Interfaith

November 28, 2008

Just a quick one today. Work is really piling on so I’m not getting much chance to blog, hopefully after exams I’ll have more time.

I had an interesting conversation with Stuart (President of the Student Humanist Society) about Interfaith. I’ve been very much involved in this kind of thing, much to the surprise of the religionists at the Chaplaincy, as I think the society has in the past come across as very ‘militant’, as much as I hate the expression.

Stuart’s position was that it’s a very useless, facile, wishy washy excercise to have people with totally contradicting beliefs sitting around a table together pretending to be friends, what’s the point? I replied that you don’t have to hold the same beliefs to partake in the exchange of information, and in the meantime we can coordinate joint events together (such as a joint application for funding which we tried a few weeks ago), and learn about religions and cultures we otherwise wouldn’t know about. That’s pretty cool!

Stuart then said that it’s hypocritical to have people working together when each of them believes the others are going to hell! I agree it would be much easier to bash religion if people did think and act that way, but that idea of hell is totally outdated, noone I know thinks of hell as fire and brimstone, it’s a separation from God and all that’s good. The point I pushed most, though is that when religious people look a “heathen”, they don’t think “you’re going to hell”. First and foremost they see another human being, and in that sense they share common ground with humanists. It’s where scripture and practice differ, even if the text says you should be killing people of other faiths, doesn’t mean that’s what you do.

It’s becoming something of a problem, all this interfaith stuff. I’m really mellowing out. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not succumbing to any religious belief, I’m just becoming less outspoken on matters of religion and atheism. I may soon be undeserving of the title “not-so-friendly humanist”.

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Remembrance Sunday

November 11, 2008

I didn’t have time to post this on Sunday, but I think Armistice Day is as good a time as any.

It is vitally important that we remember our loved ones who have died, and particularly those who have died in conflict. You may not agree with the war itself, but it’s not the fault of the troops. Many give their lives for their countries, and those who don’t are away from home, away from their loved ones and in the middle of very hostile situations fighting for a cause which they may or may not agree with, and facing traumatic events risking life and limb on a daily basis. As the saying goes, those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.

I went to the Universities’ service for Remembrance Day. It was held in the Playfair Library at Old College, followed by a parade around the quadrangle by the cadets. It was a fairly impressive affair, attended by representatives from Napier, Queen Margaret’s, Heriot Watt and Edinburgh Universities. Anyone who’s been reading the blog since its beginning may remember that I was very angry at myself for missing the ceremony last year. I suspect at that time I may have been a lot more indignant at what I saw. People may consider this an inappropriate thing to say in a post about such a somber event, but I want to make it absolutely clear that I am not criticising the act of remembrance, and neither am I criticising the University for hosting such an event, just that the type of commemoration seemed inappropriate. I feel obliged to make some kind of comment, although it is not easy to do so delicately. What follows should not be read in an agressive tone, merely a disappointed one.

What astounded me is that it was explicitly a Christian, and more specifically it seemed to me a Protestant affair (I say that because I noticed the version of the Lord’s Prayer was taken from the King James Bible, widely used by Protestants but not much at all by Catholics). Now don’t get me wrong, every other ceremony I’ve been to has been Christian, but they all took place in church, so I wasn’t surprised. Here, the ceremony took place in a library, at an educational institution which is supposedly secular, taken by a chaplain based at a chaplaincy which professes to serve people of all faiths and none, and none of the advertising for the event I saw suggested that it would have any kind of religious flavour, which is why I was so surprised. This is not a criticism of anyone in particular, but does having an explicitly Christian ceremony not undermine the sacrifices of people of other faiths and of no faith whatsoever?

Remembrance Sunday is widely considered a way of remembering and paying tribute to all those who have died in conflict, not just the World Wars, and not just people on ‘our side’. It is unrealistic to believe that all of those people were Christian, indeed if you go to the military cemeteries in Europe (as I did in the Netherlands in 2005), a large contingency of the headstones bear the star of David rather than a crucifix, and I wonder how many of those with crucifixes actually held religious belief. This website suggests that many Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims fought for Britain too. Equally it is not at all fair to presume that only Christians would like to participate in a remembrance ceremony.

