God and Primo Levi in Auschwitz

The work of Primo Levi is as important as it is moving and brilliantly written on the subjects of Auschwitz, the Holocaust and Nazism, particularly If This Is A Man and The Truce. There is nothing in human history that compares with the industrial genocide conducted with the ruthless efficiency and cruelty by the Nazis between 1943 and 1945, and so remains the keenest test of belief in God.

Levi as a “non-believer” and “secular” Jew does not deal with the question of belief in God. However, in The Drowned And The Saved, there is a remarkable passage with respect to his disbelief, and one that deserves to be quoted verbatim on this blog. For me, it is an astonishing testimony of what a coherent and intellectually honest disbelief in supernatural deities can mean, and also provides a rejoinder – if one were needed – to the claims often made by theists that, when faced with death, people will turn to a god, either in the proverbial saying that there are “no atheists in foxholes”, or perhaps when faced with a terminal illness.

Levi in The Drowned And The Saved writes of the only occasion when he was tempted to pray:

This happened in October of 1944, in the one moment in which I lucidly perceived the imminence of death. Naked and compressed among my naked companions with my personal index card in hand, I was waiting to file past the ‘commission’ that with one glance would decide whether I should immediately go into the gas chamber or was instead strong enough to go on working. For one instant I felt the need to ask for help and asylum; then despite my anguish, equanimity prevailed: you do not change the rules of the game at the end of the match, nor when you are losing. A prayer under these conditions would have been not only absurd (what rights could I claim? and from whom?) but blasphemous, obscene, laden with the greatest impiety of which a non-believer is capable. I rejected the temptation: I knew that otherwise, were I to survive, I would have to be ashamed of it (The Drowned and the Saved, 1989 Abacus edition: p118).

The 11th Februrary was the anniversary of Levi’s incarceration at Auschwitz.

Sharia law in the UK?

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has quite rightly been criticised for his comments regarding the inevitably of Sharia law in the UK yesterday.

Such a comment was always going to be a red rag to a bull for the more xenophobic inclined to shout things along the lines of, if you don’t like it here, then leave, as the BBC’s Have Your Say page illustrates. Or, indeed, to prompt populist rhetoric from politicians about British laws and British values, from the Prime Minister downwards.

Perhaps the point has been missed, though. Most people only react to the headline, but not the substance of what the Archbishop was trying to say. Sharia 0- as the Archbishop recognises – invokes the ideas of Saudi justice (for example), with its beheadings, stonings, and limited legal protection for women, to say the least. However, the crux of what he was getting at is this (and it’s worth quoting at length). For as he says:

[...] my aim is only, as I have said, to tease out some of the broader issues around the rights of religious groups within a secular state, with a few thoughts about what might be entailed in crafting a just and constructive relationship between Islamic law and the statutory law of the United Kingdom.

His point is that:

[...] there is some community of understanding between Islamic social thinking and the categories we might turn to in the non-Muslim world for the understanding of law in the most general context. There is a recognition that our social identities are not constituted by one exclusive set of relations or mode of belonging – even if one of those sets is regarded as relating to the most fundamental and non-negotiable level of reality, as established by a ‘covenant’ between the divine and the human (as in Jewish and Christian thinking; once again, we are not talking about an exclusively Muslim problem). The danger arises not only when there is an assumption on the religious side that membership of the community (belonging to the umma or the Church or whatever) is the only significant category, so that participation in other kinds of socio-political arrangement is a kind of betrayal. It also occurs when secular government assumes a monopoly in terms of defining public and political identity. There is a position – not at all unfamiliar in contemporary discussion – which says that to be a citizen is essentially and simply to be under the rule of the uniform law of a sovereign state, in such a way that any other relations, commitments or protocols of behaviour belong exclusively to the realm of the private and of individual choice. [emphasis added]

That last point is the key to what Williams was trying to say; here he has in mind the the row over not allowing Catholic adoption agencies to discriminate against homosexuals under the Sexual Orientation Regulations last year (an example he cites elsewhere).

The real point that he’s making, the one lost under all the furore over Sharia law, is not one about immigration or Muslims in particular. Rather, he seeks religious-based privileges to opt out of the secular laws in a secular country. To do so, he is trying to argue that there is more than one legal community to which one can belong, one that reflects your culture as well as the state in which you happen to reside. He claims that there needn’t be a conflict between them.

