Helen Razer on talking to the press

Here is Helen Razer with an unusual but amusing take on talking to the press.

And if that's not enough, go here. You'll find an even more unusual, and perhaps even more amusing, but possibly somewhat disturbing, discussion of a well-known Iranian theocrat.

Discuss.

Coming up - Russell Blackford in conversation with AC Grayling

On the evening of 11 March 2010, I'll be in conversation with AC Grayling about 50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists in a gig sponsored by Readings Bookshop (and with the involvement of the Atheist Foundation of Australia, which is running the Global Atheist Convention that begins in Melbourne the following day). The event will be held at Cinema Nova, in Carlton, commencing 6.30 pm. Entry is free, but you'll need to book to ensure that you get a seat.

If you're going to be in Melbourne, come along, or if you just want to buy the book you now have a link provided by Readings.

This should be a sensational gig - Anthony Grayling is one of the world's leading secular intellectuals, author of many books, a major critic of religion, and a defender of the Enlightenment. His own essay in 50 Voices of Disbelief is an important contribution to the contemporary debate over religion and atheism ... and he is also a delightful person, a gentleman in the best sense.

I'm looking forward to this, and will doubtless provide some reminders as the date gets closer.

John Birmingham on Conroy

A nice take down over here by John Birmingham.

Sample:

What's that? You're unaware of Senator Conroy's latest outrage? Oh, well, allow me to elucidate.The communications minister has been openly sulking because, as he says, Google filters "an enormous amount of material on behalf of the Chinese government", but they are resisting his attempts to do the same thing for Canberra. This is the same communications minister whose major achievement so far, besides enraging thousands of angry internet users with his wretched filter scheme, and drawing the somewhat comical wrath of the self-styled cyber-hero collective Anonymous down on the government's websites, has been to hand a massive earner to a disgraced Labor Party apparatchik, Mike Kaiser, when he thought nobody was looking.

The Kaiser embarrassment should have been enough to have any reasonable minister reaching for his resignation letter, but of course the thought never crossed Conroy's mind, because he was too busy figuring out how to turn a mature and prosperous democracy into the digital equivalent of a vicious totalitarian one-party state. Nice work, Steve.

See here for Conroy's complaint that Google is prepared to help China's government censor the internet, so it should do the same for him.

"What we're saying is, well in Australia, these are our laws and we'd like you to apply our laws," he said. "Google at the moment filters an enormous amount of material on behalf of the Chinese government; they filter an enormous amount of material on behalf of the Thai government."

Good for Google for refusing, so far, to cooperate in Conroy's attack on freedom of speech.

Sydney Morning Herald article on Global Atheist Convention

Today's Sydney Morning Herald contains an article by religion reporter Jacqueline Maley on the forthcoming Global Atheist Convention (12-14 March, in Melbourne).

Maley starts off well: Something you will never see: an atheist boarding a plane with a bomb strapped to him, waving a copy of On The Origin Of Species, before he blows himself up in a violent attempt to further his cause. So says David Nicholls, the head of the Atheist Foundation of Australia, the man at the increasingly pointy end of the reinvigorated and freshly vocal atheism movement.

Quite so. Atheists tend not to be fanatical people - at least not unless caught up by some kind of comprehensive quasi-religion such as Stalinism. Neither the lack of belief in God nor a commitment to good science is likely, in itself, to lead to fanaticism and violence. For that, you need a worldview with some kind of apocalypic content, something that makes you think you are doing the work of God or History, and that the lives of ordinary people may rightly be sacrificed in a great cause. Like the Marxist-Leninist political tradition, the traditions of the Abrahamic religions contain much to encourage that sort of worldview.

Good on Nicholls for making that point, and good for Maley in leading with it. However, the headline "Atheism's true believers gather", is already off-putting. This was probably chosen by a sub-editor rather than by the journalist, but its condescending suggestion that there is something paradoxical and funny about the convention is reflected in the article itself, with such barbs as the reference to Richard Dawkins as the atheist movement's "supreme deity". Why not just say, truthfully, that he is the most prominent figure in contemporary atheism? Dawkins provides leadership of a kind, but he is not the equivalent of a pope or a patriarch, or even a priest or a bishop, let alone a deity. His leadership comes from the power of his ideas and his ability to present them lucidly. Yes, it probably does no great damage to insert such wording, but the cumulative effect of this sort of thing is to make the article seem like smartarse journalism.