I don’t object to religious organisations holding Remembrance Day services, I openly applaud it. But a secular institution like the University, with such a multicultural membership, shouldn’t have any kind of service other than a secular one. Trawling the internet briefly, I can’t find any mention of any kind of non-Christian Remembrance Day service closer than Oxford, and even that still has Christian blessings. You can blame that on secularists, but in my opinion the University service should be one of them. I had previously been impressed with the University that other official ceremonies had no mention of any God or religious belief. If members of the University want to pray, that’s they’re prerogative, but appealing solely to Christians can only contribute to cultural fragmentation. It appears Remembrance Sunday has become a Christian celebration.

I apologise if I have offended anyone, but if you leave a comment I will happily discuss any issue.

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Homeopathy 3

November 3, 2008

Regular readers may be getting more than a little sick of this topic but I’ve been thinking about it a lot the past week or so. Today I’ve had discussions (arguments?) with several people on it, and it’s been good to question my own thoughts. Firstly, one person claimed that it works, and when I brought up all the studies that show it doesn’t, retorted to “it does for some people”. Hmm…

The second conversation was much better. One of my friends said she uses homeopathic remedies and doesn’t care if it’s just the placebo effect (it was in fact her that brought the placebo effect up, not me). She was unaware of just how diluted the remedies are, and seemed a bit less sure of it when I told her it’s really just water, but nevertheless it is a valid objection. Even if we assume it’s just the placebo effect, what does it matter? As long as it works, why do we care? What’s the big objection, and why don’t we use placebos more in conventional medicine, if they’re so effective? Here’s my response:

1. The standard objection is that there are trust and integrity issues with a doctor issuing homeopathy/placebos in place of real medicine. Apparently, though, there is limited evidence that placebos can be effective even when the patient is told it’s a placebo. So this is only a partial objection.

2. Homeopathy/placebo only treats the symptoms. This is highly ironic, since this is the same objection put forward by homeopaths about conventional medicine (apparently homeopathy cures your illness on the mental plane, which is the real root cause of your illness - so basically they mistake an illness for symptoms of some bigger mystery, really scientific). So whilst the symptoms may be reduced via the placebo effect, the underlying cause (virus, bacterium, foreign body, whatever) would still be there, the problem isn’t solved. However, if the problem is just pain from something like arthritis, or a cold, or something which’ll go away on it’s own and isn’t really a serious problem, then if the remedy/placebo speeds up the process or reduces the pain, where’s the problem? It’s not leaving any underlying cause untreated. I suppose what I mean is that if the illness itself isn’t a problem, just its symptoms, then what’s the problem just treating the symptoms? So this is still only a partial objection.

3. Placebos are much much cheaper than conventional medicine. This may seem like a strong point for homeopathy, but it’s not. People spend very good money paying homeopathists to listen to their problems and prescribe these remedies which costs much more than what it essentially is: tapwater. They’re ripping people off, whether they think they are or not. Argubly the same objection can be used against conventional medicine, but I’m not trying to defend CM, some conventional practices are disgusting, I’m objecting to homeopathy.

4. Homeopathy works through the placebo effect, but that’s not how it’s marketed. Allowing homeopaths to market it as something other than what it is is ethically unsound, and promotes bad science. Maybe I wouldn’t have such a big problem with it being a placebo if it was marketed as one, or if it wasn’t marketed as something else. This is kind of linked to no. 1, but I want to place particular emphasis on the fact that I disagree with lies and bad science being peddled to the public.

5. Remember that conventional medicine makes good use of the placebo effect too, in addition to its real medicinal properties.

6. The use of homeopathic remedies to prevent disease puts lives at risk. This example from BBC’s Newsnight shows homeopaths prescribing anti-malaria remedies in place of conventional drugs, people going off to malaria zones and coming back with malaria. Relying on placebos in general is a bad idea.

