Archives for November 2015

Our humanist High Court win changes everything – except, perhaps, the GCSE

November 26, 2015 by Richy Thompson

Yesterday the High Court ruled that the UK Government’s subject content on GCSE Religious Studies in English schools is unlawful. The ruling was as a result of a case brought by three humanist families, with support of the British Humanist Association (BHA). It reflects the views of 90% of respondents to the earlier consultation on the subject content, as well as the Religious Education Council and a wide range of RE academics, consultants, advisors, professors of philosophy and religious leaders.

The ruling focussed on paragraph 2 of the content, which reads ‘By setting out the range of subject content and areas of study for GCSE specifications in religious studies, the subject content is consistent with the requirements for the statutory provision of religious education in current legislation as it applies to different types of school.’ It was this paragraph that was deemed by the judge to be ‘a false and misleading statement of law, which encourages others to act unlawfully.’

Since the decision two erroneous narratives have emerged that it would be worth quickly debunking. One, pushed by the Department for Education, is that the ‘judgment does not challenge the content or structure of that new GCSE, and the judge has been clear it is in no way unlawful. His decision will also not affect the current teaching of the RS GCSE in classrooms.’ [Full stop.]

And the other is the countervailing narrative that the GCSE subject content needs to be rewritten and that this will be massively disruptive for exam boards, teachers, and students.

The problem with both of these narratives is that they are all about the GCSE, when the case wasn’t really all about the GCSE at all. It was about the rest of RE as a whole. Let me explain.

What the decision has done is firmly established the fact, based on the European Convention on Human Rights, that Religious Education (and not Religious Studies), outside of faith schools, must be neutral, impartial, objective and pluralistic. RE must treat the principal religious and non-religious worldviews in this country equally (other than Christianity, which could have a greater share of coverage). If a syllabus has a certain level of coverage of Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, Judaism, and Buddhism, then it must now give similar priority in its level of coverage of Humanism. This clearly has big implications for agreed syllabuses, schools, and Academy chains in setting their RE curriculum content. (And while the case focussed on England, there’s no obvious reason why the ruling doesn’t also bite across the rest of the UK.)

Where the GCSE comes into it is that most routes through the GCSE content are not inclusive of non-religious worldviews, due to the decision of the Government to prioritise religions over non-religious worldviews in the content (because, in its words, ‘as these are qualifications in Religious Studies, it is right that the content primarily focuses on developing students’ understanding of different religious beliefs’). The consequence is that if a school just teaches the GCSE as the entirety of its key stage 4 RE (as is quite common), and in so doing it doesn’t major on those few bits of the GCSE content that are inclusive of non-religious worldviews, then it has failed in its RE obligation to be pluralistic in what it has taught.

But paragraph 2 ‘permits’, indeed ‘encourages’, in the judge’s words, schools and others to believe that just teaching the GCSE, even when not including any detailed non-religious content, is sufficient to meet schools’ RE teaching obligations as a whole at key stage 4. This is why paragraph 2 is ‘a false and misleading statement of law, which encourages others to act unlawfully’. The DfE now needs to rectify this (e.g. by amending paragraph 2, or otherwise making the situation clear such as through supplementary guidance).

And so we come back to why the DfE’s press statement is misleading – the DfE is guilty of a sin of omission. Yes, strictly speaking it is right that the content of the GCSE does not have to change (other than in the way I’ve just explained). But if your school is not a religious school, and it does not currently teach non-religious worldviews on an equal footing to the major religions, then the rest of your curriculum now needs to change. And this is a much more significant consequence than any changes to the GCSE might be.

(The countervailing narrative, meanwhile, that the GCSE will now need a major rewrite, is simply wrong. The DfE could choose to majorly rewrite the GCSE to make it inclusive, but the court hasn’t compelled it to and its own responses make it clear that it isn’t minded to do that.)

This is a change for the better: all the usual contemporary justifications for teaching about religions in the school curriculum – the contribution of such teaching to our cultural and historical knowledge, and its contribution to building mutual understanding and hence community cohesion – logically also apply to teaching about non-religious worldviews as well.

