Obama's inauguration - and what was that about science and non-believers?

So far, I've only heard a radio extract of Barack Obama's inauguration speech - though a fairly long one played on the ABC. He really is an awesome orator, isn't he, but what's with the cheesy music in the background?

Never mind, the substance is what counts, and much of it was inspiring. I liked the contemptuous references to putting away childish things - quoting scripture back at the outgoing Bush administration - and to following false prophecies promises ("prophecies" would have been better).

So far, I have a good feeling about this new president. Despite all his stupid decisions, Bush was obviously not an idiot (yes, I'm serious: it's all too tempting to characterise these people simply as idiots), and he had a certain rustic charm before things got tough and he had to make some decisions. But then we were treated to the horrible spectacle of eight years of America acting like a bull in a China shop. Worse, this was actually popular with the US public for a long time, before it finally sunk through to Joe Sixpack and his dawg that their country had lost its way in a complex and fragile world.

Well, the new president just shines with intelligence, doesn't he? It's hard to imagine him ever making a totally crazy political choice like the decision to invade Iraq. Not to mention the decision to let things go to hell in Afghanistan, where the original war may or may not have been justified, but at least had something to be said in its favour ... if only there'd been follow-through to build Afghanistan as a successful democratic nation and not let the goddamn Taliban back into the frame.

Well, a blundering regime has gone. Blundering, and sometimes evil - anyone want to recall its resort to terrifying, excruciating, and mind-destroying forms of torture to try to extract information from opponents? Here's to the new regime, and may it meet its daunting challenges. Here's to the impressive Mr Obama and his feisty secretary of state, Hillary Clinton - whatever anyone has against her, she's another very smart person, and it doesn't hurt that she's as tough as they come. Good luck to them in grappling with the problems of America and the world. They'll surely need it, but I can't imagine a team more likely to face up to the task and leave the world better than they found it, when they hand over the reins of power in four, or let's hope eight, years time. If I were a praying man, my prayers would go with them, but they can have my hopes, and a certain confidence that they're at least the right people for the world's biggest and hardest jobs.

Speaking of which, I really could have done without the continual invocations of God at the inauguration ... but I guesss that's how they do things over there on the other side of the pond. It's not going to change in my lifetime, even if Aubrey de Grey helps me extend it a little, so I reckon I just have to grin and bear it.

I'm told - and I now see references here and there on the internet - that Obama said something positive about science and something conciliatory or inclusive about non-believers. That, I think, is about the best that we can hope for from an incoming US president.

If anyone can point me in a direction where I can see more precisely what he did say on those topics, I'll be very grateful.

Freedom of religion at Sentient Developments

I'm currently writing a series of solid posts trying to nail down the idea of freedom of religion. Go over to Sentient Developments and have a look!

Busty virgins upset Chilean clerics

It's been reported that Chilean clerics are upset by a fashion show in which a designer has dressed his models in garb suggesting traditional presentations of the Virgin Mary. I take especial delight in the following announcement from the country's Episcopal Conference, which has just the correctly-weighted mixture of religiose pomposity and post-this/post-that gobbledegook: "We look on with special pain and deplore those acts which seek to tarnish manifestations of sincere love toward the Virgin Mary, which end up striking at the dignity of womankind by presenting her as an object of consumption." Surely that sentence should be eligible for some sort of award. If it doesn't already exist, perhaps it ought to be established. I suggest it be called "The Chilean Episcopal Conference Prize for Moralistic Obscurantism". But maybe somebody out there can do better. The caps I've used don't make a word, or anything, so use your imaginations to improve on it.

Not content, of course, with expressing their "special pain", the local Torquemadas mounted (unsuccessful) legal proceedings in an attempt to stop the show from going ahead. All of which shows that freedom of religion and belief is fine with Church officials as long as it means their freedom to call on the apparatus of the state to you make you conform to their religious beliefs.

My latest plug for Sentient Developments

Don't forget to check out Sentient Developments. I'll be guest posting there starting today - but first to get some sleep. Let's leave it a few hours, shall we?

No one wants parallel importation

At the moment the Productivity Commission has 59 submissions up on its site about the issue of ending restrictions on parallel importation of books. Mine is there somewhere.

I think I counted 3 out to the 59 that supported the idea. Maybe I'm wrong and there's actually 4 (in fact one was sufficiently oblique that I couldn't work out what it was really saying).

It will be fascinating to see how this pans out. There's going to be some free trade bias at the Commission, of course, but then again, I have a strong free trade bias myself, and I even found reasons to worry about and argue against a change in policy. It looks like there is almost no support for a change of policy, as a matter of fact, and plenty of reasons have been set out in the more substantial submissions as to how and why a change could be culturally harmful. I mean cultural harm on a scale that will outweigh any small economic gain.

The submissions going up on the site are running about a week behind. I imagine that quite a lot more will have gone in over the last week, with the deadline on Tuesday. I'll eagerly read the rest of them when they become available. I'm betting that the ratio won't change much and that in the end there will be twelve or fifteen submissions arguing against the change for every one that favours it.

