins, of Birmingham, was arrested in July 2008 when a passerby took offence to his remarks about homosexuality and called 999.

The 45-year-old preacher, a regular on the city’s streets, was handcuffed and held in a police cell for almost four hours.

He had been quoting passages from the Bible which condemn the “unrighteous”, including adulterers, the effeminate, and “abusers of themselves with mankind”.

Mr Rollins announced that effeminate meant gay and that “the abominable shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone”.

http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2010/12/10/anti-gay-christian-preacher-wins-4000-compensation-for-arrest/c

From initial votes which showed the audience were on Hitchens’ side, this weekend’s Munk debate on the proposition “religion is a force for good in the world” between Tony Blair and Christopher Hitchens has been called a victory for the latter after slightly more of the audience swung still further against the motion.

From Hitchens’ opening:

Therefore, we might begin by asking, and I’m asking my opponent as well as you when you consider your voting, is it good for the world to appeal to our credulity and not to our scepticism? Is it good for the world to worship a deity that takes sides in wars and human affairs? To appeal to our fear and to our guilt, is it good for the world? To our terror, our terror of death, is it good to appeal? To preach guilt and shame about the sexual act and the sexual relationship, is this good for the world? And asking yourself all the while, are these really religious responsibilities, as I maintain they are? To terrify children with the image of hell and eternal punishment, not just of themselves, but their parents and those they love. Perhaps worst of all, to consider women an inferior creation, is that good for the world, and can you name me a religion that has not done that? To insist that we are created and not evolved in the face of all the evidence. To say that certain books of legend and myth, man-made and primitive, are revealed not man-made code.

Religion forces nice people to do unkind things, and also makes intelligent people say stupid things.

From Blair’s opening:

So I do not deny for a moment that religion can be a force for evil, but I claim that where it is, it is based essentially on a perversion of faith, and I assert that at least religion can also be a force for good, and where it is, that it’s true to what I believe is the essence of faith, and I say that a world without religious faith would be spiritually, morally and emotionally diminished.

Full transcript: http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2010/11/christopher-hitchens-tony-blair

The debate is recorded in a series of Youtube videos, then speakers enter on the second video at www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoKlXqDIR_A

Every Wednesday morning at Randwick Public School normal classes are suspended so that our nine-year-old son and the other children can be taken off to scripture lessons.

The compulsory allocation of time for religious instruction has been a feature of our state schools for more than 100 years. But a growing number of parents, for a variety of reasons, do not send their children to scripture. Some are non-believers and do not want their children to be told the Bible is historical fact. Others complain that little children should not be traumatised by stories of the crucifixion or the threat of spending eternity ”burning in hell”.

No reliable statistics are available, but it is estimated that about 25 per cent of primary school children now opt out of scripture; in some schools it may be as high as half. They occupy themselves by watching videos, going to the library or, I am told at one school, picking up rubbish.

This year we were offered a refreshing alternative. After seven years of agitation, the New South Wales Education Department agreed to trial ethics classes during scripture time as an option for children. Our school was one of the 10 involved in the trial, which finished at the end of the last term. The classes, designed by Associate Professor Philip Cam of the University of NSW, were run by volunteers: parents who undertook training organised by the St James Ethics Centre.

The weekly topics were designed to encourage children in inquiry rather than instruction, and related to everyday issues such as fairness, lying, telling the truth, virtues, vices and what it takes to lead a good life. The classes were not offered to my son’s year, but parents have told me the trial was an overwhelming success and, most importantly, the children loved it. When asked for their feedback, some children expressed disappointment they could not return to the ethics course next term. Some complained that returning to non-scripture classes would be boring.

Continues: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/churches-dont-have-monopoly-on-good-life-20100712-107sr.html

Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui explains the inspiration behind his new production which looks critically at the biblical story of The Tower of Babel.

Prejudice and perception are his targets. “There is a dancer in my company who is Moroccan and grew up in Belgium like me, but his skin is darker than mine,” the choreographer says. “In certain streets I am safer, in certain streets he is safer. This is the sad reality, even though we are the same. I’ve had that since I was a kid, that knowledge of skin colour; it influences people’s perceptions and opinions of you. People would be very nice to me, this little white boy, then very suspicious of my nephew because his skin was different.”

You can hear the sadness and anger in Cherkaoui’s words, though he expresses them with inordinate grace and good manners. His work is like that too, with a strong flow of movement ideas underpinned by athletic strength and often dignified by a surprising vein of humour and beauty.

As its title implies, Babel (words) is inspired by the biblical tale of the Babylonians who tried to build a tower so high that it would reach Heaven, only to be punished by a wrathful God. “It was the first time in the Bible that everybody did something wrong, it wasn’t just Eve or only Judas; it was actually all of us, we were all wrong,” Cherkaoui says. “In our arrogance we thought we could build something that would touch God. And God decided to punish us by separating languages so that we couldn’t understand each other.