The British Humanist Association, for its part, is very much looking forward to working with schools, SACREs and agreed syllabus conferences to improve the inclusivity of RE in this area, for example through http://www.humanismforschools.org.uk/, our school volunteers programme, and in partnership with the 150 humanists who are members of SACREs across England and Wales.

For more information, the BHA has produced a fuller briefing clarifying what the decision said and its implications.

Why non-belief is gaining ground… even against Islam

November 23, 2015 by Matt Ridley

As scepticism and materialism replace blind faith, more people than ever worldwide are opting for atheism, argues Conservative Humanists patron Matt Ridley.

Fifty years ago, after the cracking of the genetic code, Francis Crick was so confident religion would fade that he offered a prize for the best future use for Cambridge’s college chapels. Swimming pools, said the winning entry. Today, when terrorists cry ‘God is great’ in both Paris and Bamako as they murder, the joke seems sour. But here’s a thought: that jihadism may be a last spasm — albeit a painful one — of a snake that is being scotched. The humanists are winning, even against Islam.

Quietly, non-belief is on the march. Those who use an extreme form of religion to poison the minds of disaffected young men are furious about the spread of materialist and secularist ideas, which they feel powerless to prevent. In 50 years’ time, we may look back on this period and wonder how we failed to notice that Islam was about to lose market share, not to other religions, but to Humanism.

The fastest growing belief system in the world is non-belief. No religion grew nearly as fast over the past century. Whereas virtually nobody identified as a non-believer in 1900, today roughly 15 per cent do, and that number does not include soft Anglicans in Britain, mild Taoists in China, lukewarm Hindus in India or token Buddhists in Japan. Even so, the non-religious category has overtaken paganism, will soon pass Hinduism, may one day equal Islam and is gaining on Christianity. (Of every ten people in the world, roughly three are Christian, two Muslim, two Hindu, 1.5 non-religious and 1.5 something else.)

This is all the more remarkable when you think that, with a few notable exceptions, atheists or humanists don’t preach, let alone pour money into evangelism. Their growth has come almost entirely from voluntary conversion, whereas Islam’s slower growth in market share has largely come from demography: the high birth rates in Muslim countries compared with Christian ones.

And this is about to change. The birth rate in Muslim countries is plummeting at unprecedented speed. A study by the demographer Nicholas Eberstadt three years ago found that: ‘Six of the ten largest absolute declines in fertility for a two-decade period recorded in the postwar era have occurred in Muslim-majority countries.’ Iran, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Algeria, Bangladesh, Tunisia, Libya, Albania, Qatar and Kuwait have all seen birth-rate declines of more than 60 per cent in 30 years.

Meanwhile, secularism is on the rise within Muslim majority countries. It is not easy being a humanist in an Islamic society, even outside the Isis hell-holes, so it is hard to know how many there are. But a poll in 2012 found that 5 per cent of Saudis describe themselves as fully atheist and 19 per cent as non-believers — more than in Italy. In Lebanon the proportion is 37 per cent. Remember in many countries they are breaking the law by even thinking like this.

That Arab governments criminalise non-belief shows evidence not of confidence, but of alarm. Last week a court in Saudi Arabia sentenced a Palestinian poet, Ashraf Fayadh, to death for apostasy. In 2014 the Saudi government brought in a law defining atheism as a terrorist offence. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s government in Egypt, though tough on Islamists, has also ordered two ministries to produce a national plan to ‘confront and eliminate’ atheism. They have shut down a café frequented by atheists and dismissed a college librarian who talked about Humanism in a TV programme.

Earlier this month there was yet another murder by Islamists — the fifth such incident — of a Bangladeshi publisher of secularist writing. I recently met one of the astonishingly brave humanist bloggers of Bangladesh, Arif Rahman, who has seen four colleagues hacked to death with machetes in daylight. He told me about Bangladesh’s 2013 blasphemy law, and the increasing indifference or even hostility of the Bangladeshi government towards the plight of non-religious bloggers. For many Muslim-dominated governments, the enemy is not ‘crusader’ Christianity, it is home-grown non-belief.

