Month: August 2014

After the “Relaxed About Theology” post, I largely drafted this one in response to another twitter exchange involving a tweeter who clearly wasn’t at all relaxed about the religious connections between the Sheldonian and the recent World Humanist Congress (#WHC2014) held there. Having drafted it I decided not to post it, since although he had a point his aggressive motive wasn’t clear, and no-one from BHA or other humanist organisation seemed to have engaged. So maybe better let sleeping trolls lie. Well I discover today BHA did engage – totally defensively and dismissively, so I feel moved to share my view:

@getyourshare1 was making the point that the Sheldonian as a “religious” building was not appropriate as a humanist venue. Of course troll-style, he was making his point with emotive terms like “hypocrites”,  “betrayal”, etc. and making claims that were exaggerating what may (or may not) have been partly true. My initial tweeted response was that 1000 humanists taking over the (ex-religious) asylum had a certain delicious irony to it. But, he responded suggesting the church may have made rent out of the event at the expense of humanism. After one attempt to put a positive spin on it – “OK if that were true, what would you suggest we do about it” (other than hurl abuse)? But the hint wasn’t taken, so I shut up – Monday I think.

Anyway, it seems BHA have as recently as today simply been denying and dismissing his claims. My take is this:

The Church(es) are massive landowners in the UK. The major ancient universities were to a great extent founded by the churches, and as well as having that heritage, if Oxford is anything like Cambridge and Durham, we can be sure the churches still own a great deal of the property with ground rents and covenants and the like where the whole buildings are no longer owned. No doubt the concerns that run the academic institutions as businesses and charities have quite complex relations to their landlords, so whilst the Sheldonian is not “owned” by the church, or any hiring rents paid directly to the church, I wouldn’t be surprised if the church did benefit indirectly to some extent. (Tried to research that out of interest, but very difficult to bottom out the detail.)

What is undeniable however, is that the Sheldonian has religious heritage and a “congregational” layout, not to mention the organ and other religious artefacts, symbols and mottos all over it. Denied by the BHA.

The congregational element of humanism’s congress, and indeed of its Sunday “assemblies”, was one of the features that led Andrew Brown to point out similarities between humanism and a religion. Denied and indeed attacked with ridiculing and dismissive rhetoric by the BHA members.

Clearly not everyone in humanism is Relaxed About Theology, but the worry is that so many voices associated with humanism feel the need to attack or deny it every time some point of contact arises, rather than engage in reasonable dialogue.

[Links to all the twitter tags, handles and tweets deliberately omitted here, anyone following who has interest in reasonable dialogue knows how to make contact. Stoking trolls in 140 character sound bites is not reasonable dialogue.]

[Post Note : a particularly “shrill” denial of any case comparing humanism to religion, as a response to the Andrew Brown piece, posted at almost exactly the same time as this post.]

Sad to hear, but have to agree – wanted to give the artist Imogen Heap a chance – but this review says what I’ve been feeling about her recently.

I first came across her in Jeff Beck’s Ronnie Scott event with Eric Clapton and Tal Wilkenfeld. Some real magic delivery of both a blues-rock standard and one of her own numbers with this stellar “backing band”.

Saw her live with her own “friends” on a tour (in Oslo) 3 or 4 years ago, and found it very self-indulgent, having jolly good fun with whacky musical ideas and instruments – but sorry, not really delivering much entertainment or “soul” to an audience. Maintained an interest – because after all, quality will out – and followed her recent tweets to her self-made promo-videos, and oh dear – none too promising musically. Didn’t write a detailed review, assuming maybe this was a project in progress that needed some space to develop.

It’s like Clive James says – it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing – you can take the creative improv too far. The opening para of Grauniad review by Rebecca Nicholson of the album “Sparks” therefore comes as no surprise:

Imogen Heap‘s fourth record is less a coherent album than a collection of crowdsourced collaborations, generated through methods and techniques that include a running app and a pair of gloves that turns the wearer’s body into a human harp. Sparks was written in a community garden in Hangzhou, China, and in the Himalayas in Bhutan. There’s a song called The Listening Chair that will never be finished, with Heap promising to add a new verse every seven years. If you uploaded images of your footprints to her website, you’ll find them reproduced on the cover. (As fan interaction goes, it’s definitely one up on a T-shirt.) Musically, Sparks is a bit of a mess.

You don’t want to kick a girl when she’s down, but take note Imogen, we know you can do it.

[Post Note : rewatching that could’a had religion / rollin’ and tumbin’ with Jeff Beck – happier times, and Tal’s expression and body language within seconds of Imogen opening her mouth says it all. But do watch Blanket too.]