I think these three posts give a pretty comprehensive insight into my thoughts on homeopathy, but I look forward to Homeopathy 4 when I’ve thought some more about it tomorrow.

EDIT: Hmm… food for thought. If you took a placebo/homeopathic remedy side-by-side with conventional medicine, would the placebo effect reduce pain/suffering further?

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Homeopathy 2

November 2, 2008

So since yesterday I’ve been reading around online a little about homeopathy more generally rather than just about this specific clinic. It’s amazing what you can find out when you’re not reading propaganda.

Until now the only thing I’d read about homeopathy is leaflets from the clinic and from the society of homeopaths itself. They gave the distinct impression (as did Helen Campbell, the homeopath I spoke to on Friday at the clinic) that there hadn’t been much ‘real’ scientific research gone into it (when she asked what I mean by real science, I couldn’t resist replying “you know, chemistry, physics…”). So I was under the impression that since research hadn’t been done into homeopathy, it was unfair to dismiss it out of hand. How wrong I was!!

I’ve now learned that there are loads of studies into homeopathy showing it doesn’t work. Thanks to some of the regular posters over at think humanism I’ve been able to read up on some more information, which otherwise I wouldn’t have known about. This leaflet from sense about science is a very helpful starting point for anyone wanting to find out more, containing references to studies showing homeopathy as no better than a placebo, particularly this one from Shang et al (you may not be able to access it depending on where you are and what entitlements you have), which shows no specific effect for homeopathic treatment over that of a placebo.

This is the summary of a BBC Horizons programme on the subject (the questions and answers section with James Randi is particularly interesting - also if you go on the transcript, about 2 thirds down it tells you about the experiment they did), and Homeowatch has a great collection of materials on the subject, particularly under “articles by various critics”, where I found this very comprehensive analysis. I’m not going to do much in the way of commentary, indeed I’d prefer you read the evidence for yourself as any interpretation I put on it will be biased.

As far as I can see it is an open and shut case. The evidence in favour of homeopathy is very weak, and the evidence against is overwhelming. Not only can homeopaths not explain how it works (which I knew yesterday, but dismissing it based purely on that logic is akin to an argument from personal incredulity), they can’t even demonstrate that it does work, and plenty of studies show that it doesn’t. Until such a time as they can do so clinically (and to me they don’t even seem to be willing to try at the moment), I’m happy to dismiss it as rubbish. I would be particularly interested if they could prove it worked on animals or babies, but so far attempts to do so have fallen flat on their faces. Sorry if I confused anyone yesterday.

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Homeopathy

November 1, 2008

Sorry posting is a little irregular around here but I’ve had essays due in and the blog’s kind of on the backburner at the moment. It’s a pity because I’ve missed a few key events. In short, the society was invited to Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, and it was awesome. I just wish humanists had something similar. It appears I’m mellowing out in my relative old age as well, I may soon have to relinquish the title of Not So Friendly Humanist as it’s not that appropriate anymore. I’ve no idea if that’s a good or bad thing.

Anyway, I noticed a couple of weeks ago a set of posters around DHT Basement advertising a homeopathy service running at something called the Edinburgh University Settlement. Apparently that is a charity which isn’t part of the University but has had close links with it since its foundation in 1905, and the homeopathy programme has been running for 5 years. They operate out of the Potterrow Student Union in Bristo Square, so to me it seems like the University is openly condoning Homeopathy, something which obviously as a society we’re not too happy about.

So after reading some of their literature, I went into the Settlement office to speak with someone, hopefully to clear up how closely related it is with the University, but instead the only person who was there was the homeopath herself, Helen Campbell, so she invited me into her office and I asked her lots of questions. First of all, she was absolutely adamant that homeopathy works (my more cynical side is telling me that she would be, seeing as it’s her job), but most of her evidence was very much anecdotal. What she said, however, did seem fairly compelling. For example she told me that once her foot got run over, and through the use of homeopathic remedy, the swelling had gone down completely by the next morning.