The jihadists of Isis are probably motivated less by a desire to convert Europe’s disaffected youth to fundamentalist Islam than by a wish to prevent the Muslim diaspora sliding into western secularism. In the Arab world, according to Brian Whitaker, author of Arabs Without God, what tempts people to leave the faith is not disgust at the antics of Islamist terrorists, but the same things that have drained church attendance here: materialism, rationalism and scepticism.

As the academics Gregory Paul and Phil Zuckerman wrote in an essay eight years ago: ‘Not a single advanced democracy that enjoys benign, progressive socio-economic conditions retains a high level of popular religiosity. They all go material.’ America is no longer much of an exception. Non-believers there outnumber Mormons, Muslims and Jews combined, and are growing faster than southern Baptists.

Whitaker found that Arab atheists mostly lost their faith gradually, as the unfairness of divine justice, the irrationality of the teaching, or the prejudice against women, gay people or those of other faiths began to bother them. Whatever your origin and however well you have been brainwashed, there is just something about living in a society with restaurants and mobile phones, universities and social media, that makes it hard to go on thinking that morality derives exclusively from superstition.

Not that western humanists are immune from superstitions, of course: from Gaia to Gwyneth Paltrow diets to astrology, there’s plenty of room for cults in the western world, though they are mostly harmless. As is Christianity, these days, on the whole.

I do not mean to sound complacent about the Enlightenment. The adoption of Sharia or its nearest equivalent in no-go areas of European cities will need to be resisted, and vigorously. The jihadists will kill many more people before they are done, and will provoke reactions by governments that will erode civil liberties along the way. I am dismayed by the sheer lack of interest in defending free speech that many young westerners display these days, as more and more political groups play the blasphemy card in imitation of Islam, demanding ‘safety’ from ‘triggering’ instances of offence.

None the less, don’t lose sight of the big picture. If we hold our resolve, stop the killers, root out the hate preachers, encourage the reformers and stem the tide of militant Islamism, then secularism and milder forms of religion will win in the long run.

Matt Ridley is a journalist and Conservative Party peer who is a member of the All Party Parliamentary Humanist Group. This piece originally appeared in The Times newspaper.

Our obfuscation on Islamism misses the mark and stigmatises all Muslims

November 19, 2015 by Guest author

In the wake of the tragic events in Paris last week, Jacob Kishere appeals for an honest and plain-speaking language when describing the dangers posed by religious fundamentalists.

Jean Jullien’s Eiffel tower peace symbol, which went viral on the Internet as a show of solidarity to the victims of the atrocity in Paris.

Before the bloodshed had even ended in Paris on Friday night fingers were already pointed; it is the perpetual blame game and all too familiar to the one seen 10 months prior in the wake of Charlie Hebdo. Since the spirit of unity was channelled worldwide in the hashtag #jesuischarlie, there has been an inadequacy in our political discourse on both sides which continually fails to address the threats we face.

Given the context of rising anti-Muslim bigotry, many on the left – who anticipate further backlashes – have called for calm, repeating the mantra that the jihadist epidemic has ‘nothing to do with Islam’. Meanwhile, increasingly enraged by the left’s perceived obfuscation on matters relating to Islam, figures on the right have adopted the position that Muslim populations are complicit in these atrocities, and proclaims these terror attacks the bloody result of failed multiculturalism. The consequences of both mutually inflammatory positions have been an increasingly toxic atmosphere in civil society toward Muslims and abject failure to stem the rising tide of radicalisation.

But if we are to do any justice to the victims of these countless ideologically driven attacks, the very least we can do is recognise that there is an ideology at play. That ideology is Islamism. Both left and right must recognise this in order to move forward. Well-intentioned leftists must end their blind defence of all things Islam and recognise that the ideology of Islamism has something to do with Islam. While it may be instinctive to the traditions of academic left to attribute jihadist action to western foreign policy and prevailing conditions of social desperation, neither the data nor our experiences support such reasoning.