I’ve often used examples of football events and stories as parables for morality in life in general – if I’d tagged them more carefully you could find them; I’ll dig up a few examples. Anyway, today a great piece by Mark Kettle in the Grauniad, that frankly I could have written myself. Football has got too big for its fancy-coloured boots.

The whole stupid, stretching 10-month juggernaut of Premier League excess is about to grind back into action this weekend — a return that’s about as welcome as a drunk on the late bus home.

Don’t get this wrong. I like football. I always have. I watch a lot of games. I always did. I still have my season ticket and, though I regularly think about giving it up and putting the money to other uses, I’ll be back in the stands again this year too. But without real enthusiasm, at least until the weather gets colder, wetter and darker — when the real football weather begins. The truth is that football is just way too big for its fancy-coloured boots …

The charge sheet against modern football is not difficult to draw up. Too much money. Too many mercenaries. Too little motivation. Too few roots. Not enough skill or nurture. No moral compass.

Still, I guess the counter-example to day is that thankfully, the football arbitrators have upheld Suarez long ban for his (third) biting offence.

Letter in the Telegraph with an interesting list of signatories from the clergy and atheists of many colours. Hat tip to BHA for sharing.

As usual the letter is considered and eminently sensible, if necessarily thin on detail given the broad agreement, but the comment thread is mostly the knee-jerk critics conflating every religious issue they can think of, with a few hopeful people trying to point out the error of their views. Voted a few comments up and down, but didn’t dive into this one, so a few thoughts here:

This is basically a question of secularism.

I don’t believe any “faith-based” schools should be government supported at all. They should simply meet standards for national curricula. Faith-based schools, and indeed all forms of private schooling, raise many issues but this is not what the letter is about.

Faith-based or not-faith-based curricula should include RE “about” religion generally. This is what the letter is about – what that “RE” standard should be – according to national and global standards. The main point – it seems long overdue to recognise that the curriculum should not be tied to the official Anglican religion – “established” religion practically in symbolic name only and important primarily from a national (and international) cultural heritage standpoint. Even the Anglican church itself sees the error in being formally “established”.

The encouraging thing in the letter apart from it’s breadth of support is the implication that theology – understanding what belief means or “the place of religion & belief” – is the core of the agenda, not just some PC value-free cultural history of a balanced selection of specific religions, valuable though these also are.

I hope those signatories that are the formal voices of atheism and humanism ( eg @andrewcopson ) will be open to dialogue about what makes a good belief system, whilst no-doubt rejecting “religious” and “faith-based” labels themselves. Even belief systems wedded to their own definitions of rationality find they need some declared “credo” or basis of values, wherever these come from. They’d need to shed all such declared values if they wanted to reject even the tag “belief system”.

[Post Note : And as I said the key issue is secularism – disestablishment. The above is one aspect of getting our own UK house in order, but this is main issue in so many religious problems around the world. Hat tip to Secularism UK for reminding us of the Boko Haram example – I’m sure you can think of many more.]

‘Tis. ‘Tisn’t. ‘Tis. ‘Tisn’t …. One reason the left / right brain myth persists is because there is of course some truth to it. The problem is the simplistication of reality leading to the wrong myth, one that’s fairly easy to “debunk” as people often do, but one reason the left / right brain myth persists is ….

Some Common Facts …. Sure enough, calling people left-brained or right-brained is just a label for the balance between real thinking-behavioural traits – the wrong part of the myth is that it’s because we predominantly “use” that half of the brain in the label. We use pretty much all of our brain in most “left-brained” or “right-brained” tasks as any neural correlate scans will show (and do show). And of course the brain is tremendously plastic in terms of both development and repair of different physical sites for functional processing – different things can and do happen in multiple places in both halves anyway. OK so that’s debunked the myth that right and left brained people USE predominantly different halves of their brains. Job done ? Well, no.

But There’s More …. Whilst using both halves, the communication between the two halves and the sum-total of the processing that is elevated into our immediate consciousness is controlled (permissively) by the corpus-callosum – it’s practically the only structure that physically connects the otherwise entirely divided halves of our brain. We couldn’t “know” what our brain is telling us without this connection and its connection to our wider nervous and somatic systems. Whatever we think our mind is, it is surely illogical not to recognise that it must involve the integration of all our brain resources. No?

So The Reality Is … What is really being captured in the left/right brain labelling is the relative dominance of the different processing tasks and styles happening in the two halves making it into the integrated whole picture our consciousness picks up through that split-but-connected architecture. The processing happening in the two brain hemispheres provides the whole mind with different views or perspectives. In the same way that there are neural correlate scans that debunk the idea that processing itself is happening in one half more than the other, there are scans of accidental and deliberate lesions affecting the halves and the connecting structures that correlate the lost connectivity to functionality with the thinking-behaviour traits. That is NOT a myth, it’s the true part of the more generally misunderstood myth.