“Well, I have an issue with that. I have an issue with God in general, I’m very Richard Dawkins about that. And I feel that in a sense there is a language that we still do have in common, all of us, and I would say that is rhythm. Because anywhere I’ve worked, in Japan or India, Morocco or Spain, rhythm is universal. Why did I make this piece? Because I feel that God did not separate us — we still have rhythm.”

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/stage/dance/article7125189.ece

It was announced yesterday that the philosopher Antony Flew died on 8th April following a long illness. Flew was long-regarded as one of Britain’s finest philosophical proponents of rational atheism, and a widely respected humanist. He epitomised a deeply British approach to academic philosophy: rationalist, empiricist, closely argued in analytic prose.

Flew often criticised afterlife beliefs, and once told the Sunday Times, “I don’t want a future life.” But on earth at least, Antony Flew’s work and reputation seem destined to remain live issues. Once controversial for this stalwart atheism, it is the final work bearing his name which has attracted most criticism and controversy in recent years. The Christian ghost writers of There is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed his Mind, have been accused of foisting Intelligent Design-inspired deism on a philosopher whose memory and philosophical faculties were failing.

But There is a God was preceded by several years of muddy and conflicting reports about Flew’s  wavering views. Whatever the truth, it has become an acrimonious battle for the mind and soul of one man, perhaps a battle which – like attempts to claim for atheism or theism the personal beliefs of Einstein (or to disown those of Hitler) – will be waged for generations.

Antony flew

Throughout most of his career Flew criticised religious truth-claims for their lack of falsifiability (for a true believer, nothing seems to count against their god). He championed the “presumption of atheism” as a default position on religious matters. Flew’s essay Theology and Falsification is required reading for theologians and philosophers of religion – apparently the most quoted essay on philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century – and indeed it is written plainly enough that it features in many of the more open-minded school RE lessons. His book Atheistic Humanism pulled together various of his papers against religious beliefs, before moving on to the practice and theory of Humanism and exploring live ethical and political issues.

Flew’s work was partly influenced by his early teachers, in particular Gilbert Ryle. His longstanding humanism was reflected in his involvement with organisations such as the Rationalist Press Association. He had various hobbyhorses, and many found him obsessional. He detested the progressive, egalitarian ethos of the late 1960s and 70s, supported the cold war and lamented the state of education.

… Many former colleagues and students remembered him with great respect. One acknowledged him as having high principles and high standards, always following arguments where they led him. Another, then a novice lecturer at Keele, noted his helpfulness, in spite of political differences. A former student recalled how, in 1962, he boomed at a bemused philosophy class that “sex … is a very dangerous thing”, fearing that it would interfere with studying. But his views on abortion and homosexual law reform were liberal, and he was a trenchant critic of the Roman Catholic church’s teaching on contraception.

– from the Guardian obituary

In the new millennium Flew’s philosophical trajectory performed a slow burn about-turn. As early as 2001 rumours spread that his “negative atheism” was being chipped away by supposed evidence that there might, just might, be a creator god. In a short essay, “Sorry to Disappoint but I’m Still an Atheist!“, the mild-mannered philosopher rejected these claims of his conversion. (Rejected them “vehemently”, according to the Telegraph obituary, but this sensational description shows an unfamiliarity with Flew’s character and  doesn’t bear out in the language of the piece.) Flew wrote:

I can suggest only one possible source of the rumours. Several weeks ago I submitted to the Editor of Philo (The Journal of the Society of Humanist Philosophers) a short paper making two points which might well disturb atheists of the more positive kind. The point more relevant here was that it can be entirely rational for believers and negative atheists to respond in quite different ways to the same scientific developments.

After outlining his reasons why neither atheists nor theists would be converted by cosmological Fine Tuning arguments, he concludes:

In short, I recognize that developments in physics coming on the last twenty or thirty years can reasonably be seen as in some degree confirmatory of a previously faith-based belief in god, even though they still provide no sufficient reason for unbelievers to change their minds. They certainly have not persuaded me.

This is at best a double-edged, perhaps even slightly confused refutation of his alleged conversion, conceding as it does that some scientific findings would count as evidence for theism – if only for theists. Looking back as we do from the age of the Four Horsemen, Flew’s 2001 atheism may sound like agnosticism to many, closer to not being a theist than to active disbelief in any god:

I remain still what I have been now for over fifty years, a negative atheist. By this I mean that I construe the initial letter in the word ‘atheist’ in the way in which everyone construes the same initial letter in such words as ‘atypical’ and ‘amoral’. For I still believe that it is impossible either to verify or to falsify – to show to be false – what David Hume in his Dialogues concerning Natural Religion happily described as “the religious hypothesis.” The more I contemplate the eschatological teachings of Christianity and Islam the more I wish I could demonstrate their falsity.

