Turns out that the Sadui authorities aren’t above persecuting young men for behaving like young men any more than they are above oppressing women for being women.

Of course, there is still a difference; I doubt these men are going to be publicly beaten for their actions.

… or er something.

Suddenly I feel a lot better about myself again. I mean, I might have underestimated the diversity of an important order of mammals, but at least I can tell the difference between a cat and an orange. This guy is either stupid enough that he can’t or stupid enough to think scientists can’t. I’m not sure which would be worse.

In any case, PZ says everything that needs to be said.

Both Phil and Ed have linked to this story:

After the Sunday service in Westminster Chapel, where worshippers were exhorted to wage “the culture war” in the World War II spirit of Sir Winston Churchill, cabbie James McLean delivered his verdict on Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.

“Evolution is a lie, and it’s being taught in schools as fact, and it’s leading our kids in the wrong direction,” said McLean, chatting outside the chapel. “But now people like Ken Ham are tearing evolution to pieces.”

They seem to think it’s funny, and I guess I can see why; they’ve been living with this level of idiocy for a long time. Personally, I find it depressing whenever it rears its head on this side of the Atlantic.

I’ll bet Dr Williams is taken aback at the response his comments has generated, and I have to say, I think a lot of people are overreacting. Obviously, I make no secret of the fact that I disagree with him and I’ll argue my point, but heckling the poor man outside his Church? Calling for his resignation? Not even remotely called for, and nothing more than an attempt to limit his right to hold an opinion and express his views.

At this stage it’s probably worth pointing out that there are — at least — two separate groups who’re being critical of his position, and it’s not the secularists and the liberals who’re calling for his resignation. Those voices are raised from within his own Church, and they’re not objecting on general grounds to religious accommodation in the law, they’re objecting very specifically to accommodation of religions that aren’t theirs. Needless to say, I disagree with those people at least strongly as I do Dr Williams.

In fact, on a re-reading his lecture, I realise just how badly misrepresented by the media Dr Williams was. I’m not saying I agree with him; far from it, but I don’t think he was calling for wholesale modification of British law, either. He makes some subtle points, and his words are, at times, ambiguous (one might say disingenuous,) but there is certainly a way to interpret what he said as nothing more controversial than “just because the law gives someone a right, doesn’t mean we should necessarily force them to exercise that right at all times.” That much is obviously true.

So, surely true enough is fair enough? Well, yes, but the assumption that someone might not want to exercise their rights is a dangerous one to establish legally, and an even more dangerous one to nationally consolidate through the establishment of local courts around the country, which (will inevitably) presume the complicity of the entire local population. Williams talks about these supplementary-jurisdictions as being purely voluntary, but offers no suggestions as to how to ensure duress of any kind does not play a role. Matthew Parris puts it excellently, in his piece in The Times:

Faiths capture people. I do not mean this disparagingly. So of course do patriotisms, ideologies, families. But a religion, properly understood, makes profound claims on an individual and community, quite unlike the demands of a golf club. It involves the use of public places and public services, the subordination of the individual’s will; and may demand that he subordinate his spouse’s and children’s wills too. Hence our unease about duress, and the completeness of “consent”.

Dr Williams, in a welter of words, makes no serious attempt to resolve this. Those who read his speech properly will see that his entire argument turns upon the freedom of the group member to “opt out” of the “supplementary jurisdiction” and choose British law instead. But repressive faith groups make it culturally difficult - sometimes well-nigh impossible - for a member to opt out. This gives them the very togetherness and focus that Dr Williams wants to foster.

A religion is more than a collection of rules and habits: it is a complete moral and philosophical system with deep claims upon the inner and outer life of the adherent, from cradle, through schooling, and beyond. The rules it lays down - the private laws - are of a more commanding kind than the rules of Scrabble or the High Peak Hunt because they are morally joined-up: joined with a loyalty beyond the State; joined within an overarching faith and its explanations of the Universe.

How can we expect someone who’d been raised, educated and governed according to certain cultural and religious prescriptions to realise, when it matters, that they are able to “opt-out” of all that? Everyone they know believes and acts a certain way; they have been raised to do the same. They might not even know there is a wider law guaranteeing them greater liberty. Paris, charitably, talks about religions as providing “togetherness” and “focus,” and I dare-say he’s right, but the other side of that coin is obedience, conformity and acquiescence; not traits that I believe will lead to people looking outside the system for redress.

Put simply, religion and governance are a bad mix at any level. Religions are, by their very nature, strongly ideological, and strongly ideological governments, religious or otherwise, fall all too easily – some might say, inevitably – into oppression of dissenting views.

Additionally, and as I’ve said before, there are real risks with introducing even small-scale supplemental jurisdictions in the context of the current British population. By granting legal status to aspects of cultural codes, we run the risk of granting a veneer of legitimacy to the entirety of those codes, including elements that the majority find abhorrent, and by granting already insular communities even greater autonomy, we don’t increase social cohesion on a wide scale, so much as splinter into a series of small, independent communities with little in the way of commonality to bind them into a cohesive whole.

