The call to ban faith

I have just seen the article in the Telegraph and it's got me going. So watch out. (Article in full below)

The author makes the point that religious people were fine when they kept their opinions to themselves, but now they've started to get in the way a bit more their beliefs should be banned. I will not even start on the argument of how do you ban beliefs, monitor thoughts and censor passions. How do we as a free thinking people start down that particular cul-de-sac???

I will point out that the conference being held is obviously a good thing, it's positive that discussions are being held on the subject, healthy even, and as Voltaire said (attributed quote) 'I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it'. Fine.

But let me just say. It is not just the airy fairy christians and jews and so on who've been getting more high pitched. Hysteria and arrogance are not the sole qualities of the religious, they are common to all men and women. The arrongance of the believer can be measured equal to that of the non-believer who smugly thinks only they have the answer (even if that answer is to not have one).

It is increasingly hard to be a Christian in our society. to be human, fun loving, young, at least half sane and Christian is impossible. Partly because of the Christians I am surrounded by. And partly because the assumption of the average person is exactly what the title implies that we are all away with the fairies. I admit some are. You can't have everything. Some leaders, some lay people, are nigh on impossible to bear. But in learning about my faith I have learn to accept them and respect them wherever I can, and I apply that to atheists and believers alike.

Moreover we are not all atheists and non-believers as the article asserts. I would offer the suggestion that the majority of people are actually as yet unconvinced by either argument, others are humanists, some are scientists and many simply do not care to think about it. To say that the religious are all batty and everyone else is of one mind beggars belief.
(posted on telegraph comments page)

I'll agree with the article's author that some people are unbearable, but I happen to think that forgiveness and patience will do more good than trying to ban 99% of the country's opinions. Don't you?


Believers are away with the fairies http://www.telegraph.co.uk/portal/main.jhtml?xml=/portal/2007/03/26/nosplit/ftreligion126.xml

We'd be better off without religion, argues AC Grayling, who is a keynote speaker in a major debate on the futility of faith in London tomorrow
There is an increasingly noisy and bad-tempered quarrel between religious people and non-religious people in contemporary society.
It has flared up in the past few years, and has quickly taken a bitter turn. Why is this so?