As early as the 9/11 attacks we saw the propensity for wealthy, educated individuals to commit atrocities in the name of ideology, with many of the conspirators holding graduate level degrees. Bin Laden himself was the heir to one of the wealthiest families in Saudi Arabia. Far more revealing in his case is that he was tutored by Muhammad Qutb, brother of Sayed Qutb the ‘grandfather of Islamism’. For decades, funded by Saudi oil money and facilitated by Western governments favouring the most reactionary voices within communities as ‘leaders’, Islamist ideology has been directly imported into European communities. At present, Western Europe is reaping the seeds it has allowed to be sown by Islamists for 20 years in its communities through universities and other institutions. If anyone doubted the degree of the crises they need only consider the militants fighting in Syria from France numbering 1,200, from Belgium numbering 440, from Germany numbering between 500–600, and from the UK numbering around 600 (See International centre for the study of radicalisation and political violence, KCL) with many considering these estimates to be conservative.

At the same time, pundits on the political right must recognise that it is not Islam – the faith of billions – which drives jihadism in the west so much Islamism: the fundamentalist desire to impose any form of Islam over society.

It is often stated, and yet not enough, that the first victims of this ideology in any act of jihad are Muslims themselves. This is self-evident throughout the Arab World, and was again demonstrated brutally in the bloody Islamic State attacks in Lebanon which claimed the lives of around 43, just hours before violence erupted in Paris. Reactionaries must recognise that what they are witnessing is not a battle between a vaguely defined ‘West’ and the religion of Islam but a battle within Islam between that religion’s progressive reformers and its militant hardliners. It is only through empowering and working with the progressive reformist voices within communities that they will effectively counter Islamism. In the coming weeks, the straw man of refugees as a causal factor will inevitably be thrown up; but this too is a fiction. Those arriving on the shores of Europe are fleeing the very threat we now face at home.

Growing up in a post-9/11 Britain, I heard many times the repugnant sentiments that ‘not every Muslim is a terrorist, but every terrorist is a Muslim’. But as much as the left reviles such casual bigotry, it is very much the unintended consequence of the left’s language of obfuscation. Whole generation of Britons lack the vocabulary – the conceptual tools required — to properly articulate the nature of this threat they so fear. And if we as a society are to come together and address this common threat, we would be far better served in remembering this: not every Islamist is a jihadist, but every jihadist is an Islamist.

Jacob Kishere is a humanist and a student of history. He blogs on Medium at @JacobKishere.

Football: religion for humanists?

November 11, 2015 by Martin Smith

Five days shalt thou labour, as the Bible says. The seventh day is the Lord thy God’s. The sixth day is for football.
– Anthony Burgess

For many fans of the ‘beautiful game’, football isn’t just a sport, it’s a way of life. Photo: Jon Candy.

I am sure you have felt it too, that feeling of the numinous and the transcendent? Perhaps you feel this way when you gaze up into the night sky? Perhaps when you solve an extremely difficult mathematical question? Maybe when you step into a museum? I hazard that at some point in your life the hairs on the back of your neck have risen at moments such as these. As a humanist I am often told that this experience is solely a religious one. If that is true, I and millions of other secular humanists must therefore confess that we too are religious. Football is my religion and it may also be yours.

Perhaps you are a football fan, but do not share this view? Let me convince you.

The 1795 singer, young humanist, and BHA Patron Matt Healy equates football with ‘the warmth and wonder inhumed within the pursuit of the truth’.

The late Terry Pratchett once said: ‘The thing about football – the important thing about football – is that it is not just about football.’ He was absolutely correct too. Football is not simply twenty two people kicking a ball of compressed air for ninety minutes across a green field. Football is about community, football is about passion, and most of all football is about winning.

Supporting a football club has a lot in common with adopting a religious faith. As with religion, once you have chosen a football club you instantly become a part of that community; a community which may more accurately be described as a tribe. I wager any person who doubts this comparison ought to attend a football match and witness the fervour, the chants and the rivalry, not between opposing football teams but between opposing fans. To witness the shared, very public grief felt by football fans whose team has just been relegated or that has just lost in the cup final, is comparable only to the faithful on St. Peters Square upon the death of a Pope. In the face of oppression, as with religion, football can bring a community together. Often the most fundamental of football fans are those who have suffered the most because of their emotional attachment to their clubs. This suffering, like all suffering, can inspire hope in even the darkest of times.