Well this is somewhat heartening; it seems like pretty much everyone agrees with me on the recent statement from Dr Rowan Williams, that the UK should adopt aspects of Sharia Law.

This also neatly demonstrates something I’ve been saying for a while; The UK really is a much more secular nation that the US, state religion notwithstanding. British people tend to know this, but some (by no means all) Americans seem to labour under the impression that the Church here is actually wields some real power. This is the Archbishop of Canterbury, the head of the Church of England, and yet pretty much everyone in government has come out and publicly criticised him for speaking rubbish. Can you imagine the US president speaking out against a religious leader like this?

I know it sounds insane, but it’s true.

The BBC is reporting on an interview he gave, in which he argued that many Muslims don’t relate to British law and would seek to practice Sharia Law anyway. To avoid this going underground, or being a source of cultural tensions, he thinks we should implement “aspects” of Sharia Law in a controlled way, in order to “maintain social cohesion.” It sounds sort-of reasonable on the face of it, until you ask how exactly it’s going to maintain social cohesion, and remember exactly what particular wedge this could be thin end of. Dr Williams know this, and he says:

nobody in their right mind would want to see in this country the kind of inhumanity that’s sometimes been associated with the practice of the law in some Islamic states; the extreme punishments, the attitudes to women as well

But what he either doesn’t know or doesn’t say is that you can’t draw that distinction in a useful way. This is what Sharia Law is about, it’s not some optional extra that sits on top of a bunch of more acceptable legal constructs. Of course there is more to Sharia Law than oppressing non-Muslims and brutalising women, and it would (arguably) be possible to implement some of the less offensive aspects of it in the UK — but that wouldn’t help. And this is why it would have no positive effect on social-cohesion: No one who can’t relate to the British legal system is having a problem with the way it handles financial matters or what bank holidays we have; that feeling of alienation doesn’t stem from minor administrative details, it comes from a fundamental disconnect with the basis of the law. British law is, by and large, secular, egalitarian and liberal; Sharia Law is none of those things; it’s religiously motivated, patriarchal and authoritarian, and those are exactly the features that the Muslims who can’t abide by UK law want to see introduced. Making a few token gestures won’t appease those people, but it will give them a sense of momentum and a legal precedent for Sharia Law being enacted in the UK. I don’t know about Dr Williams, but that’s not a situation I want to find myself in.

Actually, I think I do know about Dr Williams. I’m sure he doesn’t want Sharia Law to make significant headway in the UK – he’s a civilised man, after all — but, as is so often the case with the religious, he sees any religion as better than no religion, to the point that he thinks any religion is due special privilege:

What we don’t want either, is I think, a stand-off, where the law squares up to people’s religious consciences.

Personally, I’d like to rephrase that second paragraph as “What we don’t want either, is I think, a stand-off, where people’s religious consciences lead them to claim special privilege to break the law that applies to everyone else.” But then, Dr Williams doesn’t believe in the law as I understand it:

An approach to law which simply said — there’s one law for everybody — I think that’s a bit of a danger

OK — what? What is the law if it doesn’t apply to everybody? It’s nothing more than a tool of oppression, and an educated man like Dr Williams should be ashamed of himself for even suggesting it. The law, one law, must apply to all people equally, otherwise we have no claim to be a liberal, free society, and we might, as Dr Williams suggests, resign ourselves to being on the inexorable path to Sharia Law.

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Standard disclaimer: I have nothing against the vast majority of Muslims, and have a lot of respect for many of them. It’s the barbaric misogynists who believe that women are property to be used and abused as men see fit, that it’s perfectly reasonable to behead “the enemies of Islam,” and (most importantly) that the “law of God” is the only one to which they are beholden, that I’m talking about here.

This is excellent news. I’ve always voted Liberal Democrat anyway (well except that time I helped vote Tony Blair into power¹,) but now there’s another reason to do so. Their new party leader, Nick Clegg, has come out in a radio interview and confirmed himself as an atheist. “Do you believe in God?” was the question, and “no” was the answer.

The show’s quick fire interview format forces short, unequivocal answers like that, so we shouldn’t read too much into the brevity of the answer, but it’s reassuring to note that he hasn’t gone back on the position when questioned about it afterwards. Unfortunately, he has said that he has enormous respect for religion (which must, surely, be a lie to soothe the religious voters – how can he respect such a vast, byzantine social construct, with all of it’s rules and regulations and restrictions of liberty and downright wackiness, when he doesn’t accept the one fundamental assertion they use to justify the whole sorry mess?) and, more worryingly, that since his wife is a Catholic, their children will be raised as Catholics. I don’t understand how anyone free from the mind-virus of religion could willingly allow their own children to be infected with it.

But never mind; I can draw some comfort from that fact that if my vote ever leads to a landslide victory again (which is, admittedly, a very long shot with the Lib Dems,) that I won’t be handing power to someone who’s so far from my mindset that he’s actually afraid the country at large will think him a nutter if he’s honest about his degree of religiosity.

