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.
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.
There were tons of Peter Singer fans in the house. They were soaking it up; I was typing madly, trying to get it all. And here it is, as faithfully as I could reproduce it.
The theme of Singer’s talk could be: The Expanding Circle. He started with this quote from W.E.H. Lecky:
At one time the benevolent affections embrace merely the family, soon the circle expanding includes first a class, then a nation, then a coalition of nations, then all humanity, and finally, its influence is felt in the dealings of man with the animal world.
This expanding circle of concern for the welfare of others is very encouraging. We’re seeing a decline in violence. We are currently more peaceful, and less cruel than at any other point in human history. (Singer mentioned Steven Pinker’s book, “The Better Angels of Our Nature”, which has been on my list for a while.) It may seem like there’s too much violence, and there is, but compare today to paleolithic times, when an estimated 1 in 7 human deaths were due to violence at the hands of other humans (based on markings of weapons on bones and other forensic clues). At one point, the Aztecs were sacrificing 5% of their population (cf Europe at its worst – 3%).
Why is violence less prevalent and less acceptable? One reason might be the trigger for the Enlightenment — the printing press. As the communication of ideas became cheaper, people began to criticise injustices, including torture, despotism, and slavery. Duelling became less common. People began calling for gentler and kinder treatment of animals.
There’s also been a rise in the awareness of the rights of women, children, gay people, and animals. Imagine this ad from the 50s running in a magazine today.
Singer likens this trend to an escalator. An escalator of reason. You start reasoning to advance your own interests, but then it can take you where you didn’t expect to go. you could fight the escalator and run the other way, but we generally don’t. We stay on the escalator of reason. However, in addition to our increased capacity for reason, we need to add empathy.
Even though you know you’re going to be meeting up with the likes of Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers, Daniel Dennett, and Laurence Krauss, it is still a bit of a shock when they all show up in a room at the same time.
Last weekend I was at the second Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne. It’s a great chance to hear some excellent speakers, meet up with other atheists, and participate in a growing community of smart people.
Not much was happening on Friday, so as a faculty helper for the UWA Atheist and Skeptic Society, I tagged along to the Student Leadership Conference. There were talks on organising and running a student freethinking group, and even how to do good stuff with religious clubs (which is something I’d like to do more of).
Which is how I found myself having cocktails with the aforementioned gentlemen. Richard Dawkins appeared in a puff of logic just to my left, and I roped him into a chat with a group of Perth atheists. You might think Dawkins would be rather brittle in conversation, but he was lovely and engaging, and quite happy to chat. I told him that I’d just finished reading his book “The Magic of Reality” aloud to Youngest Son, and he seemed pleased about that.
The substance of the talks:
Lyz Lidell of the Secular Student Alliance explained the importance of delegating in a student group: You can’t do everything yourself, and you won’t be around forever. That means you need to break the group’s tasks in manageable units, find volunteers, take the time to train them to do what needs to be done, and show your appreciation to your wonderful volunteers.
Debbie Goddard gave a brief history of the Center for Inquiry on Campus.
Chris Stedman gave suggestions on how and why to work with religious groups.
Why should we work as part of an interfaith effort? According to Stedman, it’s because we as atheists get a bad rap, and we get marginalised. By working together with religious groups, we can challenge misconceptions about atheism and accomplish some good.
He also gave some suggestions as to how to work with interfaith groups: work together on shared causes and values, and have mutual respect within a “mutually inspiring” relationship. This last one is a problem for me. I don’t feel ‘inspired’ by other people’s faith; I actually feel repulsed, or like I’m working with a hazardous substance. But that’s okay — I can work with people I disagree with, and I often do. I just think it should be clear from the outset that any ‘interfaith’ service project is a joint effort, operating from shared values — not religious, not atheistic, just human.
By tradition, every 100th post is an open thread. You can chat about anything you want, but as it turns out, I’m heading off to Melbourne to the Global Atheist Convention, where I’ll be posting lots of bloggy atheist goodness. If you’re short of topics, that would be a fitting one.