That's unfortunate because it could have been better than this. Maley appears to be fair in the way she treats the people she interviewed, so why spoil the effect? The quotes attributed to me, from a phone interview earlier this week, seem to be correct, and she allows Nicholls, Tanya Smith, and me to come across as sensible people. I don't think the article is damaging to us, in the sense that we will look bad to unbiased readers, but for all that I do find much of it annoying. Take the following: As atheists organise and unite, they increasingly face the criticisms they are used to levelling against their faithful counterparts - that they are extremists, skewed fundamentalists. Others warn that strict adherence to evolutionary theory leads logically to social Darwinism. Hitchens is often accused of recycling arguments and of demolishing his marks with one-eyed fervour. His targets include Mother Teresa, a woman well on her way to canonisation. Dawkins has been criticised for his ignorance of Christian theology, and his inability (and that of science in general) to disprove the existence of God.

The bit about recycling arguments is odd: is he really supposed to come up with wholly original arguments or with new ones each time? But the sentence about Mother Teresa is especially tendentious. Mother Teresa may be on her way to canonisation, but there is much controversy as to whether her work genuinely ameliorated suffering among the poor of India or had the opposite effect. Within the culture of the Roman Catholic Church, suffering is not loathed as an unmitigated, radical evil, as it is by most people who simply respond with healthy human sympathy to those who are in pain. For the Church, suffering is accepted as a mystery, and sometimes even valorised for bringing us closer to God. Conversely, birth control and the emancipation of women from traditional roles are considered morally problematic. The sort of figure who is likely to be canonised by the Roman Catholic Church is not necessarily the sort who does the most secular good in helping people attain their freedom and in carrying out good works that really do help those who are suffering from illness and pain.

However, Maley skips over all this by hinting strongly that Mother Teresa is, of course, an inappropriate target for criticism by a public intellectual such as Christopher Hitchens - and thus that Hitchens himself merits criticism for going there. But there's no of course about it. Mother Teresa was, at best, a problematic figure, even though (or, rather, because) she conformed to the dubious values of Mother Church.

Similarly, it is unfair to refer, as if it is straightforward and obvious, to Dawkins' (or science's) supposed inability to disprove the existence of God. It is highly controversial just how far the Christian image of the universe can be reconciled with the image arising from science. Dawkins, along with many other atheists, argues that the two do not go together well - in the light of science, the Christian picture does not make sense. I realise that many people disagree with this - and I will doubtless attract arguments about it even though it's not the topic of this post - but it is not reasonable to refer to Dawkins' "inability" to disprove the existence of God as if this is uncontroversial, or as if this way of putting it is uncontroversial: talk of "disproof" is very tricky here, since there are many kinds and standards of proof.

And there's more in the passage quoted. Do "others" really "warn" that strict adherence to evolutionary theory leads to social Darwinism? That's not an argument that you often hear except from the nuttier US religious zealots, and surely there's a better word than "warn" for a proposition that is not only contested but almost certainly untrue. The English language has the perfectly good and useful word "allege", which might have come in handy at this stage. The fact is, there's no reason at all to think that "strict" adherence to evolution leads anyone to support social Darwinism; on the contrary, the countries with the most widespread acceptance of biological evolution are precisely those which do not have dog-eat-dog social Darwinist societies, but are conspicuous in pursuing egalitarian policies.

The kinds of things that I find annoying will not do much good to Maley's reputation as a fair journalist with no axe of her own to grind. I repeat, however, that she has been fair to me personally. The views attributed to me are my real views: e.g. I have no problem with individuals being religious, as long as it's their private belief, not something they try to impose through public policy; I do see enormous influence being wielded by the churches, and I think it's time for secular people to have more of a say; and I certainly do contest the idea that high-profile atheists such as Dawkins and Hitchens are fundamentalist or extreme. When that claim is made, they are judged by a ridiculous standard of open-mindedness and civility that is never applied to their opponents or to anyone else in public life.