On this, he misses the point of a secular society. A secular society would not privilege any interest group – religious or otherwise – with their own legal systems and exemptions from the law. In that respect, religious groups have no more right to be taken notice of than any other pressure group, such as Greenpeace or CND. Which is why there should be no bishops in the House of Lords, nor should the Head of State should be the head of an organised religion.

At least, however, he has recognised the secular reality and has not called for a return to Christian Britain, as others have done recently (see previous posts). Unfortunately, the Archbishop has misjudged the mood of country, which is extremely reactionary on matters regarding Islam and immigration (which are more or less considered (wrongly) to be synonymous). It demonstrates the way in which the UK is unable to have an intelligent public debate with subtle nuances of argument and detail. He should have known better.

Free to blaspheme… soon. Maybe.

The word is that New Labour may be about to abolish the centuries old blasphemy laws. This is probably the only true victimless “crime” on the statute book, as things stand. More importantly, it is a potentially serious threat to the freedom of speech, which is simply not acceptable in today’s Britain. This comes a month after the High Court ruling against a Christian fundamentalist group that tried to use the law to prosecute the BBC for showing Jerry Springer – The Opera.

Asides from the obvious free speech argument, this episode also highlighted the discrepancies in the law as it stands – that it doesn’t cover theatres or tv and radio broadcasts, and only applies to the Christian god.

The last time the blasphemy law was used successfully was in a 1977 private prosecution by the anti-free speech campaigner, Mary Whitehouse – and arguably it was an anomaly then. No doubt, though, we’ll get another piece by some Bishop before long complaining that the repealing of this law undermines British morality in some way, and conveniently forgetting that this law is an example of what happens when a society is run for the good of one particular religion in the first place: it willingly criminalises those who offer different opinions to their accepted orthodoxy.

Bishop attacks multiculturalism

The recent piece in the Sunday Telegraph by the Bishop of Rochester is yet another misguided intervention by a senior member of clergy. It follows what by now should be a familier path – one from the Right, attacking multiculturalism and misunderstanding the nature of our secular society.

To begin with, it’s simply false to claim that there are “no-go” areas in the UK today – I notice that the Bishop fails to cite which areas he has in mind.

The point the Bishop is trying to argue (one familiar by now) is that Britain should go back to being a Christian country, the implication being that that is its true identity. The claim is that it is the is a ‘Christian character of the nation’s laws, values, customs and culture’ and a ‘Christian vision which underlay most of the achievements and values of the culture’. Big claims, indeed.

However, without even getting involved in a debate as to what is actually meant by these things, and which laws, customs (fox hunting?), culture (football?), “values” and “acheivements” are being referred to, it is enough to ask if it is not possible for a post-Christian society, such as the one we know live in, to also have both “values” and “acheivements”, customs and culture. We can, for example, strive to live up to the values expressed in the European Convention on Human Rights, or in the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights (something which the UK government still refuses to sign up to). Our customs and culture are now those of a post-Christian society.

The Bishop claims that Britain has lost its

vision of its destiny which made it great. That has to do with the Bible’s teaching that we have equal dignity and freedom because we are all made in God’s image.

Of course, there is this myth that Britain was “great” and it isn’t any more. I’m not sure when the Bishop thinks that Britain was “great” – 1975? 1875? However, even within living memory, Britain has had an Empire – and whatever happened in those countries, and how and why, and the extent to which it was detrimental or beneficial, none of those things, and none of the motives behind Empire, had anything whatsoever to do with a vision of ‘equal dignity and freedom’, but more to do with a feeling of superiority.

I’m not sure that at any time but in the last fifty or sixty years could anyone claim that “equal dignity and freedom” have ever been Christian values – if they have, they have also been ones that have apparently been forgotten for most of the history of Christianity, and, anyway, are hardly unique to Christianity. The same may be said of the other “values” he claims for Christianity – compassion, justice, humility, sacrifice and service

The real point that the Bishop wishes to make, in fact, is an anti-Islamic one. He wants to portray Christianity – and by default Britain, because in his view the two go hand in hand – as somehow under threat from Islamism (hence ‘It is now less possible for Christianity to be the public faith in Britain’), but which could in fact be hardly be further from the truth.

