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Global Atheist Con: Eugenie Scott

24 May 2012 / / Comments Off on Global Atheist Con: Eugenie Scott

Eugenie Scott is the Executive Director of the National Centre for Science Education. Her talk was “Reason and Creationism”.

I’ve disagreed with Scott and the NCSE over the years because of the stand she’s taken on the ‘accommodationist’ side of the science and atheism divide. It’s not because of her reluctance to fly the ‘atheist’ flag; I’m happy for the NCSE to appeal to a larger audience of possibly religious folks who would otherwise be put off by the ‘atheist’ label (see also Neil deGrasse Tyson). I also understand that the NCSE is in the business of teaching about evolution, not atheism. And so Scott has avoided the conflict. That would be okay, if she didn’t set herself against the New Atheists who want to take creationists down to the mat. New Atheists want to force the conflict between creationism and reality because they know it’s a debate they can win; accommodationists would be happy if they could fool creationists into thinking that there is no conflict between evolution and faith long enough for biology teachers could get on with their work.

The accommodationist view has always struck me as weak and disingenuous. When Scott says that she does not see a “dichotomy between science and religion or evolution and religion,” well, that’s just wrong, at least for Abrahamic religions that take their doctrine seriously. They make claims about the origin of the world, claims which many of their members take seriously, and those members reject evolution because of those claims. And every time she says that science is somehow powerless to evaluate supernatural claims, I scream. Science tells us exactly what to do with supernatural claims; bin them until they’re supported by evidence. Oh, they can’t be, because they’re not verifiable? Then that’s a problem for the believers to sort out. They need to do the work of defining what they mean by ‘god’ and backing up their claims, but they never seem to get around to it because they’re too busy preaching the word, brother.

Simply getting religious people to sign off on evolution is not the ultimate goal — the goal is getting people to reason without superstition. Non-acceptance of evolution is just a part of this larger problem, and if we don’t work on this, irrationality will pop up in other ways (e.g. climate change denialism, which the NCSE is now also fighting). And trying to do this by claiming that there’s no conflict is just fooling people, and I don’t think that even the religious will be fooled by it.

Gnu Atheists want to tell the truth. And they’re arguing from an advantageous position; when you have the facts on your side, why not argue from facts?

Well, this is an old argument, and once I get to this part, I usually regain some perspective, and remember that Scott and the NCSE aren’t the bad guys. They’re out there teaching the facts about evolution, and climate change. In fact, the NCSE news feed looks to be a good resource for evolution news. The NCSE deserve some love, even if their approach bugs the shit out of me, and even if Scott undermines her own work by saying wrong things.

To the talk.

Scott started not with biology, but with geology. There are two principles that help geologists figure out the age of a rock formation.

  • The principle of horizontality states that layers are layed down horizontally.
  • The principle of superposition tells us that lower layers are older.
But this makes life hard for a Young Earth Creationist because the earth as we see it takes longer than the 6,000 years they posit from their reading of some book or other. They allege that there hasn’t been enough time to lay all that rock down, and so they say silly things, like the Grand Canyon was laid down in a year. The geology of Coconino County, Arizona poses a special challenge for YECs because they have alternating wind-lain and water-lain layers, and that’s hard to do in a short period of time. But they take up the challenge, and try to get their work past geology editors.

Scott says that creationists see themselves as the good guys in a culture war. They reject the idea that you can be good without a god, (says Scott: “I don’t know about you, but I haven’t killed anyone in weeks!”) and see the world as a struggle between their god and materialism. But this is a linguist trick, explains Scott. Materialism has two senses that creationists conflate:

  • Methodological materialism refers to the practice of using natural explanations for the phenomena we observe, and
  • Philosophical materialism is the view that matter is all there is.

(I suppose we should add to these the idea of acquisitive materialism, concerned with getting and having the latest, which really can be destructive, IMO.)