I’ll Need Some Evidence …. All of the above is my paraphrase of what I’ve learned mainly from Iain McGilchrist – and in fact he has a very accessible 15 minute animated lecture that says all of the above much more eloquently than I. If you care enough to argue further about it, then please do also read his deeply referenced work for all the empirical scientific support. The Master and His Emissary is the book for popular science reading, but that doesn’t mean the papers and scientific texts don’t also exist. Don’t dismiss. Do the research. Follow the references.

Let vs right-brained-ness is NOT a myth.
It’s not WHICH halves of the brain are functioning.
It’s HOW the two halves are connected in the conscious mind.

[And my brain ? You’ll find it here. And a zillion more links to the topic here.]

[Post Note : Connectivity of right-brain more dominant in autism?]

Excellent FT Essay by Rosamund Bartlett on Tolstoy and Constance Garnett‘s first English translations. Picked-up from an equally interesting piece by Language Hat.

Apparently the teaching of Sanskrit is controversial in India because of its association with Hinduism, but as the article notes much ancient Sanskrit literature is non-religious anyway.

Part of the Indo-Aryan language group and indeed phonetically rooted in Proto-Indo-European language, it is the root of many. But it’s not a living language, so I can’t imagine anyone is suggesting it’s a language everyone should be taught to read, write and speak. It’s a bit like classical Greek and Latin in the English&European-speaking context. Everyone should be taught something about it, and some should be encouraged to study it for what it is. A “Sanskrit Week” celebration sounds reasonable?

Religion without a church? Humanism almost qualifies – writes Andrew Brown in the Grauniad. After comparing WHC2104 to a religious event, which is not difficult, and the likely reaction to such labelling, he concludes with:

… there are some humanists who take dialogue seriously. I talked to Babu Goginieni, now the international director of the movement, who was relaxed about theology: “The enemies of humanism are not only on the religious side,” he said. “I think the government has no business taking up any side. Atheism is not important. I happen to be an atheist, but that’s not the point — what is important is freedom and human values, and a way of living with others and with nature. Once we have concluded there is no God, we move on.”

I actually believe it’s a good piece that should lead BHA and international humanism generally to think about its real constitution. I made my comments in the thread:

The Babu Goginieni quote is well chosen. As a humanist I’m atheist too, but I’m not defined by my atheism, just am non-theist.

One correction – humanism is not defined by humanity being sacred – it’s reality that’s sacred. We humanists recognise human responsibilities to the whole alongside our rights and freedoms.

On the “being a religion” angle – sure any group develops social cohesion, through shared behaviours, but I think a key aspect of humanism (besides its inevitable universalism) is that its prefers to couch its “lore” as values supporting action, rather than as specific rules. But we’re really only having this discussion as you say, because the “religion” brand has become toxic to all “rationalists”.

[Typically – and meta – the comment thread is full of ad-hominem and “aggressive” comments denying and ridiculing Brown and his piece. Humanism needs to get a grip on this kind of twisted conception of freedom of speech even appearing to be done in its name. It’s been said before but unmediated comment threads are on their way out.]

[I made my own summary of WHC2014 here.]

[Post Note : Brown’s point in quoting  Babu Goginieni is specifically “humanists who take dialogue seriously”. One comment in the thread that arrived after mine became favourited on twitter as “nailing” the argument.

Read this article on #WHC2014 – http://t.co/n1Y1WMoKaO and then read this comment: http://t.co/2o6UbhQtjD Nails it.

— Andrew Copson (@andrewcopson) August 13, 2014

But I still beg to differ – made my own comment:

Hmm, witty rhetoric about calling a spade a shovel when it comes to suggesting humanism is (like) a religion. But Babu Goginieni’s point was about theism. Brown is not suggesting humanists are theists, he’s simply suggesting humanism is (like) a religion (not necessarily one that believes in god).

Bit disingenuous to imply theism and religion are the same.

The Brown piece is an offer of dialogue at the interface between humanism and religion(s) of which BHA should take note. Benjamin O’Donnell’s comment aligns with mine (and includes interesting rant against Rod Liddle – another story).]

I Wasn’t There – Earlier this year I attended the IAI’s How the Light Gets In festival and The Rationalist Association’s AGM to mention a couple of events, but I didn’t make plans to attend the WHC2014 organised in Oxford this weekend by the BHA. You see, I’ve had a bit of a mixed relationship with the BHA, a little bit “who’s more humanist than who” and, following the God vs Science wars, BHA and their “mob” of social media commenters seemed to have become fixated on the entirely negative anti-religion agenda, typified by recent campaigns (and victories) in religious control and curricula in UK schools, but also by a very narrow “scientistic” critical take on what passes for rational argument.