As one of those participating in it - and, confessedly, contributing to its acerbity - my answer might seem partisan. But both sides of the current dispute agree that it raises important questions about the place of religious belief in modern society.
Until very recently, people tended not to fall out with one another if they discovered that they held different views about religion.
There were three main reasons for this.
Most believers did not brandish their faith publicly, society had become increasingly secular in most major respects, and memories of the past's murderous religious factionalisms had bequeathed a reluctance to revive the problem. The latter's lingering consequences in Northern Ireland anyway served as a distasteful warning.
But all the major religions have become more assertive, more vocal, more demanding and therefore more salient in the public domain.
Followers of Islam were the first to push forward: protests against Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses in 1989 were an early indication of what has since become an insistent Islamic presence in the public square.
Not willing to be left behind, other faiths have followed suit. In 2004 Sikhs closed a play in Birmingham, Hindus complained about Christmas stamps Christianising an Indian theme and, in 2005, evangelical Christians protested against Jerry Springer: The Opera.
But it has not all been about protests.
In Britain public funding has gone to Church of England and Roman Catholic schools for a long time; now Muslims, Sikhs and Jews receive public money for their own faith-based schools. BBC radio has steadily increased the airtime available to religions other than the established one.
Requests for extra protections in law, and alternatively for exemptions from the law, to cater for religious sensitivities soon followed these developments: criminalising offensive remarks about religion, and allowing faith-based organisations to be exempt from legislation outlawing discriminatory practices, are the main examples.
The Labour Government has been as concessive and inclusive as it can be to all the religious groups in Britain.
This is well intentioned but misguided, as the example of faith-based schooling shows. If children are ghettoised by religion from an early age, the result, as seen in Northern Ireland, is disastrous.
In the past decade exactly such segregation has been given a publicly funded boost in the rest of the UK, at a time when religion-inspired tensions and divisions in society are increasing. The remedy for the latter should be to ensure that schooling is as mixed and secular as possible; instead, tax money has gone to deepen the problem because the Government thinks that by giving sectarianism its head it will appease it.
Yet history teaches that appeasement never satisfies appetites, it only feeds them.
In the face of the growing volume and assertiveness of different religious bodies asking for preferential treatment, secular opinion has hardened. The non-religious response has come largely from individuals who have a platform or the talent to speak; and they speak for themselves, not for an organisation.
In the US, the religious Right numbers about 35 million. Recent polls show that about 30 million Americans define themselves as having no religious commitment.
But whereas the religious Right is a formidable body whose constituent churches and movements have salaried administrators, vast funds, television and radio outlets, and paid Washington lobbyists, America's non-religious folk are simply unconnected individuals.
It is no surprise that the religious Right has political clout and can make a loud noise in the American public square, whereas the non-religious voice is muted.
There are two main reasons for the hardening of responses by non-religious folk.
One is that any increase in the influence of religious bodies in society threatens the de facto secular arrangement that allows all views and none to coexist. History has shown that in societies where one religious outlook becomes dominant, an uneasy situation ensues for other outlooks; at the extreme, religious control of society can degenerate into Taliban-like rule.
Look at the period in which liberty of conscience was at last secured in Christian Europe - the 16th and 17th centuries. It was an exceptionally bloody epoch: millions died as a result of a single church's reluctance to give up its control over what people can be allowed to think and believe.
The famous Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 accepted religious differences as the only way of preventing religion from being an endless source of war. Religious peace did not come straight away, but eventually it arrived, and most of Europe for most of the years since 1700 has been free of religiously motivated strife.
But this is under threat in the new climate of religious assertiveness.
Faith organisations are currently making common cause to achieve their mutual ends, but, once they have achieved them, what is to stop them remembering that their faiths are mutually exclusive and indeed mutually blaspheming, and that the history of their relationship is one of bloodshed?
The second reason why secular attitudes are hardening relates to the reflective non-religious person's attitude to religion itself.
Religious belief of all kinds shares the same intellectual respectability, evidential base, and rationality as belief in the existence of fairies.
This remark outrages the sensibilities of those who have deep religious convictions and attachments, and they regard it as insulting. But the truth is that everyone takes this attitude about all but one (or a very few) of the gods that have ever been claimed to exist.
No reasonably orthodox Christian believes in Aphrodite or the rest of the Olympian deities, or in Ganesh the Elephant God or the rest of the Hindu pantheon, or in the Japanese emperor, and so endlessly on - and officially (as a matter of Christian orthodoxy) he or she must say that anyone who sincerely believes in such deities is deluded and blasphemously in pursuit of "false gods".
The atheist adds just one more deity to the list of those not believed in; namely, the one remaining on the Christian's or Jew's or Muslim's list.
Religious belief is humankind's earliest science. Judaism, Christianity and Islam are young religions in historical terms, and came into existence after kings and emperors had more magnificently taken the place of tribal chiefs. The new religions therefore modelled their respective deities on kings with absolute powers.
But for tens of thousands of years beforehand people were fundamentally animistic, explaining the natural world by imputing agency to things - spirits or gods in the wind, in the thunder, in the rivers and sea.
As knowledge replaced these naiveties, so deities became more invisible, receding to mountain tops and then to the sky or the earth's depths. One can easily see how it was in the interests of priesthoods, most of which were hereditary, to keep these myths alive.
With such a view of religion - as ancient superstition, as a primitive form of explanation of the world sophisticated into mythology - it is hard for non-religious folk to take it seriously, and equally hard for them to accept the claim of religious folk to a disproportionate say in running society.
This is the more so given that the active constituency of all believers in Britain is about eight per cent of the population. A majority might have vague beliefs and occasionally go to church, but even they do not want their lives dictated to by so small and narrow a self-selected minority.
The disproportion is a staring one. Regular C of E churchgoers make up three per cent of the population, yet have 26 bishops in the House of Lords. Now that religion is bustling on to centre-stage and asking for everyone's taxes to pay for faith schools and exemptions, this anachronism is no longer tolerable.
And all this is happening against the background of atrocities committed by religious fanatics in America, Europe and the Middle East, whose beliefs are not very different from the majority of others in their faith.
The absolute certainty, the unreflective credence given to ancient texts that relate to historically remote conditions, the zealotry and bigotry that flow from their certainty, are profoundly dangerous: at their extreme they result in mass murder, but long before then they issue in censorship, coercion to conform, the control of women, the closing of hearts and minds.
Thus there is a continuum from the suicide bomber driven by religious zeal to the moral crusader who wishes to stop everyone else from seeing or reading what he himself finds offensive. This fact makes people of a secular disposition no longer prepared to be silent and concessive.
Religion has lost respectability as a result of the atrocities committed in its name, because of its clamouring for an undue slice of the pie, and for its efforts to impose its views on others.
Where politeness once restrained non-religious folk from expressing their true feelings about religion, both politeness and restraint have been banished by the confrontational face that faith now turns to the modern world.
This, then, is why there is an acerbic quarrel going on between religion and non-religion today, and it does not look as if it will end soon.
A C Grayling will be speaking for the motion, We'd be better off without religion, at the Intelligence2 debate on Tuesday 27 March; see www.intelligencesquared.com
Against All Gods by AC Grayling (Oberon Books) is available for £8.99 plus 99p p&p. To order, call Telegraph Books on 0870 428 4112

Exhibition season

Oh. My. Gooooooooooooooooooooooood.
Busy busy busy.
Things to do, people to see... sorry the blog got left but you see it has been impossible to update it. Let's see...