So, I’m caught in a bit of a confusing situation. On the one hand I don’t want to be so closed-minded as to dismiss homeopathy totally out of hand. One of my flatmates is very much into her homeopathy, in fact her sister is a practicing homeopath, so I can’t be dismissive, and neither would I want to be. But on the other hand it seems so obviously to be a load of rubbish. A leaflet I read said that the process of dilution and succussion (how they prepare homeopathic remedies) appears to leave the electromagnetic energy signal of the substance on the water in which it is diluted. This balances out the energy signal of the patient which may be out of sync, similar to the way TV aerials work, apparently. Obviously that’s a load of bull, but that’s not to say homeopathy doesn’t work in some other way, which perhaps hasn’t been discovered, even if it’s just by placebo.

I asked the homeopath how she responded to people who claim that homeopathy is just a placebo and that’s why it appears to work, and she said that they obviously just don’t understand, but that doesn’t put her off talking about it, which of course didn’t answer my question. Indeed nobody does understand homeopathy, not even those who practice it!

Of course there’s also the point that homeopathy is very popular in France, and is used side-by-side with what they call “Western Medicine” in Eastern Asia, so I think it’s unfair to dismiss it totally out of hand. What I will say though, is that it is up to homeopaths to prove it is not a placebo, to prove it works, and make some kind of effort to explain how it works, before people will take it seriously in the mainstream. At the moment they seem reluctant to subject their work to any kind of scientific research, thriving in the mystery which surrounds it at the moment, and to let my cynical side through again, making a lot of money from people who like ‘alternative’ culture. As far as I’m concerned, there’s no alternative. If it works, it works, if it doesn’t, it doesn’t. There’s nothing alternative about it. Perhaps it’s because people involved in homeopathy don’t tend to have a scientific background, but to me it seems totally incompatible with the humanist viewpoint.

We hope to do a debate on the subject soon.

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The Nature of Faith

October 20, 2008

I know I’ve already done a few pieces on the issue of faith, but it’s come up a few times recently at the ECG and at Student Alpha, and I want to address a couple of specific claims.

Firstly, at Alpha they were saying that we use faith for everything. Sitting on a chair, for example, you don’t know if it’s going to support your weight but you put your faith in it. I later said in the discussion that it’s a totally different kind of faith. From experience you know that most chairs do support your weight because that’s what they’re designed to do. So even though it’s not 100% certain that it won’t collapse, you can be fairly sure. Someone gave the other example that you put faith in all kinds of experts who say things about which we have little to no idea, such as your doctor’s medical advice, but again this isn’t blind faith. Scientists and even just academics in general go through a lot in the way of peer review to get their work published, as I’m sure Tim over at the Friendly Humanist will testify. The faith that you put in these kinds of everyday things is also not unfounded, it is again based on experience. You can’t really say the same about religious faith. So just because we sometimes use the same word to describe it, doesn’t make it the same thing.

It was said at the ECG that you must put faith in any account of the origin of the universe and that God is one of those accounts. Particular attention was drawn to people believing in the multiverse theory in spite of the lack of evidence, and that this is no different to faith in God. I have a couple of points to make about this.

1. Belief in the multiverse theory is not totally unfounded, it is to a small degree based on experience. We live in one universe, why could there not be other ones like it? Similarly there’s no reason to suggest the Universe could have existed forever, why does it have to be a beginning?

2. As I’ve said about a gazillion times, I have no problem with the deist idea of God as the first cause, or the idea of Spinaza’s God; it’s just as valid as any other origins theory. But this is totally different to the personal Christian God that the people at the ECG were talking about. It is not a case of accepting all or nothing.

There’s also the issue that I don’t put faith in things that are really important. I wouldn’t advocate the use of faith in something so important as whether to worship God every day of my life or not, or what to believe on certain contentious moral issues that have an effect on everyone. That I leave to reason, as I think we all should.

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Back to the ECG… again!

October 15, 2008

So last night kick-started another series of lectures from the Edinburgh Creation Group, hosted at the Greyfriars and Buccleugh Free Church. Take note that I’ve added their blog to my blogroll on the right of your screen. I only discovered it yesterday but it’s good to have a written explanation of a theory. I’ve often said that text such as on websites and forums is a much better medium through which to hold a debate than in person, so maybe it’ll be a catalyst for further blog posts in the future.