Many popular humanist philosophers today (think A C Grayling, Stephen Law, Nigel Warburton, Julian Baggini) seem quite happy to regard non-falsifiability as just one tool in an armament against gods, and non-falsifiability is no bar to offering plenty of active reasons to be skeptical. Today, philosophical complaints about the non-falsifiability in principle of god-beliefs is likely to sit alongside robust arguments against God, like the argument from suffering which had indeed compelled Flew himself in earlier days.

Over the following years the picture became more confused.

Flew’s belief was in deism, involving a remote creator who takes no interest in human affairs.

Flew said he was impressed by the work of Gerald Schroeder, a physicist and Jewish theologian who wrote “The Hidden Face of God,” published in 2001.

“He pointed out the improbable statistics involved and the pure chances that have to occur. It’s simply not on to think this could occur simply by chance,” the Sunday Times quoted Flew as saying.

– from the Los Angeles Times obituary

Despite the 2001 claim, “I’m Still an Atheist!”, by 2004 in an interview with Gary Habermas for the journal of the Evangelical Philosophical Society, things had changed. Habermas and Flew had been friends for some time. Flew first says, “I don’t believe in the God of any revelatory system”, but goes  on to answer a question about theistic revelation:

Yes. I am open to it, but not enthusiastic about potential revelation from God. On the positive side, for example, I am very much impressed with physicist Gerald Schroeder’s comments on Genesis 1. [Endnote references: Gerald L. Schroeder, The Science of God: The Convergence of Scientific and Biblical Wisdom.] That this biblical account might be scientifically accurate raises the possibility that it is revelation.

The book by Schroeder, which apparently so influenced the great philosopher, interprets the six days of Biblical Creation as billions of years corresponding with a Big Bang model of the universe and was dismissed by Victor J Stenger (among many other skeptical critics) as  ”fitting the Bible to the data” and reading at times like a “parody” of itself.

By the end of the interview, Gary Habermas asks if “there is any chance that you might in the end move from theism to Christianity?” The once proud atheist apparently doesn’t bat an eyelid at being described as a theist, but he does answer that he probably won’t become a Christian theist:

I think it’s very unlikely, due to the problem of evil. But, if it did happen, I think it would be in some eccentric fit and doubtfully orthodox form: regular religious practice perhaps but without belief.

‘Deist’ seems to be the best fit by this point.

But believers waiting to welcome this most prodigal of sons back into the fold were to be disappointed. Flew’s conversion did not embrace such concepts as Heaven, good and evil or the afterlife – let alone divine intervention in human affairs. His God was strictly minimalist – very different from “the monstrous oriental despots of the religions of Christianity and Islam”, as he liked to call them. God may have called his creation into existence, then, but why did he bother? To that question, it seemed, Flew had no answer.

– from the Telegraph obituary

His view of Christianity had not changed: he still could not accept the God who revealed himself, and intervened in the world, and he still admired the moral force of the tradition. He had no such admiration for Islam, which, he said, is “best described in a Marxian way as the uniting and justifying ideology of Arab imperialism”.

– from the Times obituary

In 2006 Flew’s signature was associated with a joint, open letter to Tony Blair calling for the teaching of Intelligent Design in UK schools. And finally in 2007, with the publication of There Is a God, it appeared that the journey from ardent atheist and humanist to religious apologist was complete.

There Is a God details some already well-rehearsed Arguments from Design. According to the book’s most infamous critic, it “is perhaps the handiest primer ever written on the science (many would say pseudoscience) of religious belief.” It’s just that Flew isn’t really the author. This critic is Mark Oppenheimer, the historian who, shortly after publication, visited Antony Flew and writing in the New York Times upped the ante on Flew’s legacy forever.

Oppenheimer damned Flew’s co-author Roy Abraham Varghese as the kind of “ghost writer” who takes complete possession of the ostensible author. Oppenheimer describes finding Flew a shadow of his former self, unable to remember key names and events not just from his philosophical career but even from the new book. The impression is of a mind approaching senility, without the energy or the wherewithal to construct a new chapter, let alone a full book. Debate about the battle for Flew’s soul was already raging and Oppenheimer acknowledges this, but his description of events puts him firmly on one side.

The version you prefer will depend on how you interpret a story that began 20 years ago, when some evangelical Christians found an atheist who, they thought, might be persuaded to join their side. In the intellectual tug of war that ensued, Flew himself — a continent away, his memory failing, without an Internet connection — had no idea how fiercely he was being fought over or how many of his acquaintances were calling or writing him just to shore up their cases. … With his powers in decline, Antony Flew, a man who devoted his life to rational argument, has become a mere symbol, a trophy in a battle fought by people whose agendas he does not fully understand.