The fact is that this country is overwhelmingly secular, and it therefore makes no sense to have a ‘public faith’. Its institutions are not somehow intrinsic to a British identity. If Christianity in this country wants to survive, it should do it without State privilege.

atheistic fundamentalism?

In the so-called season of goodwill, the Archbishop of Wales has made an attack on what he sees as ‘atheistic fundamentalism’, whatever that is. It is difficult to see how one can be a fundamentalist atheist. An atheist can’t disbelieve in a deity to a greater or lesser degree: it’s a simply either/or option where one either believes there is a god or that there isn’t. Likewise, religious fundamentalists do not believe in a god to a “greater degree” that their fellow non-fundamentalist religious worshippers. The difference between them, religious fundamentalists and non-fundamentalists, is one of ideology and intepretation of holy text, neither of which atheism has.

Either way, this “fundamentalist atheism”, in the view of the Archbishop, is apparently responsible for two events in particular: the Winterval festival in Birmingham, in 1997 and 1998, and the recent dispute involving a BA employee’s run in with BA’s dress code.

We have be careful of the “political correctness gone mad” elephant trap. It’s clear that Christmas was never “banned”, and neither was its name changed, in Birmingham: the term ‘Winterval’ was a blanket term to cover a variety of celebrations that occurred during late November and December, of which Christmas was the central event.

Likewise, the facts of the BA case are equally mundane. The Christian Cross was never banned, but the wearing of necklaces outside of clothing was. The emphasis is important – it’s not an anti-religious or anti-Christian edict, but a dresscode with the (no doubt unintended consequence) that would include any necklace with a religious symbol. The reason that came about was simply because no one has ever claimed that the Christian cross on a necklace was part of the Christian faith, one as recognisable as the Sikh Turban, for example. It has echoes of the Great Silver Ring Thing Scandal about the same time – there was no ban against Christian symbols as such, but a ban on jewellry. The essential point in both is the same: neither rings nor crucifixes are central, ideological, manifestations of the Christian faith, and so these dress codes did not seek to include any exception for allegedly “Christian” jewellry.

That these events are cynically distorted by such a senior figure as the Archbishop of Wales is disgraceful, not least because it gives propagates the myth that these event represent rather than the more mundane truth.

Nevertheless, that he saw fit to say such a thing is probably part of the same phenomena, noted before, where the Right in particular is using Christianity to re-label Britain culturally, and to make it easier to divide people into “them” and “us”. In this particular case, the issue is more subtle.

As was said before, we are a largely secular country, hence the news (for example) that more people shopped online than went to an Anglican service. In itself, it is not a surprising story – it only points to the growing use of the internet to shop online, which has been a trend noted before, anyway. As every Sunday testifies, the overwhelming majority of the population are out and about in the High Street, shopping in person, rather than in any Church, Anglican or otherwise.

The point here is that it is not “fundamentalist atheism” (whatever that is) that is responsible for this trend, but the growth of the of the consumer society in the last sixty years or more, and the parallel decline of Christian worship. Hence, the blaming of nefarious atheists for the woes of Christianity, to the point of distorting fact to promulgate myth, must be to try and create, firstly, a sense of identity, and, secondly, a sense that this identity is threatened in some way.

But if not by athiests, who? Terry Sanderson of the National Secular Society was quoted in the 2000 Guardian article linked to above as suggesting Islam. Multiculturalism – something that is now openly attacked by the Right – might be more accurate in the dying embers of 2007. It seems to fit into a coalition of interests emerging that is attempting to redefine Englishness and Britishness along exclusive, “them and us”, lines.

Whatever the real reason, it demonstrates the sectarian nature of religion generally, especially when it’s used for political ends. To then claim, as the Archbishop does, that “God is not exclusive, he is on the side of the whole of humanity with all its variety” is laughable, not least because God by any Christian view necessarily excludes those who do not accept Jesus as their Saviour.

