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The furore over the radio interview and speech given by the Archbishop of Canterbury last week are well documented in all media channels. I won’t reiterate them here. For what its worth I don’t think that the Archbishop’s use of Sharia as his example to illustrate his point was all that controversial. Rather it was the bigger point he was making that I take issue with. I haven’t read his speech, but reporting of it and synopses from trusted sources, seems to indicate that the Archbishop was saying that individuals religious beliefs or world view based on religious teaching should be a valid principle that is taken into account when Parliament is defining the scope of legislation and law. A recent example of what he seems to have been alluding to are the Roman Catholic adoption agencies who wanted to have the right not to place children with same sex couples.

It seems to me that the Archbishop is making a bigger play to get more influence for religion, of all types, back into the public policy arena. As such his speech is much more insidious than simply saying some part of Sharia is inevitable in the UK. He wants to roll back the gains we have made towards an enlightened, secular society in which everyone is the same under the law and is free from the tyranny of religious leaders.

He, and his fellow travellers, should be resisted with all the vigour we can muster. Joining the National Secular Society would be a good start. If you are reading this and are not a member then please consider joining. The more numbers the Society has the stronger its voice will be to resist the people who want to move our society backwards in time.

For the record: Anyone else can believe in whatever religion they like. As long as it doesn’t effect the choices I, or anyone else who doesn’t share their belief, want to make. Giving favour under law to any interest group, whether religious or not, is not the way to go. The argument that some groups have such favour now isn’t an argument for extending it to other groups, rather I’d say it highlights that it needs to be taken away from the ones that currently have such privilege.

I sometimes feel like I’m walking in a world of stupidity. Some examples why:

1) From this weeks New Scientist. A comment article by Michael Zimmerman who founded the Clergy Letter Project to counter the anti-scientific nonsense that many religious people are fed about the fact and theory of evolution. This is a fine thing to do. However within the article we have the following paragraph:

The clergy involved in Evolution Weekend do not set out to provide detailed information about evolution to their congregations. Rather, the aim is to outline the complementarity of religion and science, while recognising the power of science’s dependence on the scientific method and on the concept of falsifiability, along with its limitations. That is, they understand that there are areas of importance to humans that fall outside the reach of science – subjective areas that are not open to rigorous hypothesis testing.

Why are there any areas of importance that fall outside the reach of science? Who says so? Granted the imaginary deities and made up stuff the religious believe is beyond the reach of any form of investigation in the real world. They don’t exist after all. But there are things related to why people believe them that are very much open to scientific investigation. We can use neuroscience to investigate why people believe in things without evidence. We can also investigate the evolutionary advantages in belief systems within early human societies and groups. We certainly don’t have to ring fence some groups belief in the supernatural just cause they say its outside the realm of scientific investigation.

2) Looks like the UK Government is going to allow some faith schools in the UK to have their own inspectorate. That’s just so daft I couldn’t be bothered commenting on it past highlighting it here.

3) Church dentistry. That’s not an attempt at a Googlewhack. The Bishop of Carlisle, who is a mad as a fruitcake, has let it slip in a speech in the House of Lords that some church groups are bidding to offer dental services in the UK. He also said that the church should be exempt from the usual scrutiny that government welfare providers are subject to. Read the whole gory details here. The question is whether the government are actually considering things like this or they are just humouring the Bishop and his crazy fellow travellers?

Is it the 21st Century? Didn’t we settle all this tripe in the Enlightenment?

The Bishop of Wales is whining about atheistic fundamentalism. The money quote –

But he said “virulent, almost irrational” attacks on it were “dangerous” because they refused to allow any contrary viewpoint and also affected the public perception of religion.

Oh, the irony. Has he done any history? Does he know what happened to people who gainsaid the church teaching in the past? Has he heard of Giordano Bruno? Has he heard about the others persecuted in the name of religion?

Us atheists, fundamentalist or not [1], don’t want to burn anyone at the stake or deny them from practising their religion. We might think it is superstitious nonsense but that’s not the point. The point is that some of the religious wish to impose their irrational beliefs on the rest of us. They want to restrict a women’s right to choose what happens to her own body. They want to restrict our choices in medical research. They want to use tax payers money to pay for repairs to churchs when they have huge property portfolios that they could sell to fund the repairs. And so on.

All this whining about christianity being downtrodden looks like the last gasps of a dying organisation to me. The Enlightenment is still working to smoother the last irrational life out of it. The sooner the better.

[1] How can you be fundamentalist about a lack of belief?

Mark Morford does it again.