Investigating how Flew came to write such a surprising book, Oppenheimer describes Flew’s correspondence with Richard Carrier. Carrier, a skeptic who took it upon himself to investigate the earlier rumours of Flew’s theism, had exchanged numerous letters with Flew following the 2004 dabblings in theism. Flew had responded in a way which Carrier could only interpret as warped by too much theist propaganda. Carrier was exasperated.

Flew, he sees, has been taken to dinner by the theists, has been fed questionable science and swallowed it with pleasure. Carrier is fighting a rear-guard action, via snail mail, from a continent away.

Carrier urged Flew to take back responsibility and reconsider the state of the science and the direction of his philosophy.

Perhaps the single most damning piece of evidence of the extent to which Flew might have been manipulated by a theist in-crowd comes from the fact that a few simple nudges from Carrier actually worked! Flew wrote back to say he had been mistaken in trusting his Christian correspondents; that Schroeder and his modern-science-is-Genesis theory obviously wasn’t up to date, and that he would withdraw the forthcoming introduction to a new edition of one of his books. As a consequence, a passage about his deism was indeed dropped from publication. For Oppenheimer the implication is clear. Flew was in a state of severe suggestibility, whether to his multiple theist correspondents or to the skeptic Carrier. Flew was unable to assess new writing for himself.

In further correspondence with Carrier, Flew spoke of retracting other recent statements on religion, including an endorsement for a book by his 2004 interviewer, Gary Habermas. Revealingly, Flew refers to his own “decline” as an inhibiting factor, and in the context of his quickly-reversed positions on the biggest questions of his philosophical life, it’s hard to disagree.

“The statement which I most regret making during the last few months was the one about Habermas’s book on the alleged resurrection of Jesus bar Joseph. I completely forgot Hume’s to my mind decisive argument against all evidence for the miraculous. A sign of physical decline.”

Flew had been a leading authority on the philosophy of David Hume.

But by the time There Is a God was published, with Varghese as credited co-author, Flew seemed to have forgotten his re-conversion to atheism. The book happily cites Schroeder, as well as Gary Haldane and Varghese himself. Oppenheimer points out darkly that having previously forgotten even his beloved Hume, the Flew of There Is a God is ”deeply read in many philosophers — John Leslie, John Foster, Thomas Tracy, Brian Leftow — rarely if ever mentioned in his letters, articles or books. It’s as if he’s a new man.”

When Oppenheimer visited Flew he asked him, he admits, questions to test his faculties, which may seem cruel.

In “There Is a God,” Flew quotes extensively from a conversation he had with Leftow, a professor at Oxford. So I asked Flew, “Do you know Brian Leftow?”

“No,” he said. “I don’t think I do.”

“Do you know the work of the philosopher John Leslie?” Leslie is discussed extensively in the book.

Flew paused, seeming unsure. “I think he’s quite good.” But he said he did not remember the specifics of Leslie’s work.

“Have you ever run across the philosopher Paul Davies?” In his book, Flew calls Paul Davies “arguably the most influential contemporary expositor of modern science.”

“I’m afraid this is a spectacle of my not remembering!”

… As he himself conceded, he had not written his book.

“This is really Roy [Varghese]’s doing,” he said, before I had even figured out a polite way to ask. “He showed it to me, and I said O.K. I’m too old for this kind of work!”

Roy Varghese had twenty years in which to foist God-friendly works of pseudo-science on Flew, Oppenheimer argues. But he is careful not to accuse the co-author of outright manipulation.

To believe that Flew has been exploited is not to conclude that his exploiters acted with malice. If Flew in his dotage was a bit gullible, Varghese had a gullibility of his own. An autodidact with no academic credentials, Varghese was clearly thrilled to be taken seriously by an Oxford-trained philosopher; it may never have occurred to him that so educated a mind could be in decline.

Modelling his philosophical martyrdom on Socrates, Flew had always said he would take the evidence where it led him. At some point around twenty years ago, the evidence Flew was exposed to started to come in weighted measures with a very particular slant. Did Roy Varghese and Gary Habermas and others at Biola University manipulate Flew over years as he succumbed to the mental erosion of time, culminating at last in a book written, in essence, by themselves, espousing their own views?

There is something ghoulish, let alone highly speculative, about trying to determine from a distance and in retrospect exactly when (if ever) a person can be said to have lost their mental autonomy. It seems already that people will point to this interview or that book or the other letter to argue that Flew was manipulated on the one hand, or that he came to his own theistic conclusions on the other. The patchy change in his language and outlook over at least a decade probably points to a mixture of the two, at least until the ghost writing of There Is a God.

If someone did write and publish a book which essentially committed identity theft against a great philosopher then that is tragic, and it is important. But as Flew himself would undoubtedly never have disagreed, the philosophy is more important than the fate of one man. Really,  the clues about Flew’s own personal beliefs should pale into insignificance against  the body of work.