Are you going? Or are you gazing enviously at us travellers through the tiny plane windows? Or don’t you care? Maybe you think atheists shouldn’t convene at all because that makes us a religion! Someone told me that, but she was silly because getting together is a human thing, not a religious thing. If convening makes you a religion, then Linguistics and stamp collecting would be religions. Even Sexpo would be a religion. (NSFW link)
An Elephant on Mars? At Least According to This NASA Photo
NASA managed to snag this unique picture of an elephant-shaped lava flow on Mars in the Elysium Planitia sector of the planet. Located on a Martian plain known for displaying some of the planet’s youngest lava flows, this flow may have occurred within the past 100 million years – a relatively short time in the planet’s history.
Obviously it’s evidence that Ganesha is the one true god. He’s even associated with Mars for some reason. Come on, Hindus, I shouldn’t have to make this stuff up for you.
This bit of the Dawkins/Pell “debate” touched on something I’ve been thinking about.
Pell trots out that old chestnut that religious people like to say about science: science tells us “how”, and religion tells us “why”. I’d like to challenge that.
Sometimes we’re touched by tragedy. We lose someone close to us, and sometimes it’s not in a “good way”, like when someone is very old and ready. Sometimes it’s someone young and someone who really needs to be here with us. Sickness and death in that kind of situation is horrible and pointless, and there’s no good reason for it to have happened. And then people who are left alive, trying to pick up the pieces, will say something like, “It sure is hard to understand why this is happening.”
It’s completely understandable to ask why. But wait — wasn’t religion supposed to answer why? It doesn’t do the job in these situations.
Science can answer why. The person died because our bodies do a pretty good job in most circumstances, but not all the time, and sometimes they can’t heal themselves of everything. Our cells reproduce the wrong way, or a virus gets us, or we have a stroke, and we die. That’s why.
But that’s not a satisfying answer because it doesn’t speak to that person’s expectations. What the person is saying is: I had a belief that a loving god was watching over me, and was going to answer my prayerful requests, perhaps if I did the right things and/or had enough faith. Given those beliefs, it sure is hard to understand why this is happening.
So drop the belief. Without the expectations caused by this belief, things become a lot easier to understand. That’s important, because understanding why (say) cancer happens can lead to a way to beat it. But relying on religion to provide ‘why’ answers is confusing and just makes us ask the wrong questions.
I’ve just put up an interview with Caleb Everett (not to be confused with Dan Everett). We talked about the Pirahã people and some work he’s done with them on numbers. They don’t have them, and they have quite a time of it thinking in numerical ways. Really interesting stuff.
I also do a bit of scream-metal. It’s as painful as it sounds.
One-off show: Here
Subscribe via iTunes: Here
Show notes: Here
Times come and times go, but religion provides an anchor of constancy (if an anchor’s what you need). So it’s good to see Mormon apostle Russell Nelson engaging in the time-honored religious tradition of slagging science.
Well, that’s not fair. If there’s science that they like, then it’s a gift from god. If they don’t like the science, then it’s either Satan’s deception, or some irrelevant wild guess that will get resolved in the fulness of time.
Here’s the clip (from 7:12).
“Yet some people erroneously think that these marvelous physical attributes happened by chance or resulted from a big bang somewhere. Ask yourself, ‘Could an explosion in a printing shop produce a dictionary?’ The likelihood is most remote. But if so, it could never heal its own torn pages or reproduce its own newer editions.”
The printer’s shop analogy is extremely tired — evolution is not ‘by chance’! Mutation is, but natural selection is non-random. So yes, if books could reproduce and if only the fittest books survived to reproduce, then yes, we would see books that could heal torn pages and update themselves. Nelson is making a false analogy between a living being and an inanimate object, and the two have different qualities.
Analogy aside, what Elder Nelson has done must be very strange and uncomfortable for Mormons. He’s waded into science, and sneered at ideas from biology, physics, and cosmology that he doesn’t undertand, and that there’s real evidence for and no real reason to disbelieve.
To see why this is such weird territory he’s in, let’s take a look at mentions of ‘evolve’ or ‘evolution’ in General Conferences.
Predictably, the most mentions came when evolution was a new theory, and religious people were scrambling to figure out what to do about it. It popped up again as more young people started attending universities, and horrifying their religious parents with the science they were learning. Since then, things were calming down to background levels. The two words ‘evolution’ and ‘evolve’ weren’t even mentioned in all the 1990s! The last time Darwinian evolution was mentioned in General Conference was in 1984, when Bruce McConkie and Boyd Packer both had a bash. That’s 28 years of letting it lay.