Fighting materialism, says Scott, is a strong motivator for their attacks on science, as they try to pave the way for Christian theism. Scott has no doubt that creationists believe their schtick, but their typical modus operandi is to bypass the process of communicating with the scientific community and take their arguments directly to an undiscerning public, as in high schools and even very young children. That’s because their fight is a political and cultural one, not a scientific one.

The Three Horsemen: Act 2

17 May 2012 / / Comments Off on The Three Horsemen: Act 2

Setting: A very long book-signing queue

Dramatis personae:
Richard Dawkins (RD): A scientist. A public intellectual. A colossus among men.
Daniel Midgley (DM): A Daniel Midgley

Curtain rises.

DM: Hello again!
RD: (peers at DM as if for the first time, appears to recognise) Oh, hello.
DM: (hands over a copy of ‘The Magic of Reality’) This is the copy of your book that I read to my son.
RD: I’m glad! (Signs)
DM: Do you think that disgust was the mechanism for our evolved sense of morality?
RD: Yes. I do. (Hands back books)
DM: Thank you! (exit)

End of Act II

Global Atheist Con: Richard Dawkins

12 May 2012 / / 2 Comments

Richard Dawkins is Richard Dawkins. His talk was entitled “Now Praise Intelligent Design”.

Intelligent design gets a bad rap, you know. The term’s been sullied to the point where it’s been described as ‘creationism in a cheap suit‘. But all of us rely on intelligently designed things to make our lives easier. Even Dawkins believes in intelligent design — for man-made objects, as he’s explained on Colbert.

But back to the talk. Dawkins wants us to take back intelligent design, the better to design our future intelligently. In fact, Dawkins suggests a few terms we should be taking back:

  • Morality. 
  • Pro-life. You know who the real pro-lifers are? Médecins Sans Frontières, that’s who.
  • Spirituality. The feeling of transcendence at seeing the night sky is available for all of us. (Personally, I never use the term ‘spirituality’ because it’s so vague and easy to misunderstand, and I don’t want to dignify it with anything important, but that’s me.)
  • Christmas. Christians are only the latest to put their stamp on the set of pagan festivals surrounding the Winter Solstice.

And, of course, intelligent design. Dawkins explained that brains and computers are the only things capable of intelligent design, and they have origins that we know and understand. It used to be that people thought that if something looked designed, it was designed. Then Darwin showed how evolution by natural selection could create things that were apparently designed. Dawkins calls this ‘neo-design’, and differentiates it from ‘paleo-design’. Evolution (paleo-design) created us, and now we create things (neo-design).

Unfortunately, says Dawkins, paleo-design is often bad design, as evidenced by the recurrent laryngeal nerve in giraffes. This nerve takes a long path down the neck, only to connect a few centimetres from where it started. The long trip was necessary because that nerve had to work in every giraffe throughout generations of evolution, so as necks got longer, the nerve had to stretch. No intelligent designer would design a giraffe this way (nor would it give us back-to-front retinas), but evolution would. It has no plan for the future. Neo-design does, but even then we can hit problem when designing big things like a society — we sometimes lack the political unanimity to carry out a solution.

Can our morality be designed and if so, how do we design it? Dawkins seemed to relish this part, as he threw out some (perhaps half-warmed) red meat to the crowd. The idea that we should get our morality from the Bible is, in Dawkins’ words, “a sick joke”. It says “Thou shalt not kill” (which anyone could work on their own), but then Moses kills 3,000 people. The New Testament isn’t much better: God couldn’t think of a better plan than to come down as his alter ego to be horrifically tortured and killed to atone for the sin of Adam (who never existed) so that he could forgive himself.

And yet, for many people, morality and religion have a very strong mental link. When the RDF commissioned a survey into people’s responses on the census, they asked people why they’d ticked the “Christian” box (that’s 54% of the total), and many responded “Because I like to think of myself as a good person.” Yet when asked “When faced with a moral dilemma, do you turn to your religion?”, only one tenth of the 54% said yes. The bulk of the 54% said they looked to their innate moral sense. Even this doesn’t tell the whole story. Inescapably, we get our morals from the time in which we live. Darwin and Huxley were oppsed to slavery, but they would have been considered reactionary and racist by today’s standards.