We have one work of dubious authorship, to set against a lifetime of truly great, analytic British philosophy.

Bob Churchill is Head of Membership at the British Humanist Association.

Jennifer Dennis studied her 13-year-old son’s skin and was uncertain which to be more astonished by: the shape made by the strange dots running the length of his forearm, or how they got there.

“When I looked at it, the shape was definitely a cross, like a Christian cross,” said Dennis. “Zach said his teacher did it with an instrument that gave off something like a lightning bolt. It was red, like a sunburn or if you burn your arm on the oven.”

The next morning, Dennis was standing in the reception of Mount Vernon middle school demanding to know what had been done to Zachary.

That was three years ago and the small, deeply religious Ohio town is bracing itself for the answer to Dennis’s question after the lengthy de facto trial of a man who is either a decorated teacher martyred for his Christian faith, or a religious zealot who spent years undermining the very science he was paid to teach.

Along the way, the dispute has prompted Bible-waving students to march on their school, set teacher against teacher, and forced Jennifer Dennis and her family to leave town.

At the heart of the controversy is John Freshwater, who taught at Mount Vernon middle school for 21 years.

Freshwater said he had done the same science experiment to hundreds of students before Zachary Dennis, using a Tesla coil, which gives off an electric spark.

Story continues at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/feb/10/brand-cross-christian-science-teacher

Odeon at Gortys, Crete

Other than for natural disaster and disease, all man’s problems are of his own making and could be rectified, argues John Preece.

In the western world, antisocial behaviour persists in its many forms. Reports of substance abuse, crimes against property, sexual and violent crimes, sexual perversion, juvenile delinquency, corruption, terrorism, and suicide confront us daily in the press, whilst the prisons overflow, and the family unit is in decline. Most of these manifestations of social malaise are also present in the undeveloped world, often in more florid forms, but here tyranny, turf warfare, torture, mutilatory punishment and slavery are added to the corrosive litany of human malfunction.

Though promoted as a means of improving matters, the behavioural models formulated by philosophers, organised religions and academic departments of psychology and sociology have by now been extensively tested and found wanting. Humanity hungers for a new and better ethical code, based on a more profound understanding of human behaviour, hard evidence, rationality and a global concordat.

Philosophy concerns itself with the nature of the universe and with doctrines as to the best way of living. Since the days of Plato, Aristotle and Socrates, rival schools of metaphysics have approached ethical issues either from an utilitarian standpoint judged by outcomes, or from an intuitive one whose emotional content harks back to the moral compass imbued in its propounder during childhood. In either case, efforts to construct convincing proof of argument tend to be hamstrung by the use of terms whose meaning has been changed to suit their specialised context, an artifice which creates more problems for the layman than it solves.

Intuitive ethics are conjectural and subjective, and so can never be impartial, whereas pragmatic conduct is based upon the observation of consequences by consensus. Actions are by definition utilitarian if they lead to “the greatest good for the greatest number of recipients”, a principle which thereby establishes intercommunal responsibilities. Within this overall framework is embedded a second fundamental principle, that of reciprocity, which establishes interpersonal responsibility on the “do as you would be done by” basis. Parents teach their child the first of these principles, whereas the peer group teaches the second.

Early forms of religion were primarily concerned with intermediation with the spirit world, sacrificial propitiation, sorcery, healing and prophecy, whilst personal conduct was regulated by tribal law. With the introduction of writing, rules of conduct were inscribed on stone and displayed in public places, such as temples where they became sacrosanct. The earliest of these was drafted in the cuneiform language by the Autarch of Isin, but other better known examples of behavioural codes are the diorite inscriptions of Hammurabi of Babylon, the ten commandments of Moses (in fact an underestimate, as there were in reality 613 rules governing Hebrew conduct), and the Dorian code still in evidence at the Odeon of Gortys in Crete. As these early protocols became moulded into cult dogma by the priesthood, they became immutable, since to challenge them was to blaspheme.

Man conceptualised polytheism by creating a plurality of gods in his own image, each with his or her respective potency, sphere of influence, temples and cult following. When the business of attempting to apportion veneration and propitiatory sacrifice between jealous and temperamental immortals became unmanageable, monotheism emerged, first in Persia, then in Palestine and Arabia, and with it theocracy. The high priest now became plenipotential, adding the functions of supreme ruler and generalissimo to his portfolio, and became the sole arbiter of all forms of human conduct.