Football tribalism induces a passion in people not seen since the days when the Church ruled medieval Europe. To this day historians debate the reasons why thirty thousand people suddenly left behind their homes and their families and migrated to the Near East. The general consensus is that religious tribalism in these people invoked such strong feelings of passion that they were compelled to migrate because of the calling of Christ. This migration is called the First Crusade. We may think that we are far removed from the days of Church ruled Europe. We would be wrong. Each week millions of people across the world travel hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles to watch a football game. For these people football is their ‘religion’.

“Each week millions of people across the world travel hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles to watch a football game. For these people football is their ‘religion’.”

These dedicated fans do it because they have an emotional attachment to their team. They cry when they lose, and feel delirious when they win. Football like religion is about hoping your team you have chosen to support will win. The difference with religion in this case is that the winning in a religious sense only takes place after your own demise. Religious people hope that their faith is the one true faith. They cannot all be correct, that would be absurd just as absurd as two opposing football teams each winning in the cup final.

Football possesses many of the virtues of religion and I have only outlined three, but naturally it also embraces many of the vices too. With tribalism comes violence and hatred, with losing feelings of despair and emptiness. Football is religion for humanists but what I would also say is that football encapsulates the very humanity of sport. I feel that it is for this reason why in all our millions we go to such great lengths to watch those twenty two people kicking a ball of compressed air for ninety minutes across a green field. It is the drama of a last minute goal that wins you the league, or the beauty of seeing Lionel Messi come closer to the divine than any other human that has ever lived. It is the sportsmanship too: how can we forget that tragic day that Fabrice Muamba’s life was saved by a heart surgeon sitting in the home stand who rushed onto the pitch to rescue an opposing player?

Football can be like a religion to humanists, I say, but it is also so much more. Football is a celebration of humanity. As with any celebration often there are those who work tirelessly behind the scenes to ensure that humanity can be celebrated. Perhaps you wish to be one of these people? If so, then the Young Humanists are for you. I look forward to seeing you at one of their excellent launch parties very soon!

In the sweep of its appeal, its ability to touch every corner of humanity, football is the only game that needed to be invented.
– Bobby Charlton

Martin Smith, Young Humanist and former Secretary of the National Federation of Atheist, Humanist and Secular Student Societies (AHS), and Manchester United fan.

Young Humanists is the 18-35s section of the British Humanist Association. Find out more about what they do and how to get involved at younghumanists.org.uk.

Non-Prophet Week, and why humanist charity matters

November 11, 2015 by Caitlin Greenwood

All this week, young humanists are raising money for good causes. The BHA’s student section, the AHS, is hosting its annual Non-Prophet Week, and the International Humanist and Ethical Youth Organisation has launched its Better Tomorrow humanist charity drive.

In this article, AHS Secretary Caitlin Greenwood writes about the importance of humanist giving.

Schools in Uganda greatly benefited from last year’s Non-Prophet Week, as organised by non-religious students at universities across the UK and Ireland

Charity is often considered to be a uniquely Christian virtue, which is a tradition dating back at least to Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas stated that charity was the love between god and man, and between man and his neighbour. The 1822 New Catholic Catechism reaffirmed this, saying ‘Charity is the theological virtue by which we love God above all things for his own sake, and our neighbour as ourselves for the love of God.’ While some other Christian traditions have defined charity in a more restricted way, better reflecting the modern definition, they are in a somewhat of a minority worldwide.

The origin, then, of ‘Christian charity’ seems to be a conflation of a specific theological term, with a more generally used definition. But what of all those Victorian philanthropists, wasn’t their charity directed by Christian morals? Andrew Carnegie, perhaps the most famous philanthropist, was a member of a Presbyterian church, and surely he stands for so many others, too numerous to name? (Leaving aside, of course, the fact that Carnegie avoided theism for the first half of his life, and joined the church well after beginning his philanthropic efforts.)

Unfortunately, it is not quite so simple as all that. Simply wanting to do good does not mean one automatically does good. Victorian interpretations of Christian teachings often extended to the moral value of the working classes. They were not people simply fallen on hard times, but were worse than their clear moral superiors, the upper and middle classes, whose philanthropic duty was to reform them. In 1868, the Radical MP John Roebuck claimed his lifelong aim was ‘to make the working man as [. . .] civilized a creature as I could make him’. This set the tone for much of the philanthropy that was to follow over the next several decades.