So the scene was set for the LDS Church to let the issue go, accommodate evolution, and claim that they were never really against it, which is how they seem to resolve all their old conflicts. Instead, Nelson has recycled his old material, and renewed the attack. That’s going to take some time to walk back.
And just for comparison, no GA has ever trashed the Big Bang — the phrase doesn’t appear in the entire GC corpus. Nelson is really in deep water here.
What must intelligent Mormons be thinking?
a. Oh, Grandpa!
b. Um, are we not supposed to believe in the Big Bang now?
c. He spake as a man.
d. Let’s go shopping!
e. We just heard how not everything from the pulpit is doctrine, so no problem!
f. Holy fuck. This guy is a leader of my church, supposedly getting revelation from god, and he’s completely and unambiguously wrong. What else is he wrong about?
Because he is wrong. He’s proudly ignorant, making a joke out of something he doesn’t understand, and expecting the audience to laugh along. (Which of course they did, nervously.) He’s coming off as really dumb, and he’s considered one of the smart ones! (He was a doctor, doncha know.)
The takeaway: A major LDS leader just put himself (and the church) up against science. Are Mormons creationists now? Or is it possible to ignore an apostle?
Will this shake some educated Mormons up? The likelihood is most remote! But I think it should be a really big deal, and I’d like to hear from some smarter Mormons to see how they’re coping with this.
I got to interview linguist Dan Everett last week for an episode of the ‘Talk the Talk‘ podcast.
He’s well-known for his work with the Pirahã people, and we talked about the implications of their language for linguistic theory. But the Pirahã people also served as a catalyst for his deconversion from Christianity, as he has discussed in this video from Fora TV.
So after all the talk about language, I got to ask him about atheism.
– – – – – – – – – – Daniel Midgley: I’m just curious about atheism. As an atheist myself, I liked reading about your deconversion, but I think that must have been a really difficult time for you.
Dan Everett: Yeah, it was a very difficult time for me. I mean, I was raised with a complete apathy towards religion, and would have considered myself an atheist until I was about 17, when I had a dramatic conversion experience in San Diego in the 60s. And that was very useful; it got me off drugs and other things I was doing that I shouldn’t have been doing. And I met a family who had been missionaries in the Amazon for many years. That got me interested in the Amazon. And when you become a missionary, not only is your faith a personal thing, but it becomes a very public thing. You are being supported financially to do something based on what you say you believe. You’ve raised your family a certain way. So now suddenly to say, “Oh, wait, I don’t believe this stuff anymore,” it causes friends who’ve been giving money to you to help you do this work, and your family — it produces all sorts of trauma. Even when you would rather that it not do that, but at some point you have to say, “I don’t believe this stuff anymore for a number of reasons, and I can’t be dishonest and pretend that I do. I have to just say that I don’t, and take the consequences.
DM: It’s really hard to come out. I had not quite the same experience, but I used to be a Mormon, and I did the whole two year mission that they do. And there’s something about when you feel like you have to say that you believe something, it becomes very difficult — when you’re very much invested, it becomes very difficult to deconvert, I think.
DE: Yeah, I think that’s absolutely right. And so you would know from your Mormon background almost exactly what it was to go through this huge social pressure, and a lot of people that you like very much.
The other really interesting thing is there is no… I’ve never found a social equivalent to church for atheists. I mean, we don’t get together on a regular basis and sing songs and take care of each others’ children and have potlucks, because atheists don’t share beliefs. They just don’t believe something. And so we don’t have the same positive unifying force as people who share beliefs. And so once you do make that decision, you lose a certain social network that you had before, that, whatever it was based on, was psychologcally supportive. So there are a number of pressures that don’t involve threats that keep people believing, even when their inner brains tell them, “This doesn’t make any sense.”
DM: Do you think humanism could fill in the gaps somewhere?
DE: I’d like to think that it could, but I think that many of us who are atheists are pretty independent-minded anyway. So it’s difficult. I belong to a couple of humanistic societies, and I get their newsletters, and I’m encouraged by what they do, but they don’t have any particular events that look like a lot of fun that I’d like to go to. But I do enjoy the symphony and I enjoy going to concerts and things like that, so those things have to become church to me.