Overall, my attitude is that almost any publicity for the convention is good publicity, and this article is not one of the exceptions. David, Tanya, and I, as portrayed here, seem like sensible people who actually have a point. I do hope, though, that we can get some media coverage from journalists who are not religion writers and will be more critical about the virtues of religion or the likes of Mother Teresa, and less credulous about the more naive criticisms that are sent the way of Richard Dawkins and company. If you're a journalist who matches that description, and if you have an "in" to get articles like this published somewhere, why not contact the organisers?

Bailey on the life extension debate

Over at reason.com, Ronald Bailey discusses two recent papers on the ethics of radical life extension, one by me and the other by John Davis, a philosopher at the University of Tennessee.

The first objection one hears when one advocates radical life extension is that it will produce a Malthusian Hell of overpopulation and resource depletion. Objectors clearly believe it would be immoral to make it possible for lots of people to live to be, say, 150 years old. But is that so? Two newish papers from two controversial philosophers take on that reasoning, and tear it apart—with the help of their pocket calculators.

As described by Bailey, the paper by Davis comes to conclusions that sound wildly counterintuitive (to me, at least).

“So far as the total net good for humans is concerned, the most justified social policy is the one that satisfies preferences over the greatest number of life-years, all else being equal,” argues Davis. One implication of total utilitarianism is that “we should create as many people as possible in order to maximize the total amount of desirable experiences.” Total utilitarianism might result in Malthusian consequences because a large, relatively miserable population might well have a greater total amount of utility than a smaller, happier population.

To be fair, however, I should read the entire paper.

My own paper is described in quite a sympathetic way. E.g., the following is a nice para by Bailey that sums up part of my argument:

To counter the total utility logic, Blackford offers another thought experiment in which a benevolent, but not omnipotent deity has the choice between creating a world with 1 billion happy people (6 hedonic units on average out of 10 possible) versus another world with 6 billion fairly miserable inhabitants (1.5 hedonic units on average). Total average happiness on the second miserable planet would exceed that of the first by a ratio of 3 to 2 over time (9 billion units versus 6 billion units in any given year). Singer, if he followed the logic of his argument, would advise the deity to create the second world rather than the first. Blackford counters, “We expect a benevolent god to be concerned about how well lives go, rather than about the sheer number of them.” The upshot of this analysis, according to Blackford, is that “what we value…is that whatever actual lives come into existence should go well.”

I see that Bailey's piece has attracted well over 100 comments. Do feel free to comment either there or here.

Tangled Bank now available ... and launched

Chris Lynch's anthology of stories, poems, and essays, The Tangled Bank: Love, Wonder, and Evolution, has just been published and launched to coincide with Darwin's birthday, 12 February.

It contains my 5000-word essay "Science and the Sea of Faith", along with many other goodies that I'm looking forward to reading (with Sean Williams and other high-profile contributors). (Disclaimer: I haven't yet read any of it apart from my own contribution so I can't actually vouch for the individual pieces at this stage.)

The Tangled Bank will be available in various electronic and other formats, with more detailed advice available from the site. The ePub and POD editions are not yet available, but will roll out a bit later. For now, the version available on the site is a PDF format for only US$4.99. Hey, my own essay by itself should be worth that much ...

Since I actually want people to buy this book, I'm not likely to be making my own piece or others available so please don't ask me to do that. Hopefully I've made the project seem enticing enough for some of y'all to give it a try, or at least to have a look at the site for it. Happy reading.

Chris Hallquist debunks the resurrection

I've been reading UFOs, Ghosts, and a Rising God: Debunking the Resurrection of Jesus, by Chris Hallquist (Reasonable Press, 2009). Hallquist examines the evidence for the resurrection, a core Christian doctrine, adopting a sceptical viewpoint informed by our modern experience with other extraordinary claims, such as those about ghosts (including the Amityville Horror hoax), levitation, and UFO sightings/abductions. The result is an enjoyable volume, in good, clear prose, that debunks the resurrection myth quite thoroughly. Hallquist leaves few stones unmoved or unturned.

A book like this might easily have rested its case on a superficial discussion of the biblical sources or on speculation about what might really have happened after Jesus was crucified and his body then went missing. But Hallquist goes deeper than that. He is well acquainted with both popular Christian apologetics and the more specialised textual scholarship relating to the Bible. Thus, he is able to examine the provenance and historicity of the various resurrection accounts, while also answering the (rather shaky) cases that have been built on them by such apologists as William Lane Craig and Gary Habermas. He puts a compelling case that the resurrection story is a legend that grew up among the early followers of Jesus, not the rationalisation of facts about an empty tomb - indeed, we have no reason to believe that any such "empty tomb" ever existed. The historical records are far too murky for that.