Dawkins then launched into a discussion of some gray areas of morality. What about euthanasia? An absolutist might offer a blanket condemnation, but a consequentialist could point out that, if prolonging life is the goal, then legal euthanasia might prolong life. How? A number of people kill themselves while they’re able to, knowing that when they become incapacitated, they wouldn’t be able to, and no doctor would be allowed to help them.

What about eugenics? asked Dawkins, and I detected a tension in the audience. After all, eugenics is something religious people hurl at us when we talk about designing our own morality. So what about it? Yes, we condemn the idea of manipulating genes to engineer ‘superior’ humans, but most people are okay with negative eugenics, that is, testing a cell for a bad gene. What’s the difference between this and positive eugenics, say, for having a blue-eyed child, or a child who is a great musician? Even Dawkins said this was farther than he wanted to go, but then pointed out that most people mould children by non-genetic means — not by manipulating genes, but by forcing the child to practice the piano for hours a day. It’s anyone’s guess as to which is more cruel, thinks I, glibly.

Dawkins finished with a discussion of how religions evolve and survive. What’s the mechanism?

1. Is it that religious people are healthier, and this helps regions to propagate?
Dawkins says the evidence for this is sketchy, and that he only mentioned it for completeness.

2. Does religion spread by piggybacking on useful things?
For example, children are susceptible to indoctrination, and that’s a good thing because accepting things that adults say gives children knowledge that helps them to survive. Religion, however, exploits this feature of childhood in parasitic fashion.

3. Does religion help groups survive?
Dawkins describes group selection as ‘silly’, but allows that some groups might have attributes that help them survive better than others. Even so, says Dawkins, that’s not proper group selection.

4. Could the question have a memetic answer?
Memes (or ideas) spread quickly throughout a population, and remain robust despite opposition. As an illustration, Dawkins showed this graphic of the London tiger rumour as it progressed through time, all tracked through Twitter. Click to go to the interactive graphic — it’s really interesting. It’s like doing an epidemiology of rumours.

Overall, good talk, with a lot of diverse foci. I’m interested to see what he gets into next.

Global Atheist Con: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

6 May 2012 / / 2 Comments

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is the author of ‘Infidel’. Her talk was entitled “The Arab Spring”.

I want to like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, but I’ve always been wary of her. I find her admirable because of what she’s been through, and her strong stand against Islam. So why the discomfort?

It’s like this: There are two ways to be anti-Islam. You can be a secularist, or you can be a racist. (No, Islam’s not a race, but people in this group conflate the two.) And while I don’t think she’s a racist, I think she got in with a lot of the very worrying anti-immigrant crowd during her time in the Netherlands, and I think she holds a lot of right-wing views, especially about support for Israel. Maybe the best way to say it is that she’s a hero that I sometimes disagree with, much like Christopher Hitchens (whose place she has stepped into). So I attended her talk ready to be convinced, and was encouraged by much of what I heard.

She started by relating the events of the Arab Spring of 2010. What would a secular spring mean to Northern Africa? Her list:

  • An end to human rights violations
  • Freedom of speech
  • Freedom of press
  • Freedom of conscience
  • Women’s rights
  • Work
  • Voting
  • Protection from violence
  • Economic growth
  • Peace with Israel
  • End to Islamic terrorism
  • Youth would develop a confidence in life before death, instead of a life after death.

However, says Hirsi Ali, what we’re seeing is not a secular spring, but rather a Muslim winter, as old repression is being replaced by religious repression.

There are, however, signs of hope.