So, will this proposal be dropped like a hot potato or will whoever is behind it press on? The sooner there's certainty the better, because Australian publishers must currently be sitting on manuscripts, worried about what a change of policy might mean for their operations.

By the way, since I've published most of my work of any significance overseas, and have never had a book with an Australian trade publisher, this doesn't really affect me. Indeed, if I were thinking about it from a purely selfish viewpoint, I might even benefit slightly from the proposed change - it would make it easier to get books by me published overseas - of which I hope there will be many in the future - to Australia straightaway.

But I'm not a typical case, and I'm not worried about myself. My concern is that it looks like the current arrangements really have helped new Australian authors over the past decade or two. I think this is the clinching argument: why go from a system that has a good record of nurturing talent to one that is likely (when you analyse it) not to do as well?

The atheist bus

There's an advertising campaign going on in the UK at the moment involving buses with signs that say:

There's probably no God.

Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.

I love this slogan. It makes the point well - it expresses the position of religious sceptics since the time of Epicurus, one of my philosophical heroes. Epicurus didn't deny the existence of beings whom he identified with the Greek gods, but he saw them as ultimately being material creatures, though much more powerful and fortunate than we are. To Epicurus, the gods are serene, beyond emotions such as jealousy, and uninterested in creatures like us. They do not lower themselves to intervene in human affairs (contrast the jealous deity of the Old Testament). For all practical purposes, Epicureanism was an atheistic philosophy. The Epicureans' slogan would have been: "There's no heaven or hell, so stop worrying and enjoy the life you have." Of course, their idea of how to enjoy your life was surprisingly ascetic - cultivate your garden, relish the company of friends, and treat yourself to simple pleasures.

The atheist bus message is in response to religious messages on buses that ask us to worry about whether we're "saved" or not, and about what's going to happen to us after death. It's a nice, gentle riposte. I love it, and I think Ariane Sherine, who came up with the whole atheist bus campaign, deserves huge congratulations.

Of course, a message like this breaks a powerful taboo. Generally speaking, there's a taboo in our society against criticising religion, let alone taking out commercial advertisements with an anti-religious slogan, however moderately phrased. Well, let's break this taboo by all means. The coverage that the campaign has been receiving, with headlines all over the world, shows just how unexpected and dramatic such a mild message in support of atheism can be. Imagine if they had dropped out the word "probably"! This was actually imposed on them in the approval process, but it improves the message, I think, by giving it a kind of laid-back, matter-of-fact tone.

Among the many issues that have come up is that a bus driver objected to driving one of the buses. So what do you do in such a situation? I'm not going to suggest that bus drivers should have a right of conscientious objection to driving buses with advertisements for products that they dislike or perhaps even consider morally abhorrent. Where does it end if you go down that path? Some will object to advertisements for various meat products, some to advertisements for sexy clothes, some to ... well, God knows what (as it were).

Can Muslim taxi drivers refuse to drive you home from the airport if you're carrying your quota of duty free alcohol? Can Catholic doctors refuse to perform abortions, even if it's necessary to save a woman's life? The possibilities go on and on, and we shouldn't be too quick to give everyone who claims to have a moral or religious scruple the right to decide what work they will or will not do. In some cases, their employer has every right to demand that they carry out the requirements of the job. In other cases, it goes beyond that: there's a strong public policy necessity to avoid people picking and choosing. E.g. a pregnant woman is in a vulnerable situation; she needs to be confident that hospital staff will not even contemplate putting her life at risk if something goes wrong. If an emergency abortion is needed, the doctors and nurses mustn't hesitate to act.

But what about this incident under discussion, the one about the atheist bus? Here, an employee has been caught up in an unusual, unexpected, and newsworthy situation. As a Christian, this particular driver has become upset because he was directed to drive one of the buses with the atheist message. Should a manager simply dismiss him from employment for refusing to carry out a lawful and reasonable direction? How reasonable would it really be to insist on the direction without looking at alternatives (such as allocating another driver to drive this particular bus)?

Having worked in managerial jobs in my time, not to mention spending quite a few years of my life doing quasi-legal industrial relations work (acting as an advocate in industrial tribunals) then having worked for awhile as a lawyer in a major firm, mainly doing employee and labour relations law, maybe I look at this a bit differently from the way some people seem to. From an employee relations, union relations, and public relations perspective, I think that a manager who dug in and insisted, then summarily dismissed the employee if he didn't drive the bus, would be crazy.

Given the unusual circumstances, such an insistence on managerial prerogative would be widely seen as unreasonable (perhaps not by the "some people" I referred to, but certainly by a lot of folks out there in the media-devouring public). It would be a PR disaster for the bus company and the campaign ... and, depending on the law in the jurisdiction concerned, the company would very likely find itself on the back foot in attempting to defend an unfair dismissal claim.

As it happens, the company acted quite moderately and leniently. In my view, the relevant manager was smart about this one ... or took smart advice.

Over at Richard Dawkins' (very useful) site, however, the majority view is that the Christian bus driver should have been dealt with very harshly. Basically sacked on the spot. Perhaps I made a mistake in getting involved in an argument about this, because after awhile you can feel as if you're bashing your head against a brick wall.

