The Virtual Gigolo

This is a subject that has been coming up increasingly, recently. I have been following various news stories relating to church/state separation in the United States and an argument that often comes up is that religious teaching should be kept out of state schools, by way of following the constitution (another subject entirely that is worth debating) but that people who want to send their children to private religious schools have every right to do so. I honestly think that the real crux of the matter is being missed, or at best ignored.

The role of an education system is to prepare children for their future; this point I think would be unquestioned. Part of that preparation clearly involves teaching children important techniques that they can use in their higher education studies, or in life as a whole. It’s vital for children to understand how to calculate percentages, for example, because otherwise others could easily extort money from them. Equally it is important to teach children to read and write because communication is vital to modern human existence. I would tend to argue that an additional purpose of state education is to give children access to a selection of other peoples viewpoints. It is clear, of course, that for the most part these “other” viewpoints will be whatever is currently the prevalent view in society, and part of the challenge of devising an effective education system is to minimise this and attempt to include as wide a range of viewpoints as makes sense.

Indeed, in one sense, including only the majority viewpoint is not necessarily a bad thing. School is intended to prepare people for their futures in society, and teaching what society holds to be standard is not unreasonable, and in many cases such as racism and so on is quite important as social norms evolve. An imperfect setup, certainly, but vastly superior to teaching only a minority viewpoint in the majority of cases (I’m sure counter examples can be found).

It is on that last point that private religious education falls down. Clearly we cannot over generalise, many private religious schools are excellent, however, it seems that this is in spite of their being private and from a specific viewpoint than because of it. One can create a private school that gives the same broad education as a state school should, the problem is that one need not necessarily do so. In the case of the argument mentioned earlier that people make for teaching specific religions in schools, for not teaching evolution in schools and so on we are not talking about giving that broad education, but instead allowing people to pay for their children to be educated in a narrow viewpoint that their parents happen to possess.

We cannot easily restrict what parents teach their children at home, and nor should we because if we did then new views of interest would not have a chance to develop in society. The propagation of views that fit into categories such as “racism”, it seems, is a side effect of developmental freedom that it seems we must accept as being necessary. We can attempt to give them a wide education in state schools, however. An education that their parents are welcome to disagree with.

In fact, should the education not directly cause debate between the children and their parents? Is debate not a primary technique for developing critical thinking skills necessary for survival in a changing society? If children go home and their parents are upset that the child has learned something with which they disagree, surely that is exactly the kind of narrow minded thinking that teaching a range of values is intended to correct.

All of these points still miss the one which seems to stand on its own as the most important issue of all. Why should a parent assume that because they have a particular viewpoint (religious or otherwise), their children should be educated to share that viewpoint? Richard Dawkins made this point clearly when referring to religion he said “We’d be aghast to be told of a Leninist child or a neo-conservative child or a Hayekian monetarist child. So isn’t it a kind of child abuse to speak of a Catholic child or a Protestant child?”. Though you might debate whether abuse is a fair word to use, the point that assuming children are what their parents are is a dangerous one for progression of a society.

It is my view, then, that private religious education, in the completely free sense of being able to teach whatever the parents want to be taught, achieves a status that I can only really call immoral, and certainly has no place in a society which is accepting of change, social development and freedom of thought for its young.

[But] faith is like a pickpocket who loans you your own money on generous terms. Your resultant feelings of gratitude are perfectly understandable, but misplaced. - Sam Harris

And in fact there have been consistent moralists who wanted people to be different, namely virtuous, who wanted to have people in their own image, which is that of an idiot: and to this end they negated the world. – Friedrich Nietzsche

As a scientist (arguably if you debate whether my field is science or engineering, but I really don’t think that matters), if one who would not at the present time call himself an expert, I found this article from Steven Dutch at the University of Wisconsin an interesting read. In it he very directly targets those so called experts who are not worthy of taking that term, of some of whose names you are I’m sure aware.

I realise this is a touchy subject for some, but let me just present some examples of my thinking that have come out of a discussion.