The five rule-of-thumb ideologies which have dominated western civilization during the historical era have been Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Communism and Fascism. The flip side of these religions and pseudoreligions is that when it suited them to do so they invoked armed aggression, massacre, oppression, overt discrimination, the use of assassination and torture as political instruments, and a host of lesser abuses of power, privilege and trust. The Herem, the Baltic Crusade, the Jihad, the Holocaust and the Great Terror brought out the very worst in human nature. Disillusionment with the discrepancy between the aspirations and achievements of organised religion is leading to its slow decline in developed countries where congregations shrink, churches and chapels close, and it becomes increasingly difficult to recruit candidates to the ministry. The pastoral care of the sick and poor is now provided by the state, and the influence which the church exercised in law, education, art and music in past centuries is now vestigial. Given the rationality conferred by higher educational standards, belief in the paranormal now seems primitivistic to many people.

Is an irreligious society necessarily an amoral one? Monozygotic twin studies show that religiosity is genetically transmitted, and only culture determines whether an individual attends church, mosque or synagogue, or none of these. Ritual congregation has therefore little or no part to play in the acquisition of basic morality which, as we have seen, is a critical responsibility of parenthood. A child’s moral compass is developed between the ages of two and four years, and its social contract is moulded between the ages of two and six under the tutelage of its peer group. Clerics would not normally have access to children during these early years and, in any case, theosophy is unintelligible to such a small child.

With increasing specialisation in higher education, the study of human behaviour has become fragmented and dissipated between the rival disciplines of psychology, sociology and anthropology. But the study of our inner selves is a comprehensive exercise, and pertinent data must be drawn from research into at least eleven other domains. A multidimentional approach not only increases a target subject’s corpus of knowledge, but deepens the way it can be understood, allows correlative problem solving and stimulates innovative ideation.

Because of academic compartmentalization, the important contributions of history and historical biography to the formal study of human behaviour are continually sidelined, yet it is precisely from these sources that cited examples of cause and effect must be drawn. We need to re-orientate our approach to our understanding of ourselves by using corroborated exemplary historical data as the starting point of investigations which, when coupled with the findings of all other relevant disciplines, will clearly demonstrate what is, and what is not, in the best long term interests of the individual and the community at large.  The dissemination of results calls for the use of a computerised behavioural database to which all have access, and through which the process of rationalisation becomes reproducible and acceptable by all.  We shall then have created a pan global consensus and a system of ethics which complies with the needs of the twenty-first  century.

John Preece has been a practising doctor, University research fellow, software company director and national computer magazine editor

Jacobson and Grayling at the Natural History Museum

George Jellis isn’t too impressed by Creation, but has a few tips for the Natural History Museum as well.

Howard Jacobson is quoted as maintaining that “comedy is a very important part of what I do.”

So perhaps that was what he was attempting in his presentation in the first part of The Bible: a History. (The first episode, Creation, is still available online and the series continues on Channel 4.)

As he explains in his introduction on the C4 website: “The big question for me is how to believe, and not to believe, at the same time.” He concludes at the end of the film: “The concept that something can be both true and untrue is something that religious people seem better able to grasp than athiests.”

Plenty of scope for double entendre then, one would think.

Unfortunately he actually seems to have been taking these irrationalist theses seriously.

As he says in a related article in the Daily Mail, “We need, in my view, to jettison the idea of utter truth altogether.” And further: “We are complex beings, able to believe and not believe at the same time. We do it with a TV soap opera. We accept as truth what we know not to be true, and sometimes that which is not true affects us more profoundly.”

Jacobson began the programme with an outright attack on a straw-man version of atheism, and continued such quixotic attacks to such an extent that, in common with many other commentators, I found myself almost shouting at the television. He is “moved to fury” by the ‘New Atheists’, but despite being filmed looking at one chapter title of The God Delusion, doesn’t actually seem to have read the arguments in the rest of the book. In the Daily Mail article he even refers to “fire-and-brimstone atheists” who are “closed-minded in the name of science”.

Despite A. C. Grayling’s patient explanation to the contrary, Jacobson seems to think that atheists can have no appreciation of art, music or literature.

His main thesis was that New Atheists misunderstand the nature of religion, in particular the function of the Creation myth, which seems simply to be “to stir the imagination even of unbelievers like himself”.

The impression I get from trying to understand the point of view of literary figures like Jacobson is that for them words are not for conducting logical arguments, but a form of music, in which the overtones and unstated implications or impressions or allusions, in short the art, are more important than making sense.

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The interview with Grayling was conducted at the Natural History Museum in London which Jacobson described as “a temple to Charles Darwin”, kneeling reverently on the steps beneath the great naturalist’s statue. Having paid a visit to the museum myself in the last week, for a look around the new “Cocoon” structure, I have to agree with him that it has taken on the air of a Darwinian Temple.

The statue of the man who engaged the architect and planned the building, Richard Owen, I found is now relegated to a dark corner up the stairs to the left of Darwin. The fact that he is sculpted in devilish black marble and bears a resemblance to Olivier’s version of Richard III, whereas Darwin is enthroned like a bearded sage in saintly white marble adds to the impression. OK, maybe Owen was wrong about evolution, and a bit of a sly politician, but he did get the work done by founding this magnificent building. In my view he should be reinstated in a more prominent position. The obvious place would be in the Central Hall, guiding people to the Dinosaur exhibition, which is still the most entertaining and best presented part of the museum.