A Theme In Our Time? – When they announced the “Freedom of Speech” theme for WHC2014 this weekend, whilst the real world is facing Israel vs Gaza (again), and the spectre of IS(IS) in Iraq and more, they appeared to have dropped the ball of any serious discussion on the fit between religion, rationality and humanism and gone for the ubiquitous underpinnings of any-old-libertarian agenda. Freedom of speech and thought? We agree already. Some people are never happy, not even me. I even said so on Friday as the WHC2014 agenda started to appear on social media.

Twitter Take-Aways – Anyway, having got myself hooked into a fair selection of the relevant #hashtags and @tweeters on the Friday, and with the “Biblical” rains of Bertha confining us indoors, I spent almost the entire weekend glued to #WHC2014 and associated sub-tags on twitter until close of business on Sunday. I’m glad I did, in fact I’m massively disappointed I wasn’t there. There was a huge range of international participation, and a wide selection of topics in the plenary and parallel sessions. Suffice to say the tweeting from the event by BHA volunteers was excellent. The take-aways for me are:

Fighting Talk (and Action) – In parts of the world where religion is oppressive, particularly of women and liberal education, as well as socially sectarian, militant and/or brutal in its enforcement, then surely a firm stand needs to be taken against it, vocally and where necessary physically. And furthermore, the courage of those making the stand locally needs to be recognised and supported by those who find ourselves safely remote from the front lines. Many more eloquent and courageous than I spoke and have written on these aspects of the WHC2014 event. Examples like Gulalai Ismail and Wole Soyinka honoured with awards and Taslima Nasreen honoured with a keynote speaking slot and the ovation to close any congress. All I can add is – Absolutely!

Feminism, really! – A corollary of the above proved to be recognising the true place and value of women. A bit like Dawkins own “Doh!” moment, I’ve personally not felt the need to express “feminism” for several decades. Like, obviously! This is news? In fact a large part of my own agenda – under the banner Vive la Difference – is not so much being gender-blind in treating women as fully-paid-up humans (that really is a given within humanism, surely), but in fact recognising special feminine strengths in many team and governance contexts. We human individuals are all different, and fortunately at least half of us are females of the species.

Tactical Aggression – A further corollary of the aggressive response to brutal and oppressive religion was the recognition that this is tactical aggression suited to the particular battle. Quite a bit of chatter about the old misguided idea that benign expressions of religion are merely cover for militant and inhuman kinds and therefore to be challenged as aggressively as any. To be aggressive – even vocally – is not a value or strategy of humanism. It’s a necessary tool we mustn’t shy away from using – but speak softly and carry a big stick would seem to be the ready-made default adage.

Freedom of Speech – On the freedom of speech agenda, the conclusions were in the end-of-conference declaration. For me the key statement had been tweeted several times over the course of the weekend, and I have no knowledge of the drafting process of the statement. I’m guessing a statement already existed, and probably had conference-theme-specific amendments drafted in advance, to be finalised during the congress? I have a long-standing caveat to the idea that freedom of speech includes the right to offend – infamously, to “blaspheme” in a religious context – the caveat being that this is not a humanist license to gratuitously insult those you don’t respect enough to understand. (I pointed to Dennett’s espousal of Rappaport’s rules for criticism for those who asked. Second block-quote.)  In these days of social media and comment-threads-with-everything, attack and criticism are the norm, and a side order of rhetorical insult – casual or vindictive – comes as standard. The key concluding statement is:

“There is no right not to be offended.”

The double negative from the side of the receiver is not entirely novel, but as a choice is about as good an expression of this value as any I’ve heard. Progress. Any statement is part of a conversation, a conversation which, if there is any point to it, leads to better working outcomes over some practical time-scales. Sure, I may expect that I may be offended, after all any change of mind hurts, but I can also expect that offence is not the point or intention of the dialogue.

[Post Note : The “final” version of the declaration is here. It was drafted and open for comment in advance, and comments are therefore now (technically) closed. Pity the clause on restraint ends with “only” rather than indicate positive value of restraint.]

Humour – In the same vein much humour evident in the congress as well as the twitter exchanges, including several messages that needing a sense of humour was absolutely essential. As with offence generally, “No-one has a right not to be ridiculed or be offended by a joke at their expense” is not the same as carte-blanche for everyone to ridicule anyone at any time. If you’re not the court jester (or the house cartoonist) humour should only be aimed at another in circumstances where the mutual respect and intentions are clear – social-media tongue-in-cheek straw-men wise-crackers take note. Anyone can do it, but the “right to offend” is a non-existent defence; it’s not how the value is framed.