1. Voting patterns. Secular parties aren’t winning, but they do exist.
2. The Iran uprising of 2009, which saw citizens protesting against theocrats.
3. The Muslim Diaspora: Ex-Muslims are growing, writing, and communicating with each other.
4. Freedom of expression is increasing. For example, Hamsa Kashgari, a 23 year old Saudi journalist, tweeted an imaginary meeting with Muhammad that was thought to be blasphemous. He fled Saudi Arabia, but was returned, and forced to apologise. Once you start having thoughts like these, says Hirsi, Ali, you do not go back, even if you are forced to apologise.

Hirsi Ali was especially critical of liberals in the West, who were failing to protect secularists in the Arab world. Why is this so? Her view is that these liberals are falling victim to a version of romantic primitivism. Particularly galling were middle-class Western women who convert to Islam and cover themselves. She also thinks ‘white guilt’ may apply.

Most troubling to me was Hirsi Ali’s assertion that conservatives and Christians were the ones who really comprehend the threat that Islam poses, particularly with regard to nuclear proliferation. I assume that means the people that used to be the cheering section for Team Bush, starting wars of choice with the wrong countries. Methinks most Christian conservatives don’t care much for people who look like Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

So what can be done to encourage a true Secular Spring in the Middle East? Her suggestions:

  • Develop a secular liberal narrative in the Middle East
  • Have policy training for people in these countries
  • Defeat radical Islam, which threatens our thinking. 
She mentioned that gatherings like the GAC with speeches and comedy were good, but that we need to place change on our agenda, not just gather to listen and laugh.

Global Atheist Con: Lawrence Krauss

1 May 2012 / / 1 Comment

Laurence Krauss is a physicist. His talk was titled “A Universe from Nothing”, which by no small coincidence in the title of his book.

“A Universe from Nothing” is also the title of this video he gave in 2009.

It would probably be a good idea to watch this video, rather than reading what I’m writing about it. I’m not a physicist, so I’m very likely to get it wrong. Krauss explains the origins and fate of our universe in a clear style which even Cardinal Pell would understand. (“Though he’s never thought about anything deeply in his life!” snipes Krauss.) This feeling of understanding ends immediately after the talk, leaving you with pages of notes full of gibberish. Perhaps my gibberish will make sense if you watch the talk first.

Here are some thoughts that I’m sure I got right.

• People ask, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” But nothing isn’t as nothing as we used to think it is. ‘Nothing’ has energy. Empty space is actually a brew of particles that pop in and out of existence on tiny timescales. These particles have an impact on the mass of our bodies. Gravity plus quantum mechanics allows space itself to appear from nothing. So a universe from nothing is not only plausible, but likely.

• It was once thought that the universe was slowing down, and would end in a ‘big crunch’. (I remember hearing that back in the 70s.) But now that appears to be wrong. (Krauss: “Was the data wrong? It often is. The first set of data is always wrong.”) It now appears that we live in a ‘flat’ universe that will keep expanding forever, but more and more slowly. Krauss says that only a flat universe could arise from “nothing” and keep existing long enough for us to be here.

• “The best state to be in if you’re a scientist in to be confused. And I am.”

• “The real universe is more inspiring than any fairy tale.”

Global Atheist Con, Day 2: A.C. Grayling

28 April 2012 / / 1 Comment

A.C. Grayling is a philosopher, and the author of “The Good Book”.

The title of his talk was “What Next for Atheism?” We’re seeing a swelling in our ranks, but how do we make sure this healthy atheist trend continues? Grayling suggests three ways:

  • Metaphysical debate, where we talk about rationality and evidence,
  • Secularism, where we discuss the role of the religious voice in public life
  • And most importantly, ethics, which involves how we live our lives and how we make decisions about our relationships.

Metaphysical Debate

Grayling suggested some ways that we can talk about religion to show how vacuous it is.
Instead of ‘God’, try substituting ‘Fred’.

Who made the universe? Fred. 

I have a deep personal relationship… with Fred.

Another suggestion (that I customarily use myself) is to refer to ‘gods and goddesses’.