He could perhaps be matched on the other side of the hall, at the entrance to the Ecology exhibition, by the statue of Joseph Banks, which is currently to be found in another dark corner up on the second floor.

My visit to the Cocoon I have to say was a disappointment. This may have been in part because no adequate explanation was given about how to operate the exhibit screens. No doubt children are taught such elementary things at school now, and pensioners like me are expected to keep up to date, but I’m finding it going too fast for me. For instance, I tried pressing the Help symbols on the touch screens and nothing ever happened.

The only access and exits from the Cocoon appear to be by lift, which is worrying to someone claustrophobic like me, and most of it consists of a single rather featureless spiral corridor.

Surely it should have been in a double helix design! Anyway, I enjoyed the Dinosaurs once again!

George Jelliss is the secretary of Hastings Humanists and has an interest in history of ideas.

For the “beyond satire” archives:  What better demonstration of Jesus “targeting” humans with his  love and compassion than Bible references etched into gun scopes.

British soldiers fighting in Afghanistan will be issued with rifle sights bearing Biblical references, it emerged today [Wednesday].

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) said it was not aware of the significance of the markings on the advanced combat optical gunsights (ACOGs) when it placed an order for 400 from US firm Trijicon.

There are fears that the inscriptions could lead to allegations that the battle for Afghanistan is a “religious war”.

Liberal Democrat defence spokesman Willie Rennie said: “It’s pretty shoddy that the MoD missed this.

“It may be used by some of our enemies as evidence to convince its followers that we are engaged in a religious war between Christianity and Islam.”

The MoD ordered the rifle sights from Trijicon as part of a £1.5 million “urgent operational requirement” which included more than 400 Sharpshooter rifles from another manufacturer.

One of the Biblical references is John 8:12 which reads: ”Then spake Jesus again unto them, saying, I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.” And if not, you’ll get shot, presumably.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/row-over-biblical-rifle-sights-for-uk-troops-1873876.html

A somewhat flippant article about the actually quite serious issue of hugely misplaced philanthropy (or indeed, highly opportunistic evangelism) at a time of tragedy.

AS international aid agencies rush food, water and medicine to Haiti’s earthquake victims, a US faith-based group is sending Bibles to Haitians in their hour of need.

Not just any Bible.

These are solar-powered audible Bibles that can broadcast the holy scriptures in Haitian Creole to 300 people at a time.

Called the “Proclaimer,” the audio Bible delivers “digital quality” and is designed for “poor and illiterate people”, the Faith Comes By Hearing group said.

According to their website, the Proclaimer is “self-powered and can play the Bible in the jungle, desert or … even on the moon!”

Continues at http://www.news.com.au/breaking-news/earthquake-survivors-get-solar-powered-bibles/story-e6frfku0-1225821184929

BHA member Jeff Clarke

Not all opinions are equal, in the opinion of Jeff Clarke.

Whilst I am often tempted to laugh when I hear someone praised for being ‘Devout’ or taking his/her faith ‘very seriously,’ it has made me ask why other people – and not necessarily the religious – maintain respect for such sentiments. After all, religious belief is an opinion and we all have opinions.

But a major difference between secular and religious opinion is institutionalisation. Religious belief is institutionalised by the passage of time and by its incorporation into the machinery of power and the state – the monotheistic religions being the worst offenders. The class system in this and other countries existed for the same reasons and some trade unions, on a lesser scale, appeared to be heading that way until the 1980s.

Now I will be stating the obvious to Humanist readers but to most others, institutionalised belief involves acceptance without question and this is where we differ from the gullible and the credulous. A recent article in Scientific American – and Richard Dawkins may be aware of this – suggested that a predisposition toward religious belief might be genetic. Though having no more than a layman’s knowledge of the subject, I am not entirely convinced. I think it is basically cultural – pressure to conform, to take the easy way out that matters. Generally speaking, whichever of the several One True Faiths a person adheres to is a matter of political geography, though I don’t claim that has to rule out genetics. I’m convinced, however, that if my Catholic friend had been born south of the Mediterranean, she would be just as ardent a Muslim as she is at present a Christian, although I doubt she would accept the proposition. Equally, my Tunisian friend would have been a Christian had she been born over the water in Spain.