Anyway last night’s presentation was entitled “Chosen Planet: Earth’s Uniqueness for Life” by Dr George Marshall. In many ways it was quite similar to another talk last year but it didn’t go anywhere near as far as that one did. Several things were covered that I wasn’t aware of. For example, I knew that the moon caused the tide but I thought it was just the gravitational pull of the moon which pulled the water towards it, causing deeper water. Apparently there is also a high tide on the opposite side of the earth too! The point was that if the moon was closer it would cause catastrophic floods which would hinder the development of life on earth. Any further away, and the oceans wouldn’t be churned up enough to allow nutrients to come to the surface and feed the algae which are so fundamental to the balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. But ours is juuust right, so that’s ok (you’ll notice this becomes something of a theme).

Next up is the Earth’s orbit. If it were smaller, we’d be too hot, bigger and we’d be too cold. If our orbit were more elliptical the temperature would be too temperamental, and if other planets had elliptical orbits it would pull ours out of orbit creating the same problem. A bigger orbit would also result in a greater level of vulnerability from comets and asteroids. But ours is just right.

Many stars, including red dwarves, give out massive solar flares which would also make the climate too temperamental to support life. But ours is just right. Our solar system’s location in the galaxy is also idea to support life.

So, as the more astute among you may have noticed, this is no coincidence. We shouldn’t be surprised that, as living beings, we live on a planet that is suitable of supporting life. I was about to point out that the way the world is is exactly as we should expect it if it happened naturally, when someone on the front row came out with “What exactly is your point?” What followed was a very heated discussion whereby the question-asker didn’t at all make himself clear, really annoyed Dr Marshall (who didn’t understand the point he was making at all), and abiogenesis was brought up which has absolutely nothing to do with the topic at hand (oh, I should mention that halfway through the presentation it emerged that Dr Marshall is a biologist, not an astronomer), and the discussion went nowhere. I kind of brought it back up again in a more polite and clear way, and got the answer we were looking for. Dr Marshall wasn’t arguing that all these parameters amount to such a coincidence that God must have done it, it’s just that you have to step back and say “wow”. He still referred to it as a coincidence though, so I don’t think he grasped the idea that it’s not a coincidence at all.

Anyway, I think this shows the importance of at least appearing to be tolerant of people’s ideas. You don’t get anywhere by shouting and screaming, you just kind of come across as a bit childish. We were both on the same page, he just went about it a different way which I think was detrimental to the discussion.

In short, I’d heard all the arguments before and more along the same vein (which if people would like to bring up here I’m happy to discuss - last time Dr Ross’ 101 quantities was mentioned), so it was nothing new, although some things were mentioned that I hadn’t been aware of. It was also claimed that it takes faith to believe in a multiverse or an oscillating universe just as it does to believe in God. I have my own opinion on that and if anyone wants to discuss it further, drop me a comment here.

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Ritual

October 13, 2008

David Robertson mentioned (at the Is Faith in God a Delusion? debate), in response to a question about how atheists are religious, that we all have our rituals. Of course he’s totally missing the point, there’s a difference between doing something because you’re used to doing it and doing something because it’s written down in a magic book. But there are other kinds of ritual that are common between atheists and religious people (in the conventional sense); the kinds of rituals that celebrate the various stages of a persons life. I’m talking about things like weddings, naming ceremonies and funerals.

For many people, these kinds of ceremonies are the first point of contact with humanism. When I mention that I’m a humanist, people often say “Oh, my Uncle Bob had a humanist funeral, it was really good!” (well, they don’t say that if they don’t have an Uncle Bob, but you know what I mean). Just this Saturday gone I overheard an old woman who drinks at my work fairly often talking about a humanist funeral she’d been to, and when I mentioned that I’m a humanist, she said “so… you want all the ritual with none of the spiritual!” as if it were a bad thing, and I replied “Yeah, all the goodness, none of the bull!” I don’t think she realised that humanist organisations do a lot more than just bury people and marry them (not the same people you understand), but nevertheless the ceremonial aspect is important for a lot of people.