My feeling is that my fellow atheists are often so exasperated by what they see (rightly, I think) as the continual solicitude given to religion that they can lose perspective and be tempted to some unwise actions. Or at least to sounding off on the internet in defence of those sorts of actions, which is a lot easier. The beauty of the internet is that everyone has a say but no one has the responsibility. Fortunately, the atheist bus campaign itself hasn't worked like that: its gentle, laid-back approach has been one of its great pluses. It's getting publicity without presenting a confrontational message.

Oh well, maybe I'm wrong after all ... since so many people disagree with me. Maybe I'm just feeling exasperated.

Or just maybe an employer or a campaign that has this sort of problem would be better off coming to me for advice on strategic issues than to some of the more gung-ho posters on Dawkins' site.

Reminder: blogging at Sentient Developments

This is your reminder of the day that I'll be guest blogging for a week at George Dvorksy's wonderful high-traffic blog, Sentient Developments, starting Monday. In parallel with my announcement here, George has made an announcement over there (thanks, mate).

Come on over and have a look. We can make some good things happen. And check out Sentient Developments, anyway: it's one of the best blogs around.

Freedom of religion and belief

I did a twelve-hour shift yesterday to finish my submission to the Australian Human Rights Commission project on freedom of religion and belief. Honestly, I did intend to stop at some point but there was one more task to do, and then another, and another one. You know how it is. So thanks to Jenny for being understanding that I was in the zone yesterday ... and for bringing me the glasses of water and the macaroni, while I forgot about things like eating and drinking (but how am I going to return the favour when she gets into the more intense sequences of the fantasy novel she's working on)?

I'm surprised to see that I managed to write a fairly tightly-worded submission of nearly 24,000 words in three days. Admittedly, I had a lot of words lying around already in quite good shape that I was able to paste in. Anyway, at least I hope it's tightly worded: I may have been losing my judgment by last night after I spent yesterday writing a lot of them, revising the whole thing twice, re-reading Locke's A Letter Concerning Toleration, and reading the second half of the Commission's 1998 report on the same subject. I'll read what I've written again today, or tomorrow, and see if it makes sense.

What struck me during this exercise is how much our religious friends want to distort what is essentially a negative right against the state - the right that the state will not try to suppress your beliefs or impose someone else's beliefs on you - into a positive right that everyone else will go out of their way to nurture your religion of choice. This seems to mean that we are not even supposed to criticise your beliefs, must "respect" them (however silly they sound), somehow provide the resources to guarantee their survival, and be upset if some beliefs die out. Worse, all of this seems to creeping into international law and into much popular and academic thinking on the subject. Sorry, but I'm not buying it.

There are good reasons why people should have religious freedom in the sense that the state shouldn't tell you what religious beliefs to have or not have. We don't want to bring back the days when supposed heretics were burned at the stake (when Locke talks about fire and sword being brought against people, he is, of course, speaking quite literally; that's how they did things in those days). But - I'm sorry - that doesn't mean I have to like your religion, or hope that it will persist, or think that it does good on balance, or even that its doctrines deserve any respect. I won't vote for a government that will burn you at the stake (or lock you up behind iron bars, as we prefer to do to people in these more civilised times). I'll probably even be polite to you about your religious beliefs, because I'm not the sort of person who's out to upset the folks he deals with face to face. But if you imagine that your prophet of choice went up to heaven in a flaming chariot or rode around on a flying horse, or you think that the evil in the world was caused by the (literally) fiendish plot of a talking snake that danced about on its tail in the original Edenic paradise, or you've convinced yourself that a wafer of bread is simultaneously the flesh and blood of your demi-god or quasi-god ... well, great. I won't go out of my way to upset you, but I won't take your ideas very seriously, and I won't think it sad if a time ever comes when no one believes in such stories anymore.

If you start trying to suppress criticism and satire, or if you vote for a government that wants to impose your moral code on me with fire and sword (sorry, I mean iron bars and guns), then I'm not going to fuss about how nice and quaint your ideas are. You have your freedom; I have mine. I want to keep it that way.

Guest blogging at Sentient Developments

Next week I'll be doing five days of guest blogging at George Dvorsky's wonderful blog, Sentient Developments. For those who don't know, Sentient Developments is a much more ambitious and popular blog than this one, with 15,000 page hits per month. It presents itself as: "Transhumanist perspectives on science, philosophy, ethics and the future of intelligent life." Go and check it out - George has a very classy blog over there, and it's going to be difficult to reach anything like his standard of posting. Still, I'll put my thinking cap on and do my best ... and we'll have to see what happens. In fact, you could do worse than bookmark Sentient Developments, as long as you don't become so caught up in following it that you forget to follow me here.

Another submission to write

If you are an Australian, secular in orientation, and opposed to the use of state power to enforce religious morality, please consider making a submission over here: http://www.humanrights.gov.au/frb/frb_2008.pdf.

You'll have to be quick because the deadline is 31 January. Go and write!