Hallquist's book aside, an uncommitted but well-informed observer would conclude that Jesus was probably one of the many apocalyptic prophets of ancient Palestine, and that his life was heavily mythologised in the gospels, which were written well after his death. The ancient books traditionally ascribed to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were based on oral traditions that soon became embroidered with fanciful stories which are not even consistent with each other. The first of these books, Mark, did not come into existence until about 70 AD, and the other two synoptic gospels, Matthew and Luke, were largely based on Mark, with input from a lost document referred to by scholars as "Q". (The gospel of "John" is later still and presents a very different account of Jesus' life.)

It's unlikely that the story of Jesus was made up whole - for a start, the very earliest Christian writings (those of St Paul) date from a time still too close to the events - but the real apocalyptic prophets wandering around the Middle East in the first century did not, alas, have the power to confront demons or the ability to come back to life after being tortured to death.

However, it's conceivable that the New Testament's "Jesus" is a composite figure to some extent, since oral traditions based on the lives of more than one of these prophets could have become conflated as the documents came into existence over time. Be that as it may, the life of the historical figure we now know as "Jesus" was built up into something extraordinary, involving a virgin birth, miraculous healings, encounters with demons, and a divine resurrection.

Over at Butterflies and Wheels, there is an excellent article by Edmund Standing which argues for the existence of an historical Jesus, despite the unbelievable claims made about Jesus in the Bible and elsewhere. As Standing points out, the lives of real people can be mythologised beyond recognition, but this does not entail that there is no underlying stratum of truth - that such and such a person existed and did such and such (far more ordinary) things. Standing uses the example of Haile Selassie, whose life was mythologised beyond recognition, even in his own lifetime, by the Rastafarian movement, despite the fact that this was in modern times and the truth was readily available.

Hallquist takes a similar approach (though it's a pity that he does not seem to be aware of Standing's case study). He does not deny that there is a stratum of truth in the Christian mythology, i.e. that an apocalyptic prophet with a name like "Jesus" lived in the early first century, and perhaps made enough of a nuisance of himself to the local Roman administrators to be executed by them. However, we will probably never have enough information to be sure of what actually happened, event by event, and at any rate this prophet was not a god-man with supernatural powers. When we compare modern investigations of amazing phenomena such as alleged UFO abductions, we can easily understand how such a person's life could be mythologised beyond recognition very quickly, and how unlikely it would have been, in the social and technological conditions of the time, for the surrounding mythology to be successfully debunked.

UFOs, Ghosts, and a Rising God deals with all this in sufficient depth to become a valuable part of a sceptic's library. Hallquist structures the book usefully and explains the issues lucidly. My only gripe is that the British philosopher Antony Flew is referred to throughout as if his first name is "Anthony" - this detracts from the book because there are so many references to Flew. In particular, much of Hallquist's discussion of modern apologetics deals with debates in which Flew was involved on the sceptical side (he has more recently become a deist, though not a Christian or even a conventional theist: as far as I know he still denies the truth of such Christian doctrines as the divine nature and miraculous resurrection of Jesus). I hope that this glitch will be fixed in any subsequent printings.

Meanwhile, don't let it distract you too much. This is the most focused and definitive book that you'll find putting the detailed case against Jesus' resurrection. It's done very well indeed. If your home or local library has a place for such a book, I don't hesitate to recommend it.

The General

The General

(by Siegfried Sassoon)

"Good-morning; good-morning!" the General said
When we met him last week on our way to the line.
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of 'em dead,
And we're cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
"He’s a cheery old card," grunted Harry to Jack
As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.

. . . .
But he did for them both by his plan of attack.

Simon Singh letter (with my full endorsement)

Subject: Simon Singh's weird idea that might just work

Dear Friends,

I've had an idea, an unusual idea, but I think it might just work.

As you know, England's chilling libel laws need to be reformed. One way to help achieve this is for 100,000 people to sign the petition for libel reform before the political parties write their manifestos for the election. We have 17,000 signatures, but we really need 100,000, and we need your help to get there.

http://libelreform.indiemedium.com/lt.php?id=ZkQFVgECDlUYDEgEBg0LVg%3D%3D

My idea

My idea is simple: if everyone who has already signed up persuades just one more person each week to sign the petition then we will reach our goal within a month!