I was talking to a friend of mine about trying to get excommunicated from the Catholic Church (still no sign of my baptism certificate. Not being at home I can’t really go searching for it). She said that I shouldn’t do it because then I wouldn’t be able to get married at church. In reality this is one of the few things holding me back from making a real effort to find it and get ranting about it. Say I want to get married, and my future wife wants to have a church wedding, we won’t be able to and it’d be a great shame just because I didn’t want to be associated with the Catholics. But at the same time, is it not very hipocritical of me to keep my membership just for the associated benefits, when by any measure of the word I am no longer a Catholic? Undoubtedly it is. Perhaps I might go back to Christianity one day? I’m fairly sure that’s the reason my mother won’t hand over my baptism certificate. But even in the extremely rare event that some kind of proof of God is discovered, and I do turn back to Christianity, I’d never go back to Catholicism (too much human input to dogma), so it’s irrelevant.

I think I may be hunting out that certificate when I go home for Christmas.

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Alpha Course

October 10, 2008

This afternoon I had an interesting yet challenging encounter with the CU. Ruth, who I’d met at the society’s fair, invited me along to a lunchtime talk but I didn’t realise it was the Alpha Course. Maybe that’s a good thing because if I’d realised that I probably wouldn’t have gone (I’ve seen some of the materials used and it’s clearly geared towards Christians). In any case that wasn’t the interesting part, that was mainly just an exploration of Christian theology, which I’m not too interested in. I think it was good for them too to have an atheist come along and ask questions from that point of view.

I started by commenting on the notion of justice. During the talk there had been a section on grace and mercy which linked in with justice. God has to punish somehow, else where would the justice be? We wouldn’t be too happy if the Nuremberg Trials had just given Hitler a slap on the wrist (had he survived, of course), for example. But I entered the suggestion that an eternal punishment of any kind cannot be justified (whether you view hell as a place of torment or just a separation from God), there should always be some kind of time limit on it. One of the humanist society’s newer members, Greg, has made this argument before, but I think he made the mistake of saying you can’t justify eternal torment, when in fact a more modern interpretation of the idea of hell is that it’s just a separation from God, which takes the poke out of his argument, when in fact it should be on the idea that it’s eternal. There’s nothing you could do to warrant an eternal punishment. Someone brought up that even in human justice systems we have life sentences which, if you don’t believe in an afterlife, is essentially eternal, but for me that’s nothing to do with punishment, a life sentence is to protect to public from a dangerous person. The conversation kind of concluded on the thought that hell isn’t a punishment either, it’s a choice. People have chosen not to be with God, and hell (a separation from God) is the outcome of that choice, people just don’t realise how bad it is. That doesn’t really sit well with me either, but we kind of cover that later.

I then moved the conversation onto predeterminism, much to the groans of the others. The fact that God supposedly knows me and knows what I will do before it happens means that (presuming I don’t accept Jesus Christ as my personal saviour) he has created me purely so that I can go to hell, which is a problem because he’s supposed to love me. Balancing free will against this predeterminism is also a significant problem with me. I suppose knowing what I’m going to do isn’t necessarily the same as controlling it, but in that case why does he bother with our time on earth, why not just judge us based on what he knows we’re going to do?

Free will is also one way to explain away the problem of evil which I brought up next. If God is omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent, then how can evil persist in the world? Someone asked if I thought God controlled everything and I said no, just that he would intervene to prevent evil. The extension of that argument is that it would contravene our free will, but so what? Surely an omnibenevolent God would place the prevention of evil above free will? Even if not, free will doesn’t explain natural disasters and genetic diseases, but that can be explained by the Fall. Apparently the earth took the physical consequences of our sin. I have my own problems with the Fall (for example, there’s no evidence that sin is genetic), but for the purposes of the conversation I left that aside.