I’m an atheist because I don’t believe in gods and goddesses. 

You can be moral without having to believe in gods. (And so on.)

This job involves getting people (especially children) to think critically. We can do this, says Grayling, by inviting people to think about the history of religions, and whether that justifies the case for them. Religions customarily obscure the facts about their past. Consider how the Church of England (and many others) have abandoned hell, and the Roman Catholic Church has abandoned limbo. I’ve seen this in the LDS Church as they’ve changed or abandoned doctrines with little fanfare and less detail, hoping no one would notice or remember. (It’s that memory hole again.) Grayling observes that this amnesia is very useful to them because it allows them to present themselves well. Religions, he says, are like the Greek god Proteus who could change his shape; Menelaus (or Aristaeus, or both) could only conquer Proteus by holding onto him tenaciously until, having gone through all his changes, he was exhausted. You just have to hang onto them until they get tired.

Yes, the religious will complain when we engage in metaphysical debate. But even this represents a positive change. A modern atheist could say, “When you guys were in power, you didn’t argue with us; you just burned us at the stake. Now when we present challenging arguments, you complain.”

Secularism

Religious people have the right to believe what they like, and to make their voices heard in the public square, says Grayling. But their influence is currently out of proportion to the number of actual believers. With bishops sitting in the House of Lords, and money going to ‘faith schools’, religion should see themselves as they are: “Lobby groups!” Like trade unions and other interest groups, we shouldn’t be paying for them — they should be supporting themselves. Grayling says this is a point we should be making constantly.

Grayling related how, in debates, there are frequently four clergymen on the panel, and then him, the lone atheist. There are four of them because they can’t agree with each other. And yet they’re willing to make common cause… because they want the public money.

Ethics

Grayling points out that religious people think they have a social area of morality and human experience cordoned off for themselves, and they claim that they own those things. We need to take back possesson of them.

Religions teach that all the good things come from gods, and all the bad things come from us. In fact, all the things come from us, and there’s no need for mumbo-jumbo.

So in closing, Grayling outlined the way forward for atheism:

  • Challenge the claims of religion, challenge their history, pin them down about what they think
  • Demand that voices in the square are proportionate to their actual participation, and
  • Take back human experience.

The Three Horsemen: Act 1

27 April 2012 / / Comments Off on The Three Horsemen: Act 1

Setting: Book-signing queue

Dramatis personae:
Daniel Dennett (DD): A philosopher
Daniel Midgley (DM): A Daniel Midgley

DM: (hands over books) Great talk. I’m a linguist, so I’m interested in Quine’s induction problem.
DD: (autographing) Yes, it’s interesting.
DM: You mention Quine a lot.
DD: Yes, he was my first teacher.
DM: Oh, cool. (Takes books.) Thanks!

End of Act I

Global Atheist Con, Day 2: Daniel Dennett

23 April 2012 / / Comments Off on Global Atheist Con, Day 2: Daniel Dennett

Daniel Dennett is a philosopher, and author of “Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon”.

His talk was “How to Tell If You’re an Atheist“.

Dennett started out with a discussion of anasognosia, also known as Anton’s Syndrome, or ‘blindness denial’. Sometimes people are struck blind, and they don’t know it. They know something’s wrong; they just don’t know what it is. In the same way, some people might be going through ‘atheism denial’ — being an atheist and not knowing it. I’m not sure it’s helpful to compare atheism and blindness, but it’s Dan Dennett here! so we’re going to cut him some slack.

Dennett is working on the Clergy Project, kind of a research project and support network for pastors who no longer believe. Even though they’ve relinquished their faith, some of these trained ministers may be reluctant to identify as atheists, either because atheism gets a bad rap, or because they’ve invested so much in their religion. It’s their career — and who’s going to hire a 55-year-old theologian? Dennett says these ex-believers are having a hard time finding each other for support, like gay people in the 50s without the gaydar. Dennett gives a clue to spot them, though. The ones who are active in their works are probably the non-believers; they’re trying to atone for their hypocrisy. The ones playing golf still believe.