BRIGHTON
BioCare had two stands at the Natural Trade Show in Brighton. I was only there for 2 days but we spend weeks building up to these things and days recovering from them so it's quite a big deal. Normally they have quite an understated stand, using shell scheme which is what you can see in the picture below.
But BioCare has grown a lot and wanted to flex its muscles so we put on a bit of a show. It was loads of fun! We had a specially designed stand upstairs on the gallery level and then a smaller one downstairs. When you're on a stand you have to be keen and interested in everything, which is fine, but it's like your senses are being overloaded with information for about 9 hours straight, 2 days running. Plus by the time you finish standing up for more like 11 hours in black smart shoes, even your comfiest ones, you'd probably pay someone 100's of pounds to be carried home. In fact some unscrupulous git could probably make a fortune at the end of trade shows selling slippers at an exorbitant price. I should cash in!

Anyway we learned loads and it was lovely to meet so many customers. Mostly they had good things to say too, because I can imagine it would be far harder to deal with if everyone had been nasty about us. There's nowhere to run to!

As it was Brighton I got very excited about seeing the see. But in the end I saw it on the drive in, the drive out and during my 2 15 minute lunches from the other side of the road, glinting in the sunshine. Any thoughts of walking along the pier, walking virtually anywhere, were knackered by the excesses of the show.
Have spent another 3 days at a consumer show, more madness and oh my god I needed my sleep last night when I got back!
Then in 2 weeks time we have Natural Products at Olympia in London.
If I make it to my birthday I might need new feet!

Lent

This last 2 weeks have run along a particular theme I've found, one of Love. I've had friends who loved someone and who are grieving their loss, friends who thought they might love someone but couldn't decide what that meant, friends who loved each other they were willing to forgive almost anything and friend who loved someone from far away, missing them and feeling their pain. In the midst of it all I celebrated Lent and me and alex spent a few days apart while he went to Oldham on business. I suppose you could add me and the cat to that list of people, as we were out of sorts and missed him very much! Anyway, Ash wednesday gave me a chance to pause for thought during one of Rob's sermons which was all about forgiveness and especially self forgiveness, release and love too. It was again one of those talks of his I'd love to be able to bottle up and take away with me.


In an effort to take my mind off all these weighty subjects I had booked a massage on wednesday, pure bliss. Honestly. Everyone should get a regular massage, I'm a total convert! Then Friday night Danielle came over and we went to Laura's for some tea. She put on a lovely spread of salad, bread, cheeses, smoked trout, quiche and we had a glass or two of red wine with it and put the world to rights. Only thing was it was absolutely chucking it down with rain and lightning so we got away before we got too comfy and watched a dvd from home. It was good to catch up. Next day we mooched around Cotteridge, Bournville and Kings Heath. Bournville was the most fun. We actually went into Cadbury World www.cadburyworld.co.uk/en/cworld but only around the shop as it's £13 to go round and we didn't have the time to justify that kind of money, But we did get chocolate easter eggs and bags of misshapes from the factory shop, and looked in the little cake shop and bakery on the high street. news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3056286.stm. We had a look at Selly Manor too, which I'd love to go back to see properly www.bvt.org.uk/sellymanor/.

Then we went to Kings Heath to the Organic Cafe, somewhere I'd been wanting to visit for probably a year now. Everything they sell is organic, the food is fresh and tasty and heathy. It's a lovely spot and seemed really popular. They sell organic wines and beers and have a shop selling everything from organic kitchen cleaners to seeds to gardening tools and organically grown plants. It's lovely!

Then last night, after I'd dropped Danielle off and pottered and welcomed Alex back home there was an amazing sight. At about 10.30pm there was a lunar eclipse. It was such a weird sight, but beautiful. It's not something I expect to see very often and quite amazing. It made me think that however complicated our loves and lives seem, the planet we are on will never stop amazing us, doing its thing through the millennia. Wow.