-It’s awkward, I keep remembering important things we talked about, but we were talking for a good 2 hours or so, I can’t possibly include it all here, which is a shame. Maybe I’ll fill in the gaps in another post another time-

I think I’ll finish on our discussion of the trilemma and its branches. You may be familiar with CS Lewis’ argument that Jesus was either ‘lunatic, liar or lord’, and that if he’s either of the first two he cannot be merely a great moral teacher on the lines of Ghandi, Buddha etc. I added the possibility that he was merely lied about (apparently a lot of people add the words ‘or legend’ at the end), but for the people there, the historical evidence is so overwhelming that that’s not an option. I’ve already dealt with this kind of thing in my review of The Case for Christ and I don’t accept it (it’s based on the view that miracles are just as likely as normal stuff, whereas I’m like Hume - after all, if we accept the possibility that witches might exist, what happens after that is the Inquisition, it’s a twisted logic). From their perspective I look like the closed-minded one, but they’re going to have to show me the evidence before I believe in miracles. I’m not likely to budge on that one. I also queried whether Jesus could be a good moral teacher if he was a lunatic, because as far as I know, morality and lunacy aren’t mutually exclusive. This really puts the trilemma in hot water because the only reason Lewis accepts Jesus as the Son of God is because the other options aren’t feasible.

It was good to go along and discuss this kind of thing. I think I was invited personally because I like to listen to people (this is something we’re not very good at as a society - even during our own meetings we get sidetracked into our own little conversations and people get ignored, a personal pet peeve of mine), and I appear more open to discussion, whereas other members of our society can seem intimidating. That’s going to be a weakness in interfaith events, I think. I also had to leave aside points of contention (like interpretations of genesis, for example) which I knew we wouldn’t get anywhere on. Anyway I think I’ll go along next week, but my timetable changes in 3 weeks so I may be unable to go after that.

That was a long post and I still didn’t cover half of it.

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Diversity

October 7, 2008

I’ve just returned from the Chaplaincy’s Multi-faith Public Conversation on the subject ‘The Richness of Diversity’. As a humanist and an atheist it can be difficult to go to such events, especially when they’re entitled ‘Multi-Faith’, but it’s often an interesting experience and it’s important that as a society we build up relations with other societies based at the Chaplaincy. That’s something we don’t do nearly enough, in fact I was sitting next to a couple of the Vedics who said they noticed we weren’t there at the interfaith dialogue (although I’m sure Greg went along - Stuart and I were both working). I do intend to go to a couple of the CU meetings when I’m not working in the next few weeks but I’ll have to see what’s happening.

In any case I was a little disappointed. Of course with such a short space of time to discuss such a vague and in many ways diverse topic, it’s difficult to come up with a satisfying response, and I’m not sure that was the intention, to get a response, that is. For some time the three speakers (whose names I’m afraid I don’t remember - it was a Rabbi, a Bishop and a representative from the British Muslim Council) spoke about why diversity was important and what kinds of diversity there are, which I think is something we all know. In many ways it was something of a ramble. The Bishop made some attempt to explain why there is so often an intolerance of diversity, stemming from a fear of losing their religious identity, as well as economic fears like “they’re taking our jobs and our benefits”, which made the conversation a bit more dynamic, and only the Rabbi had the balls to come out and say that at the end of the day if you believe your particular faith position is correct and someone else’s isn’t, you cannot embrace diversity in the way that people had been talking about.

Reflecting back, the opinions expressed were so watered down that they were in their lowest common form which sounded essentially like humanism. Several comments were passed like “flowers are each beautiful in their own way, but they’re most beautiful when they’re put together”, and even a saying used by the HSS, “we’re a’ Jock Tamson’s Bairns” (the Bishop said in that case, Jock has been doing a bit of globetrotting), and the last sentiment on the issue came from a woman sitting at the back who said that if we want to be truly tolerant, we have to approach the table as human beings. We’re people first above all. I think that’s a truly admirable sentiment and one I’ve used before, but mainly when talking about the Scout movement.

Anyway, frustrating but intriguing, I’m glad I went.

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Posted by grammarking

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