One person per week is all we need, but please spread the word as much as you can. In fact, if you persuade 10 people to sign up then email me (simon@simonsingh.net) and I promise to thank you by printing your name in my next book - which I will start writing as soon as I have put my own libel case behind me. I cannot say when this will be, but it is a very real promise. My only caveat is that I will limit this to the first thousand people who recruit ten supporters.

When persuading your friends remember to tell them:

(a) English libel laws have been condemned by the UN Human Rights Committee.

(b) These laws gag scientists, bloggers and journalists who want to discuss matters of genuine public interest (and public health!).

(c) Our laws give rise to libel tourism, whereby the rich and the powerful (Saudi billionaires, Russian oligarchs and overseas corporations) come to London to sue writers because English libel laws are so hostile to responsible journalism. (In fact, it is exactly because English libel laws have this global impact that we welcome signatories to the petition from around the world.)

(d) Vested interests can use their resources to bully and intimidate those who seek to question them. The cost of a libel trial in England is 100 times more expensive than the European average and typically runs to over £1 million.

(e) Three separate ongoing libel cases involve myself and two medical researchers raising concerns about three medical treatments. We face losing £1 million each. In future, why would anyone else raise similar concerns? If these health matters are not reported, then the public is put at risk.

My experience has been sobering. I've had to spend £100,000 to defend my writing and have put my life on hold for almost two years. However, the prospect of reforming our libel laws keeps me cheerful.

Thanks so much for your support. We've only got one shot at this, so I hope you can persuade 1 (or maybe 10) friends, family and colleagues to sign.

Massive thanks,

Simon

http://libelreform.indiemedium.com/lt.php?id=ZkQFVgECDlUYDEgEBg0LVg%3D%3D

The Libel Reform Campaign is a coalition of English PEN, Index on Censorship and Sense About Science.

So far, 188 MPs have signed our Parliamentary Early Day Motion calling for libel reform and the Justice Secretary Jack Straw has formed a working party that the Libel Reform Coalition is represented on.

Please also considering donating to keep our campaign going:
http://libelreform.indiemedium.com/lt.php?id=ZkQFVgECDloYDEgEBg0LVg%3D%3D

"Why can't we just argue for secularism? Why be so nasty?"

Please note the inverted commas in the title of this blog. It's often asked why we horrible "New Atheists" actually have to criticise religion. Why be so nasty? Why not just argue for secularism, for a separation of church and state? This is asked so often, that it's hard to think of the best example - any ideas, anyone, of the locus classicus of this argument, so we can cite it?

It sounds vaguely plausible, but it is totally wrong. Reading Michael J. Perry this week has brought home to me even more strongly just how wrong it is. What our religious friends often mean by "separation of church and state" is that the state does not interfere with the activities of the church, but the church is free to persuade the state to impose a religion-based morality on the citizens - including (or especially!) citizens who reject that morality. With relatively minor qualifications, Perry argues for something like this, as do other high-profile Christian scholars working in such areas as legal philosophy and constitutional law. Less erudite versions of the same doctrine are widely adopted by Christian leaders from the Pope down and accepted by ordinary Christians. This is the real world that we live in, a world where there is no consensus for accepting the harm principle and other liberal principles (and where such phrases as "freedom of religion" can be given Orwellian meanings by people who wield power and influence).

I think this is an absurd and unfair interpretation of the idea of separation of church and state, but that's not the point. In the real world, politicians often do use the law to impose their specifically religious morality, in the absence of any strong or even plausible secular case for what they propose to do. They do so with a clear conscience, believing that this is legitimate. Many lobbyists and electors applaud, and even urge them on. And that means that it is, at least covertly, always an election issue just which religious morality if any is actually correct. Which further necessitates that there is no choice but to enter into arguments about whether the holy book that a religious morality comes from really is divinely inspired ...or whether it is a human construction entrenching many of the barbaric moral assumptions of an earlier time. In the real world, we have no choice but to scrutinise the claims of religion and persuade as many people as possible that those claims are actually false, or at least doubtful. I wish there were less urgency about this, and that we could all be nicer about it, but that's not the world we live in.