Moreover, this moral superiority was not intended, entirely, to be levelled by charity. The New York Times in 1937 stated: ‘So the education in giving goes on from generation to generation. It is not merely the gift that counts or the help that is given the neediest; it is the acquainting of the families year after year, as children grow into youth and youth into manhood and womanhood, with the conditions about them and the cultivation of the habit of giving.’ Charity was conceived of as a permanent virtue, a sticking plaster to be applied to the topic of inequality. While campaigners throughout the 19th and 20th centuries did fight for – and achieve – a genuine reduction in inequality, it was rarely achieved through any kind of charitable giving.

The situation whereby charities, and charitable giving, actually perpetuate a problem rather than solving it, continues to this day. Consider, for instance the way unqualified people flocked to Haiti in 2010 or Nepal in 2015. These people all wanted to help, and were clearly willing to sacrifice their time and money. Unfortunately, their presence mostly served to slow down the aid efforts, rather than help them. The same could be said for the donated goods, many of which ultimately went to waste. A New York Times article from 2013 calls this ‘Philanthropic Colonialism’, the product of uninformed philanthropists thinking they know best, and actually making things worse. And in these cases, people really did think they were trying to help.

“…it can be easy to say that charity work is our moral responsibility. However, we also emphasise reason and evidence in our thinking to be an effective force for good.”

But what does all this have to do with Humanism? Well, for me, a part of the humanist worldview is an understanding that we have a moral responsibility to our fellow beings and to alleviate suffering and difficulty wherever we find it. As a consequence, it can be easy to say that charity work is our moral responsibility. However, we also emphasise reason and evidence in our thinking. If we want to be an effective force for good in the world it makes sense to start by working out which channels provide the most efficient ways to reduce human suffering. We at the AHS agree with the principles underlying the growing social movement known as effective altruism. Effective altruism is about trying to maximise your positive impact on the world not just through choosing charities that have the highest return in good achieved for resources invested, but through other aspect of your life such as your choice of career.

The AHS (The National Federation of Atheist, Humanist and Secular student societies) is the national umbrella organisation for student societies in the UK and Republic of Ireland. Each year, we hold ‘Non-Prophet Week’, in which we encourage our members to raise money for a particular cause. During last year’s Non-Prophet week we raised money for the Ugandan Humanist Schools Trust, an organisation which provides a secular education in a country riven with religious tensions. Our total was £2784.60, and by far the most ‘charitable’ act came from Jess Barnes from Nottingham, who took sponsorship from other students to shave her head, raising £620 and then donated the hair to a charity which provides wigs for cancer patients!

This year, we have chosen to support Give Directly, a charity which simply transfers cash to extremely poor people in Kenya and Uganda. A breakdown of their processes can be viewed on their website. Give Directly exemplify transparency in the process of charitable giving. But the really great thing about Give Directly is their evidence base. The approach of offering cash transfers, as opposed to microloans or other forms of aid, seems to be one of the most effective ways of reducing suffering, both in the short and long terms. Cash transfers have been shown to increase children’s nutrition and health in the countries of Malawi, South Africa and Uganda, and more broadly to increase access to education. In the long term, one study found that men’s annual income five years after receiving transfers had increased by 64%–96% of the grant amount. There is also no evidence that cash transfers significantly increase consumption of alcohol or tobacco- which is perhaps what those Victorian philanthropists would have expected. Instead, the money might be invested in the upkeep of a house, in some new equipment, or in sending some members of the household to school. There is also good evidence that many people save at least part of the money as security against future financial difficulty or for later investment.

Give directly are also continuing to collect data to be studied by social scientists, which may, in turn, help further identify ways of reducing inequality permanently, and having a direct impact on people’s lives. You can find out more on their website and at Give Well.

If you fancy supporting Give Directly, and us through Non Prophet Week, you might enjoy hearing about how our President, Richard Acton, will be wearing a colander on his head all week, or how Treasurer Luke Dabin will have his legs waxed in public. If acquisition is more your thing, I’ll be making humanist pants, and I can guarantee you’ll get yours in time for Christmas.