Even more on Christmas…

Very interesting to see that Polly Toynbee in today’s Guardian has written an article that makes the some of the points I made ten days ago – right down to citing Dawkins’ “coming out” as a Christmas carol lover…

On her postage stamp point – the ONLY stamps available at my local shop were the Christmas stamps, and a book of twelve at that, too. It means I’ll be sending Christmas stamps in March, given the rate at which I use them…

Christmas… again

Although some on the Right may be surprised, Richard Dawkins has made it known that he is a “cultural Christian”. The Right in Britain are busy these days trying to persuade anyone who’ll listen that there’s a leftwing plot to undermine Christmas in the guise “Political Correctness”. The recent “Christianophobia” debate testifies to the jostling among those on the Right for the use of Christianity some sort of “British culture” campaign, which is apparently threatened by what they see as undue deferrence to the cultures of ethnic minorities and the like, in particular (I suspect) the Islamic traditions within this country.

On this reading, it is not secularisation that is changing the face of Christmas. Yet – as I’ve said before – what the overwhelming majority of people in Britain today celebrates is in fact a secular version of Christmas, one that is only in part informed by Christianity, and to an extent that will vary from family to family. Hence a recent finding that British people don’t seem to know much about the Christian origins of Christmas – although there are about 4.4 million people who may wish they’d never heard of Christmas at all.

To the best of my knowledge, there is no shred of evidence that anyone wants to actually ‘purge’ the Christian basis of our culture or our heritage: you can’t study either without coming up against it. Ignoring it represents a failure of understanding, both of our present and our past. But Christianity itself doesn’t need to be promoted or publicly defended in some way to underline this – it should be learnt and understood as and when one comes across these things, in its correct context, as you would the influence of Greek and Roman mythology. After all, no one would suggest that we should continue building in the English-decorated Gothic style, lest architecture should somehow forget its past and traditions.

Contemporary culture is – or should be – something that people should freely choose to engage in, or not, and on their own terms, as they see fit. Hence Dawkins has no problems with singing Christmas carols, whereas I choose not to celebrate Christmas at all. Both are valid, although one wonders if the view is soon to be that one who doesn’t celebrate Christmas is to be seen as “not British”.

Eitherway, it hardly seems an area in which the the State could effectively intervene, if indeed it should at all. Not celebrating a Christian version of Christmas, or not celebrating Christmas at all, is not to attempt a purge of anything; rather, it’s the exercise of choice.

The problem is perhaps that Christmas is bigger than Christianity – both in terms of adherents, but also culturally. The fact is that any story of Christmas that restricts itself to merely the birth of Jesus amounts to Christian propaganda: again, as I’ve said before, the “story” of Christmas also encompasses other pre-Christian European traditions – Germanic, Celtic and Roman – as well as more recent traditions, such as the American Santa Claus, the European cult of St Nicholas, and the British Father Christmas (sadly almost completely usurped by Santa). A far bigger, and dare I say it, a far more interesting story, which would of course include the Christian story.

Hate campaign against female clergy

Church of England female clergy are still unnaccepted in some quarters. A Cornish curate has now taken a couple of weeks leave after a recent spate of arson attacks, although there’s been a problem for sometime. This usefully reminds us that Christian fundamentalism (which logically must be behind this as no one else would be ideologically opposed to female Christian ministers within the Church of England) is clearly shown to be as dangerous as any other fundamentalism, religious inspired or otherwise. Naturally, it will only be a minority or even (as in this case) an individual extremist – an often recited phrase in other contexts.

Christianophobia?

A Parliamentary debate has today been scheduled on something which the MP Mark Pritchard calls “Christianophobia”. His complaint appears to centre on a perceived fear that people in this country are somehow afraid to express Christian sentiment due to “political correctness” and a wish not to offend minorities. The finding recently that four-fifths of schools are not putting on Nativity plays by the Telegraph, allegedly for the same reason, appears to have prompted the debate.

The debate raises the question of whether Christianity in this country should be supported or propped up by the State (more than it is already, of course). As a secularist, I don’t believe that any religion should be supported by the State – it is up to people themselves what cultural traditions – religious or otherwise – they want to keep onto.

But Pritchard forgets that most of the country – well over ninety per cent, in fact – are don’t practice any religion at all, let alone Christianity. With respect to Nativity plays, there may be, perhaps an excessive, desire not to “offend” other religious sentimentalities in some of the more mixed ethnic areas, but it is also a fact that cultures change. It needs hardly to be said that for two or three thousand years before Christianity was (forcibly) introduced into this country, the winter festival now called Christmas had different cultural meanings. Indeed, as we all know, very little of the origins of Christmas has to do with Christianity.