[^1]: I was a student, and only just old enough to vote when the 1997 general election came around. I can vividly remember sitting around with all my friends as the results came in, all of us buzzing with excitement as the Labour landslide became apparent. We’d obviously all voted for them, because students tend to vote left and because after chafing under 18 years of Tory rule, we just knew that a Labour victory would change the country for the better. When we saw those results come in, we really felt that our generation had made the difference, that we’d done what our parents never could; we’d kicked out the corrupt, right-wing, authoritarian Tories and given power to a more honest, democratic alternative. We felt like we’d changed the world, and that it was a change for good. Ironic, really.

1. I was a student, and only just old enough to vote when the 1997 general election came around. I can vividly remember sitting around with all my friends as the results came in, all of us buzzing with excitement as the Labour landslide became apparent. We’d obviously all voted for them, because students tend to vote left and because after chafing under 18 years of Tory rule, we just knew that a Labour victory would change the country for the better. When we saw those results come in, we really felt that our generation had made the difference, that we’d done what our parents never could; we’d kicked out the corrupt, right-wing, authoritarian Tories and given power to a more honest, democratic alternative. We felt like we’d changed the world, and that it was a change for good. Ironic, really. [↩]

Apologies for the lack of updates recently; I’ve been busy enjoying a veritable cornucopia of symptoms for the past couple of weeks, and haven’t really been up to writing about much, even though there’s been plenty going on:

• The Texas Education Agency has fired Chris Comer, a staff member of nine years, for sending an email announcing a talk by a Barbara Forrest, a prominent critic of ID. The internet has been buzzing, and Forrest herself has written on how this proves her point that ID, rather than being a scientific position, is an attempt to force the religious right’s agenda into the classroom (and the public consciousness) through power-politics and outright bullying. Just remember kids; it’s the Darwinists who have a shady global conspiracy to suppress the opposition and get people fired just for supporting ID.

• The British government has given up all pretense at seeking consensus and is forcing through legislation that will increase the time “suspected terrorists” can be held without charge. If you’re a UK citizen, you can register your displeasure by signing this petition. Please take the time; this is a hugely important issue that bears directly on our most important human rights.

• Some poor teacher was arrested, tried, jailed and then deported for calling a Teddy Bear Muhammad. Local people took exception to the fact that she wasn’t executed and took to the streets in protest. Governments the world over seem not to notice that whenever a group of people go batshit insane and start demanding innocent people are beheaded for some utterly trivial slight to their culture, those people always seem to be Muslim. The British public seems not to notice that the laws Gillian Gibbons were arrested under bear a striking resemblance to the laws our government put in place a few years back with the express purpose of arresting Muslims for making utterly trivial slights against our culture.

That’s probably enough for tonight. I should be back to a more reasonable posting-schedule now, so if I think of anything else I missed, I’ll sneak it into a future post.

The Telegraph has an interesting article about how Tony Blair didn’t feel free to express his religion in public for fear of being seen as a “nutter”:

Mr Blair complained that he had been unable to follow the example of US politicians, such as President
George W. Bush, in being open about his faith because people in Britain regarded religion with suspicion.

“It’s difficult if you talk about religious faith in our political system,” Mr Blair said. “If you are in the
American political system or others then you can talk about religious faith and people say ‘yes,
that’s fair enough’ and it is something they respond to quite naturally.

“You talk about it in our system and, frankly, people do think you’re a nutter. I mean … you may go
off and sit in the corner and … commune with the man upstairs and then come back and say ‘right, I’ve
been told the answer and that’s it’.”

Well, fair enough. I can see why you’d want to avoid people thinking you made hugely important decisions about national security and international policy based on messages from ceilingcat God. I mean, that really would be insane.

The recent ordeal (which I’ve blogged about here and here,) of a young woman who was sentenced to state-sponsored brutality after being gang-raped is just one example of the shocking barbarity of the Saudi regime. It is unacceptable that the UK counts any nation with such a poor human-rights record as an ally, so please take a couple of minutes to sign this petition urging our government to sever friendly ties with Saudi Arabia until such a time as they join us in the 21st Century.

The actual text you’ll be putting your name to is:

The government have rolled out the Red carpet to the Saudi Royal Family yet the government of Saudi Arabia is an autocratic regime with an appalling human rights record. Executions, flogging and amputations are imposed and carried out with disregard for the most basic international fair trial standards. ‘Offences’ include being gay or being a woman unaccompanied by a man or driving a car. Yet with utter hypocrisy the UK government condemns similar regimes such as Burma and has very minimal ties with countries like Libya. The UK has turned a blind eye to this for its own selfish economic interests to the extent that we will break international law on corruption to avoid upsetting the Saudi Royal Family. As a consequence of this relationship we are perceived as supporters and backers of this repressive regime. We have seen the consequences of these injustices on the security of our country. It is now the opportunity to restore Britain’s dignity and end this stain on our country’s reputation.