Returning to opinions: I readily accept that those of Charles Darwin, Richard Dawkins and, of course, mine, are also opinions. The difference is that side we support is backed by overwhelming scientific evidence whereas the religious side has, after many centuries in which to demonstrate it, practically none. I have had the Bible waved in front of me as ‘proof,’ together with back-up verbal quotations, but I then have to point out that the Bible, in particular the Old Testament, is by and large a compilation of someone else’s opinions. Opinions that do not even have the backing of fundamental scientific knowledge. Opinions that are not even original. Any one who has encountered the Epic of Gilgamesh – oldest story recorded from anywhere in the world – will be aware not only of its antiquity but of the flood and destruction of mankind episode so blatantly plagiarised by the writers of Genesis in their off-the-shelf account of Noah’s adventures. Not to mention hints of the Adam and Eve myth, and possibly the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Having heard at last of the Epic, two Jehovah’s Witnesses informed me that it was later than the Old Testament. It came as a minor setback to them when I pointed out that I have almost completed a novel based upon the Epic and have researched it to a far greater extent that they ever would. But mere historical evidence never got in the way of religious opinions. It was only back in the 1960s if I remember correctly, that the Pope, taking time off to peer into the landscape of reason, admitted after more than three centuries that Copernicus and Galileo were right with their ungodly assertions of the sun really being centre of our planetary system.

Is there anyone to who we might turn for guidance in the formation of opinions? I would suggest Socrates, whose alleged system of questioning still works well after 24 centuries. But that is only my opinion.

Jeff Clarke, a BHA member, is a self-employed graphic designer, photographer and writer. Apart from his work, he also enjoys philosophy, science, art and travel.

Richard Fortey in the TLS reviews Andrew Parker’s The Genesis Engima, which offers the thesis that the Bible is scientifically accurate because the opening of Genesis, with some rough and ready shoe-horning, offers a totally precise (but of course highly poetic) analogy to future scientific discoveries.Richard Fortey is not altogether convinced…

De Luc’s was a perfectly respectable intellectual position for his time (he also coined the word “geology”), but it comes as something of a shock to find Andrew Parker making comparable claims nearly a quarter of a millennium after de Luc. I suspect he has never heard of his intellectual forebear; certainly, his grasp of the history of geology is sketchy.

I should perhaps explain the programme of The Genesis Enigma, so that the basis of the argument can be examined properly. After a revelatory moment in the Sistine Chapel, Parker realized that the sequence of “events” described verse by verse in Genesis corresponded to real events in the history of the solar system and of life on earth. Such was the one-to-one correspondence between the “latest” scientific discoveries and the Authorized Version of the Bible – the relevant page of which provides the only illustration in the book – that the likelihood of the ancient sources arriving at the right sequence of events by chance alone was very small indeed, or so he claims. Therefore, the account in Genesis is, to use the subtitle of the book, “scientifically accurate”. Of course, some allowance must be made for the limitations of understanding that pertained in biblical times.

… The reviewer has a difficult choice when faced with a book like The Genesis Enigma. Should it be given the oxygen of publicity? Or should it be ignored? To treat such a book at length in the TLS is to award it a seriousness it does not really deserve, but what has propelled me to do so is the invocation of science and scientists in support of Parker’s dodgy thesis. It is important that scientific evidence be honestly treated. There is an alarming tendency today to regard science as “just an opinion”. I do think it possible that some anti-rationalists might welcome Parker’s book to show how much a matter of opinion science can be. It is not, of course; it stands or falls on evidence.

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article6981314.ece

Terry Pratchett on the Guardian Book Club

There are lots of positive laughs, as well a few ‘shock’ noises from the audience, as Terry Pratchett addresses the Guardian Book Club.

Pratchett is the beloved author of the Discworld series and a Distinguished Supporter of the British Humanist Association.

Pratchett describes Carl Sagan’s Cosmos as “the best piece of popular science that there has ever been” and advises the audience to “go and get it”.

“There are lots of people including Einstein, and Spinoza, and … me,” he says, prompting laugher, so he adds, “and Stephen Hawking,” who are all naturally inclined to the good. “In my religion the building of a telescope is the building of a cathedral,” he says, dismissing Genesis and the Old Testament as indicating only the presence of a “maniac” god, to applause from the audience. On the New Testament he says that St Paul “should have been introduced to a good woman” – this time eliciting a smattering of applause but also noises of outraged (but not too outraged) surprise.

He then addresses the science of evolution, saying how much more interesting it is “that a bunch of monkeys got down off trees and stopped arguing long enough to build this, to build that, and to build everything!” Evolution is far more interesting than the Bible, and street lamps are more important than stars: “there’s only a few million of them in the universe, and they were built by monkeys!”

He concludes, “I would much rather be a rising ape than a falling angel.”

Terry Pratchett also spoke to the BHA earlier in the year on a number of topics related to his humanism, to meaning, science and his books. The first video from that interview, on the topic of assisted dying, is available on the BHA’s YouTube channel and below.

Pratchett supports the legalisation of assisted dying, saying, “I’m thinking of a sensible decision, that at a point x a life should stop. Without pain, without undue suffering. … It seems sensible and generous.”