Working Together – perhaps unsurprisingly the political thread converged on the idea that more working together with each other and with the prevailing political machinery is to be encouraged. Given topical news I was surprised not to hear any mention of say, either Baroness Warsi or Michael Cashman as supporters and collaborators from distinct perspectives. Quite a few comparing sizes of humanist organisations to religious and other lobby groups. Anyway, reassuringly, the idea that if so many disparate groups are going to work together in different political systems on myriad specific agenda priorities in the name of humanism, we’re going to need some overarching manifesto or constitution in which to capture the values we so far share only implicitly. Good news is that the BHA and other international humanist organisations clearly have drafting such a constitution on their agenda(s), and no doubt the declaration on Freedom of Speech (and Thought) is one piece of that jigsaw. I’m looking forward to hearing from and contributing to that development.

The Dawkins Backlash – One encouraging sign of the maturing humanist agenda was the recognition that those combative and “shrill” spokespeople, we’ve come to associate with the “science vs religion” voice of humanism, and indeed who have been instrumental in promoting humanism, may no longer be the figureheads we need to make progress, if they ever were. Richard Dawkins was the unfortunate representative of “the four horseman” whose feet were held to the fire in a keynote interview by Samira Ahmed. The applause for Dawkins was decidedly divided, and there were strong statements elsewhere that the dominant western scientific conception of rationality were part of the problem facing humanism; something that some of us have been warning for some time. Doubly significant that fellow spaghetti westerner PZ Myers felt moved to blog that his friend Dawkins was still missing the point – digging himself a bigger hole – in continuing to defend his recent logical argument using the relative merits of date-rape as his example.

Imperfect Makes Progress – my reflections reflect what I picked up from the twitter traffic and the interactions I chose to engage with, so no doubt my biased view missed other important points. Much has already been blogged elsewhere. However I came a away, like so many others reported, with a tremendous positive vibe and optimism for the future of humanism, and hence the future of humanity. I must repeat; well done to the organisers, the participants and the tweeters. Much appreciated. Roll on Sao Paolo WHC2017.

[END]

[12 links and counting. With acknowledgements to the many other humanists whose tweets I absorbed by osmosis and so far failed to link explicitly – ping me and I’m happy to amend @psybertron.]

[Post Note : Another collection of highlights at Blackwells Broad Conversation.]

[And here : Kenan Malik’s summary of his own talk – one I didn’t catch on twitter.]

[And here a retweeted tweet I noted during the conference, but in response to PZ Myers own posting of his link – mentioned in The Dawkins Backlash above – I was moved to ask where the #irony tag had gone. Still not sure of the context of this remark – on face value I agree with it:

‘If you have open, unregulated freedom of speech, you are going to drown in noise’, says @pzmyers now at the #WHCnonsense. #whc2014

— Eliza Goroya (@ElizaGoroya) August 8, 2014

And here another view from ex-pastor Catherine Dunphy:

… the privilege of seeing the values that I aspired to being lived and communicated, all the while staying cognizant of ideological baggage and being open to hearing divergent opinions.

– That’s all for now.]

Sad thing given the World Humanist Congress 2014 kicking off today is their chosen theme “Freedom of Speech”.

After a decade of humanists hammering (exercising their own freedom of speech against) the religious in the science vs religion wars, we find ourselves at a point where religious wars are recognised for what they are. “Wars of Religion” proclaims The Times front page banner headline – in response to US authorising strikes against IS(IS)(IL) in Iraq. (A good move.)

Yes freedom of speech is wonderful, like motherhood and apple pie, even if the practical subtleties of its responsibilities escape many of its adherents. The same day BHA hails “we win” in the other headline about the withdrawal of state funding from nurseries with extremist religious agendas (like creationism). The BHA appears to support batlles, so long as it wins them. Even A C Grayling, philosopher following in the footsteps of J S Mill, kicks off his own introduction to WNC2014 with “No one is born with religion”. No-one is born with science, or with speech either for that matter, so the anti-religion slogan is pretty fatuous. All education and development is based on the values of the cultural environment of the child. British values says the (British) minister, but human values in a free society for sure – sod all to do with science or religion – but all to do with a philosophical belief system called humanism.

I do wish WHC2014 every success, but ho hum. What a missed opportunity to major specifically on religion and war in terms of human values from the ground up. Timing is everything. Freedom (of speech) is the ubiquitous value in a free society.