DM: Do you identify with the New Atheism crowd, Dawkins and Myers and skeptics like that?
DE: My view of Dawkins’ book in particular is that … somebody wrote me one time and said “I suspected that Dawkins was an atheist, but I just didn’t realise that he was an amateur atheist!” And my view is that… I respect what they’re doing. I think that, you know, my favourite writer in this regard is Christopher Hitchens. But at the same time, I don’t think that people have done a very good job of trying to understand the cultural meaning that people find in the social attraction in religion, and why really really intelligent people can be religious. I think that just to say that this is all stupid, and anybody who believes this stuff is an idiot… you know, I can see the appeal in saying something like that, but it doesn’t really give a satisfying explanation to me. So while I think there need to be writings trying to lay out the case against theism and why it can be a very negative force, I think we have to do it with understanding and compassion in a way that I haven’t really seen in much of the New Atheism writing.
DM: I think one of the approaches that a lot of people take is that we need a multiplicity of approaches — we have people that, you know, mock and ridicule because that fires up the base and it can shake some people, but then we also have the ‘nice atheists’ who understand what it was like to be maybe a fundamentalist and can approach things a little more gently.
DE: Yeah, as I say, even having said what I just said about the need for more compassion I still find Christopher Hitchens’ work to be absolutely hilarious and wonderful to read and he just brings so much wit to the process. But still, it’s got to be aggravating and I don’t know who it would convince if they believe fervently the other way. So I agree. There needs to be a multiplicity of approaches, and among other atheists, I don’t need to hold back my opinion of theism, but when I’m with… you know, I have people that I love and respect very much who are strong believers, and I don’t hold back — I tell them what I think — but at the same time it would never occur to me to insult them because they believe differently than me.
DM: I tend to say: I respect people but I don’t respect ideas.
DE: Yeah, I agree with that. I completely agree with that. It’s just that sometimes people that we respect hold ideas that we hate. And so we have to speak to those ideas. And there are some times when there’s just no way to be diplomatic about it. So if I say, you know, “I don’t believe in God, and Jesus is not my saviour,” well, that’s what I believe and there are some people who are going to be offended by that no matter how nice I try to say it, but that is the bottom line.
DM: Sometimes you have to say, “I’m not going to sugar-coat this for you. That’s how it is.”
DE: I agree with that, too. Yeah, there are times you just have to say it. My grandkids come up to me, and they say, “Are you afraid of going to hell?” And I said, “No, I’m not.” But I said, “You don’t need to be afraid about it either, because even if there is a hell, you didn’t send me there. I make my own decisions, and I’ll have to deal with it when I die. But I don’t believe I’m going to such a place.”
DM: How do the other family members feel about that?
DE: They’ve become pretty understanding of me nowadays. I mean, it was hard initially for a number of reasons because I made the announcement of my atheism, and that was a very strong contributing factor to my divorce, and the divorce in itself was traumatic, so there’s a lot of stuff going on. But right now they’re all quite understanding of me, and they tolerate me. More than tolerate; they love me as their father, but you know, I don’t bring these things up all the time. Sometimes sitting around at one of my daughters’ homes, their sons will ask me or daughters, you know, what do you think about this? And I don’t lie and I don’t hold back.
DM: I found that my linguistics kind of informed my atheism in a way. Like I used to be a literal Tower-of-Babel believer on some level, even if I never thought about it very much, because I was kind of a literalist, like a lot of Mormons, I think.
DE: Uh-huh.
DM: Did your linguistics factor in?
DE: In a different way. My linguistics factored in for two reasons. One, it was teaching me how to think scientifically. And two, it brought me into contact with other people who were thinking scientifically. It gave me a different social crowd. And I realised that I admired this crowd more — that people who reasoned, however imperfectly, in a scientific way, seemed to be more interesting people than people who did not reason in a scientific way, the people who simply based everything on what they interpreted a book written a couple of thousand years ago said. So it was very appealing, and also I didn’t like all the rules and regulation of religion, to tell you the truth. I was very happy to be able to think for myself about what I thought morality should be, and what I can and can’t do.
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