Dennett explains some of the appeal of atheism: We’re a happy lot, in part because we don’t suffer under a burden of artificial guilt. We feel bad for our misdeeds, but we don’t call them sins. So you might be an atheist if you’re curious about atheists, and yet you’re a little worried about what you might find out about yourself.

Lots of Christians don’t believe that Jesus is the son of a god. In a recent UK poll (commissioned by the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science), the percentage of people describing themselves as Christian has dropped from 72 to 54%. Of those 54% percent, half hadn’t attended a church service in the previous year, 16 percent hadn’t attended in the past ten years, and a further 12 percent had never done so. And only 44% of that “54-percenter” group believed that Jesus is the son of a god. Asks Dennett: Do you believe that Jesus is the literal son of god? If not, you might be an atheist.

What about believing in something divine, like a benign force? Dennett was once asked by a radio host if, despite being an atheist, he didn’t believe in some kind of force that protects us. “Well, yes,” Dennett replied. “Gravity!” If you believe that God is a “concept” that enriches our spirits and enlightens them, then you’re definitely an atheist! Dennett remarked that even he believed that the “concept” of god exists… as a concept. He believes that thousands of concepts of gods exist — but that doesn’t make him a polytheist.

Science is disciplined. It relies on double-blind studies, accurate measurements, and peer review. There’s nothing like this in religion. In fact it’s just the opposite. Dennett cited the phrase “Fake it ’til you make it!” as typical of religion, and mentioned the case of Mother Teresa, who wrote of feeling like god wasn’t there. The fuzziness of religion enables its impenetrable creeds, and in fact relies on them for its survival; creeds that are simple don’t last long. Religion doesn’t survive too much probing, which is why believers think that talking about religion critically is rude — sort of like, “Don’t ask, don’t tell”. Dennett’s response: Don’t ask — Tell!

Technological advances will break down religions. Many of us owe our deconversion in some sense to the Internet, either by exposure to more information, or to the creation of new non-churchy social support networks. The elders of churches will either have to anticipate unwelcome questions from young people, or try and lock the kids away from the technology — and they probably won’t. Eventually, this may lead to religion becoming a semi-transparent myth in our culture, like Santa Claus. Asks Dennett: Wouldn’t it be great if the god myth were semi-transparent like this?

Global Atheist Con, Day 2: Dan Barker

19 April 2012 / / Comments Off on Global Atheist Con, Day 2: Dan Barker

Dan Barker is co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation.

His talk was entitled Life-Driven Purpose, which is of course, a take-off on Rick Warren’s book. As a pastor, Rick Warren’s purpose is “to glorify God”, which is to say, to bow down to a master. What’s that like? Barker invited us to consider the posture of prayer: Prostrate on the floor, on our knees, hands clasped (shackled?) in supplication, not a threat. A slave. Masters are afraid of slave revolts, which is what atheists are doing. But many people still want to bow down before a king, even those whose ancestors kicked kings out of their country.

You can watch the next bit of Barker’s talk yourself (or something like it).

Barker points out that religion does not enhance your moral judgment. It compromises it. Two stories to illustrate.

Story one: Suppose I were to break into some Christians’ home. I torture them, shoot the dog, and burn the house down. When people ask why I did it, I say, “No reason; the devil made me do it!“

Would you consider that person to be moral? Probs not, I’m guessing.

Story two: The story of Job. His whole family is killed by a collapsing house, and Job is tormented with sore boils.

Why did God allow this?

Job 2:3 And the LORD said unto Satan, Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil? and still he holdeth fast his integrity, although thou movedst me against him, to destroy him without cause.

In other words: No reason; the Devil made him do it. This is not a moral being.

The good news we offer to the world is that “There IS no purpose of life. And that’s good!”