Let us first think of a man, who is drunk, and he has sex with a woman who is not without her consent. Presumably everything thinks of this as rape, although some might suggest that the drunken state suggests that he might not really have been fully concious of his behaviour in that situation. Is his blame is mitigated somewhat, or should he simply have not been so drunk in the first place?

Let us now think of a man who is not drunk, who has sex with a woman who is drunk, without her consent, but in a situation where she could have refused had she been sober. Clearly she has been raped (and taken advantage of at that), but should she share any of the blame for having been drunk, afterall, the earlier man had little choice in the matter but he shouldn’t have been drunk and hence is fully blamed, but maybe this woman also should not have been drunk?

Let us now think of a third situation, a man sleeps with a drunken woman, with only her mumbled drunken consent. Is this rape? Does the fact that she gave consent mean is it not rape, or is it anyway because she was taken advantage of in her drunken state?

Do people have a duty to protect themselves? If men have a duty to refrain from being drunk if there is a chance they might rape a woman, do women also not have a duty to refrain from being drunk if there is a chance they might give consent and then regret having done so in the morning? Given that it is hard to prove whether consent was given or not, where should the law fall?

My own opinion on this is that the final situation was not rape (if not exactly right) and that the courts should fall on the side of caution when prosecuting. Given a situation of rape, the woman might have been mentally damaged, that this is possible is not doubted, but it has already happened so can effectively be ignored as the equivilent of a financial sunk cost. The balance therefore is between sentencing a man who might be innocent (and therefore ruining his life) and the risk of his repeat offending if not convicted. This balance can be argued either way, but it certainly isn’t definitively in favour of prospective victims and hence it is in no way definitive that presumed accuracy of a rape report is at all reasonable.

I don’t know much about this gentleman, but was pointed to his website discussing the fact that the stone age is a fallacy. (thestoneage dot org).

On the “About the author” page of the website is stated:

The 22 April 2000 issue of New Scientist called Mr. Oktar an “international hero” for communicating the fact of creation over the fallacy of evolution.

This surprised me slightly, so I researched further. Other quotes from New Scientist suggest that in fact it said:

Harun Yahya is an international hero. His books have spread everywhere in the Islamic world.

I really don’t think those two quotes are even vaguely related in their implications. Another dishonest author in the world of pseudoscience?

I have only found out today what many presumably know already – that non-Muslims are not allowed in the cities of Mecca or Medina, and only barely allowed in Saudi Arabia at all (oil workers, essentially – economic greed often allows breaking of discrimatory laws). Amazing, after the years fighting South African opression, apartheid (of a religious sort at least) is alive and well in Arabia.

Something else the march on Saturday in Trafalgar Square should have been campaigning about, instead of allowing oneself to be offended by innocuous cartoons, why not campaign against applications of your religion that are downright evil in any reasonable moral framwork?

According to dictionary.com, altruism is defined as “Unselfish concern for the welfare of others; selflessness.”, is this really possible? Can people really perform actions for others behalf completely selflessly. It seems that this is not the case, people perform actions for others because those actions make them feel better. More accurately then altruism could be defined as “concern for the welfare of others with nothing at its heart other than the feeling that it is beneficial”.

Leaving that alone we can go one step further. Is there a case for suggesting that supposed “good” behaviour is unselfish if it is performed at the point of a gun? “Altruism” originating in religious belief often suffers from this problem. Some Christians seem to think that one cannot be moral without God. This seems to me to be a very short sighted attitude. Firstly it assumes that people cannot be moral without being told to be. Secondly it assumes that people cannot be moral without threats to make them act that way (punishment by some god for immoral activity). Moral activity in this context leads to “unselfish” behaviour, but while behaviour resulting from the threat of some “hell” may appear moral it is certainly not unselfish.

It is for this reason that I cannot think of the kind of Christians who have made such comments to me as moral at all. They clearly feel that one cannot be moral, and therefore altruistic, without threats. Those threats make their behaviour inherrently selfish as they are performing good deeds to protect themselves from their god, and therefore not altruistic at all. Moreover it might be suggested that acting constantly selfishly will lead to later punishment from their god, depending on its point of view on such issues.