The period we now call “Christmas” has undergone yet another transformation in the last thirty to fifty years in the UK. To all intents and purposes, it is now largely a secular festival, reflecting a largely secular society, as the annual pleas by religious figures to remember what Christmas is “really” about testifies. You could disparagingly characterise Christmas as one that now celebrates Santa Claus as the god of consumerism, and there’d be some truth in that, although it is also one that has the remnants of previous Christian, Roman, Germanic and Celtic beliefs, among other native folk traditions. (Oddly, those concerned with the “true” meaning of Christmas don’t tend to talk about these earlier beliefs.)

The lack of interest in specifically Nativity plays by schools more than likely represents a broader cultural change associated just as much with secularism as with anything to do with “political correctness”. It’s not that there is a rise in “Christianophobia” so much as a radical decline in Christian worship, and a lack of relevance of the previously Christian message of Christmas to the modern day secular festival that is now Christmas.

This is something that has been happening for a number of years, if personal experience is anything to go by. Because of house moves, during the 1980s I went to three different primary schools in Essex – two of which were Church of England Voluntary Controlled – in places which were overwhelmingly white British. Not once did I see, or was ever part of, a Nativity play.

Scientific facts and theories

Following very belatedly from my last post, a reasonable question is “what is a scientific theory?”, and what constitutes a “scientific fact”?

The question of a scientific fact arose in a brief discussion I had on a creationist blog. The objection by said Creationist was to a BBC web page about science talking about scientific facts. That’s an odd state of affairs for non-Creationists such as myself – a bit like being outraged at naked people on a porn site. But the objection centred on the idea that science – and in particular the theory of human evolution – was being portrayed at “fact”, while misunderstanding the context within which these “facts” appeared.

It is – I find – a common misunderstanding within the Creationist/”Intelligent Design” camp. So let’s recap what a “scientific fact” is, as no doubt I shall refer to such things as this blog develops. Apologies in advance for those that find this basic, but it’s better to be clear on such things!

A scientific fact is one which has been corroborated by reproducible results from experiments that themselves can be repeated – that’s not the same as “proved”. It’s virtually impossible to prove a theory. So it’s true to say that no one has proved that gravity exists – it’s just that all the known experimental data corroborates the theory that it does, and it is referred then as a “scientific fact”.

Evolution is likewise a “scientific fact”, for exactly the same reason that garvity is; and evolutionary theory – aka theory of evolution – explains the fact of evolution.

For a theory to be a theory, one needs to be able to make a prediction – or a hypothesis – based on this theory which can then be tested by experiment. The data either corroborates or disproves the theory. So, with evolution for example, your hypothesis would be that you would expect to see increasing complexity over time. You would not expect to see birds before the existence of land animals, for example. To do so would prove evolution wrong; not to do so corroborates the theory as it falls in line with our hypothesis.

Disproving that theories relating to gravity or evolution exist is only that – proving that that those particular theories are wrong. So if cars and buses and trains tomorrow all start floating, or that daylight in the UK doesn’t appear until 1.30pm, we can say that our theory of gravity is wrong. Likewise, if we found a fossilised rabbit in a strata of rock that was a billion years old, we’d say that the current theory of evolution is wrong.

Saying a theory is wrong is NOT the same as saying that another is right. It is an odd feature of the Creationist debate that an awful lot of energy of Creationists and their ilk is spent on “disproving” the theory of evolution. They have continually failed so far, but even if they were correct in their assertions, that doesn’t prove anything at all about Creationism – they would only have only shown that evolution is wrong.

Likewise, demonstrating or showing that “irreducible complexity” exists (a favourite of the so-called “Intelligent Design” adherents) only proves that such thing appear to exist – it does not prove that there is in fact a Designer or Intelligence or Creator. Separate experimental data would be needed for such a thing to be established in a scientific manner. So far, “irreducible complexity” has not been shown.

But as I’ve pointed out, that would at best only show that evolution is wrong – not that Creationism or Intelligent Design is actually correct in its further claims about Designers and Creators. Here, to the best of my knowledge, no attempt has even been made to even say what kind of experiment could be done or what evidence would be required that corroborates the existence of a single Designer or Intelligence at work somewhere, rather than disproves current scientific theories. And it’s precisely because it fails to produce a testable hypothesis, that Creationist “science” and ID “theory” are not theories or science.