People often act like there’s some kind of purpose to life, and if only we could find out what that was, we could do it and be happy. But if that were true, we would be secondary. We would be subservient, looking for marching orders, looking outside ourselves to find some purpose. But it’s wonderful that life is its own reward. We want to make the world better, reproduce, have jollity, and so on. But those things aren’t the purpose OF life. There’s a purpose IN life.

As long as there are problems to solve, knowledge to be gained, beauty to create, we have a purpose IN life. Life with purpose, life with meaning. A life-driven purpose.

Global Atheist Con, Day 2: Leslie Cannold

19 April 2012 / / 3 Comments

Leslie Cannold is a writer, activist, and the author of “The Book of Rachel”. Her talk: Separating Church and State: A Call to Action.

It’s one of those funny paradoxes that Americans seem super-religious, when their constitution has provisions for the separation of church and state — and what’s more important, that separation gets upheld in court. Australia, however, allows lots of religious stuff past the legal barriers — and Australians are largely secular. The net effect is that Australia does not really achieve a separation of church and state.

Cannold compared the relevant bits of each country’s constitution. Let’s start with Australia:

Section 116: The Commonwealth shall not make any law for establishing any religion, or for imposing any religious observance, or for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion, and no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office or public trust under the Commonwealth.

And the USA:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…

Both texts read about the same. The difference is that of implementation. In USA, courts have a tradition of “reading it up”, so that an action is prohibited unless it’s explicitly okay. In Australia, they “read it down”, so that it’s okay unless it’s explicitly prohibited. That means a lot of religious stuff gets in.

The difference between the two methods of implementation shows up in two landmark cases, both of which involved the role of the government in promoting religion in schools: McCollum v Board of Education (USA, 1948)

“For the First Amendment rests upon the premise that both religion and government can best work to achieve their lofty aims if each is left free from the other within its respective sphere. Or, as we said in the Everson case, the First Amendment had erected a wall between Church and State which must be kept high and impregnable.”

and The Dog’s Case (Australia, 1981), in which one Justice said:

[Section 116] cannot readily be viewed as the repository of some broad statement of the principle concerning the separation of church and state from which may be distilled the detailed consequences of such separation.

What this means is that Australian taxpayers pay to promote religions:

  • religious festivals (millions of dollars for World Youth Day)
  • canonisations ($1.5 million in the case of Mary McKillop)
  • tax breaks for churches
  • private schools
  • and exposing kids to religion via chaplains

Cannold actually has no objection to Religious Education taught by teachers. However, at the moment we have a situation where access to high school students is thrown open to what can only be described as evangelists. Here’s the head of Access Ministries:

“There is enormous amount of christian ministry going on in our schools, both at state level and at at national level, both at government and non-government schools, but we must ask how much of that ministry is actually resulting in christian conversion and discipleship growing”

“Our Federal and State Governments allow us to take the Christian faith into schools. We need to go and make disciples.”

In Cannold’s view, Australia is a soft theocracy. Politicians feign religiosity because they think it will get them votes. Our Prime Minister (who Fiona Patten calls a “non-practicing atheist“) has given religions everything they’ve wanted.

So what can we do?

Cannold emphasises that “we” includes the non-faith community and some religious believers who can’t stand this trend and who consider faith a private matter. We need to find them and form coalitions.

Here are some simple suggestions from Cannold.

Join the Facebook group for Australians for Separation of Church & State
Help with the Australian University Freethought Alliance.
Donate to Ron Williams. He’s single-handedly mounting a challenge against the chaplaincy, and the legal costs are climbing. Throw him some dough.
Engage in web-based advocacy
Build alliances with teachers. There are teachers who agree that scripture shouldn’t be taught in school, but after school. Opt-in, not opt-out.

And foremost — we need to admit that we do not have a secular state in Australia. We think of ourselves as secular and non-religious, and we are. But we’re also kind of conflict-averse, and we need to stop that.

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