Not a terribly “deep” post,  just a thought I was having on the train this morning.

Different people have different approaches to religious belief. One group of people will believe one set of things, another group will believe another, completely contradictory, set. Non-believers may see belief as irrational, or even downright dangerous. Richard Dawkins has talked about religious belief as a “virus of the mind”, or what he termed a “meme” in his writings. By seeing beliefs in black and white it may be that we are limiting our interpretation options. Rather, let us assume that belief in itself is not something necessary to remove, but rather the interpretation of that belief by non-believers.

In society religious belief posesses something of a skeleton key where many laws and social situations are concerned. We have a fear of intruding on peoples beliefs. In a discussion of something like circumcision, which many people feel is highly damaging, the fact that many people believe through their religions that circumcision is necessary means that others will see the discussion as a no-go area. This avoidance of the issue is where the real danger to society appears.

In some circumstances, treating religious belief as a no-go area has only minor implications. If we create a law to protect people from themselves, and some religions are allowed to be excluded does it matter? In these cases many people oppose such laws on nanny-state principles anyway. Let us take the example of motorcycle helmets. Laws exist in many countries stating that people must wear helmets while on motorcycles. Sikhs may then be allowed to avoid this requirement because they believe they must wear turbans. Who does this affect? Arguably nobody, we do not have to have any sympathy for a Sikh who is injured in a way that a helmet would have protected, it is their life decision just like we do not have to have sympathy for someone injured skydiving, or at least we can as people avoid feeling too bad about it and blame it on the individual. This argument becomes more complicated if health insurance and strain on national health systems are considered, but at that point everything becomes very complicated.

Occasionally this “its what they believe” approach does start to harm others. A debatable example might be Mormons and polygamy. Whether polygamy harms people or not might be open to debate. An example that certainly causes harm is where some religious groups believe that they are not allowed blood transfusions. In an individual case there are no obvious problems with this. The problem comes where peoples invidual beliefs have wider affects. Disallowing one’s children to have blood transfusions is a prime example of this problem. In this case the beliefs of parents are being applied to their children, with disasterous effects in some cases. Of course, these people believe they are doing their best for their children, protecting them for the afterlife, for example. Society would usually try to protect children from such activities, which could be considered to be amounting to negligence. Because these are religious beliefs, however, again society considers them sacrosanct and as a result children could die.

I think a very good example of this problem is in aspects of dress. Schools have been having problems with making exceptions to uniforms to placate religious groups. The only long term situation I can see here is that uniforms will be entirely unknown in state schools – maybe private schools too due to “discrimination” legislation, although whether or not religious schools will also have to fall in is open to question. Similarly we see many shopkeepers banning “Hoodies and motorcycle helmets” from their shops so that security cameras can see the faces of customers. Are those shopkeepers allowed to also ban people wearing religious headwear? It is unlikely that a turban could cause problems for cameras, but headscarves and other dress could easily. This wouldn’t be intentional discrimination against religions, afterall, rather the shopkeeper would not be conciously exclude religious wear from the rules.

We can all talk about “the thin end of the wedge”, an argument particularly popular from some of the lesser news publications (if you’ve ever read here before you may notice my views on some of those), but in this case an issue along those lines is evident. It may not be something that will get worse, as a thin end argument usually implies, but it is something with a continuous scale and no clear cutoff. If I believed that 6 year old girls should have to have intercourse with middle aged men as a rite of passage, would that be ok to exclude on religious grounds? Or if I felt that ritually cutting deep scars into the cheeks of my children was appropriate?

It is my view that very deep consideration should be taken in the direction of removing religious allowances completely from laws. When a religious disagreement with a law arises it should be considered whether or not that point is one of general application and that the law should be changed generally as a result. It is obvious that excluding minorities is not appropriate, and this is one reason why many believe representative democracies are better than direct versions, but excluding the majority is not appropriate either.